The Myth of Equality
In 21st century America, institutional racism and sexism remain great twin evils to be eradicated on our long journey to the wonderful world where, at last, all are equal.
What are we to make, then, of a profession that rewards workers with fame and fortune, yet discriminates ruthlessly against women; an institution where Hispanics and Asians, 20 percent of the U.S. population, are neither sought after nor widely seen.
In this profession, white males, a third of the population, retain a third of the jobs. But black males, 6.5 percent of the U.S. population, have 67 percent of the coveted positions—10 times their fair share.
We are talking of the NFL.
In figures reported by columnist Walter Williams, not only are black males 77 percent of the National Basketball Association, they are 67 percent of the players in the NFL.
Yet no one objects that women are not permitted to compete in the NFL. Nor do many object to the paucity of Asian and Mexicans, or the over-representation of blacks, even as white males dominate the National Hockey League and the PGA.
When it comes to sports—high school, collegiate or professional—Americans are intolerant of lectures about diversity and inclusiveness. They want the best—the best in the NFL, the best in the NBA, the best at Augusta, the best at Wimbledon, the best in the Olympics, the best in the All-Star Game, the World Series, the Super Bowl.
When it comes to artistic ability, musical ability, acting ability, athletic ability, Americans accept the reality of inequality. We are not all born equal, other than in our God-given and constitutional rights.
We are not all equally gifted. There are prodigies like pianist Van Cliburn, chess wizard Bobby Fischer, actress Shirley Temple. Every kid halfway through first grade knows who can spell and sing and who cannot, and who is bright and talented and athletic, and who is not.
What most Americans seek is a level playing field on which all compete equally, for what we ultimately seek is excellence, not equality.
Why, then, cannot our elites accept that, be it by nature, nurture, attitude or aptitude, we are not all equal in academic ability?
What raises this issue is the anguish evident in New York over the latest state test scores of public school students, which reveal that the ballyhooed progress in closing the racial achievement gap never happened.
That gap approached closure only by lowering the pass-fail score and by using similar tests, year-after-year, so teachers could prepare the kids to take them.
After a new, tougher state test was used in 2010, where 51 correct answers, not 37, meant achieving the desired grade, the old gaps between Hispanics, blacks, whites and Asians reappeared as wide as they were when Mayor Michael Bloomberg and city schools chief Joel Klein set out to close them.
"We are closing the shameful achievement gap faster than ever," blared Bloomberg in 2009, in the euphoria of what The New York Times now calls "the test score bubble."
"Among the students in the city's third through eighth grades, 40 percent of black students and 46 percent of Hispanic students met state standards in math, compared with 75 percent of white students and 83 recent of Asian students. In English, 33 percent of black students and 34 percent of Hispanic students are now proficient, compared with 64 percent of whites and Asians."
Appalling, when one considers New York City usually ranks first or second in the nation in per-pupil expenditures.
Nor has George W. Bush's vaunted No Child Left Behind program fared better. Results of national tests conducted in 2009 make New York students look like the Whiz Kids.
"Forty-nine percent of white students and 17 percent of black students showed proficiency on the fourth-grade English test, up from 45 percent of white students and 14 percent of black students in 2003."
One in six African-American fourth-grade kids is making the grade.
How many scores of billions did this pathetic gain cost us?
Since 1965, America has invested trillions in education with a primary goal of equalizing test scores among the races and genders. Measured by U.S. test scores, it has been a waste—an immense transfer of wealth from private citizens to an education industry that has grown bloated while failing us again and again.
Perhaps it is time to abandon the goal of educational equality as utopian—i.e., unattainable—and to focus, as we do in sports and art, on excellence.
Teach all kids to the limit of their ability, while recognizing that all are not equal in their ability to read, write, learn, compute or debate, any more than they are equally able to play in a band or excel on a ball field. For an indeterminate future, Mexican kids are not going to match Asian kids in math.
The beginning of wisdom is to recognize this world as it is, not as what we would wish it to be.
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Perhaps it is time to abandon the goal of educational equality as utopian—i.e., unattainable—and to focus, as we do in sports and art, on excellence.
Ya think?? It won't happen in our lifetimes.
No child left behind translates to all children are pushed out equally stupid.
what we ultimately seek is excellence, not equality.
The beginning of wisdom is to recognize this world as it is, not as what we would wish it to be."
Pat,
The beginning of Wisdom is the fear of God. Philosophy is born in wonder and is called the love of Wisdom as in: philo (Love of)---sophia (Goddess of Wisdom). To recognize this world as it is, cultivates humility which the saints say can lead to understanding, wisdom and even praise. Thanks for another of your thoughtful and courageous essays full of both wisdom and praise.
"Yet no one objects that women are not permitted to compete in the NFL. Nor do many object to the paucity of Asian and Mexicans, or the over-representation of blacks, even as white males dominate the National Hockey League and the PGA."
By bringing up sports, Mr. Buchanan has selected the reductio absurdum of affirmative action, which is precisely where the conversation belongs. It would not surprise me in the least if we were to begin hearing clamoring for females in the NFL; for blacks and/or women in the NHL; or any other manifestation of affirmative action, especially the versions that fly in the face of both durable biology and invincible patterns of demographics. It is actually a saving grace of feminism-lite (as opposed to the militant version) that NBA commissioner David Stern thinks of the WNBA as a triumph of feminism. Were he to go all the way and truly bite the bullet of whole-orbed egalitarianism in hoops, he would have to push for what even he recognizes as an absurdity: men and women competing on the same courts. As it is, they have ONLY insisted on subsidizing the WNBA, a league that makes no money, attracts no ratings, and entertains zero people. But it's all for a great cause!
Meanwhile, there have been several instances over the last few years of black pro baseball players agitating for increased black recruitment. I recall Garry Sheffield talking about this a couple of years ago, but what he thought such activity would accomplish was never made clear. It couldn't possibly be that the vast majority of black kids are into football and don't really like baseball. No, it has to be that some of Garry's fellow people are being discriminated against while MLB skews white. (Actually it's never been more dominated by Central Americans.) You won't be hearing any white baseball players complaining about the demise of white guys in baseball.
"When it comes to artistic ability, musical ability, acting ability, athletic ability, Americans accept the reality of inequality. We are not all born equal, other than in our God-given and constitutional rights."
If there is in America a lingering sense of meritocracy with respect to art, music, etc. (and I think Mr. Buchanan is right, although even these areas of agreement are eroding constantly), it is perhaps explained by the fact that most Americans have not yet caught up with the full implications of the reign of pragmatism. Dewey's philosophy of education is absolutely triumphant now in state schools, but its implications for the arts have not been felt as thoroughly, at least not by the public. The ruling elites of the culture industry (movie studios, departments of film and English, and all academies handing out trophies for music, movies and television) are already totally convinced of the importance of affirmative action schemes not only in the production of art but also in promotion and praise of art. Thus we see a relentless decline, not only in the quality of pop music and movies (they are not entertaining), not only in the morality of popular art (it is typically pornographic), but also in the grounds of praise (we have to award Oscars to movies like "Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire"). Again, I would not be surprised to see the myth of equality finish the job by contaminating even these areas of culture as exhaustively as it already has politics.
Greg- The WNBA does attract and entertain a few thousand lesbians.
We are already seeing affirmative action creep into College football. There are a few coaches that have been forced to accept female place kickers. The way the NFL is disallowing defensive backs to defend against receivers and the over protection of the quarterbacks I would not be surprised if the game is reduced to near two hand touch allowing a few gifted females to suit up.
Look what they did to amateur boxing.Speaking of affirmative action in sports just look at the PGA. I agree with Greg I don't think it won't stop until they have ruined all areas of culture.
Excellent piece!
To argue on the basis of sports is to trivialise the issues of equality and affirmative action. There are other inequalities and coerved "equalities" that are far more important. Alas, if Americans can only be approached in these vital matters via sports, then it is hopeless to reason.
Mr. Wilson, you are absolutely correct that sports are the least of our concerns when it comes to the insidiousness of affirmative action which, as you have observed many times, is a policy that is plainly rooted in resentment and covetousness. I have no deep commitment to eliminating affirmative action from pro sports, though AA is just as incoherent in that field as in any other. And I would eagerly give sports up completely to multiculturalism if it somehow meant that merit could obtain in, for instance, hiring for jobs, or in academia. I suppose Mr. Buchanan's opening appeal to sports-crazy Americans was meant to expose how numb we often are to the Satanic logic of affirmative action.
By the way Mr. Wilson, you mentioned some time ago on this site that the Abbeville Institute was compiling a reading list in Southern history or literature. Any word on when that may appear on their website?
Free trade insanity has trickled down to education, where every high school student is pushed into college regardless of their actual ability. Most would be better off learning a trade or even entering the minimum wage workforce. Unfortunatley most of the blue-collar exporting jobs in this country have been outsourced to China, Mexico, India. Patrick Buchanan details this extensively in The Great Betrayl. The companies include General Motors, Whirlpool, and Fruit of the Loom. However, I do not blame these businesses, instead I blame the government which refuses to adopt economic nationalist policies. Liberalism benefits from such a system because it is in these universities that the ideology of secular humanism is crafted. The end result of the four year college experience for someone who should not have been there in the first place is usually thousands of dollars in debt, a useless degree, a rejection of traditional values, a rejection of traditional christianity, and sexual degeneracy in the form of "hooking up" that resembles hedonism.
"The end result of the four year college experience for someone who should not have been there in the first place is usually thousands of dollars in debt, a useless degree, a rejection of traditional values, a rejection of traditional christianity, and sexual degeneracy in the form of “hooking up” that resembles hedonism."
Yes, I quite agree with all of this but isn't it the same "outcome" for those who should be there as well?
As in "The end result of the four year college experience for someone who should be there is usually thousands of dollars in debt, a useless degree, a rejection of traditional values, a rejection of traditional christianity, and sexual degeneracy in the form of “hooking up” that resembles hedonism."
To Dr. Wilson @6 and greg @7.
I agree. However, the reason AA has not been applied to sports is because it does not matter to our ruling elites who wins the World Series, the Super Bowl, or whatever over-hyped contest one chooses. All that matters to them is that the masses watch the events and are distracted. If everything were like the WNBA, one might turn off one's TV and notice that one is being outsourced, overtaxed, and dispossessed.
One of the benefits of a college education is supposed to be exposure to, and exercise of the power of critical appraisal. Is religious belief to be held exempt from criticism? Will rational analysis and empirical observation inevitably favor secular belief? I do not believe so.
The majority of faculty members in this country may be alien to religious faith, if not hostile toward it. Many students also enjoy their freedom to deride the faithful and slander their faith. This only steeps the challenge, and sharpens the discussion.
The PC forces are out in force on the TAC thread for this article.
http://www.amconmag.com/blog/2010/08/26/the-myth-of-equality/
I know Larison has some liberal fans. They must have drifted over to the main blog.
About all the trillions spent in education in the US since 1965 that Mr. Buchanan mentions, I am curious why lack of funding is still cited for poor schools all over the world.
That aside, the public school system has one unchangeable flaw. You could make public schools more autonomous, localized, and independent, but that wouldn't change the single major flaw remaining.
People who study Bachelors of Education to become educrats are often all the worst performing left-behind students who had no other course to take.
Basically, educators are often the worst educated.
Exceptions are there - I knew a young 25 year old B.Ed. from Dartmouth who was multilingual and with a broad understanding of everything from classics to hard science, but she was a high tier person hired only by international baccalaureat schools of Germany, France, and other places. For all the rest, they are at the mercy of people who weren't good students in their youth to begin with.
None of those people valued excellence ever in their lives.
Red, TAC has been filled with liberals for awhile now. I think their antiwar stance attracted the more lefty libertarians and eventually outright leftists, and its hurt the quality of the magazine.
I am not a fanatic of sport. I enjoy playing many of the popular(and some of the not-so-popular) sports; but, I detest the modern day incarnation of the 'Circus' which is so pervasive in world culture. So, I agree with Dr. Wilson: if Americans in particular, and the remainder of the world in general, cannot understand, without sport analogy, the seriousness of the education scam, then we truly are doomed to the rot.
Additionally, Mr. Buchanan is correct in his theory: equality doesn't exist among nature's creature: of which, man is one.
Long live the best of the best: let us pity the rest.
@Red Phillips
I am having a laugh reading those comments.
The American conservative is the only kind of conservative in the world who adores Rousseau, defends divorce, worships egalitarian ideology, champions useless legislations to solve societal problems that nobody can change, and blames black crime in Michigan and Washington on slavery in Arabia, Africa, and Portugal.
I am not even conservative, and perhaps left of Chronicles, but neither I nor even post-communist Chinese and Russians hold many of these PC notions. What Chinese or Russian has ever been an apologist for violence by Uighurs or Dagestanis? Who there even tries to blame their actions on persecutions from more than 100 years ago?
#12. Actually, these days Journalism ("Media Arts") majors are even dumber than Education majors.
"The American conservative is the only kind of conservative in the world who adores Rousseau, defends divorce, worships egalitarian ideology, champions useless legislations to solve societal problems that nobody can change, and blames black crime in Michigan and Washington on slavery in Arabia, Africa, and Portugal."
Prateek,
This would seem so on the surface but it is in fact this very coalition of the willing who gave us G.W.Bush, Iraq, Afghanistan, huge deficits, financial collapse, no child left behind, and our current leader, President Obama. Never underestimate the cunning power of these fools who will combine heaven and hell for a win.
I agree with Coulter and others that a Sociology degree ranks right down there with an Education BA or BS. And what about that other uniquely American way of getting an academically challenged kid into college: The Athletic Scholarship?
I had to work with affirmative action for 25 years. Now we have a black President, black Surpreme Court justices, Secretaries of State, many black athletes, entertainers, coaches etc. Any excuse for it is long past. It is time to end it not mend it. Let there be merit instead of pushing one group against the other. Otherwise we are asking for massive civil disturbances. The Ivy league is among the worst examples of discrimination against white males. What does the Ivy League offer to a normal middle class American?
I'm worried that Pat is losing his touch. Age catches up with all of us, eventually.
His article could have received greater notoriety, and thus attention and influence, if he had queried the the disproportionate underrepresentation of Jews in sports to the disproportionate overrepresentation of Jews in government, media, law, and medicine, not to mention violin and physics.
Nothing like Abe Foxman shouting you down to help make the "Myth of Equality" case for you.
How about discrimination against white male applicants to medical school, where for every female accepted, 19 more qualified males are passed over? How about pilots and police? The effeminization of America will tell in time, as women in command or management degrade the effectiveness of all our institutions. Our elites--just look at these feeble excuses for men--obviously have a vested interest in neutralizing manhood by promoting feminism.
As I said over on the TAC post, the real issue seems to me to be that public education in this country is a total racket. There is no end to the lobbyists and unions clamoring for more more more. Some educrats probably care about the achievement gap, but how many are just trying to get their hands on some loot? Education spending has gone up and up and achievement has remained constant...I imagine kids graduating from public schools today are dumber than they were 50 years ago. And yet the clamor goes on, and everyone is guilted into it because of the poor blacks and browns that can't compete with the whites and Asians. It's enough to make a grown man cry.
To address the issues of equality and affirmitive action on a level your audience can relate to and understand is not trivializing the subjects, but democratizing them. These are not esoteric issues, intended only for illuminati or Essenian gnostics. And since they are indeed vital matters, they ought to be discussed without offending decency,decorum,etc., via whatever engages the hoi polloi, even if it does offend the concierge. In a penglossian world these weighty matters would of course be debated and disposed of via proper debating societies and faculty lounge philistines. Should that dystopia arrives, let's not in the meantime abandon hope so flippantly, nor dismiss reason with self-righteous condescension- let's employ it. Buchanan does.
Re 23, I enjoyed the refined sense of concierge humor, slipping in that "your audience" where "one's audience" is required, right under the noses of the Illiterati.
Re 24, Touche'. Your left hand is deft indeed. I'll heed today's reading. "What is sublime for you, seek not, into things beyond your strength search not...with what is too much for you meddle not.."
Dirty Harry would say, "A man's got to know his limitations."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2JnCXvm_Qc
Powell is the greatest soldier and one of the greatest statesmen of our time, Kagan and Sotomeyer are the finest Constitutional scholars of today, and Michelle Obama deserved her six-figure salary.
I think it's tricky to call it an affirmative action appointment when you don't know whether an equally incompetent person would have been placed in a top government position anyway.
Although it has not yet been altogether adopted, I do believe I have devised a solution to the problem of unequal educational performance. Our government need only to separate out Caucasian and Asian students and, using laser technology, vaporize about one cubic inch of cortex.
@27. And Obama was accepted into Columbia and Harvard Law by academic merit. Clarence Thomas is a modern-day William Blackstone. Michael Steele is competent. Condoleezza Rice is intelligent. MLK Jr. was not a plagarist. LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa passed the California Bar with flying colors. Raúl Grijalva is a modern-day Thomas Jefferson. And Alberto Gonzales is one of the great legal minds of our age.
And most of the heroes and dedicated, skillful leaders of the American military are black. If you don't believe it, just watch some TV and movies. In one prime-time, popular medical show, in one episode, there were 1)a self-made billionaire black philanthropist, 2) a black heart transplant surgeon, and 3)brilliant black neurosurgeon. And in a popular action show there was not one but two noble black Presidents, and a noble black Special Forces colonel.
A far right weirdo once observed that blacks were beginning to demographically gain on whites in America (si assiste ad una negrizzazione). With that in mind he opined, "naturally, from the point of view of democracy, there is nothing wrong with this phenomenon [the negrification of America], on the contrary. We know about the zeal and the intransigence showed in the United States by the supporters of so-called 'racial integration,' which can only promote it further. Moreover, not only do they support full social and racial promiscuity and want Negroes to have equal access to any governmental and political positions (this is why a black president of the United States is to be expected in the future), but also they have nothing to object to Negroes mixing their blood with that of whites.
These words were written in 1957. Anne Dunham was a sophomore in high school. Too bad the author was a supporter of fascism (wicked pagan!).
P.S. I was browsing in a book store today and I chanced upon Pettigrew's Notes on Spain and the Spaniards. The intro was by a certain Clyde N. Wilson. What a coincidence. Another Clyde Wilson who writes of Pettigrew!
If only President Obama meant what he said with respect to transparency. If he did, we would be able to see how insidious discrimination has become in every aspect of our lives. One extremely depressing example was pointed out by Mr. Buchanan in a piece about the U.S. Naval Academy selection results. The ultimate outcome of that will be a U.S. Navy, ever-more dependent upon technology beyond the grasp of 90% of Americans, incapable of even operating its own platforms. And just another anecdote--a 3.70 GPA and a 1200 SAT gets you into what "great" American universities? Duke, Northwestern, and UVA, but only if. . .