A relevant cartoon.
Your OP premise and the NY Post article are misleading. The Post calls the program a “liberal idiocy”, but in the NY Magazine article it references, the liberal parents are the ones more likely to be against the program.
If anyone is truly interested, read the original article in NY Magazine. It goes into detail about how the program is implemented, and gives an evenhanded account of the pros and cons, including positive and negative responses from the parents and students.
This kind of program is not really that new. It was one of my graduate classes in the Teaching Fellows program in 2008, and had been part of the curriculum even before that. I think it is well intentioned, and has value, although I also think the implementation can be improved. My training was for middle and high school students, but as the article points out, it might be more useful to introduce it in the lower grades.
I’m not an expert on this stuff. I suspect Left Hand of Dorkness would have more enlightening comments. But I know some of the basics.
Black students, especially those who are a minority in their school, face all kinds of special pressures and race-based issues. As one example among many, these students will often be called to (or seen to) speak on behalf of all black people or represent them. This experience can be quite uncomfortable, leading to less engagement in class. There is also the related issue of stereotype threat.
One method that has been used to try to ameliorate these issues has been affinity groups in which black students are alone or a majority and can discuss these issues and share experiences and solutions together in a more comfortable environment. The groups can also be used to help develop positive racial identity in the face of lots of negative stereotypes.
The racial construction of these groups both helps them succeed and targets their resources where needed. I don’t know the literature very well, but I understand that there is a mixed track record of reducing levels of social anxiety while increasing academic achievement. There seems to be something to the idea, but we’re not quite sure how to implement it properly. So, at least in my mind, careful trial of such ideas is warranted.
Awesome.
Technically, it’s never good to treat black students differently. I might be persuaded to treat students differently if they’ve been subject in their culture to widespread racism, however. The fact that that coincides with folks who are viewed as black is purely coincidental.
I’m not convinced that sending those who have experienced racism to events that folks with privilege don’t go to is wise. It gives the privileged kids the impression that it’s not their problem–and of course it is. As Chris Rock says, black people haven’t advanced in the last half-century, it’s just that white people have gotten nicer. There’s a massive racism problem in white culture, and white kids need a lot of exposure to that problem if white people are gonna pull themselves out of our cultural hole.
Our district has a particularly bad achievement gap between white and black students: there are tests that (roughly speaking) 85% of white students pass and 10% of black students pass. It’s terrible.
However, poverty accounts for the lion’s share of this difference. Most of the African American students I teach live in poverty; most of the white students don’t. When I teach middle-class African American students, they perform about as well as white students do. As such, when I’ve seen proposals to specifically target the learning of African American students, I’ve vocally opposed them, preferring instead proposals that specifically target students living in poverty. I don’t do this out of any sort of high-minded idealism, but out of practicality: I think that where I live, targeting poverty is a more precise intervention.
That said, there are other interventions that deal with race that can be effective. If we have an entire school in which there are no black male teachers, where the only black men who work there are custodial staff, that sends a message to everyone. I have no problem with efforts to specifically recruit black male teachers.
I trust black people in America to tell me about the problems and difficulties facing black people in America. The vast majority of black people in America to whom I’ve spoken (including members of my family) strongly disagree with Terr’s “culture of victimhood” hypothesis. I think these black people in America are far, far more likely to be correct about the difficulties and challenges facing black people in America than Terr. I’m sure Terr has valuable insight on the difficulties and challenges facing the group from which he descends (Russian Jewish immigrants, IIRC), but I find his assertions about black people in America to be worth very, very little.
From my conversations with black Americans, and from reading articles and books by black Americans, I think it’s certainly a very complex problem, but is mostly summed up by this statement: for most of our history, America has been a white supremacist nation that has specifically economically favored white people and white achievement while directly and indirectly economically retarding black people and black achievement. Black people have been treated very differently by government, authority, and society in general compared to most other minority groups (except, perhaps, Native Americans, who also (coincidentally, perhaps, unless this ongoing long-term treatment really might be related to these disparate outcomes?) measure at the bottom in various statistical economic, criminal, and educational indicators). This has lasted far beyond slavery, and beyond Jim Crow and segregation, and includes deliberate housing discrimination/redlining in the 60s and 70s (and beyond), mistreatment by law enforcement, and a media that has subtly (and sometimes not-so-subtly) reinforced the inferiority of black people and undesirability of black skin.
I’ll point out that all of this can be true without a deliberate conspiracy, or without even any particular motivation from those in power. With rare exceptions, the powers-that-be were simply ambivalent to the plight of black people, and ambivalent to the (for most of American history) overwhelmingly racist beliefs of white people.
And things have gotten far, far better. But we’re still a long, long way from true equality of opportunity, and equal treatment by the law.
I don’t think it’s worth side-tracking for too long on Terr’s causal claim. After centuries of policies designed to keep black people illiterate, powerless, and segregated, we go maybe a decade without a comprehensive program of discrimination (and that’s assuming you don’t count the War on Drugs, which you should) before people like Terr are blaming liberals for racial disparities. It’s just abject historical ignorance mixed with partisanship is all it is. Your point about the sometimes banality of racism is exactly right.
Perhaps. I’m still waiting for my Irish reparations. You know, centuries of plunder by the English throne? British authorities standing by and doing nothing during the mid-19th century famine? Irish people scattered across all parts of the earth? Where do I pick up my reparations check? Anyone? Bueller? O’Bueller?
That’s a matter to be worked out with the government of Great Britain, not the US. And since there is no evidence that Irish in the US are discriminated against today, we’re all good! Can you say that about blacks in the US?
Wait, it’s not enough that they are not discriminated against today. Like it’s not enough for blacks. You have to take into account the past oppression and give extra benefits today based on that.
Yeah, look, this is essentially the same riposte as the Jewish guy earlier, and it suggests you don’t really know anything about black history in America.
We’re talking about generations of enslavement with all the torture and forced illiteracy that went with it, followed immediately by state-sanctioned terrorism–hanging your father outside your house because he tried to get what was due your family at harvest time for sharecoppers, followed by intentional segregation of African-Americans into ghettos, followed by a multi-decade project of race-based imprisonment. No wrong done to a single generation of people will ever compare to multi-generational chattel slavery in terms of the effect it has on subsequent generations, much less multi-generational chattel slavery followed by a hundred more years of abuse. Even if you think state-sanctioned racism ended in the 1960’s, that applies to many of the people alive today, unlike whatever gripes you have about King George III.
Comparing yourself to an African-American family in 2015 because your ancestors went through the potato famine is like me comparing myself to a Holocaust survivor because I burned my hand once. It’s completely asinine.
No, the point is that blacks still face significant discrimination today, even if it’s not codified into law (as it was in the not too distant past). The question is, what to do about it? But it’s rather silly to compare the “plight” of Americans of Irish descent, today, with that of African-Americans. We still see significant discrimination against blacks in the US. You’d have to be blind to not see it.
So let’s quantify it. I’d like Congress to study the actual economic effects slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, and other racist US policies have on today’s African Americans. If you think it’s important, sure, we can study the effects of racist US policies on today’s Irish Americans.
There’s a bill before Congress to conduct just such a study. Contact your congresspeople and urge them to co-sponsor the bill!
This, too, is a good point. Robert, I’ve got a time machine here. The good news is I’m going to let you choose the time in American history that you visit–anything from 1600 to 1960. There’s more good news: you can bid either to go back as a black man or an Irish man. Bad news is, you have to choose one of those two, based on the time machine. More bad news is, I have limited money I can send back: $1,000,000.
Whichever one you don’t choose, the other [del]victim[/del] volunteer is gonna take. They want to be the Irish man. Of the $1,000,000 stash I can send back with you, how much would you bid in order to be the Irish man instead?
If I were given this scenario, I’d bid all million bucks to be Irish instead of black at any point in our nation’s history, up through about 1960. How about you?
Why limit to Irish and blacks? How about Jews? Germans (I am sure they were at least somewhat oppressed during WWII)? French (you know, when you’re called cheese-eating surrender-monkey, that really oppresses you). Canadians (made fun of because of their accents must be really hurtful). Mormons were quite oppressed for a while. Satanists still are. Reparations for everyone!
Because that’s goddamned ridiculous, and I was making fun of you for even taking the Irish thing seriously. Are you so unaware of our nation’s history that you think discrimination against Mormons (through measures such as housing redlining) is within five orders of magnitude of discrimination against African Americans, economically speaking?
It’s like saying we can’t have a tort system because there’s no way to distinguish between the guy whose leg you broke and the guy whose stapler you borrowed without asking. They are both injustices after all, so obviously the whole idea is unworkable!
Do the people advocate for the methods in the links because they are liberal, or does doing so make them liberal? Because from the Post article, I sure can’t tell which is which. And this always baffles me. Some new idea comes along, and somehow everybody immediately seems to know which category it comes under! I suspect this has more to do with whether you agree with it or not.
Ah torts… Can you sue someone because his great-grandfather has broken your great-grandfather’s leg?
Of course I am not taking the Irish thing seriously. Or the black thing. Or the Mormon thing.
Claiming damages today because your grandfather was “oppressed” is ridiculous. If you are oppressed today - sue. If you’re not, you don’t have a case. Especially against people who have never been anywhere near your grandfather, either dimensionally or temporally.
Are we Dopers because we are liberal, or liberal because we are Dopers? 
Why is this automatically labeled a “liberal” idea?