Student demands at colleges are nothing new. My dad gained a certain amount of notoriety 80 years ago with an editorial in his college newspaper demanding that co-eds be allowed to smoke on campus. However, a set of demands by a black student organization at Cornell University has made the news. For background see this article at the Cornell Sun.
The specific demand that has garnered the most attention and certainly caught my notice was this:
The Black student population at Cornell disproportionately represents international or first-generation African or Caribbean students. While these students have a right to flourish at Cornell, there is a lack of investment in Black students whose families were affected directly by the African Holocaust in America. Cornell must work to actively support students whose families have been impacted for generations by white supremacy and American fascism.
When you strip away the jargon and boilerplate, there’s a serious issue there, one that I wish received more attention.
We have a social problem in the United States and it’s only partially about race. There are grave problems among black Americans who are the descendants of slaves, a group of black Americans the sociologist Charles Moskos dubbed “Afro-Americans†. The problems include lack of economic opportunity, the collapse of the family, the street gangs that have led to Chicago’s homicide rate, and a host of others. Sub-Saharan Africans in the United States don’t experience those problems and Caribbean blacks experience them to a reduced degree.
In the 1960s, 70s, and 80s a series of measures were put in place that were at least notionally intended to address those problems. Perversely, they have been used to confer advantages on sub-Saharan Africans and Caribbean blacks.
It’s not new. It’s been going on for the last 30 years. That’s deseg’s dirty secret. Preferences and set-asides have gone disproportionately to sub-Saharan Africans and Caribbean blacks rather than to the African Americans, the descendants of American slaves, they were intended to help.
While I look with favor on points that have been made by some about groups as opposed to individuals and the inherent problems in trying to solve the problems of groups, nonetheless it still remains the case that Afro-Americans have special problems, if we wish to be one society rather than two as a society we need to do something about them, and some other means will need to be found to address them.
IMO this is good news. Afro-Americans want to be successful, but not at the expense of “acting white”, giving up their special victim status. The immigration from Africa dilutes this status, makes it fuzzy and harder to make claim to. Also, most Afro-Americans in this town have White mothers. Fuzzier yet.
My mother’s people were Slavs, she used to warn me about what was for us, and what was for “big”people”. Did this hold me back? Didn’t help. Wheres my check?
The lack of advance for Afro-Americans is too complex to cover in a blog piece. Part of it, i believe really is cultural. However, it is still more difficult for them too. At one of our facilities up north I have been advised by the nurses there to not send any blacks, out of safety concerns. Sent a Puerto Rican once. For a week. Never again.
Steve
My point is simple. Sub-Saharan Africans, Caribbean blacks, Mexican, Slavs, or the Irish cannot make claims equivalent to those of Afro-Americans.
History is what it is. No Afro-American alive today has been a slave, yes, you’re right about recent immigrants using affirmative action to get ahead, I personally believe, (no proof except his Harvard law school biography) , that a recent POTUS did exactly that Look, they’re more proactive.
I also think the whole affirmative action thing should be scrapped.
Yes, freed slaves in 1865 were rudderless, deserving of help. But it wasn’t until the 1960’s great society program that aid programs made black women with children the primary breadwinners in Black families. Working husbands actually made them poorer. So Black men started living around the edges, making children, stopping by on Momma’s day (food stamps)to get a piece of it, but never stay and ruin her benny’s.
What passes today for Black culture is really criminal activity, masked by fashion and hip-hop.
If I’m wrong about some of the subset, I apologize for the generalization.
You’re missing something significant, gray shambler. For nearly a century after the abolition of slavery blacks were prevented from advancing socially and economically by Jim Crow laws. Separate and unequal isn’t just history. It’s living memory. After that just removing the laws wasn’t enough. What was done had perverse consequences but that doesn’t mean that we still don’t need to do something.
I see your point, and I actually agree with it, but at the same time I don’t want to shout AMEN too loudly.
My thought is, imagine two young black men, one from a lower class big city environment with a century and a half of urban pathology in his background, the other a second generation Caribbean immigrant with a middle class background and a college degree and a decent job. So they’re different. But their skins are black, and they’re equally likely to run into a gun-happy cop who is suspicious of people “driving while black.” They’re both as likely to run into realtors who steer them away from white neighborhoods. They’re both going to run into managers who only hire blacks because upper management insists on filling a quota. They’re both as likely to be called out in a movie ticket line by a Nazi.
And so on. Yeah, your long-time black loser gets a couple of strikes against him almost as soon as he enters the game, but the black Caribbean kid who can hit some homers also starts out with a 1 and 0 count.
As for what we actually ought to do about this … I don’t know. This has been studied more than a little, and we’ve learned some things that work. Keep the kids healthy. Get the lead out of the air and out of the old wall paint and put fiberglass insulation or something of the sort after yanking the asbestos. Afterschool programs to keep the kids off the street if the parent(s) are busy working. Public parks are nice. Going to church might be a good idea — I’ve got doubts about the payoff from evangelical super-churches with thousands of congregants, but maybe that’s just me.
And lots and lots of personal tutoring and attention in general — kids should be reading at 4th grade level in 4th grade, not 10th; they should be doing algebra and biology if they intend to go to college; they should read some 19th and 20th century authors; they ought to know some history and civics. And hit some museums and look at paintings and learn who Plato and Julius Caesar were, and so on. Kids with lower class backgrounds who stay lower class aren’t going to make it through Harvard or Vassar; I’m not sure they’ll make it through liberal arts degrees at Ordinary State or the University of Southern Dismal. But it takes almost two decades of full time adult supervision to turn ordinary middle class children into creditable college students; it’s at least as demanding a job to do this with lower class kids from a bad environment.
Which is sort of strange in a way. We keep bemoaning the fact that decent meaningful demanding jobs for the middle class are going away, and we could easily put ten million people to work in training children for adult employment and life.
But there’s no damned money for any of this. And a good chunk of the population gets their rocks off feeling superior to blacks and Hispanics and other races. And nobody knows how to change that.
Your hypothetical is wrong. They’re not equally likely. For reasons of affect, dialect, that he was reared by his biological parents and any number of other reasons the son of Jamaican parents won’t be treated the way the other kid will. He also won’t be doing things the other kid does, has different work habits than the other kid does, and different modes of learning and problem-solving. That’s why Colin Powell (son of Jamaican parents) became a general and Barack Obama (white mother, Kenyan father, reared by white grandparents) became president.
There is a hierarchy of bigotry. It’s partially based but not solely based on race. People within racial categories are in fact treated differently.
The way that works in real life is that quotas get filled with Jamaicans and Nigerians. Policies intended to give poor inner city kids a break end up giving breaks to others.
“Sub-Saharan Africans, Caribbean blacks, Mexican, Slavs, or the Irish cannot make claims equivalent to those of Afro-Americans.”
That’s true, but it does not follow that those groups cannot validly cite their own variety of claims. And the same for a poor white kid from Appalachia. More importantly, the ready excuses and ineffective nostrums provided blacks are more harmful than helpful, no matter their intent. The value set of a person is the key, and the simple fact is that the primary setting for value setting, the family, is in worse shape today than 50 years ago when all this race legislation and the race industry started.
If we insist on continuing the pity party the same arguments and words will be spoken in another 50 years, it’s just that slavery and Jim Crow will be 50 years further in the past. This is a test of good intentions and race profiteering vs the will to call the problem what it is. A race disproportionately populated with successes in the entertainment industry and gang society, all excused as the fault of whitey, is doomed.
It’s not pity. It’s practicality. My experience has been that if things aren’t improving they’re deteriorating. Things are pretty obviously deteriorating in the black community.
Many,many,many, generations will pass before this is resolved. Blacks are out of patience and feel liberated enough from Jim Crow laws to takeover disobedience to a new level. Whites are angry too at the anger they see against police,and by multi millionaire ballplayers. But it won,t be civil war, white who can will move away, whites who can’t will intermix with Blacks and adopt they’re ways and language. The wild card in all of this is the influx of Hispanics. Ask an MS 13 gang member to feel sympathy over the legacy of slavery. Ask any Hispanic. they weren’t here and couldn’t care less.
Indians did not experience the Tuskegee syphilis experiment:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment
“the economic exploitation of humans as a natural resource of a disease that could not be cultivated or animals in order to establish and sustain U.S. superiority in patented commercial biotechnology”.
Sounds like grounds for a lawsuit to me.
SCOTUS ruled that public colleges could only use AA for purposes of diversity; the explanation suggests the benefit of AA is for whites, to learn about the “other.” One of the main reasons college-level AA doesn’t seem to work to help deal with the vestiges of American past is that this is not the system’s design. And college incentives to be selective and maximize economic returns will tend to direct admissions towards privileged minorities, both domestic and foreign. From the university viewpoint, the system works.