Here’s another exchange between John McWhorter and I, in which we discuss the racial disparities in education and the notion that, if Black students aren’t measuring up to a standard, it is the standard that’s problematic.
MCWHORTER: I think that there is a tacit idea among a lot of people that authentic Blackness means that you “stick with that.” There's a very interesting question being posed as to whether we can just say that Black people are going to be these people with rhythm, these people who don't deal in exactness, these people who are holistic, these people who can create hip hop, but it's going to be the white people who invent glasses and transistors, et cetera. Black people are good the way they were before the Enlightenment.
The idea is that the way we were as Africans, why don't we just preserve that. We'll cherry pick the things that whites invented, because, of course, it's good that there is glass, for example.
But no, Blackness means we're not going to get the real answers, that we're not going to have standardized tests, that people are not going to be ranked on the basis of something that comes from these standardized tests.
And I think that it needs to be posed as a question rather than seeping into our thinking without being questioned.
Because the idea definitely seems to be: Charlie Parker? Yes. But Lord forbid that a Black person also learn how to do calculus or be expected to, unless they're peculiar and that's the way that they really want to go. And It makes me extremely uncomfortable.
I have to bring up Ibram Kendi. He has a passage—I think it's my least favorite passage of his— which is that maybe we should rank Black students on their desire to know. That's coming from this well. The idea that somebody's saying “I would like to know this” is enough. We have to remember that Kendi writes that in all seriousness, in books that are being read by possibly billions of people.
This doesn't work for me. It doesn't work for me at all.
Something related is the idea that music theory that is based on hierarchy, and some notes being more important than others, is somehow white and also racist. And that that kind of music theory shouldn't be taught as the basis of anything, that it shouldn't get disproportionate attention in the teaching of music. That's something that a very bright, very intelligent, very insightful Black musicologist has proposed. But once again, in some of this, I detect the idea that precision is alien to good people. And I don't like it.
LOURY: I have to give voice to an ugly thought here, which is that if you look at the assessments of the intellectual functioning of young Americans—the National Assessment of Educational Progress comes to mind, it's a test that's administered annually to a sample of American students in the fourth, eighth and 12th grades, and the results are reported by the Department of Education—it shows huge disparities by race in the fraction of students who have acquired basic proficiency or advanced proficiency in mathematics and reading. African Americans come out on the short end of the stick. I don't have the tables in front of me, but they would be easy to find.
We're talking about the majority of African American students performing below basic proficiency for their age and grade level in the testing of mathematical aptitude, performance, ability to solve problems.
Isn't that what's really going on here? That, for reasons that we could spend a long time trying to explore, as a population, Black kids aren't doing so well in terms of acquiring mathematical proficiency.
That is manifesting itself in a number of different ways, including on these national assessment tests that I just mentioned. But also in more rarefied environments, when it comes to selecting people for programs of study, when it comes to Gifted and Talented, when it comes to Advanced Placement classes, when it comes to getting into universities, when it comes to majoring in the STEM subjects where we see African Americans underrepresented.
So the stark fact of differences by race in the acquisition of the functional capacity to master certain skills, that stark fact calls out for some kind of account, some kind of narrative. How can we explain it?
And what better than to wrap oneself in the warm blanket of anti-racist outrage? What better than to denounce the entire corpus that your people are not mastering by saying that it's somehow alien to or in fact repressive of the essence of your people.
This is an avoidance of the reality of under-development, differences—on the whole, not every single individual— differences in populations and their acquisition of human functioning capacities. That is a tremendous challenge. And one avoids the unbearable weight of facing that challenge and the uncertainty and insecurity associated with taking up the challenge by basically ignoring it, pretending that it doesn't exist. Saying it’s an artifact of some mystical, structurally racist social order, diverting teachers from actually doing what they need to do to equip the kids so that they do better on the test by denying the reality of the test.
That's the ugly thought that I can't help but entertain here.
And it's racist! That's where I'm going with this. It seems to betray a lack of confidence in the capacities of our people to actually do what everybody else in the world—in the world—can do.
Go to China, find out what they teach. Go to Pakistan, for crying out loud. Go to Sri Lanka and find out what they're teaching there. Those kids are learning mathematics. But the descendants of African slaves here in the rich and powerful country of the United States of America, with every opportunity, are going to be presumed a priori not to be capable?
Because that's in effect what you're saying. We can't cut it. You're trying to change the name of the game, but what you're really saying is we can't cut it. That's racist.
You know, I can't improve on that much.
Where this starts is people who look at those disparities and they figure that maybe a creative and, frankly, easier way of dealing with them is to say, well, why should Black people be like white people in those regards? We're going to have our own standards, and we're going to call them “equal” rather than “lesser.”
That's a nervy idea. That's an interesting idea. People have been putting it forth in various venues, I think, for the past 50 years.
I've never seen it really go over. It's never put convincingly, beyond what would make a certain contingent of education grad students and professors and sociologists applaud. Beyond that, it never really attains any purchase. ‘Cause I don't think anybody really believes it, or at least anybody who's given to really thinking things over, both intellectually and morally.
And it's a problem because the truth is—and I don't know if this is the truth, but I highly suspect it's the truth—your performance on things like that, as we've discussed here before, is partly because of very subtle but powerful aspects of conditioning during childhood, where you're taught what matters and what doesn't, what bears thinking about and what doesn't, what is us and what is them, how children are spoken to in terms of being lent the problem solving mindset, whether children are allowed to ask questions, how they're allowed to talk to adults.
I am sure—I don't know, but I'm sure—that 50 years from now, we will understand why there is that gap that you're talking about. And I highly feel in my gut that it's about what it is to be raised Black. Even often, if you are middle class or above it, it's a subtle cultural factor that means that a kid even as young as six or seven is going to have a different attitude towards the monotony of learning times tables than Abigail, the white girl next door.
I highly suspect that's what it is. Partly because I have grown up so much, as a Black kid and then a Black adult, with one foot in and one foot out. I've known Abigail very well. I've known Black kids very well.
I've been watching this in Montessori schools. I watched it throughout my childhood. Both of my Montessori schools were ones where, when I look back, especially the second one, I don't know what the details were, but it's clear that Black kids were brought in from working class communities on some sort of fellowship arrangement, with the idea being that they would benefit from being around more middle-class kids. There were various Black kids where, looking back, knowing what they were like—and I knew them, I tended to know them better than a lot of the white kids—their parents couldn't have had the money to pay for it. There was some sort of arrangement.
And great! But I used to watch a lot of them, and the Montessori thing didn't work for most of those kids because they had a different attitude towards doing schoolwork. It wasn't about intelligence. It was that they were—I hate to say this—but they were from Black homes. It probably would have been the same if they were working class white, but there weren't any of them.
They needed to be taught harder. They needed one of these charter schools where everybody is made to sit down and raise their hand. Those schools very often do very well. You need to teach those kids harder because their home environments—even if they aren't pathological, it's subtle things about the home environment—haven't prepared them to drift into nerdiness as easily as an Asian kid or a white kid. I think that's what it is.
But we can’t explore any of those things if we have very responsible people walking around and saying Black kids shouldn't be expected to work hard in school anyway, or pretending that to be a spunky person is an achievement, that to be a person who values community is somehow the same achievement as somebody who is working with calculus as somebody who is writing articles as somebody who's doing interesting things by the time they're 20. It's a lot of fakeness. It's a lot of mendacity, as Tennessee Williams has it in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
Some people are so culturally balkanized—even many people who have come quite far in life—that I think they really may think that sitting around being holistic and approximating answers and being spontaneous and, I guess, listening to hip hop, that all of that is the equivalent of this stuff that white kids do. It's not. And here we are. That's a problem.
I just want to pick up or underscore two things that come out of the last comment that you made.
One is class. Class. What was the education of the parents? How chaotic is the home? What's going on in the community? This is pedagogically relevant. This is something to which I would think an instructor of youngsters would want to adapt his or her pedagogical framework to accommodate what the child is bringing into the classroom with him or her. And mainly that's going to be the social position, the resources available, the experiences that are outside of the school, but that affect the kids' development.
That's class, that's not race.
Those experiences are mainly about the resources available. How adept the parents are, what their vocabulary is, how much time they spend reading to the kid, does the kid know her numbers and her shapes before she gets to the kindergarten, this kind of thing.
Nothing wrong with taking that into account, but it's not white supremacy that's the enemy here. The enemy here is the disadvantages associated with marginality, low resources, and poorly equipped parents to supplement what the school is doing for the kids.
So you're missing the mark to the extent that you racialize this. Missing the mark for the poor white kids who might also need to have their special concerns attended to, but also missing the mark by racializing it.
The other thing I just wanted to say is this is math that we're talking about. It's universal.
I mean, the thing about it is that the theorem two plus two equals four is true everywhere and all the time. It transcends the particularity of our social location.
You may need to take onboard some aspects of the youngsters’ social situation. We teach, for example, in English and not in French because they're English-speaking, et cetera. So we are adapting to some degree to the social given.
The goal is to open them to perceive the universality of the truths. These are not identitarian matters that we're dealing with here. These are human matters that we're dealing with here, in the purest sense of the term.
So there's a theorem: There is no largest prime number. That's true everywhere, all the time. People from another planet will be able to understand, if you can find a way of conveying it to them, what you're talking about when you say there is no largest prime number.
There’s just something incredibly powerful, it seems to me, about transcending our social particulars. And kids are to be pointed toward that, toward the beauty, the universality, and so on.
Euclid is still relevant today. God only knows what Euclid had for breakfast, what sacred texts he worshipped. I don't care about that. What I care about is that the sum of the angles of a triangle is 180 degrees. That's what I care about. (Unless we're doing non-Euclidean geometry, which is stepping outside the box, but again, that's not an ethnic move. That's not a cultural move. It's an ideational move that every person can aspire to grasp and comprehend and make their own.)
Once again, I will recommend talking to Dr Tony Sewell who has done a lot of work on the problem with his Generating Genius charity. If you have not read the relevant portion of the UK Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, it might be worth a read. For example * Is the UK the same as the USA when it comes to attainment and ethnicity?
In short: no. In terms of the difference in attainment between Black pupils and White pupils, Strand finds the mean Best 8 score[footnote 45] was 0.05 for White students and -0.06 for Black students, giving a difference of -0.11 standard deviations. This gap is statistically significant but small (approximately the difference between one grade in one subject).[footnote 46]
These results indicate an attainment gap approximately 8 times smaller than that found in the US. In the 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), Black students scored -0.81, -0.83 and -0.89 standard deviations below the mean for White students in maths at age 10, 14 and 18 respectively. They also scored approximately -0.72 standard deviations below the mean average for White students for reading at the same ages.[footnote 47] Issues of race disparity in attainment from the USA can not be presumed to be identical in the UK.* https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-report-of-the-commission-on-race-and-ethnic-disparities/education-and-training There are also some suggestions about ways to close the gap which might be applicable to the US.