Bill Cosby complains that too many American blacks just look on while Nigerian, Ethiopian,and Jamaican immigrants 1) value an American education, 2) put themselves through school while driving taxis, and 3) become professionals. He complains further that American blacks do not make use of other opportunities as well.
There is a book written largely around his complaints, Juan Williams, Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America- and What We Can Do About It. For a rather small volume, it also presents quite an extensive history of black self-sufficiency going back to Frederick Douglass. Not that it says everything that might be said (what else does, actually?) but it could be considered a bible of sorts.
But let's say a thing or two more. About 30 years ago Thomas Sowell, Race and Economics, compared the experiences of different ethnic groups in this country and made very similar points. It has a very interesting inquiry why West Indian blacks have such a disproportionate number of black "firsts" and other prominent figures, compared to American blacks.
West Indian slavery was in many respects harsher than American plantation slavery, but the slaves had to shift for themselves and grow their own food. Plantation slavery, on the other hand, allowed the slaves very little initiative. It was a welfare state, however crude. Little children were sometimes fed from a trough like animals. The cultural differences, he concluded, still persisted, even sometimes to the point of violence.
Sowell also notes that blacks had to adjust from rural to urban life in the 20th century, not unlike the Irish in the 19th century. It takes two or three generations. Jews, however, had lived in cities for centuries and had a culture well adapted to urban life, including a high premium on education. He also notes that many slaves were sent to the cities to live almost as free people, except for turning over a portion of their earnings to the master.
Williams also has a chapter on the futility of the reparations movement, at least on getting some financial settlement.
And we have all heard of lottery winners who were broke a year later or less, haven't we? Or, on the other hand, of fortunes that were accumulated honestly in not that many years, far less than a century and a quarter?
Wealth, beyond the bounty of nature, is a moving target. There is no long lost pot of gold somewhere that will uplift the black population. It is false expectations and a waste of time to think so. See Eugene Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery, on how the southern slave economy stifled the creation of wealth, as opposed to the dynamic industrial north.
The immigrants who came here with just the clothes on their backs, however, generally did better than those who came in comfortable circumstances.
The newly freed slaves should have gotten their forty acres and a mule. But they did not, for whatever reason, good or bad. The Jews and Japanese-Americans, however, the actual victims, got their reparations while still alive.
A century and a quarter later it would be ancestral entitlement, which smacks of aristocracy, even for the best causes.
(There is a Muslim stand-up comedian who says there are still backward countries that make you a ruler just because you daddy was. We don't want anything like that around here, do we?)
And, comparing the states of the black population in 1950 and in 2000, just see the damage the liberal welfare state did in a half-century, or less. For all the horrors of Jim Crow, actually, what has done the greater damage? Remember, too, the guff Daniel Patrick Moynihan took forty years ago when he warned of the disintegrating black family.
Then we have an endless controversy over school reform. We get all this ramphorincus about school funding, educational policies, bureaucratic machinations, teaching to test, (Chicago school superintendent) Arne Duncan not having an education degree, etc.
Who ever mentions that education is an almost totally subjective activity?
Subjective, as in, you know it when you see it. What Marva Collins does, in twenty-five words or less, is establish a relationship with the student. Everything proceeds from that.
Without it you have nothing. You do not simply hand out marching orders, not to students, nor to teachers, nor to administrators either.
No, her relationships with students instil a love of learning. Forming them can be supremely touchy-feely or as crass as showing the little ones a check she got for consulting services.
And she does make spiffy little Shakespeare scholars out of snot-nosed ghetto monsters. Yes, there are snot-nosed ghetto monsters, let's face it, after all this time, and who else has ever done anything for them, even recognize they exist?
What, however, can even the most perfect schools do if people do not value an education? Without a culture of learning, schools are as helpless as a hand puppet without a hand.
If someone values an education enough, on the other hand, what is to stop him from getting one, not even the worst schools nor the most virulent prejudice? Was Frederick Douglass well educated or not? Or Malcolm X? Neither had any schooling to speak of but both made supreme efforts to educate themselves.
One who really wants to learn will learn, good school or bad school, school or no school. Mark Twain has been quoted that his idea of education was Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other. Today he would say Marva Collins.
There was an observation some twenty years ago that slaves had a higher literacy rate, in spite of it being illegal to teach them, than black children in public schools. It made me wonder, if we have such inefficient compulsory public schools, on the one hand, and such efficient illegal drug networks, on the other, if we should make education illegal and drugs compulsory.
But, again, if people do not value learning, what point is there to even the best schools?
The schools these days commonly blame their failures on parents. Never mind that the schools for decades told the parents to just leave little Johnnie and Janie to them. That is what many parents did, out of genuine preference or not, but the schools have yet to admit their responsibility for undermining parental influence.
And, of course, the schools always want more money and, lately, in Illinois, an increased income tax to supply it. There is also a hue and cry about affluent suburban schools spending some three times as much per student as poor city districts. And one income tax bill, pushed by downtown interests, would not even lower property taxes.
A severe critic of public education allowed, again, about thirty years ago, that public education worked tolerably well when it was locally controlled and financed. All the state and federal funding, with accompanying regulation, however, turned it into bureaucratic Babylon.
It did work for the Jews, a century ago, as we see in Albert Lee, Henry Ford and the Jews:
"Jews also came with a passion for higher learning which upset still more native Americans. The urban system of education, particularly in New York City, made it possible for poor immigrants to go through college at little cost. Rural Americans, on the other hand, usually had to leave home to have access to postsecon-dary education. The Jews, more than any other immigrant group, took full advantage of free public schooling. By 1907, when Jews constituted about 25 percent of the population of New York City, they were the largest single ethnic group in the public schools. Jews were entering profession-al schools in such large numbers that Lawrence Lowell of Harvard imposed a quota, limiting Jewish enrollment there."
Whether the fault lies with schools or parents, still, the younger generation has been badly shortchanged by the older generation, which does not value learning that much itself.
But see Fred Hess, Spinning Wheels, a debunking of perpetual "innovation" in the schools. In particular, he quotes a school official in an affluent suburban district:
"We have a full board room at every board meeting, and the board meets twice a month or more. The parents are full of letters to the editor. Whenever we advertise for parents to join committees, we have people standing in line to get on those committees... The PTA is involved in everything. Our site councils are like mini-school boards and people apply from all over. It's very impressive. It's overwhelming for some of our staff who aren't used to everyone looking over your shoulder... I spend half my life arguing with (the community)."
And before anyone belabors Arne Duncan again for not having an education degree, consider that the very least of his sins. "Education" as taught in "education" schools is actually social adjustment and very anti-learning. Cogent, pointed criticisms have been available for decades by such authors as Jacques Barzun, Arthur Bestor, Richard Hofstadter (Anti-Intellectualism in American Life), Reginald Damerell, and Diane Ravitch. Charles Silberman, Crisis in the Classroom, has a chapter titled, "Education for Docility."
Not that it is entirely the older generation's fault, at least on an individual level. Black children commonly consider it "white" to excel in academic matters, quite the notion to produce an inferior race. Oprah funded a school in South Africa, she said, because kids here do not appreciate it. Sen. Obama recently said much the same thing.
More than that, a truism of the age is that it takes two incomes to support a family. Thus children have much less time with their parents. Mary Eberstadt, Home Alone America, traces the problems of today's youth, the drugs, sex, violence, etc., largely to absent parents.
Why does it take two incomes to support a family now and not forty or fifty years ago?
In other words, why is the cost of living so much higher?
How about wasteful government spending, which ratchets ever upward even under "conservative" administrations? And throwing money at the schools or anything else is not the solution to that.
Anti-tax organizations miss a golden opportunity when they proclaim "tax freedom day" sometime in May, when we start working for ourselves instead of to pay taxes. They ought to figure how many hours a week a couple works just to pay for bloated government spending. But it could take some really ferocious bean counting.
Or just figure, that if it takes 80 hours a week to support a family, that is 40 too many. That is time parents cannot spend with their children.
And the schools are supposed to make that up? Or should they just blame the parents?
Is income tax really the road to equal educational opportunity? What if there weren't any? Figure that lavish suburban spending comes from property values subsidized by mortgage interest deducted from income tax and from property taxes likewise deducted.
Figure, too, that Douglass, as an urban slave living almost as a free man, made out massa to be a sort of Internal Revenue Service, over his
"... own hard earnings, every cent of it- ... demanded of me, and taken from me by Master Hugh. He did not earn it; he had no hand in earning it; why, then, should he have it? I owed him nothing. He had given me no schooling, and I had received from him only my food and raiment; and for these, my services were supposed to pay, from the first. The right to take my earnings, was the right of the robber. He had the power to compel me to give him the fruits of my labor, and this power was his only right in the case. I became more and more dissatisfied with this state of things; and, in so becoming, I only gave proof of the same human nature which every reader of this chapter in my life- slaveholder, or non-slaveholder- is conscious of possessing.
"To make a contented slave, you must make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate his power of reason. He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery. The man that takes his earnings, must be able to convince him that he has a perfect right to do so. It must not depend upon mere force; the slave must know no Higher Law than his master's will. The whole relationship must not only demonstrate, to his mind, its necessity, but its absolute rightfulness. If there be one crevice through which a single drop can fall, it will certainly rust off the slave's chain." My Bondage and My Freedom, p320 (which also observed in another chapter most northerners living better than most southern slaveholders.)
Economists recognize that you get less of what you tax and more of what you do not. Thus there is a movement in some environmental circles to tax "bads" such as pollution, congestion, land use, and use of natural resources, instead of "goods" such as profits and payrolls. Between cutting wasteful government spending and less destructive tax policies we will take large steps toward making families supportable on one income again.
Figure that wasteful government spending is welfare for someone who does not need it.
Figure, too, that income tax is the mortal enemy of small, start-up businesses. Small business has long been the route around discrimination among Jews and Orientals. Among blacks, however, according to figures Cliff Kelley airs out every so often on (Chicago radio station) WVON, of every thousand population, something like 109 Arabs are in business, 92 Jews, 66 whites, and 9 blacks. Ever hear a Mexican complain about Arab or Korean stores? A quick trip down 18th St. or 26th St. will explain why. For the forseeable future, any extraneous burden on small business will be a real barrier to the black community.
In the meantime, now that the Democrats control the House, Senate, and governor's office in Illinois, it will take a strong voice from the black community to stop income tax increases and wasteful spending, on transportation especially.
Sometimes at largely black political meetings the discussion turns to the dirt that some blacks do to each other, and I say I get tired of hearing about all the bad things white people have done to black people when blacks do each other like that. So far I have gotten away with it.
There is a profound need for reparations in the black community, to be sure, as Williams also makes clear. Certainly there is much to be said for the fullest possible historical understanding of and repudiation of slavery, Jim Crow, and, dare we say it, the liberal welfare state, including urban renewal and stifling public schooling.
What has changed in the past half century, or not? What has come of "making the white man pay"? A good place to start looking is Julia Abrahamson, A Neighborhood Finds Itself, what happened in Hyde Park fifty years ago, like the beginning of urban renewal in Chicago, or black and white united against the poor. On pp292-293, however, there is a point about the blacks in the city prior to 1950 knowing how to live here and the new arrivals not knowing. It is amazing how erudite those Hyde Park liberals could be even a half century ago, such as the "liberal white leader, long an advocate of Negro (sic) rights," who said,
"... I think the time has come when we ought to be able to sublimate our guilt feelings about past oppression and exploitation of the Negro (my father, God knows, was not a plantation owner) and ask the Negro to take a more active part in the rehabilitation of his people. The harsh fact is that Negroes who are financially and professionally successful have not properly concerned themselves with the Negro's problems, and altogether too many of the Negroes themselves act as though they have a mission to make the white man pay for past sins. I have been disappointed in the failure of Negro leaders to take a responsible part through contributions of time, thought, and money in the redemptive work of this neighborhood and the larger community. But this, of course, is something their own leaders have to tell them."
Take care of the internal reparations, then, especially between the ears, and the rest will follow. There has been some fascination among more alienated blacks for some years with the "Willie Lynch letter," purportedly revealing a slave owners' intention to keep blacks in servitude forever. Not that slave owners were ever that smart, but there has been a long-lasting servitude in the American black community.
There was a homey little item in Reader's Digest about forty years ago, anticipating Cosby. A civil rights leader complained that blacks were not taking advantage of the new opportunities opening up. They reminded him of a cow on the family farm when he was a boy. They did not have enough money to fence the field, so they tied the cow to a stake and she went around it all day. They finally got enough to fence the field, but what did the cow do? Go around the stake all day.
It would be racist indeed to leave any notion that black people are the only ones with that problem (search "calf-path"
And ageist, indeed, to suggest it is only a problem of the younger generation. It is a problem of the younger generation because it is a problem of the older generation
Accountability is not what you expect but what you inspect. If you do not have enough love of learning you will not inspect very much. You will spend your life arguing whether the elephant is a tree, wall, rope, or snake, if you do not have enough love of learning to walk around it and get a ladder to reach over the top.
An elephant is a strange image to one who has never seen one. Too many people are prisoners of the familiar. Consider the whole elephant, however, and you will have a superb beast of burden or circus performer.
He who acts through a power outside himself is a slave. Whether Thomas Aquinas said that or not it should be self-evident.
Where there is no vision, the people perish, says the Book of Proverbs. But there is no vision without love of learning. And when no one else is making the necessary mental effort, some pseudo-profundity will tell you that the difference between a vision and a hallucination is whether anyone else can see it. If it is something that takes mental effort to see, you have that external problem, which you realize, but everyone else has a greater internal one, which they do not realize.
If you have any love of learning in transportation and excess spending for it, let me bend your ears a bit. It might be a while before you get to enjoy more time with your children but they will have more time with your grandchildren.
And there is still lots and lots of urban renewal stuff below the radar too.
Yours truly never got along with schools very well, even the far superior schools of a half-century ago. Yours truly has been a library hound since third grade, however, but his little-shared love of learning often leaves him feeling a bit lonely. People do tell him every so often he is hallucinating, in one way or another, but he does not see them making that much mental effort either.
And if you do have that much love of learning, search
See if the problems, considered intolerable two centuries ago with state-established religion are not largely repeated in state-established education, to wit, the constant strife, the arrogance and indolence of the clergy, the servility and ignorance of the laity, the superstition and bigotry in both.
We are stuck with it for the forseeable future, but at least we can form realistic expectations. And we can educate ourselves in many ways.
WHOLE ELEPHANT QUARTERLY
William F. Wendt, Jr. Editor and Publisher $5 per copy 10 for $35 hard currency accepted
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Copyright 2007 by William F. Wendt, Jr. permission granted to reproduce and distribute in whole this four page advertising supplement
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