The black author of the following essay says blacks live in their own culture and need their own education system.
Daisy M. Jenkins writes: Sixty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and with many schools being resegregated, we may have lost more than we gained…
Fast-forward 60 years and a big question looms large: Is it possible that integration was actually a major setback for black educators and students?
The reality is that black families faced heavier burdens with the desegregation mandate than whites. Black children spent more time commuting, black schools were closed to make desegregation more convenient for whites (and to prevent their flight to the suburbs or private schools), and black teachers and principals were fired when white and black schools were merged. Estimates show that more than 82,000 black teachers provided instruction to a black student population numbering around 2 million in 1954. Within a span of 10 years, around 40,000 black teachers lost their jobs. Ninety percent of black principals lost their jobs in 11 Southern states.
Today, increased public school closings across the nation disproportionately impact black, Latino and poor students who lose their neighborhood schools. Eighty-eight percent of the school closings in Chicago affect black students.
The races spring from utterly different cultures. Compulsory integration is thus a form of social imperialism in which whites try to force blacks to conform to European norms. Blacks have no historical connection at all to Greece, Rome, the Old Testament Hebrews, Christianity, the Middle Ages, the Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution, to Newton, LaGrange, or Galois, to the philosophic tradition of Thales, Aquinas, Schopenhauer, or Hegel. Nor do Eurowhites have roots in Africa. No commonality exists.
We talk multiculturism, but try to imose a monoculture—ours—on blacks. Why? Why in school should we insist that blacks study things of no interest to them? It is reminiscent of policies aimed at stripping American Indians of their languages and traditions.
On the other hand, I as a white man have little enthusiasm for studying Shaka Zulu, the Great Zimbabwe, or African religions. Would not all be happier with their own schools in which they could maintain their own culture?
“Separate but equal” is in bad odor as a governing philosophy. It seems to be the only thing that works. If voluntary, wherein lies the evil? Less contact means less conflict.
Is there any evidence that blacks want to associate with whites? Or vice versa? In the universities, do blacks not clamor for black-only dormitories, black-only fraternities, and Black Studies? And what is wrong with this? Why should blacks not associate with whom they choose? And why should not whites?
Almost always, when the races do not have to mingle, they don’t. In Washington, blacks fleeing the crime of the city go to the heavily-black Prince George’s County, whites to Arlington, Fairfax, and Bethesda. Within Arlington, blacks cluster together in mini-barrios. So what? It’s their business.
Note that the togetherheid pushed endlessly on us is almost entirely rhetorical, preached by people who mean that others should practice it. I lived for years in the city with many liberal, racially correct friends. They spent all their time with other whites, and the restaurants and bars they patronized seldom had more than a token black, if that.
