The UK government has rejected the proposal by Trevor Phillips, the head of the Commission for Racial Equality that, in the hope of tackling consistent academic underachievement by that group, black male pupils be taught separately for some subjects. The Department for Education and Skills says it would have “negative effects”.
Today a spokesperson from the ministry will call a special press conference to reassure worried middle-class parents that the policy of teaching children in separate state schools according to the size of their parents’ mortgages will continue.
Out of interest, Damian, and I ask this question because of your ethnic background and your line of work, what do you honestly think when people use the term “black” ?
A person with one black and one white parent is, logically, genetically, equally “black” and “white”, I’d estimate this actually covers a lot of “black” candidates in Britain today, and propably constitutes a larger ethnic group than “black”, it is surprizing how many famous “black” people really are equally white.
As far as I’m concerned its about culture anyway, but once you start categorizing people as “black” and “white”, then you may as well start talking about “blue eyed” and “brown eyed”.
How come racial profiling is OK if you’re a teacher (according to Phillips) but a big no-no if you’re a policeman?
Hey, look on the bright side, you could have had forced bussing for the past 45 years. I spent an hour-and-a-half ride on the bus, each way, so that an inner city high school could be exactly within the 49%-51% racial balance (asians and hispanics excluded of course, they don’t contribute to the NAACP legal fund).
Of course, there was a bright side to all that as well. McKinley High had Mr. Johnny B. Cage, the baddest-ass jazz band director in the state (in my biased opinion, of course). It’s not just anywhere that you can get a director who had shared a stage with Tabby Thomas, Cannonball Adderly, or Dizzy Gillespie, especially in a public school.
Ian asked:
I’ve touched on this before on this ‘Blog many times. I avoid the word “black” by referring to myself (and others of mixed parentage) as “beige”. I have got myself into trouble with black people for calling myself “coloured” and with white people for calling myself “black”. I don’t get out much these days so I’m a lot paler than I used to be and I don’t grow my hair long enough for anyone to see how curly it is so—as goes one of the running themes at PooterGeek—many people have no idea what I am. Suits me.
As for the biological question, you are likely to measure a bigger genetic difference between any two randomly chosen black Africans than between a randomly chosen black African and a randomly chosen white European. We humans are (and I suspect always have been) very sensitive to particular traits that mark out members of other tribes—sensitive out of all proportion to the physiological significance of those markers. I happen to believe there are real evolutionary reasons for that, but I haven’t got time to into that argument with sufficiently well-chosen words right now.
You’ve put me in a difficult position now because the next ‘Blog post I had in the pipeline is about the genetic differences between humans and chimpanzees. I should point out that planned it long before this reply.
I’ve just finished watching “Ebony Towers” (BBC2, Monday) where they gave the astonishing figure that only 1 in 250 university faculty in Britain are black. Makes the Met look positively PC (sorry). The main hypothesis was that this was because we never had the big, one-time push of a civil rights movement over here to get the first generation in, unlike America where the situation is drastically different. Not sure I buy that. In Britain it’s nearly always the middle class that wins and there simply weren’t enough middle-class blacks.
[BTW, Damian, that stuff in your post above about genetic differences is so obviously pants I’m surprised you fell for it. I heard Steve Jones say it first. He should stick to snails.]
There are plenty of occasions I’ve disagreed with things Steve Jones has said; this isn’t one of them. You don’t even need to resort to DNA sequence analysis to make the argument. The phenotypic variation between populations in Africa is significantly wider than that between populations in Europe. That is, there is a greater variation in, for example, height, bone structure, fat distribution between people in Africa who might be casually labelled as “black” than there is across Europe between people we would call “white”. If you randomly sample individuals from those populations, chances are you’ll get the result I quote.
Now I’m going to quote Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, whose Genes Peoples and Languages I fortunately have overdue from the Campus library. He has specialised in the genetic variations between human populations for decades, precisely because he is interested in race and culture:
The question of attaching percentages to such differences is one I touch on in my most recent post so I’m not giving Cavalli-Sforza a bye on that one, I should add. The bigger they are, the harder they fall.
On the question of blacks in academia, one factor shouldn’t be forgotten: if you are an ambitious young black man or woman you are likely to be encouraged to go after a job working in a proper profession, not fannying about for peanuts in an ivory tower. Take it from medical school dropout whose sibling did law. In her first shared house at university every other occupant was a British-born black woman also studying law. (Then, briefly, they had a black man living there who turned out to be on the run from the law. But that’s another story.)
🙂
Great post – we have segregation by mortgage size here in California, too. About a dozen years ago, there was an uproar in Palo Alto, California when a school district change forced the children of doctors and lawyers to attend school with the children of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. Worried professional parents did not want the bad influence on their children of the richer kids driving Jags to school. I wish all the families out there had similar concerns.
Good post. But what can be done? Outside of the large cities, unless you have enormous schools with huge catchment areas it’s very tricky to avoid some schools having richer catchment areas than others. You could bus children around but that’s bound to be counter-productive. You could select pupils by a criteria other than geographical, but wouldn’t it need to be less related to income to make much of a change? For example selecting by exam performance appears to only exacerbate the situation in N.Ireland.
In the big cities, where I suspect this is really where it matters, it shouldn’t be too hard to devise a catchment area that takes a mix of children. London for example is relatively socially mixed in most areas (though it is getting worse).
Not true. I’m not advocating a return to an unreconstructed grammar/secondary modern system, but in NI, even those children who go to secondary moderns outperform (albeit only marginally) their matched peers in comprehensives on the mainland at GCSE and more working class students make it to university. I’d link to the relevant Economist article, but it’s subscriber only.
The system as it stands benefits the rich and pushy-parented over the hard-working and talented. That’s just wrong.
I don’t actually think that’s true, but what I meant was the “social composition” of schools in N.Ireland, which is similar to England, and much worse than in all comprehensive Wales and Scotland.
I’ll dig out some links on that and others.
The Economist 18Jan01
In the article referenced there’s a graph showing that under 24% of university admissions in England come from the lower social classes whilst the figure for NI is over 31%
Thanks I thought they were very interesting. I took my view from this article (http://www.casenet.org.uk/mcca.html#Begin) [and one other I can’t find at the moment] which is from a conference that also has a speech by the person whose work the Economist’s chart refers to so you may find it interesting.
On the Economist numbers. I’d thought I’d run them myself (you can get them from here [http://search1.ucas.co.uk/fandf00/index.html].
I couldn’t replicate the Economist’s chart though the data I used was 2001 and 2004, not 1997/98 so possibly things have changed. What i get is (for the same 3 lower social groupings)
In 2001: NI 28%, UK 24%
In 2004 (here UCAS change to a different social classification so the changes over time are probably not comparable) NI 25%, UK 23%.
So N.Ireland is better, but only by a nose. Furthermore you have to consider the different social composition of the populations as a whole. In N.I the three lower social groupings account for 56% of the population, in England 48%. So as a proportion of the class the English performance is better.
The main difference, to be honest, is the top social grouping which in England accounts for 23% of university admissions, in N.Ireland just 14%. But remarkably this seems to mirror the population as a whole (where it is England 12.3%, Northern Ireland 6.6%), although clearly they are massively over-represented in both countries.
Looking at the data I’m not really sure what the link is between social classes going to university and exam results. Scotland has the worst of the former but the best of the latter…
“In N.I the three lower social groupings account for 56% of the population, in England 48%. So as a proportion of the class the English performance is better. ”
I made a mistake here by including the 8th grouping (on their system) the ‘long-term unemployed’. Without these the situation is not so different, with England 33% and N.Ireland 32%. So N.I’s 25% is better than the UK’s 23%. However the long-term unemployed category is so important in N.Ireland (it also includes people that have never worked) at 23% that it must be included the UCAS figures, but I can’t really work out how.
Recent research from leading American universities has produced strong evidence that the civil rights revolution of the past half century has failed African Americans economically and educationally. Angela O’Rand and Mary Elizabeth Hughes, both professors of sociology at Duke University, reveal in their book The Life and Times of the Baby Boomers, released last week, that black Americans born between 1946 and 1964 earn only two thirds of what American whites earn—no more, relative to whites, than their parents and grandparents earned. Even more surprising is O’Rand and Hughes’s finding that African Americans were graduating at the same rate as whites eighty to ninety years ago, but that graduation rates for blacks peaked in the mid-1950s—at the start of the movement for racial integration. Professor Richard Sander, of the UCLA School of Law, reports on studies that indicate that affirmative action and similar programs has made blacks admitted to elite universities less likely to pursue Ph.Ds after four years of competition with white and Asian undergraduates than are black at state universities (from Stephen Cole and Elinor Barber’s Increasing Faculty Diversity, Harvard University Press, 2003), while Dartmouth psychologist Rogers Elliott and three colleagues discovered that half of blacks admitted to college by racial preferences abandon majors in science due to their academic disadvantage (“The Role of Ethnicity in Choosing and Leaving Science in Highly Selective Institutions,” 37 Research in Higher Education, 681, 695-696, 1996). Professor Hughes notes that the persistent failure to achieve racial equality in income and education “…suggests there are very deep root causes here, not one-answer causes.” Granted the cause isn’t the stock answer of “racism”—but it’s more than likely that race explains a good deal of the problem. ———–Actually, culture or a lack of, explains the problem. If blacks think passing the 6th grade is acting white and thus should be avoided at all costs then they need only blame themselves for their sorry standing in the USA. Blacks have done more damage to themselves post civil rights than white could have ever dreamed of doing to them. Whites who question black culture are not racist, but simply intellectually curious as to how an entire race could believe that poor behavior should be rewarded.
Whites who ascribe any belief to “an entire race” are, by definition, racist. Please don’t waste my bandwidth with this shit.