Garvey's Ghost: Black Talk

Brown V. Board anniversary

Today marks the 50'th anniversary of the first Brown decision in the US. The deeply flawed decision that legally brought down the principle of "Separate but Equal" is it applied to education and public accommodation. 50 years out many studies are showing that school and housing segregation are just as bad, if not worse than at the time of the Board decision. Of course I disagree with such reports as there is no legal segregation whatsoever. What I found interesting was a video presentation over at the New York Times website where Skip Gates and Cornell West debated the issues around so called segregated education. One thing that did bother me was that Cornel West attributed the idea that white Americans would be generous up until circumstances dictated they look after themselves to Derrick Bell. This idea was vocalised by Marcus Garvey and Martin Delany long before Derrick Bell. This underlines a problem with much of Black Academia. They, in their drive to shore themselves up and to "produce" and form their various cliques, will attribute ideas that are not even original to them to themselves, which makes them look like genius' when in fact they are merely repeating the ideas and conclusion reached by others before them. Nothing is more illustrative of this as the conflict between Dubois and Garvey. Dubois is highly regarded among Black Academics and relatively social elite whereas Garvey and his type are at best glossed over and simplified and usually outright ignored while the ideas are appropriated by more "friendly" and less "militant" persons or organization. But that's off topic.

I hope that this year, Black academics and others will finally get the point that socializing may be good for networking but does nothing in terms of learning. Education comes down to highly motivated teachers, students and parents. There are mastermind black students coming out of Countries that spend fall less on education than the US does and nary a white face around.

Also, I ran across an article by Thomas sowell entitled : Half a Century after Brown Where surprisingly I find myself in near total agreement with Mr Sowell's points:
Quote:

The landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education was immediately about schools, even though it quickly became a precedent for outlawing racial segregation in other government-controlled institutions and programs.

What was the basis for that landmark decision and what have been the actual effects of Brown v. Board of Education on the education of black students?

The key sentence in the Brown decision was: "Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." It was not just that the previous "separate but equal" doctrine was not being followed in practice. Rather, the Supreme Court argued that there was no way to make separate schools equal. All-black schools were inherently inferior.

It so happened that, within walking distance of the Supreme Court where this sweeping pronouncement was made, there was an all-black high school that had produced quality education for more than 80 years. Back in 1899 this school outscored two out of three white high schools in Washington on standardized tests.

Today, in the 21st century, it would be considered Utopian even to hope for such a result. Moreover, this was not an isolated fluke. This same school had an average IQ of 111 in 1939 %97 fifteen years before the Supreme Court declared such things impossible.

Most schools for blacks were in fact inferior, mainly because most were in the South, where the educational standards for blacks and whites alike tended to be lower. Racial discrimination, as distinguished from segregation alone, tended to make black schools the worst of all.

This was not due to their being all black, however. Back in the early 1940s, the black schools in Harlem had test scores very similar to those in white working class neighborhoods on New York's lower east side. Sometimes the Harlem schools' scores were a little higher than those of schools on the lower east side, and sometimes they were a little lower, but these scores were always comparable.

In short, it was not segregation, as such, that made schools inferior. If this seems like hair-splitting, consider the consequences of the Supreme Court's reasoning.

Once you say that racial separation makes the education itself inferior, you are launched on a course that leads straight to court-ordered busing of school children hither and yon to mix and match them racially, in hopes of educational improvement.

The polarization and bitterness of this crusade has lasted for decades %97 and has left black children still far behind educationally. Many are now much further below national norms than black students were in Harlem more than half a century ago....
More broadly, both the explicit language and the implicit assumptions of the Supreme Court in Brown depicted the answer to problems of blacks in general as being essentially the changing of white people. This was yet another line of reasoning that led straight into a blind alley.

Today, there are all-black schools that succeed, all-black schools that fail, and racially mixed schools that do either. Neither race nor racial segregation can explain such things. But both can serve as distractions from the task of creating higher standards and harder work.

The judicial mythology of racial mixing has led to an absurd situation where a white student can get into a selective public high school in San Francisco with lower qualifications than a Chinese American student. This farcical consequence of judicial mythology about a need for racial mixing does nothing to improve education for blacks or anyone else.

Unfortunately Mr. Sowell goes off into left field and discusses the supposed foolishness of the Miranda Warning given to people who are arrested.
Quote:

Under the much disdained "traditional" approach of criminal law, murders had been declining dramatically over the years. The murder rate in 1960 was just under half of what it had been in 1934.

All of that changed quickly and dramatically for the worse after the Warren Court began imposing its own notions about crime in the 1960s. The most famous of these changes was the "Miranda warning" that police have to give suspects, stating that they have a right to remain silent and to have an attorney supplied free.

For more than a century and a half, not one of the great Supreme Court Justices %97 not Holmes, not Brandeis, nor anybody else %97 had ever discovered any such requirement in the Constitution of the United States. Nor had Congress passed any law requiring any such thing.

Not only is his point way off the topic, but he fails to realize that Miranda was not created to protect the criminal but to inform the innocent. The Miranda Warning reminds the citizen of their constitutional right not to say anything that may incriminate themselves. It is entirely possible for an innocent person to incriminate themselves, The provision for a lawyer underscores the fact that the suspect, under the US constitution has a right to due process and equal accesmeansch menas that he should have at least a lawyer to defend him or her should they not afford one just as The State hires an attorny ( the DA) to prosecute it's behaf.

Thomas. Sowel started out with an unusually poignant idea but got himself lost.


Links:
http://www.nytimes.com/videopages/2004/05/16/books/20040516_BROWN00_VIDEO.html
http://www.naplesnews.com/npdn/pe_columnists/article/0,2071,NPDN_14960_2886784,00.html