Magic bricks. In Chapter Six of We Are Doomed I told the story of parents in the Upper West Side of 
Manhattan furious over a proposal to redraw school district boundaries back in 2008. Their kids attended Public School 199, whose student body was only 19 percent black and Hispanic. Under the rezoning proposal, their kids would have had to attend P.S. 191, which serves nearby projects, and whose student body was 88 percent black and Hispanic. The liberal, New York Times-reading, Obama-voting goodwhites of the Upper West Side were determined not to let that happen.
That was in 2008, eight years ago. I assumed when I wrote about it that this little conflict was a one-off story that would be resolved one way or the other. Not so: It is apparently what gardeners call a hardy perennial, a permanently recurring feature of New York City life.So here’s the New York Times, September 29th 2016, headline: Rezoning Plan for Manhattan Elementary School Draws Anger From All Sides. Quote:
New York City has proposed to move some blocks out of the zone of a popular school, Public School 199, which is mostly white and well off, into that of a lower-performing nearby school, Public School 191, where the students are largely poor and black or Hispanic. The city hopes to achieve a more diverse racial and economic mix at the schools, as well as relieve overcrowding at P.S. 199.End quote. Once again, eight years since I wrote about it, the goodwhites of the Upper West Side are fighting tooth and nail against the rezoning plan. I’m guessing that if I went back a further eight years there would have been a plan back then, too, and goodwhites fighting against it. Probably, eight years from now there'll be another plan, and the goodwhites will have to buckle on their armor yet again. It’s what Nietzsche called Eternal Recurrence.
It’s delicious of course to contemplate all the goodwhite hypocrisy on display here. Delicious, but also depressing to see how deeply stupid an issue like this makes otherwise intelligent people.
The editorial writers at the New York Post, for example. The Post is normally a pretty sensible paper; but race denialism does to IQ what Sherman did to Georgia. Here is an actual quote from their October 19th editorial, quote:
The core problem remains the ugly fact that the city’s worst schools are overwhelmingly in minority neighborhoods.End quote. Just savor that, and think about the mentality behind it.
We have fun at VDARE.com with what we call Magic Dirt Theory: the notion that differences in the overall performance of different races are caused by people just being in the wrong place.
Well, you see in that quote from the Post that it’s not just Magic Dirt, it’s Magic Bricks and Mortar, too. See, there are these bad schools. New York’s PS 191, for example, has low test scores, and it shows up regularly on New York State’s annual list of most dangerous schools.
What makes a school bad? It must be the construction materials it’s made from. The bricks and mortar exude invisible, noxious vapors that make the students dull-witted and violent. What else could it be? And look: These bad schools are, quote, "overwhelmingly in minority neighborhoods." How evil is that — to put these bad schools with their poisonous bricks in neighborhoods full of blacks and Hispanics?
Why don’t we build good schools in minority neighborhoods — schools made out of good construction materials, that don’t make the kids dumb and unruly? Why does nobody think to do that? Don’t black lives matter? Look at the injustice!
That is the actual mentality of race denialists. That’s what they believe. It’s magical thinking, at a level that would disgrace headhunters in the Amazon jungle.
The hypocrisy of those Upper West Side parents is, as I said, amusing and entertaining to watch. The willed self-enstupidation of those who shape public opinion is not amusing, not entertaining. It’s depressing and alarming, and bodes nothing but ill for our civilization.