05/02/2013
Re: John Derbyshire On His New Book, FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT
From: Florida Observer
Just as VDARE.com announced the superb ebook called From the Dissident Right by John Derbyshire, the local Tampa Bay Times, which is compulsively liberal, had an article entitled "Hillsborough School Board takes on discipline of minorities" [By Marlene Sokol, April 30, 2013]
Alas, no-one engaged in this emerging problem was likely to have read any of the Derbyshire corpus of very thoughtful work, so the result was a faithful repetition of the conventional blunders over the IQ gap, the achievement gap, and the "punishment gap." The local school officials, having squeezed $100 million out of Bill Gates for a teacher evaluation project, now focus their mighty intellects on the strange problem of "disparate impact." That is, they suspect something downright evil is lurking behind the data that shows black males as victims of punishments far in excess of the punishment rate for whites or Asians.
The first task of this august body was to interview black male students from a middle-school. They discovered that these students mostly had solid role models and when they didn’t they at least found models among the teachers. In other words the kids did not lack positive role models.
But since blacks dominate the suspension lists, they surely have some kind of problem that seems to evade comprehension. However, for some reason asking the perps why they misbehave provides very little insight into this mystery. African-American school board member Doretha Edgecomb is quoted as warning that this conversation must be followed by more such meetings.
Imagine now that VDARE.com kindly distributes the insightful Derbyshire work to all members of this committee. Try to imagine the cognitive dissonance. Imagine discovering that the punishment data are perfectly accurate reflections of racial differences on a variety of factors. Imagine suggesting that a just society would be one in which both school suspensions and adult imprisonment were closely related.
Somehow I expect that the locals will manage to mangle this issue just as mass cheating in Atlanta won’t stop the liberal attack on schools and teachers. Making black students into the exact copies of their white counterparts is a mission too juicy for these crusaders to ignore. Odd that in basketball no-one expects such miraculous transformations.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.