I would think part of the problem is maybe that race is used as a qualification for their role models. If, instead, teachers like yourself could be accepted as role models, wouldn’t the problem just vanish?
I suppose the reason that white boys survive the effects of mostly female teachers better because most black children lack the long-term presence of a father figure.
Not sure having a male second-grade teacher is going to make all that much difference.
Regards,
Shodan
Show me the studies concluding that having black male teachers causes “these black boys” to have better life outcomes. Until you do that, I will not agree with your feling that more discrimination on the basis of race is a good thing.
It would be a tough study to conduct, and take so long that even if the outcome were to show an improvement, a lot of time would be lost finding out. I think it is a reasonable inference that good role models have a substantial benefit. Notice, for instance, the improvement in blacks’ perception of race relations based on nothing more than the election of a President they consider black:
"*(CBS) For the first time in CBS News polling history, a majority of blacks are casting race relations in the United States in a positive light.
Fifty-nine percent of African-Americans - along with 65 percent of whites - now characterize the relationship between blacks and whites in America as “good,” according to a new CBS News/New York Times survey.
Less than a year ago, just 29 percent of blacks said race relations were good. The percentage of blacks who say race relations are bad, meanwhile, has dropped from 59 percent last July to 30 percent today. *"
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/04/27/opinion/polls/main4972532.shtml
At some point you have to get people past feeling cheated before you can get them excited about performing to a maximum potential. It may be true that they are not actually being cheated, but perception does count.
There’s some serious question as to whether AA helps blacks feel less cheated.
In general, to the extent that anyone - whether group or individual - is in an unfortunate position they have a tendency to feel cheated (and even some who aren’t feel this way). As long as blacks are clearly less well-off on average, they will feel cheated as a group.
Unless you think AA will solve this problem and make everyone equal. To the extent that you think it won’t, than it won’t solve the perception problem either.
In other words, you have no data, but discrimination on the basis of race just fits your view of how the world should work. That is the exact attitude that brought us Jim Crow. I’ll have none of that, thank you very much.
Also, neither you nor the OP have explained your belief that only black males can be role models for “these black boys.”
I’d ask anyone who has a problem with AA for teacher hiring to consider how they would have turned out if, as a white male, all of their teachers were black females.
Or as a white female, all their teachers and most of the administrators were black men.
Even if you do have two strong parents at home to model yourself after, don’t you think you’d feel a kind of uncomfortable having almost all the adults in your life being from completely different racial and possible cultural backgrounds shaping you?
Hope this isn’t too much of a hijack, but I noticed something the other day while walking to work. I passed by a daycare center on the “white” side of town. The kids were waiting around in the playground. Most of the kids were white, with a couple of black kids thrown in the mix. When I got downtown, I passed by another center where the kids were being taken on a walk around the block. ALL the kids were black. No “token” whites thrown in. I see things like this time and time again. It’s either 90% white with 10% non-white, or 100% black. Now maybe the black kids’ parents don’t care about diversity and want their kids in an all-black environment (though some of the teachers at the downtown school were white). Or maybe all-black schools, even ones for little tykes, carry a stigma of inferiority and only poor blacks would bother with them. But still, it’s likely those kids in the all-black schools will go on to all-black primary and secondary schools and be just as unexposed to diversity as a white kid who only goes to white schools and is taught by white teachers. There should be a mutual effort at creating diversity in the educational system, if we’re going to pay lip service to it.
I wouldn’t say “most” black children, but certainly “many” black children lack that long-term presence. So do some of the white children–and indeed the two most insufferable white girls I’ve taught have been raised by single moms. (Other single moms do a spectacular job raising their kids). One male second-grade teacher won’t make all the difference, but if there were a white boy who didn’t otherwise encounter white males who succeeded in school (a hard proposition to believe), that might make a difference.
Perhaps–but how do you change that? I had an experience once when I was subbing: a black boy came up to me at lunch and told me a joke that ended with “And the black man says, ‘I’m doing this for my country!’ and throws the white man out of the airplane.” He really expected me to laugh, and when I explained to him that I was a white man, he looked annoyed and confused, told me I wasn’t THAT kind of a white man and that his dad had told him the joke, and stalked off. It’s a population in which I’ve heard black kids saying that they hate white people (never the opposite, interestingly), or just white girls, while simultaneously cutting one another down for having skin too dark. These kids, as I said, are deeply aware of race.
If I had a magic wand to wave to make all of them completely tolerant and able to look past skin color and ethnicity, that wand would be a-waving. But I don’t: I gotta work with the kids that are, not the kids in my fantasy. Given that, I see no way to magically make myself into a role model that they could see themselves becoming: when they don’t see any black men working middle-class jobs ever (and Rand Rover, this’ll be my only response to you in this thread: TV multi-millionaires are neither middle-class nor plausible role-models), they draw what is a rational if incorrect conclusion, that academic success isn’t something for black males.
That’s what I want to change.
Yep, that’s about where I am too. What you say about discipline has been a huge learning curve for me. Middle class kids I can say, “Would you come here for a minute, please?” and they hear it as a direction and come here. Poor kids from rough neighborhoods (overwhelmingly though not exclusively black kids in my city) seem to hear that as a non-rhetorical question: last year I had kids answer me with a calm, “no,” and go about whatever they were doing, and I was completely flummoxed at first. I had to learn first to give unambiguous directions (“Mal, come here right now!” in a steeled voice), and then to raise my voice in scary-mode in front of the whole class (“Tony, do you see what you are doing? **Do you see what you are doing?! You are STOPPING the WHOLE CLASS from learning! Look around you! Do you see these other students paying attention? Do you have the right to stop them from learning? Well? … That’s right, you don’t. Get out in the hallway, now!” That kind of thing, doesn’t come naturally at all). Otherwise they didn’t get it.
Yeah, honestly, in this situation I don’t care about that question. I don’t really care in most cases: if you don’t want AA, don’t pursue it, and if you can’t help it, boo hoo, what a poor little rich boy you are. I extra-don’t care here, though, because I’m not proposing AA to benefit the teachers: I’m proposing it to benefit the students.
Why I think it’s difficult is something my wife suggested. A lot of black men who go to college are first-generation college kids, and it’s a sacrifice for their family to make to send their brightest kid to college. The family expects a return on investment: they want their kid to go into business, or engineering, or law, or some profession where they can make a decent living and perhaps give back to the family in some way or another. Teaching is the wrong profession for that idea. Any recruitment you do would either have to change that dynamic, or would have to be so enticing that it’d draw first-generation college students away from other more lucrative career choices. I’m really not sure whether that’s possible, or how it could be done.
Ohhhhh yeah.
Yep, but if that something drastic involves punishing innocent people then it’s wrong. f you disagree with that then we’ll have to just agree to disagree. Otherwise we’ll hijack this thread.
A 24 year old white woman did not introduce the Jim Crow laws. She didn’t support them. She wasn’t even alive at the time. The idea that no matter how hard she works she won’t be able to get a job she wants because she is the wrong race and sex is abhorrent to me. It’s not just and it’s not ethical and it never can be. The ends do not justify the means.
I have to admit I was thinking more for older children.
But I think your examples are more indicative of selecting inappropriate speakers than anything else. At age 8 the “guest speakers” at our school involved firefighters bringing in the truck and letting us clamber all over it and giving us a short speech and a long, very informal Q&A session. And someone from some forgotten organisation bringing in snakes an possums and other animals in boxes and letting us touch them, again with a short speech on how to deal with wildlife if you encounter rit, and another Q& A session. There are endless organisations like that out there that have exciting “exhibits” and would love the opportunity to talk o underprivileged kids.
If you’re school’s getting county commissioner and Asian educators to talk to 8yos then of course they’re going to rarely find speaker who know how to engage children. Nobody could engage with 8yos on those topics.
Probably not much, but it has to be real, and TV isn’t real. If you want a more detailed evaluation of all the issues, I gave one here.
If you can’t be bothered slogging through that then here’s the potted version:
Nobody seriously uses TV characters or personalities as role models. It’s a nonsense. You saw the President on TV constantly when you were a kid. Did you seriously think that you were going to grow up to be president? I saw Mr. T on TV constantly when I was a kid, I didn’t think I was going to grow up to be a bald muscular black man.
All else aside a role model is someone you model your life on. It’s impossible for a poor child to model himself on a millionaire because everything is out of reach. He can’t ride to school in a limousine. He can’t holiday on the Bahamas and so forth. Everything that a child sees of a millionaire on TV is unattainable. The same child can however model themselves on a middle class person however. They can work 8 hours a day. They can dress neatly. They can treat the women in their lives well. Those things aren’t out of reach of the child no mater how poor they are.
That’s why the idea that TV provides role models to poor children is a fantasy. I can’t say that any role models in my early childhood were from TV. Not one. I can remember clearly modelling some of my behaviour on characters from books, but that’s because characters in books were also often poor. But how as I, as a poor child, supposed to model myself after BA Baracus or Bo and Luke Duke, which is what I was seeing on TV? What are kids seeing now? Miley Cyrus with a superstar lifestyle? How can an 8yo model themselves on that? What traits exactly can they adopt from these characters and apply to their real life? These shows are fairytales, and they can teach moral lessons, as all fairytales do, but the characters can’t be role model any more than Hansel and Gretel can be role models.
Would you ask anyone who has a problem with Jim Crow laws to consider how they would have turned out if, as a white male, they had a family of Darkies living next door? To consider how they would have turned out if, as a white male, there sister had married a Negro?
Because that is precisely how those unjust and immoral laws were passed and maintained. By pandering to personal fears. Sure the laws are unjust, but think what might happen to you if the laws were removed…
Life is unfair. That never, ever, ever justifies you the individual treating someone unfairly because of their race. That just makes the world more unfair and leads to more people feeling they are being treated unfairly. Denying someone a job because you don’t want a white woman to get it is no different at all to denying someone a job because you don’t want a black man to get it. No different at all. Your motives can be as pure as you like, but the ends never justify the means. You can’t correct past injustice to innocents based on their race by inflicting present injustice on innocents based on their race.
So LHOD you have no data at all to support your belief that “these black boys” would have better life outcomes if they had black male teachers, and you are willing to stick by that belief in any event. Why?
I expect I’d be a lot hipper.
If these kids are acutely aware of race, then why insult their intelligence by placing minorities in positions at the expense of more qualified white teachers? Won’t they be sophisticated enough to figure this out and joke about it behind the teacher’s back?
“Mr. Smith is only a teacher here because he’s black just like us!”
I think you’re just inadvertently adding fuel to the fire for the racial jokes.
A teacher that was that put their by affirmative action is not a role model. I believe kids can be cruel and brutally honest and use the teacher’s placement circumstances to disregard him as a role model – the exact opposite effect of what you’re trying to achieve.
A true story… I took a last-minute standby flight from San Francisco and I got stuck in the middle seat between two Silicon Valley managers. If you’ve ever sat in a middle seat between 2 people who are friends, you can imagine the awkwardness of not being able to ignore their conversation. Anyways, the one exchange I’ll never forget: they were talking about a client meeting they just had and joked about how one person in that meeting was an idiot. His exact words were, “yeah, you could tell that Mr X was hired to meet their affirmative action quota.” The bluntness of that sentence just hit me in a weird way. I’ll never forget that sentence.
This sounds nice, but its so oversimplistic to be anywhere close to persuasive. Of course the two things are different if the motivations are different. The difference is as stark as that which exists between murder and self-defense.
Denying someone a job because you hate people of a certain race is most certainly different than denying someone a job because you feel another candidate may have an easier time being a positive role model to a demographic group sorely in need of one.
In a perfect world, black kids should emulate white adults with equal fervor as they do black ones. But because the world isn’t perfect now and neither was it perfect in the past, they don’t. And neither would any other race of kids if the shoe was on the other foot. History has put blacks at a disadvantaged position, the world isn’t color blind, and the box other people put you in has a big effect on how you view yourself and who you identify with. Ignoring this reality in favor of bromides about the virtures of colorblindness only perpetuates the status quo.
I have zero problems with efforts to encourage more black male teachers. Incentive packages would be one way to do it. Advertising is another.
The OP said that he himself is AA beneficiary, as he’s received a bonus for being male. Are you arguing that this makes him less qualified than his fellow teachers?
Obviously I can’t speak to LHOD’s specific situation. He may be the most qualified teacher period regardless of race. But that’s irrelevant to the discussion because we have to speak in generalities.
Therefore (generally speaking), I thought that “affirmative action” already carries the implicit sacrifice of promoting a less qualified individual over a more qualified one (short-term negative) because it supposedly will be offset by a greater society goal (long-term positive).
No it’s not.
In murder you kill a person who has done no wrong. In self defence you kill a person for trying to harm you. The person who has been harmed is fundamentally different.
In AA you hurt someone who has done no wrong because they are the wrong race. And under Jim Crow you hurt someone who has done no wrong because they are the wrong race. The person who has been harmed is fundamentally the same.
Your analogy to murder and self defence doesn’t stand up to even cursory examination.
No, it’s not!
Denying someone a job because you feel people of a certain race may have an easier time being accepted by a demographic group is most certainly not different than denying someone a job because you feel another candidate may have an easier time being accepted by a demographic group.
The folks in my neighbourhood have a hard time accepting Darkies as their neighbours. So I should be able to prevent Darkies from living in my street. Because we know that it’s acceptable to discriminate because you feel another candidate may have an easier time being accepted by a demographic group
All of these lame arsed excuses ignore one simple fact: the person that you are hurting through your actions has done no wrong. They are innocent.
It doesn’t matter whether you think a demographic group is sorely in need of a role model, or a safe community, or teachers who don’t eat fried chicken. What you think does not give you the right to hurt innocent people.
If your position is so strong then convince white women not to take these jobs when there are male candidates through the force of your argument. But as soon as you deny them jobs against your will then you are engaged in open racial discrimination that hurts people emotionally and financially andleaves peope feeling cheated.
And that, my friend, is never morally acceptable. The ends do not justify the means.
I have a feeling that very few of the people here who have a problem with AA in education have ever been the lone “one” in a class or an entire school, including the faculty and the adminstration.
That “one” could be race, culture, religion, or nationality.
It can be a very lonely, alienating, and frustrating experience.
School has never been just about reading, writing, and arithmetic. It’s about socialization, handling conflict with authority, and having a place to simply mature among peers and caring adults. When those caring adults don’t know about your culture or they denigrate it because it differs from the mainstream or historical stigmitization, that can turn you off not only from education, but from being around people who aren’t like you. It can entrench problems rather than solve them.
I was shafted a couple of times in school by administrators who didn’t know me but did know (from my records) that I was black and that I was from the “bad” side of town. Funny, none of those administrators were black. Maybe I wouldn’t have been mistakenly marked as remedial if my middle school had had more black professionals. Who knows?
If teaching was only about conveying information effectively, we could set robots in the classrooms and be done with it. But teachers are human and can make human mistakes. I think the point of the OP is that if we accept that human mistakes are natural, a school comprised of one general group of humans will have the same set of mistakes always perpetuated. One way to change this is to reprogram teachers and hold training workshops geared at fixing misconceptions etc. Another way is to hire some qualified people who don’t have to be reprogrammed, who already know the “deal”, and can also serve as a resource for the other staff. You better believe if I was at teacher at LHOD’s school and I had two resumes with equal qualifications but one was a black male (particularly one from a background similar to my students) and the other was a white woman, I’d hire the former. I wouldn’t be doing my students justice by playing eenie meenie moe in such a situation.
I really don’t see it as being any different than hiring a person fluent in Spanish for a school that’s predominately Mexican and a faculty full of Anglos. If all other qualifications met, hiring a person like that would be a no-brainer even if they were competing against Harvard grads. Depending on a school’s needs, some skills are more valuable than others.
Whenever we have threads about favorite teachers, it’s always refreshing to see how many male teachers are mentioned despite the fact they aren’t that common. To me, that indicates that women and men bring different things to the classroom. When you throw in culture and background, well, student-teacher connections become that much richer. One of the few black male teachers I had in high school was also the first gay teacher I had (though he wasn’t open), as well as the smartest son of a bitch the school had ever had. As strict as he was as a teacher, it made me feel proud that he was there making all those smarty-pant white kids sweat. Perhaps if it hadn’t been for him, we all would have graduated thinking the only places for black male teachers were the gym and ROTC.
Oooh, oooh, oooh. Pick me. I have. I get three out of that four.
Which is precisely why I know it’s wrong to alienate and frustrate a 24 year old white woman by refusing to give her a job because she’s the wrong race.
If alienation and frustration are bad thing then policies that inflict them on innocents are wrong.
We could say the same about neighbourhoods, couldn’t we? Does that justify Jim Crow laws regarding who could live where?
I agree. So let’s train the teachers so they don’t do those things. Or fire teachers who dare to denigrate a culture because it; not mainstream.
Isn’t that eminently more fair and sensible than refusing to employ people because they have the wrong amount of melanin in their skin?
Not to mention the colossal, racist wrongness of the implication that black men don’t denigrate black culture, never mind other cultures. Listen to some rap music some time. I’ve never heard anyone denigrate black culture as forcefully and hatefully as Black men.
If hearing adults denigrate your culture is bad then we should refuse to hire such adults/fire them when they do so. The idea that all white female teachers denigrate black culture and all black men praise and understand black culture is racist nonsense.
And until you present some evidence that black teachers are les prone otmaking these mistakes then white I can’t uite see how it justifies racist hiring polices.
And that is the most racist thing I have seen written this month. Congratualtions.
It may surprise you, but neither “blacks” nor “whites” are a homegenous groups. The member sof those groups have nothing in common with each other beyond the very characteristic that you use to group them.
The very suggestion is outrageous. Many black men make the same mistake of getting hooked on crack and robbing liquor stores. According to your position that means that mistake will always be perpetuated by the majority of black men.
That doesn’t even make sense, never mind the moral or factual dimensions.
I agree with this. But there is absolutely no reason to believe that a black man is any more or less likely to need to be reprogrammed than a white.
So let’s make “cultural sensitivity” a criterion for the job, then come up with some objective way of measuring it, and then hire the person who best meets the criterion?
You OTOH seem to be working from an unspoken assumption that all black men are inherently more culturally aware and less likely to denigrate black culture than all white women. That’s racism, pure and simple.
Why? What’s your evidence that the black man will be a better teacher than the white woman? If you can’t produce any evidence then you are a racist employer. No different to a person who would always selects against the black candidate because he knows that black people are less reliable.
You don’t? Honestly? How about the fact that you can objectively measure that the Hispanic is better at commmunicating?
In one case you are talking about an objective and easily verified trait that is an essential criterion for teaching: ability to communicate concepts.
In the other you are talking about an immeasurable and subjective trait that is only marginally applicable to teaching: that black men are less likely to denigrate black culture than white women.
Seriously, if a principal told you he would hire the white woman over the black man because she knows that blacks are more likely to call in sick and men are more likely to be paedophiles, would you also be cool with thatr? After al she’s also doing what’s best for the children.
Yep, when you can prove those skills actually exist. I can easily prove that a woman speaks Spanish. But how do you know that black man is more culturally sensitive than a white woman? If you don’t know, but are just making an asumption base don race, then you are being racist, by definition. Since your decision is hurting the white woman you are being hurtfully racist.
That’s not justifiable.
Quoting things a lot of times doesn’t change their meaning or tone, no matter how much you wish it did. I had trouble finding your point in the big wall of aggressiveness you typed.
Your first point is that television role models are worth exactly as much as role models in real life. You made that statement and boldly declared that it’s up to us to prove it wrong, which is preposterous.
Why do you suppose whites do better than blacks (and especially black boys) in school? Do you think we should do anything to fix it? What do you think we should do?
Well, actually, it’s possible to defend yourself against someone who isn’t consciously trying to harm you.