#there’s also a reason black kids are barred from advanced level classes among others

[liminalcathag]

gifted kids need to realize everybody else was also traumatized by the school system lmfao

[loudlytransparenttrash]

Time To Reform Black America

A big reason why the black communities today are failing to progress and keep up is not because of racism, it is not because ‘the legacy of slavery,’ it’s not because of white people or Donald Trump, it’s because they are brought up as if the year is still 1917 and they can’t let go. It’s a symbol of black empowerment to teach the kids about their history which is great, but it’s also important to seperate history from present day which so many fail to do. Black children are coaxed into watching old newsreels of black civil rights protesters being hosed, beaten, and dragged off to prison. They watch Norman Lear-like sitcoms and get told stories and read accounts of black America before the civil rights movement and the assassination of MLK. Such things would fill any child with horror. Yet you would imagine it would also encourage them to feel grateful and excited to live in times of equal rights and treatment and liberty for all, as it does with any other race or civilization looking back on its tragic and troubling past.

Yet most blacks who do realize this are usually the odd one out among other black Americans. In every race-related debate, whether it’s Black Lives Matter, any of the police shootings, the Million Man March, Ebonics or affirmative action, most blacks start every conversation with fierce conviction that even 150 years after slavery and decades after the Civil Rights Act, the white man’s foot remains pressed upon all black Americans’ necks. Challenging this idea is called racist, we are told to just “shut up and listen.” For most black Americans, the rapid increase of the black middle class, of interracial relationships and marriages, and of blacks in prestigious positions including our President for the past eight years, has no bearing on the real state of black America. Further, they believe, whites’ inability to grasp the unmistakable reality of oppression is itself proof of savage racism, while blacks who question this claim are called self-deluded uncle toms. Individuality is rare in black America. 

Black leaders and movements mouth the ideology of victimhood for political advantage, “Confrontation works,” as Al Sharpton has calculatingly observed. But most rank-and-file exponents of the “racism forever” worldview really mean it. Their conviction rests on several core excuses, carefully passed from person to person, generation to generation at all levels of the black community. These myths and severe distortions of truth are the biggest obstacle to further black progress in today’s America, adding up to a deeply felt cult of victimology that refuses to be held accountable and move on with the times. Some subscribe to it fiercely, most accept it as a valid point of view. The black leaders and the voices of black lives matter, who launches into a tirade about the War on Blacks, receive nodding heads all over as they absorb this indoctrination.

You’d think that a group committed to advancement would find empowerment in fighting new challenges such as the ones plaguing their own communities but instead they focus on challenges that have already been fought and won decades ago or ones that simply do not exist. But many blacks, inevitably, suffer from a classic post-colonial inferiority complex. Like insecure people everywhere, they are driven by a private sense of personal inadequacy to seeing imaginary obstacles to their success supposedly planted by others. Once the 1968 Kerner Commission report fueled that tendency by positing that American racism was an institutional, systemic matter rather than a merely personal one, black leaders and thinkers gripped on tight and black Americans still hold onto this idea as if their lives depend on it being real.

In the grip of this seductive ideology, blacks have made the immobilizing assumption that individual initiative can lead only to failure, with only a few exceptionally lucky exceptions. Yet many groups have triumphed over similar or worse obstacles, including millions of Caribbean and African immigrants in America, from Colin Powell to the thousands of Caribbean children succeeding in precisely the crumbling schools where black American kids fail. Indeed, thinkers such as Thomas Sowell and Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom argue that American blacks could have advanced, and were advancing, even without the civil rights legislation of the sixties and the racial preferences of the seventies, since black unemployment was at an all-time low in the mid-sixties, and the black middle class was already growing fast. But these facts can’t outweigh the almost narcotic pleasure that underdoggism provides a race plagued by self-doubt. The victimology cult has in turn engendered a cult of black separatism. Inspired by the Black Power movement of the 1960s, which violently rejected whites as terminally evil, today’s separatism, in the same vein, flirts disastrously with the idea that, because white racism ineluctably drives black people outside the bounds of civic virtue, blacks shouldn’t be seriously punished or morally condemned for criminal behavior. If they call their violence a reaction against racism, anything goes, regardless of any other factor such as the truth. The consequences of this are rising all throughout the country today, as they have done in the past and it’s a real concern.

The worst result of black America keeping themselves in a separate realm to its “oppressors,” is the widespread cult of anti-intellectualism. Consider even in middle-class suburbs, increasing numbers of middle-class black students tend to cluster at the bottom of their schools in grades and test scores. Black students whose parents earn $70,000 a year or more make median SAT scores lower than impoverished white students whose parents make $6,000 a year or less, while black students whose parents both have graduate degrees make mean SAT scores lower than white students whose parents only completed high school. Why? All through modern black American culture, even throughout black academia, the belief prevails that learning for learning’s sake is a white affair, spelling properly and talking properly is a white thing and therefore inherently disloyal to a proper black identity. Studying black-related issues is okay, because learning about oneself is authentic. But this impulse also implicitly classifies higher education as irrelevant, which is the direct cause of the underrepresentation of minorities in the hard sciences and other major fields. But hey, it’s okay, affirmative action resolves that, we can just hand out some scholarships and lower the bar to the ground, enforce racial quotas and hey presto, we have equal representation to keep the race baiters happy. 

The sense that the properly “black” person only delves into topics related to himself is also why you can count on one hand the number of books by black Americans that are not on racial topics. The belief that blacks and school don’t go together gained strength in the mid-1960s, when black panther separatists rejected traits associated with whites as alien, and black students, in this spirit, began teasing their fellows who strove to excel in school as “acting white,” a much harsher taunt than merely dismissing them as nerds and this trend has continued well into today. The “acting white” charge, which implies that you think yourself different from and better than your peers, is the prime reason that blacks do poorly in school and why the drop out rates are so high. The gifted black student quickly faces a choice between peer group acceptance and intellectual achievement. Most, out of an utterly human impulse, choose the former. Even if they open themselves to schooling in college or later, their performance all too often permanently suffers from the message they long ago internalized that “the school thing” is an add-on, not a mix-in.

The prevailing orthodoxy lays the blame on other factors, of course, but none of them withstands scrutiny. The fact that the children of working poor immigrants, including Asian and Indian and many other non-whites, who often do well in school and actually do far, far better economically and academically than whites, disproves the claim that their working-class roots deny today’s newly middle-class blacks to teach their children to excel in school. The success of Southeast Asian immigrants’ children particular in the same terrible inner-city schools in which black students fail disproves the Jonathan Kozol gospel that it is the “savage inequality” of school funding that makes black kids fail. Claude Steele at one point made the famous and influential argument that middle-class black students only underachieve in school because fear of confirming the stereotype of black mental inferiority makes them choke up on tests. There may be a grain of truth to this but again, all accountability and blame is shifted onto somebody else while the convenience and safety of victimhood is indulged in. 

Victimology, separatism, and anti-intellectualism underlie the general black community’s response to all race-related issues. The response to affirmative action is a case in point. Blacks see it as a policy that appropriately bends the rules for a group of people who believe are owed something, a notion that today, when middle-class blacks are a massive and thriving group in American society, can only seem plausible through the lens of victimology. The defense of affirmative action on the grounds of “diversity” is an expression of separatism. Since there are not enough black students to be admitted to selective schools on the same merits as the other students, beyond a certain cut-off point blacks are being valued for their skin color rather than their academic accomplishments, everything MLK was against. This is a state of affairs, moreover, that requires a strong dose of anti-intellectualism to accept without discomfort. And the same anti-intellectualism rests content with the flimsy reasoning behind all defenses of affirmative action: that it is immoral for colleges to require a top-quality dossier from the black child of a doctor and a corporate manager simply because he’s black.

Today, these three thought patterns impede black advancement much more than racism and the dysfunctional inner cities, the broken families and black on black crime and black educational underachievement will persist until such thinking disappears. In my experience, trying to show many black Americans how mistaken and counterproductive these ideas are is like trying to convince a religious person that God does not exist: the sentiments are beyond the reach of rational, civil discourse and I get that, it’s almost impossible to overcome but just as we reform religions, I think the black narrative is also in much need of reformation as well, it is severely outdated. There was a time when fighting and decrying institutional racism was the main task at hand, and blacks of today’s generation owe gratitude to those who did it, their comfortable and privileged lives would be impossible without the sacrifices and efforts made by everyone who was a part of the revolution. Today, though, these people are well-intentioned relics of another era, an era they in their moment helped us to get past. Our main concern must be with new generations, who can fulfill their potential only in an America where victimology, separatism, and anti-intellectualism don’t flourish among black Americans. There are two main paths to this goal.

First, it’s time for well-intentioned whites to stop pardoning “understandable” the worst of human nature whenever black people exhibit it. The person one pities is a person one may like but does not truly respect. Second, it’s time for our selective educational institutions to eliminate affirmative action in admissions. This policy may have been useful in the 1960s in creating a black middle class. Today, however, it can only be classed as discriminatory. To achieve in any endeavor, people need incentives. As long as top colleges exempt black students of all classes from serious competition, their admissions officers shouldn’t wonder why so few black students submit top-class dossiers. Only without such a policy will parents, teachers, and school boards, genuinely alarmed at drop-offs in “diversity” in institutions of higher learning, start to help black children become truly competitive for selective schools. What happened after California ended legalized racial preferences in 1995 is a case in point. Programs exploded throughout the state to prepare minorities to be competitive and to eliminate their financial barriers to college.

Eliminating affirmative action will also help dispel black college students’ resentment-tinged anxiety that their white classmates dismiss them as affirmative action picks. It will promote richer interracial contact among students poised to become the nation’s leaders as they will then all be truly on an equal playing field. The black student who can confidently claim to be on campus for the exact same reasons that white and Asian students are, they would be less likely to feel defensive and indulge in victimhood and less likely to be paranoid about their white classmates being covert racists. I believe the time has come for such changes. Sure, these ideas will be condemned, branded racist and repulsive but I also know it has to be said. There was a crucial and damaging change in black ideology in the mid-1960s which we are at risk of not only repeating but making even worse today. 

Perhaps twenty years from now mainstream black thought won’t be such a taboo and more blacks will stress individual initiative and integration. And perhaps the national media will get on the bandwagon too. Let’s hope by then, we won’t feel that any talk of black personal responsibility needs to be balanced by victimology and blaming others. That’s when we will know that we are past the coded fraud that passes for interracial discourse today and have made the kind of progress that yesterday’s civil rights’ leaders would recognize and applaud.