At the RPGMaker.net forums I made a pretty impassioned post about Toronto’s recent decision to have schools for black kids that are separate from schools for white kids and thought I would post it on my blog.
Source: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/toronto/story/2008/01/29/tto-schools.html
The goal of the initiative is to get the current dropout rate of 40% among black kids down and to provide a better future in general for black kids in the area. Black kids will as I understand it go to a separate but equal high school with a curriculum focused around black history and culture (as Holbert astutely pointed out, they already spend their time studying white history and culture so “why not” as he puts it).
I am fiercely critical of this initiative. The following is from a forum post and is not a formal essay, so it’s a little disjointed and is not the smoothest read, but since I felt so strongly I felt it was worth a repost.
Before you call me a racist you should probably read the entire article and not just the part where I say that black people have ruined their own lives and that it isn’t society’s fault. I do say that and it is a pretty racist thing to say but I have an argument that follows. Also, I make a lot of very bold generalizations that are by no means universally true and I am not politically correct at all. For example I will not use terms like African-American or African-Canadian because the last time a black friend heard me call him an African-American he was pretty pissed off about it and requested that if I were going to address him like that I might as well call him a nigger. I am writing completely from anecdotal evidence gathered from a few years that I lived in black neighborhoods in Saint Paul so who knows how correct my impressions are.
I think the the race barriers in the western world come from a much more more fundamental set of problems than they do from the shortcomings of the educational system. You can offer scholarships and hiring preferences to minorities all you want, but if minorities are not applying for the scholarships or jobs, then you’re just wasting your time. I could tell you all sorts of things about how easy life is for a black person living in America as long as they are willing to take advantage of the special treatment afforded to them; the problem is that they are not and anecdotally at least I have seen most of the aid going to college-bound or college-educated blacks who probably don’t need the assistance in the first place.
So really I think the problem is not with the system but with the individuals themselves and their values. On an individual-by-individual basis you will find that an overwhelming number of black people in America and I assume Canada are simply uninterested in making their lives better. It does not matter how hard the system tries because it is the individuals that are unwilling to put forth any effort or to take themselves and their lives seriously. The gangs and the drugs and the racism aren’t the problem — it’s the individuals who make bad decisions that screw up their own lives. Renovating their apartment buildings won’t solve the underlying issue.
But you sort of have to think about why the individuals are the way they are and try to address the problems that make those individuals. In my opinion it is other individuals; a black person who does not take himself or his life seriously passes those values on to his children, who think the same way. There are always neighborhoods and parts of town that “belong” to certain minorities, and these communities have fucked-up values that send children down the wrong path. A black child living in the ghetto sees that people of his color live life a certain way and sometimes accepts that maybe his life is doomed from the start. I think this is where ideas like “you’ll never get out of the ghetto” come from.
The black-focused school movement in my opinion sounds dangerously like SEPARATE BUT EQUAL and the Jim Crow laws that inspired dangerously violent and angry people such as the Black Panthers and enlightened, brave people such as Martin Luther King, Jr and his constituents. By taking members of a minority under the pretext that they are fundamentally inferior and need the extra help and segregating them into their own separate public school system, the city is taking the ghetto culture and artificially superimposing it onto high schools. Rather than treating black kids like human beings the school system is taking black kids and treating them like highways that need to have their potholes filled and saying here is some funding try to fix the problem.
There was a time in the United States where if you were not Jewish you probably would never be a successful person. In Hollywood you can still see traces of that today but it isn’t like the 1920s when the Igor Stravinsky and anyone from France were the only people who could be successful in publishing music in the western hemisphere. We did not make opportunities equal for all white people by giving non-Jews special treatment (except for Hitler and well look at how that turned out) but by treating all white people as human beings and letting the system sort itself out.
I think the only result of this initiative will be that black kids in Toronto will feel even more marginalized and lower-class than they already do. Rather than seeing other kids who come from better backgrounds and maybe feeling inspired to work hard to make life as good for their own kids as it is for their more fortunate peers at school, they’ll come from their homes in the black ghettos and go to school and see a bunch of other kids from the black ghettos. They’ll learn all about George Washington Carver while kids in other schools are being taught about Eli Whitney who basically necessitated slave labor in America by stealing an invention from his wife, but it will be a waste of time because they’ll see the same bullshit at school that they see back at home in the ghetto. The result is that the black kids you are trying help will only have the reinforced notion that it is hopeless for them to want to get out of the ghetto because hell apparently that’s how life is for everyone. By the way, black kids from good neighborhoods, who have been succeeding the entire time, might stop succeeding if they are transplanted to a new system that assumes they are troubled and require special assistance.
I think that this is the worst idea I’ve seen in terms of race relations since those water fountains where the black person would have to stoop lower than the white person and drink the water cycled through the white person’s fountain, backwash and all, for no reason other to be really fucking spiteful. If you want to see black people succeed and stop dropping out of school you need to treat them like people and not like a government project. The most powerful influence in a young person’s life is that young person’s peers, and if you start to separate young people by skin color, you start to separate them by social class. Even though they live in a society that is officially equal to people of all colors and creeds, if you don’t expose young people who are taught by their neighborhood it is hopeless to have hopes and dreams to other young people who are taught that the world is their oyster, you’re dooming them to accept the negative attitudes prevalent in their drug-addled ghettos and pass those ideas on the next generation on highschool dropouts.
In other news I am going to be putting out an early prototype of a new homebrew game on March 20. It is part of RPGMaker.net’s Release Something event where everyone releases
something regardless of how finished it is. It stars Wilfred and has entirely user-made assets (well it will eventually but it currently uses some stock graphics until I finish cartooning).
