PAN DISCUSSION GROUP 

Home

Bring drinks and snacks to share

The documents are also available at the PAN web site:

https://www.angelfire.com/ult/pan/

General:
The articles are the basis for the discussion and reading them helps give us some common ground and focus for the discussion, especially where we would otherwise be ignorant of the issues. The discussions are not intended as debates or arguments, rather they should be a chance to explore ideas and issues in a constructive forum Feel free to bring along other stuff you've read on this, related subjects or on topics the group might be interested in for future meetings.

GROUND RULES:
* Temper the urge to speak with the discipline to listen and leave space for others
* Balance the desire to teach with a passion to learn
* Hear what is said and listen for what is meant
* Marry your certainties with others' possibilities
* Reserve judgment until you can claim the understanding we seek


Well I guess that's all for now.
Colin
Any problems let me know..
847-963-1254
tysoe2@yahoo.com

The Articles: 

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First the text of Cosby's speech - you can also find the audio here:

http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/billcosbypoundcakespeech.htm

Ladies and gentlemen, I really have to ask you to seriously consider what you've heard, and now this is the end of the evening so to speak. I heard a prize fight manager say to his fellow who was losing badly, "David, listen to me. It's not what's he's doing to you. It's what you're not doing."

Ladies and gentlemen, these people set -- they opened the doors, they gave us the right, and today, ladies and gentlemen, in our cities and public schools we have 50% drop out. In our own neighborhood, we have men in prison. No longer is a person embarrassed because they're pregnant without a husband. No longer is a boy considered an embarrassment if he tries to run away from being the father of the unmarried child.

Ladies and gentlemen, the lower economic and lower middle economic people are not holding their end in this deal. In the neighborhood that most of us grew up in, parenting is not going on. In the old days, you couldn't hooky school because every drawn shade was an eye. And before your mother got off the bus and to the house, she knew exactly where you had gone, who had gone into the house, and where you got on whatever you had one and where you got it from. Parents don't know that today.

I'm talking about these people who cry when their son is standing there in an orange suit. Where were you when he was two? Where were you when he was twelve? Where were you when he was eighteen, and how come you don't know he had a pistol? And where is his father, and why don't you know where he is? And why doesn't the father show up to talk to this boy?

The church is only open on Sunday. And you can't keep asking Jesus to ask doing things for you. You can't keep asking that God will find a way. God is tired of you . God was there when they won all those cases. 50 in a row. That's where God was because these people were doing something. And God said, "I'm going to find a way." I wasn't there when God said it -- I'm making this up. But it sounds like what God would do.

We cannot blame white people. White people -- white people don't live over there. They close up the shop early. The Korean ones still don't know us as well -- they stay open 24 hours. I'm looking and I see a man named Kenneth Clark, he and his wife Mamie. Kenneth's still alive. I have to apologize to him for these people because Kenneth said it straight. He said you have to strengthen yourselves, and we've got to have that black doll. And everybody said it. Julian Bond said it. Dick Gregory said it. All these lawyers said it. And you wouldn't know that anybody had done a damned thing.

50 percent drop out rate, I'm telling you, and people in jail, and women having children by five, six different men. Under what excuse? I want somebody to love me. And as soon as you have it, you forget to parent. Grandmother, mother, and great grandmother in the same room, raising children, and the child knows nothing about love or respect of any one of the three of them. All this child knows is "gimme, gimme, gimme." These people want to buy the friendship of a child, and the child couldn't care less. Those of us sitting out here who have gone on to some college or whatever we've done, we still fear our parents. And these people are not parenting. They're buying things for the kid -- $500 sneakers -- for what? They won't buy or spend $250 on Hooked on Phonics.

Kenneth Clark, somewhere in his home in upstate New York -- just looking ahead. Thank God he doesn't know what's going on. Thank God. But these people -- the ones up here in the balcony fought so hard. Looking at the incarcerated, these are not political criminals. These are people going around stealing Coca Cola. People getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of pound cake! Then we all run out and are outraged: "The cops shouldn't have shot him." What the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his hand? I wanted a piece of pound cake just as bad as anybody else. And I looked at it and I had no money. And something called parenting said if you get caught with it you're going to embarrass your mother." Not, "You're going to get your butt kicked." No. "You're going to embarrass your mother." "You're going to embarrass your family." If you knock that girl up, you're going to have to run away because it's going to be too embarrassing for your family. In the old days, a girl getting pregnant had to go down South, and then her mother would go down to get her. But the mother had the baby. I said the mother had the baby. The girl didn't have a baby. The mother had the baby in two weeks. We are not parenting.

Ladies and gentlemen, listen to these people. They are showing you what's wrong. People putting their clothes on backwards. Isn't that a sign of something going on wrong? Are you not paying attention? People with their hat on backwards, pants down around the crack. Isn't that a sign of something or are you waiting for Jesus to pull his pants up? Isn't it a sign of something when she's got her dress all the way up to the crack -- and got all kinds of needles and things going through her body. What part of Africa did this come from? We are not Africans. Those people are not Africans; they don't know a damned thing about Africa. With names like Shaniqua, Shaligua, Mohammed and all that crap and all of them are in jail. (When we give these kinds names to our children, we give them the strength and inspiration in the meaning of those names. What's the point of giving them strong names if there is not parenting and values backing it up).

Brown versus the Board of Education is no longer the white person's problem. We've got to take the neighborhood back. We've got to go in there. Just forget telling your child to go to the Peace Corps. It's right around the corner. It's standing on the corner. It can't speak English. It doesn't want to speak English. I can't even talk the way these people talk. "Why you ain't where you is go, ra." I don't know who these people are. And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. Then I heard the father talk. This is all in the house. You used to talk a certain way on the corner and you got into the house and switched to English. Everybody knows it's important to speak English except these knuckleheads. You can't land a plane with, "Why you ain't..." You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth. There is no Bible that has that kind of language. Where did these people get the idea that they're moving ahead on this. Well, they know they're not; they're just hanging out in the same place, five or six generations sitting in the projects when you're just supposed to stay there long enough to get a job and move out.

Now, look, I'm telling you. It's not what they're doing to us. It's what we're not doing. 50 percent drop out. Look, we're raising our own ingrown immigrants. These people are fighting hard to be ignorant. There's no English being spoken, and they're walking and they're angry. Oh God, they're angry and they have pistols and they shoot and they do stupid things. And after they kill somebody, they don't have a plan. Just murder somebody. Boom. Over what? A pizza? And then run to the poor cousin's house.

They sit there and the cousin says, "What are you doing here?"

"I just killed somebody, man."

"What?"

"I just killed somebody; I've got to stay here."

"No, you don't."

"Well, give me some money, I'll go...."

 "Where are you going?"

"North Carolina."

Everybody wanted to go to North Carolina. But the police know where you're going because your cousin has a record.

Five or six different children -- same woman, eight, ten different husbands or whatever. Pretty soon you're going to have to have DNA cards so you can tell who you're making love to. You don't who this is. It might be your grandmother. I'm telling you, they're young enough. Hey, you have a baby when you're twelve. Your baby turns thirteen and has a baby, how old are you? Huh? Grandmother. By the time you're twelve, you could have sex with your grandmother, you keep those numbers coming. I'm just predicting.

I'm saying Brown versus the Board of Education. We've got to hit the streets, ladies and gentlemen. I'm winding up, now -- no more applause. I'm saying, look at the Black Muslims. There are Black Muslims standing on the street corners and they say so forth and so on, and we're laughing at them because they have bean pies and all that, but you don't read, "Black Muslim gunned down while chastising drug dealer." You don't read that. They don't shoot down Black Muslims. You understand me. Muslims tell you to get out of the neighborhood. When you want to clear your neighborhood out, first thing you do is go get the Black Muslims, bean pies and all. And your neighborhood is then clear. The police can't do it.I'm telling you Christians, what's wrong with you? Why can't you hit the streets? Why can't you clean it out yourselves? It's our time now, ladies and gentlemen. It is our time. And I've got good news for you. It's not about money. It's about you doing something ordinarily that we do -- get in somebody else's business. It's time for you to not accept the language that these people are speaking, which will take them nowhere. What the hell good is Brown V. Board of Education if nobody wants it?

What is it with young girls getting after some girl who wants to still remain a virgin. Who are these sick black people and where did they come from and why haven't they been parented to shut up? To go up to girls and try to get a club where "you are nobody...." This is a sickness, ladies and gentlemen, and we are not paying attention to these children. These are children. They don't know anything. They don't have anything. They're homeless people. All they know how to do is beg. And you give it to them, trying to win their friendship. And what are they good for? And then they stand there in an orange suit and you drop to your knees: "He didn't do anything. He didn't do anything." Yes, he did do it. And you need to have an orange suit on, too.

So, ladies and gentlemen, I want to thank you for the award -- and giving me an opportunity to speak because, I mean, this is the future, and all of these people who lined up and done -- they've got to be wondering what the hell happened. Brown V. Board of Education -- these people who marched and were hit in the face with rocks and punched in the face to get an education and we got these knuckleheads walking around who don't want to learn English. I know that you all know it. I just want to get you as angry that you ought to be. When you walk around the neighborhood and you see this stuff, that stuff's not funny. These people are not funny anymore. And that's not my brother. And that's not my sister. They're faking and they're dragging me way down because the state, the city, and all these people have to pick up the tab on them because they don't want to accept that they have to study to get an education.

We have to begin to build in the neighborhood, have restaurants, have cleaners, have pharmacies, have real estate, have medical buildings instead of trying to rob them all. And so, ladies and gentlemen, please, Dorothy Height, where ever she's sitting, she didn't do all that stuff so that she could hear somebody say "I can't stand algebra, I can't stand..." and "what you is." It's horrible.

Basketball players -- multimillionaires can't write a paragraph. Football players, multimillionaires, can't read. Yes. Multimillionaires. Well, Brown v. Board of Education, where are we today? It's there. They paved the way. What did we do with it? The White Man, he's laughing -- got to be laughing. 50 percent drop out -- rest of them in prison.

You got to tell me that if there was parenting -- help me -- if there was parenting, he wouldn't have picked up the Coca Cola bottle and walked out with it to get shot in the back of the head. He wouldn't have. Not if he loved his parents. And not if they were parenting! Not if the father would come home. Not if the boy hadn't dropped the sperm cell inside of the girl and the girl had said, "No, you have to come back here and be the father of this child." Not .."I don't have to." Therefore, you have the pile up of these sweet beautiful things born by nature -- raised by no one. Give them presents. You're raising pimps. That's what a pimp is. A pimp will act nasty to you so you have to go out and get them something. And then you bring it back and maybe he or she hugs you. And that's why pimp is so famous. They've got a drink called the "Pimp-something." You all wonder what that's about, don't you? Well, you're probably going to let Jesus figure it out for you. Well, I've got something to tell you about Jesus. When you go to the church, look at the stained glass things of Jesus. Look at them. Is Jesus smiling? Not in one picture. So, tell your friends. Let's try to do something. Let's try to make Jesus smile. Let's start parenting. Thank you, thank you.

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A response..  

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4628960

In a new book, Is Bill Cosby Right? , Michael Eric Dyson describes Cosby's remarks as a vicious attack on the most vulnerable among us.

In The New York Times a few days after his remarks, I offered that Cosby's comments "betray classist, elitist viewpoints rooted in generational warfare," that he was "ill-informed on the critical and complex issues that shape people's lives," and that his words only "reinforce suspicions about black humanity." Still, I don't consider Cosby a traitor, and I said so to Zahn. In fact, I defended his right to speak his mind in full public view. After all, I'd been similarly stung by claims of racial disloyalty when I wrote my controversial book on Martin Luther King, Jr. I also said that while Cosby is right to emphasize personal behavior (a lesson, by the way, that many wealthy people should bone up on), we must never lose sight of the big social forces that make it difficult for poor parents to do their best jobs and for poor children to prosper.

Of course, the ink and applause Cosby has won rest largely on a faulty assumption: that he is the first black figure to stare down the "pathology" that plagues poor blacks. But to believe that ignores how figures from black intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois to civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, in varying contexts, with differing results, have spoken controversially about the black poor. Equally intriguing is the leap of faith one must make in granting Cosby revered status as a racial spokesman and critic. He has famously demurred in his duties as a racial representative. He has flatly refused over the years to deal with blackness and color in his comedy. Cosby was defensive, even defiant, in his views, as prickly a racial avoider as one might imagine for a man who traded so brilliantly on dimensions of black culture in his comedy. While Cosby took full advantage of the civil rights struggle, he resolutely denied it a seat at his artistic table. Thus it's hard to swallow Cosby's flailing away at youth for neglecting their history, and overlooking the gains paid for by the blood of their ancestors, when he reneged on its service when it beckoned at his door.

For those who overlook the uneven history of black engagement with the race's social dislocations and moral struggles-and who conveniently ignore Cosby's Johnny-come-lately standing as a racial critic-Cosby is an ethical pioneer, a racial hero. In this view, Cosby is brave to admit that "lower economic people" are "not parenting" and are failing the civil rights movement by "not holding up their end in this deal." Single mothers are no longer "embarrassed because they're pregnant without a husband." A single father is no longer "considered an embarrassment if he tries to run away from being the father" of his child. And what do we make of their criminal children? Cosby's "courage" does not fail. "In our own neighborhood, we have men in prison.... I'm talking about these people who cry when their son is standing there in an orange suit. Where were you when he was two? Where were you when he was twelve? Where were you when he was eighteen, and how come you don't know he had a pistol?" Before he is finished, Cosby beats up on the black poor for their horrible education, their style of dress, the names they give their children, their backward speech and their consumptive habits. As a cruel coda, Cosby even suggests to the black poor that "God is tired of you."

It is not remarkable that such sentiments exist. Similar comments can be heard in countless black spaces: barbershops and beauty shops; pulpits and pavement platforms; street corners and suite hallways; and civil rights conventions and political conferences. These cultural settings give such ideas an interpretive context that they often lack when they bleed beyond ghetto walls and comfortable black meeting places and homes into the wider world. Cosby bypassed, or, more accurately, short-circuited, the policing mechanism the black elite-the Afristocracy-habitually use to keep such thoughts from public view (This is done not so much to spare the poor but to save the black elite from further embarrassment. And no matter how you judge Cosby's comments, you can't help but believe that a great deal of his consternation with the poor stems from his desire to remove the shame he feels in their presence and about their activity in the world.)

Usually the sort of bile that Cosby spilled is more expertly contained, or at least poured on its targets in ways that escape white notice. Cosby's remarks betray seething class warfare in black America that has finally boiled over to the general public. It is that general public, especially white social critics and other prophets of black ethical erosion, that has been eager for Cosby's dispatches from the tortured front of black class war. Cosby's comments let many of these whites off the hook. If what Cosby says is true, then critics who have said the same, but who courted charges of racism, are vindicated. There's nothing like a formerly poor black multimillionaire bashing poor blacks to lend credence to the ancient assaults they've endured from the dominant culture.

Cosby's overemphasis on personal responsibility, not structural features, wrongly locates the source of poor black suffering-and by implication its remedy-in the lives of the poor. When you think the problems are personal, you think the solutions are the same. If only the poor were willing to work harder, act better, get educated, stay out of jail and parent more effectively, their problems would go away. It's hard to argue against any of these things in the abstract; in principle such suggestions sound just fine. But one could do all of these things and still be in bad shape at home, work or school. For instance, Cosby completely ignores shifts in the economy that give value to some work while other work, in the words of William Julius Wilson, "disappears." In our high-tech, high-skilled economy where low-skilled work is being scaled back, phased out, exported, or severely under-compensated, all the right behavior in the world won't create better jobs with more pay. And without such support, all the goals that Cosby expresses for the black poor are not likely to become reality. If the rigidly segregated educational system continues to miserably fail poor blacks by failing to prepare their children for the world of work, then admonitions to "stay in school" may ring hollow.

In this light, the imprisonment of black people takes on political consequence. Cosby may be right that most black folk in jail are not "political prisoners," but it doesn't mean that their imprisonment has not been politicized. Given the vicious way blacks have been targeted for incarceration, Cosby's comments about poor blacks who end up in jail are dangerously naïve and empirically wrong. Cosby's critique of criminal behavior among poor blacks neglects the massive body of work that catalogs the unjust imprisonment of young blacks. This is not to suggest an apologia for black thugs; instead, it suggests that a disproportionate number of black (men) are incarcerated for nonviolent drug offenses. Moreover, Cosby seems to offer justification for the police killing a young black for a trivial offense (the theft of a Coca-Cola or pound cake), neglecting the heinous injustices of the police against blacks across the land. Further, Cosby neglects to mention that crime occurs in all classes and races, though it is not equally judged and prosecuted.

Cosby also slights the economic, social, political and other structural barriers that poor black parents are up against: welfare reform, dwindling resources, export of jobs and ongoing racial stigma. And then there are the problems of the working poor: folk who rise up early every day and often work more than forty hours a week, and yet barely, if ever, make it above the poverty level. We must acknowledge the plight of both poor black (single) mothers and poor black fathers, and the lack of social support they confront. Hence, it is incredibly difficult to spend as much time with children as poor black parents might like, especially since they will be demonized if they fail to provide for their children's basic needs. But doing so deflects critical attention and time from child-rearing duties-duties that are difficult enough for two-parent, two-income, intact middle-class families. The characteristics Cosby cites are typical of all families that confront poverty the world over. They are not indigenous to the black poor; they are symptomatic of the predicament of poor people in general. And Cosby's mean-spirited characterizations of the black poor as licentious, sexually promiscuous, materialistic and wantonly irresponsible can be made of all classes in the nation. (Paris Hilton, after all, is a huge star for just these reasons.) Moreover, Cosby's own problems-particularly the affair he had that led to the very public charge that he may have fathered a child-suggest that not only poor people do desperate things. In fact, as we reflect on his family troubles over the years, we get a glimpse of the unavoidable pain and contradictions that plague all families, rich and poor.

Cosby's views on education have in some respects changed for the worse. His earlier take on the prospects of schooling for the poor was more humane and balanced. In his 1976 dissertation, Cosby argued against "institutional racism" and maintained that school systems failed the poorest and most vulnerable black students. It is necessary as well to acknowledge the resegregation of American education (when in truth it was hardly desegregated to begin with). The failure of Brown v. Board to instigate sufficient change in the nation's schools suggests that the greatest burden-and responsibility-should be on crumbling educational infrastructures. In suburban neighborhoods, there are $60-million schools with state-of-the-art technology, while inner city schools fight desperately for funding for their students. And anti-intellectualism, despite Cosby's claims, is hardly a black phenomenon; it is endemic to the culture. Cosby also spies the critical deficiency of the black poor in their linguistic habits, displaying his ignorance about "black English" and "Ebonics." But the intent of Ebonics, according to its advocates, is to help poor black youth speak "standard" English while retaining an appreciation for their dialects and "native tongues." All of this suggests that structural barriers, much more than personal desire, shape the educational experiences of poor blacks. In fact, Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, Cosby's lauded '70s television cartoon series, won greater acceptance for a new cast of black identities and vernacular language styles. Cosby has made money and gained further influence from using forms of Black English he now violently detests.

Cosby's comments betray the ugly generational divide in black America. His disregard for the hip-hop generation is not unique, but it is still disheartening. Cosby's poisonous view of young folk who speak a language he can barely parse simmers with hostility and resentment. And yet, some of the engaged critique he seeks to make of black folk-of their materialism, their consumptive desires, their personal choices, their moral aspirations, their social conscience-is broadcast with much more imagination and insight in certain quarters of hip-hop culture. (Think of Kanye West's track, "All Falls Down," which displays a self-critical approach to the link between consumption and the effort to ward off racial degradation.) Cosby detests youth for their hip-hop dress, body piercing and the pseudo-African-sounding names they have. Yet, body piercing and baggy clothes express identity among black youth, and not just beginning with hip-hop culture. Moreover, young black entrepreneurs like Sean "P. Diddy" Combs and Russell Simmons have made millions from their clothing lines. There are generational tensions over self-definition; arguments over clothes and body markings reflect class, age and intracultural conflicts as well. I think that, contrary to Cosby's argument, it does have something to do with the African roots of black identity, and perhaps with Cosby's ignorance of and discomfort with those roots. And Cosby's ornery, ill-informed diatribe against black naming is a snapshot of his assault on poor black identity. Names like Shaniqua and Taliqua are meaningful cultural expressions of self-determination and allow relatively powerless blacks to fashion their identities outside the glare of white society. And it didn't just start in this generation. Cosby's inability to discern the difference between Taliqua and Muhammad, an ancient Muslim name, is as remarkable as it is depressing-and bigoted in its rebuff to venerable forms of black identity and culture.

Cosby's comments don't exist in a cultural or political vacuum. His views have traction in conservative (and some liberal) circles because they bolster the belief that less money, political action and societal intervention-and more hard work and personal responsibility-are the key to black success. While Cosby can surely afford to ignore what white folk think, the majority of black folk can't reasonably dismiss whites in influential places. Cosby has said that he's not worried about how the white right wing might use his speech, but it certainly fits nicely with their twisted views of the black poor. The poor folk Cosby has hit the hardest are most vulnerable to the decisions of the powerful groups of which he has demanded the least: public policy makers, the business and social elite, and political activists. Poor black folk cannot gain asylum from the potentially negative effects of Cosby's words on public policy makers and politicians who decide to put into play measures that support Cosby's narrow beliefs.

Cosby also contends that black folk can't blame white folk for our plight. His discounting of structural forces and his exclusive focus on personal responsibility, and black self-help, ignore the persistence of the institutional racism Cosby lamented in his dissertation. To be sure, even when black folk argued for social justice, we never neglected the simultaneous pursuit of personal responsibility and self-help, since that's often the only help we had. In the end, Cosby's views may make white and black liberal fence-sitters unfairly critical of the black poor. Cosby may even convince them that personal behavior will help the poor more than social programs, thus letting white and black elites off the hook. There is a strong counterpoint to Cosby's evasive, and dismissive, racial politics in his own home

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So is this Responsibility thing just a black problem or are we all guilty/justified i

http://www.heritage.org/Research/PoliticalPhilosophy/HL515.cfm   

The American Tradition of Personal Responsibility     by Dennis Prager

What is unique about our society? The United States was a socieiy founded on the almost unique belief that who your ancestors are is far less important than who you are. This was a monumentally important belief about the worth of the individual. Of course, there was a terrible exception in practice-the attitude toward blacks. The idea of the supreme worth of the individual rather than of his ancestry was violated in the case of the African.

In Who Prospers? an important book by Lawrence Harrison, the author asks why North America prospered while Latin America didn't. He lists a number of reasons. Among them is what he calls "familism." In Catholic Latin America, as opposed to Protestant North America, people had felt that they could trust only members of their family, not the stranger. In the United States, on the other hand, blood ties were less important than anywhere else on this planet.

That doesn't mean family didn't mean much in America. But it did mean, for example, that if you wanted to start a business, it didn't have to be with your son or your brother-in-law.

Individual Responsibility

Along with this individualism came individual responsibility: Just as I am rewarded for my good behavior, I am accountable for my bad behavior. This belief was a result of the individualism just described and of the Judeo-Christian ethic. American individualism and the Judeo-Christian notion of personal accountability gave us the extraordinary nation that we built here.

The Death of Stigma

One source of the onslaught against personal responsibility and accountability is secularism. As a secular individual in a secular, multi-ethnic society, to whom will I be accountable? Without a religious code, a religious community, a God, or a homogeneous secular ethnic community, to whom am I responsible? Obviously, only to the authorities--but what if I can elude the authorities?--and to myself.

In America today, much of society holds that we are responsible only to ourselves. We have interiorized everything: We-nothing outside of us-and how we feel--not how we behave--are all that matter in assessing us. As a result, we are witnessing the death of a very important socializing tool-stigma.

Do something bad today, and not only do you not suffer stigma, you may become a national media star. The murderer of John Lennon has been interviewed on one of the most respectable national television interview shows. Tonya Harding is becoming a movie actress. Kids are trading O.J. Simpson trading cards.

Stigma means personal accountability to society's standards. It is society's way of declaring something wrong without sending you to prison. In lieu of laws, we have stigma.

Responsibility Only to Self: Feelings over Behavior

Without accountability to an outside authority or standard, and without stigma, the only remaining responsibility is to self Self-which may have once meant one's conscience but now simply means one's feelings-has become for many people the one standard of behavior: If I feel good, the act is good. I have no accountability to anyone or anything but my feelings.

The incident I have most often cited to illustrate the rise in feelings-based values happened to my oldest son. Once, when he was two years old, a five-year-old bully walked over and threw him to the ground. The bully's mother frantically ran over to her son, held him, and said, "What's troubling you, darling?"

I know nothing about this woman, but of one thing I was certain-that she attended graduate school. I am certain of this because hers was a learned response. Most human beings would have yelled at their child "What are you doing?" and probably would have punished the child. You need many years of an American liberal arts education to learn that the proper response to a bully is to ask the bully what is troubling him.

"What's troubling you?" means that your feelings, not your actions, are what are most important.

We monitor personal feelings more than personal behavior. This completely undermines personal responsibility for the obvious reason that personal responsibility means responsibility for our behavior. Therefore, the more we preoccupy ourselves with monitoring our feelings and motives, the less we will be concerned with personal responsibility.

Yet, we have raised a generation to value and monitor their feelings rather than their behavior. I have repeatedly asked students this question: Imagine two wealthy men, equally wealthy in every way. Each is approached by a woman whose daughter has cancer. The woman explains that without more money she cannot afford an operation that will save her daughter's life. Upon hearing the woman's story, one of the men began to cry and, in the midst of his tears, gave the woman a dollar. The other man did not cry. In fact, he had another appointment and therefore couldn't even stay to hear the woman's entire story. But being a religious person who felt obligated to the biblical law of tithing, he gave the woman fifty dollars. "Who," I ask the groups, "did a better thing?" Overwhelmingly, students answer, "The one who gave the dollar, because he gave from his heart."

It is a profound illustration of how behavior has come to matter less than feelings. And since only feelings matter, how can you be responsible for your behavior?

Incidentally, whenever I have asked the question to poorer kids, they all vote for the $50 man. But it is not usually the poor kids who will set the agenda in our country. It is the kids at Beverly Hills High School, who vote for the one dollar man, who will attend the Harvards and UCLAs and ultimately go into the media and political positions that will set the society's agenda. And they tend to value feelings over behavior. But you can't pay for surgery with tears. You can't pay for a meal with sympathy. That is why the man who gave $50 did a 50 times better thing. That is the only possible answer.

God may judge hearts, but humans must judge actions. That is all we can judge, because none of us always knows our own motives, let alone the motives of others. We are a mixture of so many motives.

This belief that motives and feelings are what matter destroys personal responsibility. America is becoming a feelings-based society. That's why the mother asked, "How do you feel?" to her son the bully instead of worrying about that later and yelling at him, at the moment he bullied, "Never do that again. I do not care how depressed you are. I do not care how socioeconomically deprived you feel."

The Battle Against Religion

One consequence of the war on personal responsibility is that those who do judge behavior are called the worst thing you can be called today-judgmental. Here is how it works:

Personal responsibility means you could be judged guilty.

We never want to be judged guilty.

So we must stop people who make such judgments.

We stop them by calling them judgmental.

The desire to escape judgment and personal responsibility is a large part of the reason for the widespread anger at religion in America. Religion has something that is anathema to the modern flight from personal responsibility-a higher code whereby we can say, "You're guilty. You're wrong. You are responsible." That is the ultimate reason for the fear of religion in America and why that fear is felt so often by those opposed to personal responsibility and accountability. Religion comes with the baggage of judgment. It judges your behavior. And that is what the ultimate cultural battle is about: Is all behavior acceptable, or is there such a thing as sin?

As an example of the social/moral importance of God and a religious code, I frequently cite this story. During the riots in Los Angeles, our family watched the looting-some of which was happening blocks from our house-on television. At one point, I looked at my then-nine-year-old son and said, "Look, those people are getting away with taking what they want. Would you loot if you could get away with it?" He said, "No," which I expected.

I was interested in his response to the next question. "Why not?" I asked him. "Because it is against the Ten Commandants," he replied. I then knew that every penny I spent on his Jewish day school was worth it.

As I wrote in Ultimate Issues, the quarterly journal that I write, while my son gave the answer that I wanted, most educated parents would want a different answer. Of course, they, too, want their children to say that they wouldn't steal even if they could get away with it, but they would want a different response to the second question: "Why?" They would want their child to answer, "Because I feel (or think) it is wrong." That's the difference between the religious/hierarchy-of-authority view and the liberal, secular/no-hierarchy-of-authority view. It is the Kohlberg scheme of moral excellence versus the Judeo-Christian. The highest level of morality in secular thinking is that you feel it is wrong. In my religion, which I know best, it is the opposite.

Judaism has a remarkable statement in the Talmud: "A person who does something because he is commanded [by God] is greater than one who does something without being commanded." This runs entirely against the modern outlook which holds that the highest good is good done not out of obligation, but because one feels it is good. What could be more noble than doing right from inner feeling? The answer is that, for the good of society, it is far preferable to do what is right out of obligation to a higher authority. If we rely on everyone doing what he or she thinks is right, we are finished, unless you believe in the innate goodness of humanity, which no great religion believes in.

I did a television show in Cleveland with students from six high schools of different ethnic, racial, religious, and socioeconomic backgrounds. I asked them, on camera, "How many of you would shoplift from a department store if you really wanted something badly and were certain you wouldn't get caught?" Virtually every student, rich or poor, white or black, raised his or her hand. What amazed me was not so much that they would, but that they raised their hands on camera. Now, why would they raise their hands on camera? Because there is no stigma. Some people of my generation also would have shoplifted from a department store, of course. But they never would have raised their hands on camera. What if their parents saw? What if neighbors saw? Teachers? But today, "Hey, it doesn't matter; that's how I feel." That's all that matters.

Redefining Tolerance to Mean Approval

As defined by one major dictionary, "tolerate" means "to allow without prohibiting or opposing; to permit." As now redefined, "tolerate" means "not only to permit, but to approve."

Let me touch on what I believe to be the most difficult contemporary example-homosexuality. I believe that, except for incest, we must tolerate any consensual sexual behavior among adults. I also strongly believe that any dismissal of the humanity of a homosexual person is immoral; a gay person is created in God's image, just as is any other human being, and is as likely to do good as any other human. But while I must tolerate homosexuality and honor the personhood of the homosexual, I do not have to say, "I honor same-sex love as the equal of male-female love."

It is virtually impossible to hold such a position today, however. Tolerance of homosexuals without full acceptance of homosexuality renders you a "homophobe," and discussion is thereby ended. If you state that male-female love should be society's ideal, you are deemed so morally inferior as to be unworthy of dialogue.

Whatever your position regarding homosexuality, however, the fact remains that the new meaning of tolerance-approval-is another attempt to do away with personal responsibility.

Opposition to Failing

The onslaught against individual responsibility takes yet another form-opposition to competition. Personal responsibility means that just as you have the right to succeed because of your actions, you will be able to fail because of your actions. In America today, however, there is a movement to have no one fail.

One example is grades: At some universities today, a student cannot get a failing grade, and only rarely will he or she receive a poor passing grade. The thinking is: "We do not want to judge your behavior as a student; we only want your feelings about yourself to be good. If you get a D or an F, you may feel bad."

Competition is dismissed as a bad, macho thing.

The war against the possibility of failure has a more significant upshot. It is part of the reason for the support of a welfare state. In his important book, Dead Right, conservative writer David Frum makes this point well: If the state will support me, why be personally responsible and save money?

I was raised with middle-class values such as, "You better save. If you make money, put some of it away. There may be a rainy day." The modern attitude in America is that when there is a rainy day, others should, and will, supply umbrellas. In the meantime, therefore, borrow and spend as irresponsibly as you want.

This opposition to personal responsibility was recently manifested in the arguments for national health care. Its proponents argued that preexisting medical conditions should not be considered an issue in obtaining health insurance. But if that is the case, why ever buy insurance? I will purchase insurance only once I get sick

No One Is Guilty

Yet another battle against personal accountability/responsibility is the battle against guilt. No one is guilty of behavior: If you steal, you are the product of socioeconomic forces; if you're 15 years old and get pregnant, it is because there weren't enough condoms and you didn't get a good enough sex education in school; if you murder, it is because you had too easy access to a gun and/or because you were raised in a poor neighborhood.

Race, Gender, and Class Determine Behavior

The war against individual responsibility has taken another new form called Race-Gender-Class. Our universities have substituted a new trinity for the classic Trinity of the past. For Christians, it was the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost; for the educated elite, it is Race, Gender, and Class. Personal behavior is determined by my race, gender, and/or class, not by my values and my free moral will. It is therefore not possible to make a moral judgment about antisocial behavior by members of selected races, by "the poor," or by women (especially when one person combines all three identities, which explains the widespread feminist understanding for Lorena Bobbit's mutilation of her husband's genitals).

James Baldwin, the black novelist, once said that sometimes, when he gets into an impish mood at a cocktail party and wants to find out quickly which whites are racist, he says some particularly stupid thing, and any white who tells him how brilliant it was, he knows is a racist.

That is why I consider liberal racism the most dangerous and pervasive form of racism in America today. Of course, there is right-wing racism. And it is evil. But it is obvious and relatively rare. Liberal racism, however, is more pernicious because it is far more ubiquitous.

There is no one standard to which all people are accountable any more. And that's what Race-Gender-Class does. It subverts responsibility.

Compassion Rather than Standards

Finally, you can have responsibility only if you have standards. I mentioned this earlier with regard to a code of ethics-if you're not responsible to a God or a religion or some code above you, you cannot be held responsible for your behavior. There is one other way in which we have obliterated standards, and therefore responsibility. We have substituted compassion for standards.

To demand that people take personal responsibility for their behavior is extremely difficult. It doesn't come naturally to any of us. Perhaps the case for it can best be made by using other words to describe the assuming of personal responsibility. Those words are "growing up."

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How  did all this play out in what many saw as the greatest manifestation of US racism in recent years - Katrina 

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110007457

Witness: Blacks, whites, and the politics of shame in America. By Steele

Probably the single greatest problem between blacks and whites in America is that we are forever witness to each other's great shames. This occurred to me in the immediate aftermath of Katrina, when so many black people were plunged into misery that it seemed the hurricane itself had held a racial animus. I felt a consuming empathy but also another, more atavistic impulse. I did not like my people being seen this way. Beyond the human mess one expects to see after a storm like this, another kind of human wretchedness was on display. In the people traversing waist-deep water and languishing on rooftops were the markers of a deep and static poverty. The despair over the storm that was so evident in people's faces seemed to come out of an older despair, one that had always been there. Here--40 years after the great civil rights victories and 50 years after Rosa Parks's great refusal--was a poverty that oppression could no longer entirely explain. Here was poverty with an element of surrender in it that seemed to confirm the worst charges against blacks: that we are inferior, that nothing really helps us, that the modern world is beyond our reach.

Of course, shame is made worse, even unbearable, when there is a witness, the eye of an "other" who is only too happy to use our shame against us. Whites and blacks often play the "other" for each other in this way, each race seeking a bit of redemption and power in the other's shame. And both races live with the permanent anxiety of being held to account for their shames by the other race. So, there is a reflex in both races that reaches for narratives to explain shame away and, thus, disarm the "other."

Therefore, it was only a matter of time before the images of deep black poverty that emerged in Katrina's aftermath were covered over in a narrative of racism: If Katrina's victims had not been black, the response to their suffering would have been faster. It did not matter that a general lack of preparedness, combined with a stunning level of governmental incompetence and confusion, made for an unforgivably slow response to Katrina's victims. What mattered was the invocation of the great white shame. And here, in white racism, was a shame of truly epic proportions--the shame of white supremacy that for centuries so squeezed the world with violence and oppression that white privilege was made a natural law. Once white racism--long witnessed by blacks and acknowledged since the '60s by whites--was in play, the subject was changed from black weakness to white evil. Now accountability for the poverty that shamed blacks could be once again assigned to whites. If this was tiresome for many whites, it was a restoration of dignity for many blacks.

In the '60s--the first instance of open mutual witness between blacks and whites in American history--a balance of power was struck between the races. The broad white acknowledgment of racism meant that whites would be responsible both for overcoming their racism and for ending black poverty because, after all, their racism had so obviously caused that poverty. For whites to suggest that blacks might be in some way responsible for their own poverty would be to relinquish this responsibility and, thus, to return to racism. So, from its start in the '60s, this balance of power (offering redemption to whites and justice to blacks) involved a skewed distribution of responsibility: Whites, and not blacks, would be responsible for achieving racial equality in America, for overcoming the shames of both races--black inferiority and white racism. And the very idea of black responsibility would be stigmatized as racism in whites and Uncle Tomism in blacks.

President Johnson's famous Howard University speech, which launched the Great Society in 1965, outlined this balance of power by explicitly spelling out white responsibility without a single reference to black responsibility. In the 40 years since that speech no American president has dared correct this oversight.

The problem here is obvious: The black shame of inferiority (the result of oppression, not genetics) cannot be overcome with anything less than a heroic assumption of responsibility on the part of black Americans. In fact, true equality--an actual parity of wealth and ability between the races--is now largely a black responsibility. This may not be fair, but historical fairness--of the sort that resolves history's injustices--is an idealism that now plagues black America by making black responsibility seem an injustice.

And yet, despite the fact that greater responsibility is the only transforming power that can take blacks to true equality, this is an idea that deeply threatens the 40-year balance of power between the races. Bill Cosby's recent demand that poor blacks hold up "their end of the bargain" and do a better job of raising their children was explosive because it threatened this balance. Mr. Cosby not only implied that black responsibility was the great transforming power; he also implied that there was a limit to what white responsibility could do. He said, in effect, that white responsibility cannot overcome black inferiority. This is a truth so obvious as to be mundane. Yet whites won't say it in the interest of their redemption and blacks won't say it in the interest of historical justice. It is left to hurricanes to make such statements.

And black responsibility undermines another purpose of this balance of power, which is to keep the shames of both races covered. It was always the grandiosity of white promises (President Johnson's promise to "end poverty in our time," today's promises of "diversity" and "inclusion") that enabled whites and American institutions to distance themselves from the shame of white racism. But if black responsibility is the great transformative power, whites are no more than humble partners in racial reform, partners upon whom little depends. In this position they cannot make grandiose claims for what white responsibility can do. And without a language of grandiose promises, the shame of white racism is harder to dispel.

But it is the shame of blacks that becomes most transparent when black responsibility is given its rightful ascendancy. When this happens blacks themselves cannot look at New Orleans without acknowledging what Bill Cosby acknowledged in a different context, that poor blacks have not held up their end of the bargain. Responsibility always comes with the risk of great shame, the shame of failing to meet the responsibility one has assumed. A great problem in black American life is that we have too often avoided responsibility in order to avoid shame. This is understandable given the unforgiving pas de deux of mutual witness between blacks and whites in which each race prepares a face for the other and seizes on the other's weaknesses with ravenous delight. And four centuries of persecution have indeed left us with weaknesses, and even a degree of human brokenness, that is shaming. Nevertheless, it is only an illusion to think that we can mute the sting of shame by charging whites with responsibility for us. This is a formula for running into the shame you run from.

Today it has to be conceded that whites have made more progress against their shame of racism than we blacks have made against our shame of inferiority. It took nothing less than four centuries, but in the '60s whites finally took open responsibility for their racism despite the shame this exposed them to. And they knew that ever-present black witness would impose on them an exacting accountability (Bill Bennett, Vicente Fox, Trent Lott) for diffusing this evil. But, in fact, racism has receded in American life because whites, at long last, took greater responsibility for making it recede despite the shame they endured. And wasn't it the certainty of shame, as much as anything else, that had kept them rationalizing their racism for so long, looking to the supposed inferiority of blacks to justify an evil?

No doubt it is easier to overcome racism than an inferiority of development grounded in centuries of racial persecution. Nevertheless, if New Orleans is a wake-up call to government, it is also a wake-up call to black America. If we want to finally erase the inferiority that oppression left us with, we have to first of all acknowledge it to ourselves, as whites did with their racism. Our scrupulous witness of whites helped them become more and more responsible for resisting the shame of racism.

And our open acknowledgment of our underdevelopment will clearly give whites a power of witness over us. It will mean that whites can hold us accountable for overcoming inferiority as we hold them to accountable for overcoming racism. They will be able to openly shame us when we are not fully at war with our underdevelopment, just as Bill Bennett was shamed for no more than giving a false impression of racism. If this prospect feels terrifying to many blacks, we have to remember that whites witness and judge us anyway, just as we have witnessed and judged their shame for so long. Mutual witness will go on no matter what balances of power we strike. It is best to be open, and allow the "other's" witness to inspire rather than shame.

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Finally,  a look at the roots of inequality on a global scale.....

http://www.hoover.org/publications/he/23/23a.html

Although the original title of my talk was "Conquests and Cultures," my recently published book with the same title is the last volume of a broader three-volume study of worldwide cultural differences and their economic and social impacts. So I would like to use the opportunity of this occasion and this distinguished audience and institution, not to plug a book, but to discuss some broader themes and conclusions that I have reached after 15 years of researching and writing. I would also like to talk about how those broader themes and conclusions might apply to some of the racial, ethnic, and cultural dilemmas confronting us today.

During the long years that I spent researching and writing this trilogy I was struck again and again with how common huge disparities in income and wealth have been for centuries, in countries around the world--and yet how each country regards its own particular disparities as unusual, if not unique. Some of these disparities have been among racial or ethnic groups, some among nations, and some among regions, continents, or whole civilizations.

Occupational differences have been equally unequal.

In the early 1920s, Jews were just 6 percent of the population of Hungary and 11 percent of the population of Poland, but they were more than half of all the physicians in both countries, as well as being vastly over-represented in commerce and other fields In the middle of the nineteenth century, just three countries produced most of the manufactured goods in the world--Britain, Germany, and the United States. By the late twentieth century, it was estimated that 17 percent of the people in the world produce four-fifths of the total output on the planet.

Why are there such disparities? In some cases, we can trace the reasons, but in other cases we cannot. A more fundamental question, however, is: Why should anyone have ever expected equality in the first place?

Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that not only every racial or ethnic group, but even every single individual in the entire world, has identical genetic potential. If it is possible to be even more extreme, let us assume that we all behave like saints toward one another. Would that produce equality of results?

Of course not. Real income consists of output and output depends on inputs. These inputs are almost never equal--or even close to being equal.

During the decade of the 1960s, for example, the Chinese minority in Malaysia earned more than a hundred times as many engineering degrees as the Malay majority. Halfway around the world at the same time, the majority of the population of Nigeria, living in its northern provinces, were just 9 percent of the students attending that country's University of Ibadan and just 2 percent of the much larger number of Nigerian students studying abroad in foreign institutions of higher learning. Given similar educational disparities among other groups in other countries--disparities in both the quantity and quality of education, as well as in fields of specialization--why should anyone expect equal outcomes in incomes or occupations?

 Even at the level of craft skills, groups have differed enormously, as they have in urbanization. During the Middle Ages, and in some places long beyond, most of the population of the cities in Slavic Eastern Europe were not Slavs. Germans, Jews, and other non-Slavic peoples were the majority populations in these cities for centuries, while the Slavs were predominantly peasants in the surrounding countrysides. Only over a period of centuries did the other cities of Slavic Eastern Europe acquire predominantly Slavic populations.

Until this long transition to urban living took place among the Slavs, how could the wide range of skills typically found in cities be expected to exist in populations that lived overwhelmingly in the countryside? Not only did they not have such skills in Eastern Europe, they did not have them when they immigrated to the United States, to Australia, or to other countries, where they typically worked in low-level occupations and earned correspondingly low incomes.

Where geography isolates people, whether in mountain valleys or on small islands scattered across a vast sea, there the cultural exposures of those people to the outside world are very limited and so, typically, is their technological advancement. While the rest of the world exchanges goods, knowledge, and innovations from a vast cultural universe, isolated peoples have been largely limited to what they alone have been able to develop.

Few, if any, of the great advances in human civilization have come from isolated peoples. As the eminent French historian Fernand Braudel put it, the mountains almost always lag behind the plains--even if the races in the two places are the same. Potatoes and the English language both reached the Scottish lowlands before they reached the highlands. Geographically imposed cultural isolation takes many forms and exists in many degrees. Cities have long been in the vanguard of human progress, all over the world, but cities do not arise randomly in all geographic settings. Most of the great cities of the world have developed on navigable waterways--rivers or harbors--but such waterways are by no means equally or randomly distributed around the world. They are very common in Western Europe and very rare in sub-Saharan Africa. Navigable waterways have been economically crucial, especially during the millennia of human history before the development of railroads, trucks, and airplanes. No great civilization has developed in isolation. For example, when the British first crossed the Atlantic and confronted the Iroquois on the eastern seaboard of what is today the United States, they were able to steer across that ocean in the first place because they used rudders invented in China, they could navigate on the open seas with the help of trigonometry invented in Egypt, their calculations were done with numbers invented in India, and their general knowledge was preserved in letters invented by the Romans.

A network of rivers in Western Europe flow gently through vast plains, connecting wide areas economically and culturally. The rivers of tropical Africa plunge a thousand feet or more on their way to the sea, with cascades and waterfalls making them navigable only for stretches between these natural barriers--and the coastal plain in Africa averages just 20 miles. Regular rainfall and melting snows keep the rivers of Western Europe flowing throughout the year but African rivers have neither--and so rise and fall dramatically with the seasons, further limiting their usefulness.

We have seen how cultural handicaps have followed Eastern Europeans as they immigrated overseas, leading to lower levels of income than among immigrants from Western Europe who settled in the same places, whether North America or Australia. If Africans had immigrated voluntarily to the Western Hemisphere, instead of in bondage, is there any reason to believe that their earnings would have achieved an equality that the Slavic immigrants failed to achieve?

There is no question that Africans and their descendants faced the additional barrier of color prejudice, but can we measure its effects by assuming that black people would have had the same income and wealth as white people in the absence of this factor--especially in view of the large disparities among different groups of white immigrants, not to mention the rise of some non-white groups such as Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans to incomes above the national average?

Anyone familiar with the history of race relations in the Western Hemisphere would find it virtually impossible to deny that blacks in the United States have faced more hostility and discrimination than blacks in Latin America. As just one example, 161 blacks were lynched in one year in the United States, but racial lynching was unknown south of the Rio Grande. People may debate whether race relations in Brazil, for example, have ever been quite as good as sometimes represented, but there is little or no debate that they have been better than in the United States.

If discrimination were as all-purpose an explanation of economic differences as is often supposed, we might reasonably expect blacks in Brazil to have come closer to economic parity with whites there than blacks in the United States have come to achieving parity with white Americans. In fact, however, Brazil has larger black-white disparities in income than does the United States. As inconsistent as this may be with discrimination as a dominant explanatory factor, it is perfectly consistent with cultural explanations.

Blacks in the United States have had more centuries of acculturation to Western civilization than blacks in Brazil. Brazil continuously imported Africans in large numbers up through the middle of the nineteenth century, while most people of African ancestry on American soil were born on American soil as far back as colonial times. Perhaps an even stronger case against the predominance of discrimination as an explanation of economic disparities would be a comparison of blacks in Haiti with blacks in the United States. Since Haiti became independent two centuries ago, Haitian blacks should be the most prosperous blacks in the hemisphere and American blacks the poorest, if discrimination is the overwhelming factor, but in fact the direct opposite is the case. It is Haitians who are the poorest and American blacks who are the most prosperous in the hemisphere--and in the world.

None of this should be surprising. The fact that discrimination deserves moral condemnation does not automatically make it causally crucial. Whether it is or is not in a given time and place is an empirical question, not a foregone conclusion. A confusion of morality with causation may be politically convenient but that does not make the two things one.

We rightly condemn a history of gross racial discrimination in American education, for example, but when we make that the causal explanation of educational differences, we go beyond what the facts will support. Everyone is aware of times and places when the amount of money spent educating a black child was a fraction of what was spent educating a white child, when the two groups were educated in separate systems, hermetically sealed off from one another, and when worn-out textbooks from the white schools were then sent over to the black schools to be used, while new and more up-to-date textbooks were bought for the white children. The number of days in a school sometimes differed so much that a black child with 9 years of schooling would have been in class the same number of days as a white child with only 6 years of schooling. It seems so obvious that such things would account for disparities in test scores, for example.

But is it true?

There are other groups to whom none of these factors apply--and who still have had test score differences as great as those between black and white children in the Jim Crow South. Japanese and Mexican immigrants began arriving in California at about the same time and initially worked in very similar occupations as agricultural laborers. Yet a study of a school district in which their children attended the same schools and sat side-by-side in the same classrooms found IQ differences as great as those between blacks and whites attending schools on opposite sides of town in the Jim Crow South. International studies have found different groups of illiterates--people with no educational differences because they had no education--with mental test differences larger than those between blacks and whites in the United States. Nor is this necessarily a matter of genetics. During the First World War, black soldiers from Ohio, Illinois, New York, and Pennsylvania scored higher on mental tests than did white soldiers from Georgia, Arkansas, Kentucky, and Mississippi What is "the" reason? There may not be any such thing as "the" reason. There are so many cultural, social, economic, and other factors interacting that there was never any reason to expect equal results in the first place. That is why plausible simplicities must be subjected to factual scrutiny.

Back in 1899, when the schools of Washington, D.C. were racially segregated and discrimination was rampant, there were four academic high schools in the city--three white and one black. When standardized tests were given that year, the black academic high school scored higher than two of the three white academic high schools Today, nearly a century later, even setting such a goal would be considered hopelessly utopian. Nor was this a fluke. That same high school was scoring at or above the national average on IQ tests during the 1930s and 1940s. Yet its physical plant was inadequate and its average class size was higher than that in the city's white high schools.

Today, that same school has a much better physical plant and per-pupil expenditures in the District of Columbia are among the highest in the nation. But the students' test scores are among the lowest. Nor was this school unique in having had higher academic achievements during a period when it seemingly lacked the prerequisites of achievement and yet fell far behind in a later period when these supposed prerequisites were more plentiful.

It is also important that economic and other disparities be confronted, not evaded. Best-selling author Shelby Steele says that whites in America today are fearful of being considered racists, while blacks are fearful of being considered inferior. Social dogmas may be accepted because they relieve both groups of their fears, even if these dogmas neither explain the past nor prepare for the future.

History, geography, and cultures are influences but they are not predestination. Not only individuals but whole peoples have moved from the backwaters of the world to the forefront of civilization. The late Italian author Luigi Barzini asked of Britain: "How, in the first place, did a peripheral island rise from primitive squalor to world domination?" The story of Japan's rise from a backward country in the mid-nineteenth century to one of today's leading economic powers has been at least equally as dramatic. Scotland was for centuries known for its illiteracy, poverty, and lack of elementary cleanliness. Yet, from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, most of the leading intellectual pioneers of Britain were Scots, and Scots also become prominent in business, banking, medicine, and engineering--not only in Britain but around the world.

These and other dramatic and heartening rises of whole peoples came from doing things that were often directly the opposite of what is being urged upon less fortunate groups in the United States today. Far from painting themselves into their own little cultural corner and celebrating their "identity," these peoples sought the knowledge and insights of other peoples more advanced than themselves in particular skills, technologies, or organizational experience. It took centuries for the English to absorb the cultural advances brought by such conquerors as the Romans and the Normans and by such immigrants as the Huguenots, Germans, Jews, and others who played a major role in developing the British economy.

Thats all folks!

Colin