Does “‘Western’ mathematics … disenfranchise people and communities of color”?
The Seattle school board included that “fact” in a K-12 curriculum.
How can that be?
According to one of the educators who helped design it, because math and science tend to
be “white dominated spaces” and “devalue Black and Brown identities.”
According to state government statistics it is the case that students of color perform
worse on average in math than their white peers.
But is that disparity ‘white domination’ that ‘devalues’ others?
Is oppression the cause?
According to much of today’s political Left, you’re not supposed to ask that question.
Ibram Kendi, Founding Director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University,
explains, “If racist policies lead to racial inequity, then anti-racist policies lead to
racial equity … If anyone is supporting a policy that is leading to racial inequity,
they are being racist.”
That means it doesn’t matter that any acts of discrimination be found; if there’s a
disparity, according to Kendi there is by definition racist oppression.
All that matters is finding and removing disparities, trying to make everyone’s outcome equal.
Does this make any sense?
According to government research, white adults are more likely to have had a mental illness
in the past year than black adults.
But it would obviously be absurd to imply racism is causing mental illness among whites
based on that outcome alone.
Likewise, Indian and East Asian Americans on average have substantially higher incomes
than white Americans.
Anti-white racism didn’t cause that.
Even within separate white ancestry groups, there are income disparities.
Austrian and Russian Americans, for instance, tend to be better off than Dutch and French
Americans.
There are always disparities when you compare any two groups.
And sometimes those disparities benefit groups generally considered to be marginalized.
African immigrants to America, for example, are more than twice as likely as native-born
white Americans to hold a college degree.
Despites decades of anti-Semitism where Jews were prevented from joining professional and
social organizations, or attending or teaching at many universities, today Jews have substantially
higher income than the national median, are disproportionately represented at universities,
and make up 37% of American Nobel Prize winners.
When law firms wouldn’t hire Jewish lawyers, they started their own; by 1980 four of the
ten largest were Jewish owned.
Despite no black Americans being drafted to the NBA before 1950, today around 75% of players
are black.
And around 65% of players in the NFL.
Should these disparities be “corrected”?
Would it be right to limit the percentage of Jewish lawyers to their 2% population share?
Or limit the number of black professional athletes to their 13% population share?
These disparities aren’t oppression, they are the achievements won by skilled individuals.
The best being allowed to rise to the top benefits everyone who needs a lawyer, watches
sports, or engages with professionals of any type.
Sometimes, when equalizing outcome by giving special advantages to underrepresented groups
isn’t enough, the ideologues try to equalize outcomes by tearing down those who have achieved
success.
Also in Seattle, public schools have a plan to phase out AP and gifted student programs
by 2023 because white kids only make up 47% of the district… but happen to make up 67%
of the program.
The superintendent of the school district agreed with students that the programs for
advanced learners turned the school into “a slave ship” and “Apartheid High”.
Or in Hartford, Connecticut, a high-quality magnet school wanted to increase integration.
But when they couldn’t get enough white students to meet the racial make-up they wanted
the school to have, black students who wanted to go the school were disallowed, leaving
seats empty to make the numbers work.
Or to fix the problem of a disproportionate number of black children being in foster care,
the Annie E. Casey foundation pushed a program that “aimed at reducing the rate at which
black children are placed in foster care and increasing the rate at which those removed
return to parents’ custody,” never mind if the kids were separated for good reason.
Fighting oppression can’t be about making numbers balance.
To do so is to give unearned advantages to some, or tear down others, and neither of
those options is fair.
Fighting oppression needs to mean destroying barriers that prevent disadvantaged groups
from rising up to their best potential.
Let’s focus on that, rather than continuing to give oxygen to the unscientific racial
categories that divide us.
I’m Jake Klein.
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