The Brown v. Board of Education Hoax

Every mass movement spawns a bunch of little myths. One such myth is the misconception that American schools were desegregated by court order because little Linda Brown was denied access to her neighborhood school. The truth is that black parents had been challenging segregated public education since 1849. Little Linda’s father, Oliver Brown, was recruited by Charles Scott, an attorney serving as legal counsel for the Topeka NAACP. The Brown case was initiated by the NAACP leadership which was recruiting black parents in the Topeka area for a class-action lawsuit. Oliver Brown’s name became attached to this class-action litigation for only one reason: of the 13 plaintiffs in the case he was the only male plaintiff; the NAACP wanted a male plaintiff to head the roster.

According to the NAACP litigators, the separate-but-equal doctrine codified in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson was rooted in a misapprehension of social reality. The Plessy decision supposed that even in a racist environment a separation of the races could be accomplished without diminishing racial equality. The NAACP contended that this assumption was a factual error.

To bolster their contention, the NAACP enlisted willing sociologists, social psychologists and anthropologists to serve as expert witnesses and to offer their opinions. The NAACP recruited witnesses who would testify that racially segregated education was inherently unequal and that there were no inborn differences in the ability of different races to learn school lessons. Further, the NAACP wanted to present testimony that racially segregated schools were psychologically harmful to both white and black children.

The NAACP litigators were steeped in the culture of the court; they knew full well how the justices would prepare themselves before this momentous case. As Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes had explained: “In confronting any serious problem a wide-awake and careful judge will at once look to see if the subject has been discussed or the authorities collated and analyzed, in a good law periodical.” And so it was that the NAACP Legal Defense Fund fell to the task of using the law journals as an “educational forum for molding opinion,” to use their own words. They meant to sway the justices long before the court date.

The ghost of Franz Boas hovered over the Brown decision. As a rule, courts do not make decisions based on things that have not been offered in evidence during a trial because both sides have not had the opportunity to examine and criticize those things. The only exception to this rule are those facts so obvious as to be beyond question, such as, birds have wings, fish swim in the sea, the moon circles the Earth, the sun is a star, etc. In such obvious instances the court is said to take “judicial notice” of those facts. What is remarkable about the Brown decision is that the Supreme Court tacitly took judicial notice of the personal assumptions of Franz Boas and his disciples. Boasian anthropology is a body of opinion; it is saturated with articles of faith and its assumptions fly in the face of a mountain of evidence that has been accumulated by other anthropologists, many of whom have demonstrated the strong influence of heredity in the formation of cultures and national temperaments. In a footnote to the Brown case the Supreme Court acknowledged its deference to various sociological treatises and appended the words “see generally Myrdal, An American Dilemma.” At that historical moment the Court might just as well have written “read everything by Franz Boas and his hand-picked disciples and ignore everyone else.”

Gunnar Myrdal was a Swedish socialist who traveled to America for the purpose of writing exactly the political treatise he did write. Along the way he recruited a disciple of Franz Boas to act as his fact finder; that disciple was Kenneth Clark. Myrdal had been invited to America by the left-leaning Carnegie Foundation to oversee a major study of “the Negro problem.” Myrdal’s book, published in 1944, altered forever the character of the discussion of race in the United States; it established the working paradigms, the arguments and the assumptions of the emerging civil rights movement. Myrdal personally popularized two expressions that even decades later continue to shape discussions about race: prejudice and discrimination. His personal biases inclined Gunnar Myrdal toward Boasian interpretations. In addition to Kenneth Clark, Myrdal commissioned two other Boas disciples, Otto Klineberg and Ashley Montagu, to write supportive monographs. Myrdal referenced Klineberg’s opinions to support his conclusion that there were no inborn differences in intelligence between populations of blacks and whites.

From the beginning Myrdal simply assumed that race was a social artifact without a genuine biological foundation; he dismissed the possibility of natural differences between races; he believed that nothing “could be scientifically explained in terms of the peculiarities of the Negroes themselves.” Myrdal blamed every aspect of interracial discomfort on white folks. He said that white people were infected with “prejudice.” He ignored completely the complex history of how the races first encountered one another. Myrdal argued that there was no Negro problem, but only a white man’s problem. By the 1950s his vision of American racial dynamics was the new and prevailing intellectual orthodoxy among academics and social activists.

Because they were troubled by the documented intellectual performance of the black population, authors such a Bruno Bettelheim and Morris Janowitz chose to turn the public’s attention away from the black population and focus it instead on the psychology of anyone who dared to question their assumptions about race. T.W. Adorno condemned the values of Western culture which he believed to be most conducive to racism; he believed that persons who clung to Western values and ideals were probable bigots and “potential fascists,” sad little people fraught with anxieties, insecurities and psychological ill health and desperately in need of remedial re-education in matters of tolerance and understanding.

According to the Franz Boas school of cultural and moral relativism there could be no justification for any criticism of any non-white culture or group, and further, any utterance of criticism was taken as clear evidence of the speaker’s irrational “prejudice.” The newly self-appointed experts on race had defined themselves as the new sophisticates; they had defined their critics as mental low-watts, semi-beasts, proto-fascists and general all-round ne’er-do-wells. The Boasians fancied themselves to be a radiant avant-garde; they characterized anyone who might want to introduce disquieting evidence as someone with grievous psychological problems.

And so it was that cultural relativism became the body of operating social assumptions in American social science and every critic of cultural relativism became, by definition, a thug. It is now unquestioned that all other cultures are the equal of Western civilization, even if those cultures exhibit a fondness for child slavery, forced genital mutilation, one-party rule, ethnic mass murder, dressing women in head-to-toe cloth bags, and calling for the death of all infidels. It is indicative of the sway of Boasian cultural and moral relativism that a heartbeat after thousands of their fellow Americans were reduced to bits of skin and fingernails by Muslim religious bigots on September 11th, 2001, the Boasians among us began to blather about all the bad stuff America had done to provoke the bigots. The Boasians were instantly and reflexively entreating us to “understand” our attackers, to see the world from their perspective, to accommodate Western ideals and culture to their desire that we make room for an emerging Islamic global empire.

If you were wondering where all those people who yearn to “understand” murderous Muslim jihadists come from, the answer is simple: they were students of the Boasian cultural and moral relativists who now dominate American classrooms. To the indoctrinated Boasian every culture must be accorded the same respect as Western civilization and probably more. Lost in his extreme egalitarianism, the Boasian ends up defending religious bigotry in the name of nondiscrimination. Gunnar Myrdal felt so confident that the Boasian vision of everything had completely carried the day that he boasted “It is now becoming difficult for even popular writers to express other views than the ones of racial egalitarianism and still retain intellectual respect.”

More About Gunnar Myrdal

Gunnar Myrdal was a Swedish politician, a member of the Swedish Social Democrat Party. His personal guiding philosophy and world vision was that of the German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche who emphasized the virtue of intense emotion in art and life and who encouraged the emergence of the Ubermench, a superior sort of human, a man of intense emotion and reckless courage who would lead the rest of brutish and ignorant humanity into a radiant tomorrow. Myrdal despised democracy with its slow and careful consideration of social change. To quote Myrdal himself: “The masses are impervious to rational argument,” and “Democratic politics are stupid.” Gunnar Myrdal shared with W.E.B. DuBois and the leadership of the NAACP the belief that an “enlightened” elite should make every important decision on behalf of the brain-dead common folk.

In 1937 Frederick Kepple, the president of the Carnegie Foundation, chose to invite this peculiar adherent of Nietzschianism to the United States and lavish upon him an enormous sum of money to examine and critique America’s “Negro problem.” The fruit of Myrdal’s exertions was 1000 pages of text which he titled An American Dilemma. It was pure Myrdal; it was pure Boas; it was a love song to cultural relativism. America’s leftist intelligentsia was immediately seduced by Myrdal’s innovative paradigms. A survey of leading American intellectuals conducted by the Saturday Review in the 1960s revealed that America’s left-leaning deep thinkers ranked An American Dilemma among the small group of books that had been most influential in shaping their world vision.

Gunnar Myrdal’s conclusion, bolstered by monographs written by students of Franz Boas, was that America was such a hideously racist nation that the low estate of black folks could never be put right by the efforts of America’s elected representatives. Myrdal’s book, his Nietzschian vision, is a relentless assault on the limitations of any democratic process. This political tract concludes with a cry from the heart for the superior men of the Supreme Court to intervene and impose “the spirit of the Reconstruction Amendments.”

No one was more dazzled by Myrdal’s anti-democratic vision than Thurgood Marshall, then the boss of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Marshall was quick to secure the services of a “legal realist” named Nathan Margold whose opinion it was that sociological sensitivity ought to have greater sway over court decisions than the intentions of the elected lawmakers who had created the statutes being considered. Mr. Margold cared nothing for legal precedent; he believed that every legal decision ought to be an instrument of social policy intended to improve society. In short, Mr. Margold was an anti-democratic utopian with a law degree.

Mr. Margold knew that liberal judges were especially susceptible to the seductions of feel-good utopianism, that they secretly imagined themselves to be superior visionaries in a unique position to do something “nice.” The Supreme Court justices had read Myrdal’s book and they had been inspired. The result of the NAACP’s careful stagecraft resulted in the most portentous legal decision in American history. In the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka the Supreme Court justices consciously chose to assume the role of philosopher kings. Justice Robert Jackson captured their sentiments perfectly: “I suppose that realistically the reason this case is here is that action couldn’t be obtained by Congress.” In other words, the legislative branch of our democratic republic had failed to keep pace with the progressive opinions of the unelected judicial elite; the philosopher kings on the bench assigned themselves the task of redeeming what they imagined to be a failing legislature.

In short order (1955), the Supreme Court was issuing detailed instructions on how schools must be desegregated and granting authority to federal courts to micromanage the desegregation process. By appointing itself the enforcer of its own judicial dictates the Supreme Court also assumed the powers of what the Court imagined to be a failing executive branch of government. In short, the Supreme Court became a government unto itself, a government detached from the one described in the United States Constitution. The Court had declared a new law and was endeavoring to enforce it. Four decades after the Brown decision, over 450 school districts remained under the thumb of some federal court. Within these decades generations of children learned their lessons in American schools that were governed by robed utopians in Washington rather than by any democratically elected local authority. One lawyer who had shaped the Brown decision, Columbia Law Professor Herbert Washsler, later declared that Brown was an “unprincipled decision” that had dispensed with judicial neutrality in favor of a desired social transformation. Professor Raoul Berger of Harvard stated that the Supreme Court had shouldered the legislature aside “on the grounds that there is no other way to be rid of an acknowledged evil.” So the liberals’ moral defense of the high court’s usurpation of legislative and executive powers in the Brown case is simply that someone had to play the role of monarch because democracy just wasn’t giving them the results they wanted. They were playing king because they wanted to play king.

Brown v. Board of Education

In hindsight it is clear that in 1954 the Supreme Court was not a tribunal of unbiased jurists. Their notions of modern American social dynamics and their sense of what was current opinion among progressive sociologists and anthropologists had been carefully nurtured by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Fund’s allies within the small club of disciples of Franz Boas, a club that had only recently created America’s first anthropology doctoral programs. The Supreme Court’s specialized reading list of law journals had been the targets of an intensive propaganda offensive by the NAACP, which sought to pull the justices into an opinion penumbra that favored the Boasian vision of race and cultural development.

As the date for open-court arguments approached, the justices would be awash in a torrent of amicus briefs prompted by requests from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to sympathetic political associations. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was itself founded by a bunch of white folks, in part to revive the flagging enthusiasm of the waning abolitionist movement and in part to showcase the mulatto W.E.B. DuBois. Mr. DuBois was born a free man in the American North; he was of French, Dutch, American Indian and black ancestry. He attended schools in both America and Europe and, in 1895, became the first person of black ancestry to receive a post graduate degree from Harvard. He was an exemplar of a generation of light-skinned northern mulattoes who were the children of Negro doctors, teachers and the better-educated clergy, a generation that keenly felt the limitations that social color lines placed on their personal social advancement.

W.E.B. DuBois, especially, felt that he had not been given the deference that was due him. He was a dapper chap who was seldom seen in public without his gloves and walking stick; he was an unapologetic elitist who spoke French and German and who liberally seasoned his English with upper-crust intonations and archaic words. DuBois advocated the cultivation of a Talented Tenth, an educated black elite that would become the custodians of the welfare of the ignorant black masses. “The Negro race,” intoned DuBois, “is going to be saved by its exceptional men.” He called for a campaign of militant political agitation. He took the position that the only obstacle to black advancement was white racism; he nastily disparaged Booker T. Washington, a former slave who had surmounted enormous obstacles, for daring to suggest that an additional impediment to black advancement might also lie in the comparative backwardness of the black population which contributed to the reluctance of whites to associate with them socially. Washington wanted to increase the social acceptance of blacks by improving the job skills and rustic country manners of the emancipated black masses; DuBois wanted to crash every white comfort zone, preferably overnight and by court order. DuBois reviled Washington for making such common sense observations as this:

“A race or an individual which has no fixed habits, no fixed place of abode, no time for going to bed, or getting up in the morning, for going to work; no arrangement, order or system in all the ordinary business of life – such a race and such individuals are lacking in self-control, lacking in some of the fundamentals of civilization.”

Washington was no idle critic; he had a working program to elevate the social and employment skills of his people. What DuBois wanted was for the rustic uneducated black masses to support his Talented Tenth, that educated elite that would come to enjoy lifetime tenure in an emerging political-power and money-raising machine that would be known as the civil rights establishment. It was DuBois who personally insisted on the inclusion of the word “colored” in preference to the word Negro (black), because he wanted to spotlight the NAACP’s mulatto leadership, its Northern light-skinned elite.

DuBois was a committed cultural relativist; he believed that black culture as it existed right then was every bit the cultural equal of the better educated parts of American civilization; he wanted the immediate and full accommodation of blacks in even the most intimate social situations. It was the official position of the NAACP in the Brown case that if sudden school integration was undertaken with ample determination and backed up with a show of force, then full and immediate racial integration could be accomplished quickly and without any unpleasant consequences. In other words, the black masses would abruptly crash a cherished white comfort zone and make themselves at home; the white folks would immediately sense that they were in the presence of new arrivals whose values, assumptions, language skills and high regard for learning were in no way a threat to the educational development of their children.

As both sides squared off in the Brown case, both sides wanted what they imagined was best for their children. The plaintiffs believed that racial integration would be a step up for black children; the whites fretted about the destruction of a nurturing comfort zone that had been built around white social rhythms. Ironically, long after the imposition of court-ordered school integration, the pages of numerous black-oriented publications would bloom with articles nervously echoing the concerns of bygone white segregationists by asking if the growing presence of white students on such traditionally all-black campuses as Morehouse and Howard University wasn’t a threat to the unique and cherished black culture of these educational environments. When whites began to tread on the sacred soil of black comfort zones black publications suddenly began telegraphing the “wisdom” of preserving the unique cultural aura of these schools.

Today it is difficult to imagine what an extreme change the NAACP was proposing. On paper it looked so simple: just give the black kids the “equal protection” guaranteed them under the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment. The reality of the proposed accommodation was that people of two cultures would be compelled to intermingle socially. Prior to this the average American did not imagine that blacks had a “right” to intimately associate with them; the plaintiffs might just as well have been proposing the notion that men had a “right” to use the separate-but-equal toilets provided for women.

The biggest problem with the legally segregated Southern schools was that they were not truly equal. The Southern states, with their agrarian economies, were historically cash poor and notoriously stingy when it came to financing education for anyone’s children. The ol’ boys in charge of the money chest chose to spend most of what little they were willing to spend on education on the children of the white voters who had elected them to office and put them in charge of the money chest. In some cases these guys actually paid higher salaries to black teachers in order to keep the two-track system stabilized. The expression “separate but equal” wouldn’t have the cynical sting it does if the black schools had been equally funded. Even so, when they were finally admitted to the no-longer-all-white schools many black children were dismayed to discover that these schools were not the palaces of learning they had anticipated.

Back to Brown

The defendants in the Brown case were denied any opportunity to answer the opinions of Gunnar Myrdal and his Boasian sidekicks; the decision was predestined by the Court’s uncritical acceptance of the lopsided social models invented by Franz Boas. Left unexamined was the historical quirk by which a single German socialist became the wellspring of every doctoral degree in anthropology awarded in the early Twentieth Century. Worse yet, the Court chose to compound its dereliction of duty by allowing Kenneth Clark to present as evidence an egregious piece of trash science; it was the sort of fluff that would have gotten a high school student expelled from a science fair.

Clark wrongly imagined that he could fathom the emotional depths of children by asking them questions about dolls. He was frustrated from the start by the fact that not a single manufacturer on the entire planet offered identical black and white dolls. Undaunted, he had purchased two identical white dolls and then attempted to transform one of them into a credible Negro by the application of some brown paint. He used a brush, and by his own account (years later) his best efforts were not very good. He was certainly no match for the platoon of experienced artists and mold makers who had created the charming dolls he had purchased at a store. In brief, the young psychologist created a Caucasian doll in blackface, a creepy minstrel-show doll which he tried to pass off on some black children as genuine black folks.

To their credit, the black kids proved to be discerning critics of doll beauty. When they were asked which doll was the more beautiful they answered truthfully that the white doll was the more beautiful. It was the more beautiful doll because Kenneth Clark had not ruined its perfect complexion with lumpy paint and brush streaks. The “black” doll was odd because it had facial proportions that were far from average for black people.

Every child has a deep emotional stake in seeing himself as loveable; this is especially true of little girls. As every child quickly learns, to be beautiful, to be cute, to be endearing, is a ticket to a better life; to be ugly is to be less socially secure. Children will bolster their social position by claiming to be better looking than other children. Kids are not stupid, for them being cute has survival implications.

So when Ken Clark flashed his two dolls at a child who had only just met him, one doll perfect and the other a primitive paint-job mutation that looked sort of Negroid, and then asked the tiny stranger “Which doll is most like you?”, the child defended his (her) essential self and answered that he (she) was most like the most perfect doll. Clark’s interpretation of their responses was fanciful. Any child who sensed that his adult interrogator was really testing his racial-group identification would experience heightened tension. In those instances the child would be compelled to make a choice between “identifying” with the obviously black but physically grotesque doll and the fresh-from-the-box flawlessly rendered light-complexioned doll. Seen for what it was, Clark’s doll experiments were just useless and cruel. These question sessions didn’t prove that school segregation produced low self-esteem in black kids. In fact, the full complement of doll experiments suggested exactly the opposite. Question sessions conducted in the North produced a higher percentage of black responses that favored the white doll than did question sessions in the South.

The Supreme Court justices were inclined to the opinion that segregation had so damaged black children that its long-term effects might “affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” The Court’s emotional opinion was rooted in Clark’s doll quiz. Later an NAACP staff member would publicly remark that “[Clark’s] black and white dolls won the case, not the historians.”

The quiz results that Kenneth Clark presented to the Supreme Court were conducted using a selected group of only sixteen children, so each child’s choice counted for a fat 6.25%. At first Clark had insisted that 10 black children had preferred the white doll. Later, under oath, he lowered the number to nine, a downsizing of 10%. If one more child had chosen differently, then the doll tally might have been a draw.

Clark reached the conclusion he wanted to reach: “. . . these children . . . have been definitely harmed in the development of their personalities . . . My opinion is that a fundamental effect of segregation is basic confusion in the individuals and their concept about themselves . . .” Really? Or was it that young children do not share the same fixation with race that leftist ideologues do. Racial consciousness increases with age; it is well established by adolescence, but its absence in young children is not indicative of a deformed sense of self. A child might play with a doll of any color and be as unconcerned with its racial characteristics as they would be with the pedigree of a puppy.

Clark went on to tell the Court that he had conducted other doll tests and that the results of these tests were “consistent” with the results of the little test that had been entered in the record. He was speaking of tests done in the North in which a higher percentage of black children chose the white doll. The fact that a higher number of kids who lived in an area where there was no legally enforced school segregation had chosen the white doll would seem to contradict the hypothesis that school segregation had warped their emotional growth. What Clark meant to convey was the notion that any black child choosing any white doll was indicative of damage done by a generalized environment of racial segregation, be it de facto or de jure. Clark had no evidence that school segregation caused anyone harm; no such evidence existed. Left unexplored was the possibility that in the more affluent North more black children had been given store-bought dolls to play with, which, at that time, were usually white dolls. Because the store-bought doll came from a loving relative or friend it also came with the gift giver’s approval of the doll; so these kids had received tacit adult approval to play with white dolls. Black kids in the poor South were more likely to have played with handmade cloth dolls of the same race as the black doll maker. How a child who has only played with handmade black cloth dolls responds when first offered a slick piece of polyvinyl confection from a team of professional commercial artists we can only guess, but just knowing that these personal histories exist makes it clear that the doll tests were eliciting responses that were rooted in things more complex than just racial identity.

Clark had quizzed 134 black kids in segregated schools in Arkansas and another 119 black kids in integrated nursery and public schools in Springfield, Massachusetts. The questions were the same; the dolls were presented. Clark concluded from these interrogations that “. . . the southern children in segregated schools are less pronounced in their preference for the white doll, compared to the northern children’s definite preference for this doll.” So a higher percentage of black kids in the segregated southern schools preferred the black doll. So how does this finding support the notion that segregated schools are more damaging to black self-esteem than are integrated schools? This test seems to imply the exact opposite; it suggests that a racially homogenous educational environment may enhance self-esteem. At the very least, the Court testimony was awash with deception.

In a rare moment of candor, NAACP staff member Dr. Alfred H. Kelly, let the cat out of the bag at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association on December 28, 1961. Dr. Kelly, a professor of history at Wayne State University, was recalling the NAACP’s court testimony on the question of whether or not Congress had intended the 14th Amendment to compel the desegregation of schools in the capital city. Dr. Kelly described the NAACP’s dishonest presentation to the Court with these words:

“The problem we faced was not the historian’s discovery of the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth; the problem instead was the formulation of an adequate gloss on the fateful events of 1866 sufficient to convince the Court that we had something of a historical case. . . It is not that we engaged in formulating lies; there was nothing as crude and naïve as that. But we were using facts, emphasizing facts, bearing down on facts, sliding off facts, quietly ignoring facts and above all interpreting facts in a way to do what [Thurgood] Marshall said we had to do – ‘get by those boys down there.’”

Who was Dr. Kelly trying to gull? Deliberately “ignoring facts” when offering an “expert opinion” is simply telling lies by omission. Furthermore, “sliding off facts” and “interpreting facts” to suit the desires of a team of lawyers is called “spinning” the facts. Doctor Kelly has admitted that those who gave testimony in the Brown case were acting as willful and knowing spin doctors. Even more disturbing is the insight it offers us into the character of spin doctor Thurgood Marshall whose elastic morals were untroubled by offering bogus testimony crafted to “get by those boys down there.” Marshall’s later appointment as a Supreme Court justice should give us pause.

The NAACP’s “gloss on the events of 1866” was trash history. If the American Historical Association had a shred of integrity its assembled members would have hooted Dr. Kelly off the stage then and there. They did not, so we know that ideological historians are available for purchase. The stagecraft of the Brown case would be offensive to any people who valued an honorable tradition of jurisprudence. Seen for what they were, the courtroom antics of the NAACP “experts” were as hollow as the laughable courtroom shenanigans of an Amos and Andy courtroom skit: the subversive Negro folk hero known as the trickster had entered the courtroom disguised as a diploma-waving “expert.”

In 1979 the American Psychological Association hosted a symposium to celebrate the psychologists who contributed to the Brown decision. Psychologists had eagerly offered their opinions at all four trials that were bundled together by the Supreme Court in the Brown case. Kenneth Clark, Isidor Chein and Stuart W. Cook had presented a Social Scientific Statement over the signatures of 32 social scientists. These psychologists had claimed that there were no racial differences in the ability of school children to learn and that racial separation harmed black children. The symposium marked the quarter-century anniversary of the Brown decision and some of the original courtroom experts were asked to chat about their participation in the Brown campaign. From the outset these speakers were reticent and defensive in explaining their participation because, years later, the psychologists who had testified in Brown were commonly seen as liberal reformers who had concealed their utopian social agendas behind a false front of impartiality.

As James T. Paterson tells us in his history of the United States since 1945: “The fact of the matter was that in 1954 there simply did not exist sufficient research that could ‘prove’ whether any particular racial mix was superior – or in what ways – to any other.” William Tucker’s history of “scientific racism” tells us that “. . . the only empirical data submitted to the court [Clark’s doll test] to support the scientific assertions turned out to be of questionable validity.” In other words, it was junk science. Clark and his colleagues had failed to present any broad and coherent evidence that black children suffered emotional harm as a result of going to school with lots of other black children.

Henry E. Garrett, former president of the American Psychological Association and the chairman of the psychology department of Columbia University, had been on the Ph.D. committee of both Kenneth Clark and Isidor Chein and had served as the Ph.D. advisor for Clark’s wife Mamie. At trial Garrett observed that social scientists had entered the realm of politics and social opinion when they offered testimony that school segregation was psychologically damaging.

Ernest van den Haag, a psychologist and professor of sociology at the New School for Social Research at New York University, proposed a three-part educational system: “The desire for the maximization of liberty leads to the contention that there should be schools for white [people], schools for Negroes, and schools which both can attend, just as there are colleges for males, females, and coeducational ones. . . Neither the legal enforcement of segregation nor compulsory congregation – the outlawing of segregation – is consistent with freedom.”

Ernest van den Haag’s proposal maximized individual freedom of choice; it minimized social conflict; every child would be where his parents wanted him to be; every school attendee would be a willing volunteer. What could be more harmonious?

Nothing. Its only flaw was that it would fail in the real world. Everyone, the NAACP litigators included, knew that research data did not support the assertion that the general population of black children in 1954 were socially or intellectually prepared to be the scholastic equals of white students. White parents would be reticent to send their children to schools where big chunks of classroom time were devoted to raising the black fraction of the classroom to the level of existing white norms; the integrated classrooms of Mr. van den Haag’s system would have lacked enough white students to make it a meaningfully integrated society.

Studies done years later suggested that black students enjoyed an educational benefit from their close association with white students because the cultural values that the white students brought to school, such as diligent study habits, were contagious. These findings were highlighted in the popular press and then quickly suppressed because black parents were incensed at the suggestion that it was the white child’s burden to communicate positive values to their black children; black activists saw the study results as a backhanded criticism of black culture and black parenting. After that, declarations of the doctrine of the white child’s burden were consigned to the closet and replaced with the notion that it was the white children who were being enriched by contact with lots of black kids.

What Might Have Been

We can only guess what the Brown decision might have been if the court had heard evidence from anyone who wasn’t a committed follower of Franz Boas. We can get a glimmer of what might have been from the 1963 case of Stell v. the Savannah Board of Education, in which some white parents intervened in a court action to desegregate schools in the Savannah-Chatham County region of Georgia. The plaintiffs were amply represented by NAACP litigators; the Savannah-Chatham Board of Education was the defendant. For the first time the assumptions of cultural relativists, such as Ashley Montagu, Otto Kleinberg and Kenneth Clark, would be challenged by contradictory evidence. Attorneys for the plaintiffs included Jack Greenberg and Constance Motley, a mulatto, both of whom had served as counsel for the NAACP in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

Court proceedings began on May 9th, 1963 with few reporters present. The morning was spent questioning the Superintendent of Schools about the fact of segregation in Savannah-Chatham County. It was not until mid-afternoon that Dr. R.T. Osborne was called to the stand as an expert witness. Dr. Osborne was asked what conclusions he had drawn from his research.

Dr. Osborne: “At all levels in the educational program there are differences in achievement between white and Negro pupils. The differences are noticeable at the preschool level and persist throughout the entire program in the Chatham County schools through the 12th grade.”

Next question: “Are the differences of a particular type only or do they vary in patterns or according to schools?”

Osborne: “The differences are found in reading, achievement, mathematics, mental maturity.”

Mrs. Motley took up cross examination for the NAACP. She asked if the lower performance of black students might be the consequence of the inferior education they had received in segregated schools, to which Dr. Osborne allowed that poor performance by black students might be due to either inferior schooling or heredity.

Mrs. Motley: “Then it [low achievement by black students] can’t be attributed wholly to race, by your study, right?”

Dr. Osborne: “Not wholly to race.”

The next witness was Dr. Henry E. Garrett, but before he uttered a word Mrs. Motley attempted to terminate any further exploration of scientific evidence in an effort to keep the evidence from entering the court record. The trial judge responded, “. . .I’m going to hear all the evidence and you can make your objections when we get through with the evidence and then I will hear both sides. . .”

Mrs. Motley then proceeded to argue with the judge in an effort to prevent Dr. Garrett’s testimony from entering the court record. She suggested that she might turn to the Court of Appeals in an effort to suppress Dr. Garrett’s testimony.

Mrs. Motley: “Your Honor, I think that what the plaintiffs are going to have to do is to go to the Fifth Circuit, or some other court, and get a Writ of Prohibition, or something against this kind of testimony.”

The Court: “I have already ruled on that, I said that I was going to hear the testimony, and then after I hear it, then you raise your objections. . .”

Mrs. Motley continued to argue against the inclusion of scientific evidence she didn’t want in the court record.

Mrs. Motley: “Well, the point is we want this question determined before all of this evidence is put into the record.”

The Court: “Well, you seem hard to convince, but I am trying to convince you that I am going to hear it, and that’s that. So, you may proceed. I don’t mean to be discourteous but I said that to start with, that I was going to hear it all. This is an important case. It is a novel case. All right, you may proceed.”

Mrs. Motley’s emotionalism increased as she came to understand that, for the first time, contrary evidence would be read into the court record. Dr. Garrett was allowed to speak, but his testimony was quickly interrupted by Mrs. Motley.

Mrs. Motley: “Well, your Honor, I would like to say this then: Judge Tuttle has said that we can renew our motion on Monday for the appointment of another judge to hear this case, and on Monday we plan to do that. We don’t plan to appear in Savannah on Monday. We plan to file a motion in the Fifth Circuit.”

The Court: “That’s your privilege. However, I think that is more or less a threat, and let the record show that, but that isn’t bothering me a bit. I am going to do what I think is right, and I am sure Judge Tuttle will agree with me that is right.”

Testimony continued and Dr. Garrett gave evidence based on nation-wide testing. At one point Mrs. Motley asked Dr. Garrett: “Well, what does [intelligence] quotient have to do with race?”

Dr. Garrett: “Because the difference is one where the race is concerned and if you make studies of the performance of the Negro child – it was found in a study of 8,000 children in Chicago not long ago, and they were able to find 103 children, Negro children, with intelligence above 120, that is very bright. Now, they had to look through 8,000 to get them, and in a comparable group of 8,000 white children you would get 800 with I.Q.s above 120 which, to me, shows that the incidence of high intelligence is about 7-8 to 1.”

Mrs. Motley: “What about the 103 Negroes that do?”

Dr. Garrett: “Eighty percent of them are mixed blood.”

Motley: “How do you know that?”

Garrett: “They said so. . .”

Motley: “Who said it?”

Garrett: “The children, or their parents. It’s reported in the report.”

And so it went, witness after witness. The evidence of inborn differences between the races continued to accumulate. During a review of data about comparative brain structure Constance Motley began to weep audibly. Attorney Carter Pittman read aloud pages 115 and 116 from Dr. Carleton Coon’s text Origin of Races:

“Human beings also vary in temperament. It is a common observation among anthropologists who have worked in many parts of the world in intimate contact with people of differences – people of different races – that racial differences in temperament also exist and can be predicted. Races also differ in the size and weight of endocrine glands, and in the substances carried in the urine. The study of these variations has just begun, and many readers who believe in the current dogma that all behavioral differences are due to man’s unique capacity for learning will find this unpalatable, but the burden of proof is on them. If such differences are not related to the endocrine system, then man is indeed a unique animal.”

The attorney then asked the witness, Dr. George, if he agreed with this passage, to which Dr. George replied, “I think that is very fundamentally sound, yes.” There followed testimony about comparative brain structure.

All the biological evidence that had been excluded from the Brown case was read into the record in Stell v. Savannah Board of Education. Constance Motley eventually got her emotions under control. The NAACP litigators presented no evidence or even a single expert witness to challenge the given biological evidence even though that evidence had decisively trashed the central assumption of Boasian cultural relativism, the assumption that there are absolutely no biological differences between races of humans that might account for differences in temperament, cultural expression, general health or level of commitment to certain endeavors.

Back to Brown

Ernest van den Haag’s critique of Kenneth Clark’s manipulation of his own doll-test data was not unique. As early as 1955 Edmond Cahn, professor of jurisprudence at New York University had pointed out the inconsistency in Clark’s odd interpretations. The doll studies formed the core of the NAACP’s sociological evidence and Clark’s testimony about the results of those tests was, at best, misleading. Seen from our present historical distance from the trial, it looks ever more like premeditated perjury. Ernest van den Haag stated that “the type of evidence is much the same in all, very largely based on several works of Kenneth B. Clark. . . Professor Clark undertook a number of experiments and submitted them to the Court.” In his comprehensive history of Brown v. Board of Education Richard Kluger dubbed Clark “The Doll Man” and the name stuck. According to A. James Gregor, professor of political philosophy at the University of Hawaii, Clark could sway the Court only by arguing against “his own scientific findings” and selectively poaching data from other sources.

Professor Gregor went further, suggesting that racially homogeneous educational environments could be beneficial to school children because they were free of distracting alien cultural rhythms. His argument anticipated that of the emerging Black Nationalist movement which insisted on the establishment of racially distinct schools to instill pride in the minority child. Professor Gregor believed that the Black Nationalists had a logical and defensible social vision. He argued that the vision of the Black Nationalists was an “insistent reminder that America’s Negro problem is not to be resolved exclusively through the legalisms of the NAACP.” As the nation proceeded into the 1960s the Black Nationalist perspective would cause the tight liberal consensus on racial integration to unravel.

Back in 1955 Kenneth Stamp had openly declared that black folks were “only white men in black skins, nothing more, nothing less.” To integrationists and assimilationists of that generation “race” was a figment of the imagination, a troublesome distraction. Kenneth Clark and his colleagues were all the stepchildren of Franz Boas who embraced what has been called an “exaggerated universalism,” a faith that all humanity would work together to tear down the social constructions of race and nationalism. At that time the segregationists were pretty much alone in their open claims that “race matters.”

As America moved deeper into the 1960s an enfeebled Jim Crow yielded growing space to an emerging Black Power movement. Suddenly black spokesmen were cautioning black folks to beware of the endless compromise and accommodation that cultural assimilation would demand of them. Suddenly integration was no longer synonymous with “racial progress.” The raceless monoculture of the integrationists now appeared worse than naïve; for many black folks boundless assimilation loomed as a threat to their black culture and their personal identity. African-American culture was reevaluated and accepted as something distinct from European culture, but also valued and worth preserving. Rather than feign color blindness, black folks began to cultivate an elaborated racial consciousness.

By the late 1960s Black Power rhetoric was an echo of the bygone segregationists, with eloquent scholars such as Harold Cruse declaring that “the Negro integrationist runs afoul of reality in the pursuit of an illusion, the ‘open society’ – a false front that hides several worlds of hyphenated-Americans. Which group or subgroup leaves the door wide open to the outsider? None really.”

The central assumptions of Brown v. Board of Education were being called into question. The “expert opinions” and the social science tests used to sway the Supreme Court justices assumed that black culture was damaged and pathological, that black communities were populated with wounded people. It was a portrait of an inferior culture in dire need of a helping hand from the superior white culture. By the late 60s many Black Power ideologues imagined this portrait itself to be a patronizing white supremacist construct.

The historiography of the African-American experience has taken a dramatic turn since the end of World War II. As historians came to reject the “victimization model” of the black experience during slavery and on into the Twentieth Century, more historians came to see blacks as not mere victims of racism but as a people who pushed back against the indignities imposed on them by non-blacks and who created their own unique culture and comfort zones. Historians began to explore black resistance and self-determination and self-reliance. All of this historiography called into question the “social science” testimony in the Brown case. For example, the historical explorations of Darryl Michael Scott discard “the integrationist belief that black institutions are inherently inferior,” a false idea which he says “underpins the widely held belief that black people would not create or preserve private-sphere institutions to address their group needs and aspirations.”

In his insightful book Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880-1996, Mr. Scott informs us that the “damaged black psyche” was an invention of post-WWII social scientists who exploited their creation for political purposes. Mr. Scott tells us that researchers found no evidence of psychological damage resulting from segregation during the period between the two world wars. Consequently, when social scientists later closed ranks with left-wing social reformers they had little to offer as evidence of the emotional down side of segregation. It was then that political motivations pushed them to spin novel evidence from novel little experiments. Mr. Scott explains how a single NAACP attorney, Robert Carter, was the driving engine behind the idea of using social science to “prove” the existence of some “intangible” harm done to black youngsters as a direct consequence of school segregation:

“Proving the Carter thesis on the relationship between segregated schools and learning placed a heavy burden on the existing body if social science literature. The plaintiffs had to demonstrate first, that black children had damaged psyches; second, that the damage flowed from the schools rather than from their families or social discrimination at large; and third, that the damage to their psyches adversely affected their ability to learn. These issues were more than the literature could handle. The Carter thesis exceeded the factual knowledge of the social sciences on the relationship between self-concept and learning, strained the methodological approaches to measuring damage, and ran counter to the prevailing assumptions underlying theories about the spatial relationship between dominant and subordinate groups and personality developments among the latter.”

Mr. Scott explained how these politicized social scientists were forced to perform feats of “intellectual legerdemain” to create a semblance of evidence to support the litigation. He was joined in his opinion by many social scientists and historians. The kindest thing that could be said of Kenneth Clark’s shoddy doll tests is that they were dubious proof of any psychological harm done to anyone. Not a single study existed, including Clark’s, that demonstrated that school segregation caused any psychological damage. The simple truth is that the NAACP had a political wish list and to get their wishes they employed some willing guys with diplomas to fake some supporting evidence; Kenneth Clark, ever the disciple of Franz Boas, was the most prominent of these eager fakers. Clark personally testified at three of the four trials that culminated in the Brown decision.

In the fourth trial Davis v. Prince Edward County, the attorney general representing Virginia asked Kenneth Clark, “How do you account for the fact that you got the same or similar reactions [to the doll test] in the North, where no segregation exists by law, as you did where it does exist by law?” Clark responded, “I think that the reaction of children is never to just one aspect of their society. These children appeared to be sensitive to all aspects of their society. . .” Indeed they were, including their society’s notions of what is beautiful and what is not. What Clark could never let slip was the fact that his handpicked test subjects were also sensitive to the ugliness of his crudely crafted Negro dolls, which would always compare poorly with his professionally-made fresh-from-the-factory Caucasian dolls. Clark’s courtroom performance was a high-wire act by an intellectual hoodlum. He employed all the inflated bluster of the Wizard of Oz, but he always had the good sense to keep his hideous dolls hidden behind a curtain of words: he always talked about the dolls but he was careful not to show the dolls. His test subjects were too young to pull the mask from this intellectual prankster. In any case, Clark could provide no evidence of any psychological harm done to anyone caused specifically by school segregation. In fact, in his instructions to the expert witnesses in the first trial, Briggs v. Elliot, the NAACP’s chief attorney, Robert Carter, wrote: “Unfortunately, no study has been made. . .of the impact of segregated education itself on the development of the Negro’s personality. . .”

The “damage argument” first popped up in a 1946 amicus curiae brief written by Alexander Pekelis for the American Jewish Congress and filed in the California case of Westminster School District v. Mendez. Their argument simply assumed that if some group of people is considered “inferior” by some other group then the group deemed inferior has no choice but to become overwhelmed with feelings of humiliation. In the Brown case, politicized social scientists replayed this argument with all its built-in assumptions. Thus in the Brown case sociologist John J. Kane testified that:

“The school, with the exception of the home, is the institution that makes the greatest impact on American youth. You see the school gets the child early in life, keeps him for a number of years, so that day after day, year after year it is transferring attitudes to him. . .In a school system in which racial segregation is practiced, you have a day after day accumulation of attitudes that the negro is inferior because segregation is differentiation and distinction.” Which begs the question, in exactly which school is a black teacher transferring attitudes “of black inferiority” to black students “day after day”? It just doesn’t happen. Today’s de facto all-black schools are bastions of black pride; they are fortresses of black culture wherein black scholarship and black perspectives are given free rein and a full airing. They are places where the rhythms of black speech and culture are unselfconsciously accepted.

The avatars of contemporary black empowerment would think it preposterous that children in these schools feel themselves to be inferior because of the absence of lots of white kids from a culture that is most comfortable with other cultural cadences and perspectives. While cross-cultural socialization can be enriching, it can also be inhibiting, especially for a group that is a numerical minority. Does black culture thrive in classrooms filled with countless little white critics? Is any black teacher ever as uninhibited as one in front of an all-black classroom? How much cultural compromise and accommodation is unhealthy for a culture? Is forced socialization the proper business of government or a proper price to achieve a color-bland society? And, yes, I did say color bland.

All these questions apply to gender as well as race. Feminism has been promoting a gender-bland culture for decades, which is to say, a feminized culture in which everyone would behave more like a woman. We now have feminized classrooms from kindergarten through high school and this environment has been ruinous to boys in general. Is the combo of color-bland and gender-bland a double whammy for black boys? It’s worth investigating. And yet, psychologist Louisa Holt was so bold as to declare in her testimony that going to school without white classmates “is a trauma to the negro child,” even though there were no studies that had specifically investigated whether this was true.

The absence of facts did not inhibit the court; the social scientists were not present for the purpose of offering the truth; they were there to offer the court their opinions because the case of Brown v. Board of Education was a political show trial. The justices had been steeped in the lore of Boasian cultural relativism well before the trial began; it had been made clear to them that cultural relativism was the current intellectual fashion; the trial was for the purpose of showcasing progressive social opinions. In a letter he wrote in 1954, Isidor Chein, who testified for the NAACP, recalled that “in the segregation cases. . .nobody asked us for the basis on which we reached our conclusions.” On one occasion when Mr. Chein attempted to explain the origin of his opinion, the judge abruptly ended Chein’s testimony with a brusque, “I think we have your position pretty clearly.” The court was only interested in Chein’s opinion, not whether there was any rational basis for Chein’s opinion.

An enduring criticism of the use of social science in shaping the Brown decision is that it rested on a crutch of fashionable opinions. It begged the question of whether a change of opinion by future social scientists would justify a re-imposition of state-mandated racial segregation. Given the history of social scientists lending the authority of science to all sorts of horrid political contraptions, it’s a question worth asking.

Social science isn’t physics; it isn’t an “exact” science amenable to crisp experiments that yield clearly quantifiable results. Like its oddball cousin psychology, it is largely a body of liberal opinion more closely related to literary theory than to thermodynamics. Associating these social studies with hard science in the popular mind was done primarily for political reasons. American intellectuals are suckers for anything therapeutic. Once social “science” began to dabble in the mysteries of the psyche, as in the arguments about the theoretical harm done to children by racially homogeneous educational environments, it became a body of hermeneutic theory entangled in the methodology of interpretation.

Most people agree that science needs to be isolated from social and political values if it is to be objective, so how are we to conceptualize objectivity in the social sciences? Can social science investigators deny themselves any opinions about the issues being investigated? This notion of objectivity has been called “the view from nowhere” and “the god trick.”

Professor John P. Jackson (U. of Colorado) tells us that: “The notion of objectivity as aperspectival leads to the second notion regarding the public authority of science. If good science is objective, then the public authority of science would increase the further that scientific findings would be isolated from social and political concerns. Public advocates who can enroll science for their cause are, in a significant sense, enrolling nature itself because, in this view, science speaks for nature rather than for the investigator.” (American Psychologist, Sept. ’04)

To which I would add that to those people who believe that Creation is God’s dictation, any convincingly objective disclosure about Nature would also be redolent with a hint of God’s will.

The Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka is now a half century old; the body of Kenneth Bancroft Clark has been laid to rest and the New York Times has rehashed the time-worn mythology of Clark’s legacy:

“Dr. Clark administered a test which he had devised years earlier, to 16 of those black children, who were between the ages of 6 and 9. He showed them a black doll and a white doll and asked them what they thought of each. Eleven of them said that the black doll looked ‘bad,’ and nine of them thought the white doll looked ‘nice.’ Seven of the 16 told Dr. Clark that they actually saw themselves as being closest to the white doll in appearance when asked, “Now show me the doll that’s most like you.’”

The Times, like the Supreme Court, uncritically accepted Clark’s interpretations at face value. Clark’s testimony, under oath, contradicts the inflated number of kids who favored the white dolls as quoted by the Times. So uncurious were the Times writers that they failed to discover that Clark’s handcrafted black dolls really did look “bad.” The Times dutifully reported how Thurgood Marshall had called Clark with the news that “Justice Warren has specifically mentioned the psychological testimony as key.” Indeed, NAACP lead counsel Robert Carter had called Clark’s doll quiz the “Aladdin’s lamp” of their case. The Times quoted Clark as saying, “I confidently expected the segregation problem would be solved by 1960. That shows how naïve I was.”

The Times relates that “to the end Clark remained committed to integration, although he grew more pessimistic.” According to an Associated Press account of his life, Clark described himself as “bewildered” at the persistence of de facto segregation a full three decades after the Brown decision. “I believed in the 1950s that a significant percentage of Americans were looking for a way out of the morass of segregation,” said Clark in 1984. “It was wishful thinking.” Clark went on to say that “It took me 10 or 15 years to realize that I seriously underestimated the depth and complexity of Northern racism . . .We haven’t found a way of dealing with discrimination in the North.”

Before the civil rights movement gave the word discrimination a negative connotation the word meant no more than a discerning judgment about something or other. Advertisements from the 1950s were constantly reminding Americans that people with “discriminating taste” preferred the product being advertised. To be discriminating was a good thing because it meant that you were capable of exercising educated judgment. Clark exercised his own discriminating judgment in 1950 when he packed up his family, waved goodbye to Harlem, and made tracks for Hastings-on-the-Hudson in affluent Westchester County, New York. New York Times, “He wanted to leave Harlem because he and his wife could not bear to send their children to the public schools that he was trying so hard to improve but were failing anyhow.” They quoted Clark as declaring: “My children have only one life.” Of course, when white parents drifted to the suburbs in search of better schools for their children Clark disparaged them as “racists” who were “discriminating” against blacks; when white folks changed address it was stigmatized as “white flight.” But when black parents moved to the suburbs seeking better educational environments they were lovingly characterized as “movin’ on up” or “upwardly mobile” by the liberal media.

So Clark scrammed out of Harlem after doing as much damage to his old neighborhood as he could possibly do. Back in the 1950s Clark had been appointed to head a Board of Education commission to enrich the curriculum of New York City’s slum schools. He had foolishly embraced a campaign to “decentralize” the New York City school system which, in real terms, meant that the schools would be guided by a coalition of politically savvy teacher’s union operatives and a clutch of easily manipulated semi-literate parents steeped in the intensely anti-intellectual culture of the black welfare poor. According to the Times:

“Dr. Clark came to think of the decentralization experiment as a ‘disaster,’ failing to achieve any of the educational objectives he had sought.” Really? The man had a Ph.D. degree but he couldn’t see that teaming a well-financed and aggressively self-serving teachers’ union with a bunch of ignorant welfare moms might lead to an educational “disaster”?

According to the Times, “In the 1980s, he expressed anger over assertions that blacks were the cause of their own problems.” But in the very next paragraph the Times says of Clark that “He also suggested that whatever argot black children spoke on the streets, they ought to be required to use standard American English in school.” But they are not required to speak English in school, which begs the question: What loving and literate parent would send their child into a classroom where standard American English is not spoken? Certainly not Kenneth Clark himself. Slum slang is a black people’s invention; if its acceptance in classrooms causes literate parents to pull their children from those classrooms, how is that not a problem caused by blacks themselves?

Kenneth Clark fled to the mostly-white suburbs to spare his children the anti-intellectual atmosphere of classrooms steeped in the values of the black welfare underclass. Did he expect white parents to love their children any less than he loved his children; were whites expected to display a nobility of which Clark himself was incapable?

What the Court Did

The behavior of the Supreme Court justices who crafted the Brown decision was unique in American history. For the first time members of the judiciary had assumed the powers of all three branches of government; they had become a government unto themselves. The nine lawyers of the Court had declared new law to suit themselves and they had dictated that lower court judges enforce the new edicts. The Brown decision also marked the moment in American history when the Court decided that everyone’s children were the property of the government, to do with as the government chose. The Brown decision was also the incubator of every future “affirmative action” program; it was wet nurse to the budding cult of “self-esteem.”

The Brown decision forced the average American to an elevated state of racial consciousness; it suffocated forever the ideal of race-neutral policies; it inaugurated the era of splinter-group identity politics; it accelerated the decline of civilization in America’s cities. On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional to have separate schools for black and white children. The Court’s opinion held that separate facilities denied black children “equal protection” under the law. Henceforth, it was simply assumed that any school with a black administration, black teachers and black students must be an educational dead end. The Court’s decision assumed that black folks were a damaged and distraught people so deformed by racism that they were in dire need of a special kind of healing that could only he had by an intimate association with lots of white folks; in other words, white children would henceforth bear the burden of modeling constructive behavior for black kids. This vision of blacks as a hopelessly screwed up and powerless minority made perfect sense as long as no one searched the historical record. Here’s the truth.

Black children attended school with whites as early as the 18th Century in New England, though not always happily. Black parents petitioned the Massachusetts Legislature in 1787 for an “African” school of their own in Boston. When their petition was denied, black parents gradually began sending their children to private black schools, often in private homes. The local government took note of this trend and, in 1820, began funding a public school for black students. Racially distinct schools continued to be the general rule throughout America and was generally endorsed by both races.

As late as the 1940s, the NAACP was initiating litigation only for the purpose of securing equal funding for black schools; there was no mention of any need for school integration. Roy Brooks, Professor of Law at the University of San Diego, names Thurgood Marshall as the activist who steered the NAACP toward its new goal of close racial commingling. It was imagined that school integration would enhance the self-esteem of black students and also improve their academic performance. In his book Integration or Separation: A Strategy for Racial Equality, Professor Roy L. Brooks argues that school integration failed on both counts. Mr. Brooks interprets Kenneth Clark’s doll quiz results as an affirmation that black children in segregated schools enjoyed greater self-esteem. Professor Brooks tells us that the “high level of personal self-esteem suggests that African American children in segregated environments derived their self-esteem from comparisons with children in their own group, not with whites.” This black academic believes that “…the homogeneous community rather than the larger white society is the environment in which the personal self-esteem of African Americans develops positively.” Brooks observes that black academic improvement in integrated settings has been minimal and often less than that achieved by blacks in de facto segregated schools. The Department of Education reports that in the decade from 1978 to 1988 “African American 13-year-olds attending integrated schools had lower rates of increase in reading and math scores than did children of the same age in de facto segregated schools.” Professor Brooks is supported by sociologist David J. Armour, who states flatly that “Not only has mandatory desegregation failed to produce educational and social benefits for most minority children but also research shows it can lead to adverse consequences for some.”

To hear the Supreme Court and the integrationists tell it, an all black school can’t possibly be any good. Is this true? Well, no. In fact some of them have been spectacularly good. Parker High School in Birmingham, Alabama was founded in 1899 to educate black students. Parker had a well-educated staff of black teachers. Expectations were high; discipline was strict; there was a dress code. For generations of black families Parker High School was a “symbol of pride,” a place where black children received a superb education. Today Parker is an unkempt, weed-bound, struggling inner-city school. Its sense of community and its commitment to academic excellence fell victim to Thurgood Marshall’s vision of an assimilated black minority. As the best teachers and the most accomplished parents drifted away to the no-longer-segregated suburbs, the least capable black folks were left behind in the inner cities where they re-imagined Parker High School as a bastion of hip-hop cultural values.

Here’s another example of an excellent black school: For a good while fully a third of all black students in our nation’s capital city were educated at Dunbar High School. Dunbar is something of an embarrassment to integrationists whose prevailing educational dogma holds that we cannot expect black children who are not middle class to do well on standardized tests; the hunt for ever more esoteric methods to teach lower class black kids proceeds as though such children had never been successfully educated in the past. Only by ignoring or misrepresenting what Dunbar once was can these educational frauds maintain their employment.

As early as 1899 the all-black student body of Dunbar was averaging higher scores on standardized tests than were two of Washington’s three all-white academic high schools. Dunbar continued to produce standardized test scores that equaled or exceeded national norms through the 1930s, the 1940s and on into the early 1950s. Originally named the M Street School, it was renamed Dunbar High School in 1916.

The outstanding success of Dunbar at educating black students made it a contradiction to the dogmas of integrationists such as Kenneth Clark who resorted to lies and distortions to explain away what was clearly an example of how best to educate minority children. Clark falsely asserted that “excellence at Dunbar represented the few,” even though the school was educating fully a third of the black students in Washington, DC. Clark asserted that Dunbar “is the only example in our history of a separate black school that was able, somehow, to be equal.” Somehow? Only example?

Clark is spewing rubbish. Dunbar was not unique and its winning formula for academic success was not a closely guarded secret. All that was necessary was for the students to desire an education. That and an educated teacher corps. Like so many leftist ideologues, Kenneth Clark had a deep personal interest in the dogma that black and separate must also be inferior. This was the rigid stance that drove Brown v. Board of Education. To admit that blacks alone could craft a first-rate educational environment would question the wisdom of igniting decades of racial animosity with elaborate forced busing schemes concocted by federal judges who had usurped the powers of the nation’s elected legislators and the executive branch of government, all for the purpose of achieving a racial “diversity” without which, it was assumed, blacks could not hope to become useful citizens. Black children were assumed to be damaged beings in need of uplift and the burden of lifting them up was placed on the shoulders of white children who were drafted into the war on black ignorance to act as role models for their benighted little black brothers.

Was Dunbar really the elitist haven that its detractors suggest? Not at all. Data on the parents of the children who attended Dunbar exists as far back as the 1890s. For the academic year 1892-93 they include 51 laborers, 25 messengers, 12 janitors and one doctor. This settles the lie that the Dunbar kids were “middle class.” A teacher of a later time tells us that “A large segment of the homes of the students had one or more government employees for support. Before the 1940s these employees were messengers and clerks with few exceptions.” To quote a former Dunbar principal: “If we took only the children of doctors and lawyers how could we have had 1400 black students at one time?” In short, Dunbar was not a selective school; no entrance tests were required. All that was asked of entering students was an honest commitment to their own intellectual development.

Over its entire history from 1870 to 1955 most Dunbar graduates went on to higher education, which was unusual even for white students of that era. A study of black Ph.D.s done in 1970 revealed that more had graduated from Dunbar High School than from any other black high school in America. Dunbar put the lie to the notion that family income is the deciding factor in student performance. Dunbar demonstrated that schools based on rational principles and discipline can greatly improve children’s academic and career success.

In his brilliant study Black Rednecks and White Liberals sociologist Thomas Sowell informs us that:

“The first black man to graduate from Annapolis came from Dunbar. The first black enlisted man in the army to rise to become a commissioned officer also came from the same institution. So did the first black woman to receive a Ph.D. from an American university. So did the first black full professor at a major American university (Allison Davis at the University of Chicago). So did the first black federal judge, the first black general, the first black Cabinet member, the first black senator elected since Reconstruction and, among other notables, the doctor who pioneered the use of blood plasma, historian Carter G. Woodson, author and poet Sterling Brown, and Duke Ellington, who studied music at Dunbar. During World War II, when black military officers were rare, there were among this school’s graduates ‘many captains and lieutenants, nearly a score of majors, nine colonels and lieutenant colonels, and one brigadier general.’” Not bad for a school that integrationist dogma says couldn’t possibly exist.

After the case of Brown v. Board of Education Dunbar High School was designated a neighborhood school, which meant that its classrooms were suddenly flooded with the unmotivated and undisciplined offspring of the anti-intellectual black underclass. Many Dunbar teachers who had remained at Dunbar well past retirement age suddenly left the school. Teachers began retiring as early as 55 years. Eighty-five years of excellence evaporated as the New England values of the black teaching staff were overwhelmed by the know-nothing culture of the urban underclass. Today the per-pupil expenditure in Washington, DC is one of the highest in America, but the pupil test scores are among the lowest in the nation. During Dunbar’s best years it was short of funds and some of its classrooms had more than 40 students. Today, as a failing slum school, Dunbar is in better physical condition than ever before. The lesson is clear: a culture that encourages intellectual achievement is more important than money; lavishing taxpayer funds on an anti-intellectual culture is a waste of working people’s lives.

Enough minority public schools have tested above the national average to put the lie to the notion that a segregated school must be inferior. One fifth of all the Presidential Scholars in the history of Louisiana came from St. Augustine School in New Orleans, a Catholic school of about 600 black students. The first black student from the South to win a National Merit Scholarship was a graduate from St. Augustine. The measured intelligence of St. Augustine students ranged from smart down to IQs in the 60s. Back in the 1940s the test scores of black students in Harlem’s public schools were comparable to those of white working-class students living on New York’s lower east side.

The historical facts demonstrate that groups of black folks are capable of academic excellence when they are motivated to be excellent. In those places where the New England cultural values of a disciplined black teacher corps prevailed, black students thrived. In those places where the values of the black cracker culture prevailed, black students remained semi-literate, ill-spoken and ignorant.

Black Cracker Nation

Black cracker culture is the fossilized remains of the fast fading white cracker culture of the American South; it was this culture that shaped the attitudes and values of most of America’s black population for generations. Cracker culture has always been profoundly anti-intellectual and childishly emotional in its world view, from its origins in the lawless borderlands of Eighteenth Century Britain, to the settlement of the American South by immigrants from those wild borderlands, until the present. Though slavery is a tempting causal explanation for the trashiest behaviors of the black underclass, these same behaviors existed among southern whites and their ancestors in those uncultured and lawless regions of the British Isles from which the white settlers of the American South came. The people of this rude British subculture were called “rednecks” and “crackers” long before they set sail from Britain; they were a violent, impulsive and ill-tempered lot long before they set foot in America and long before they ever set eyes on a black person. It was the sad destiny of American blacks that so many of their ancestors would receive their educations in how to “be civilized” from white folks who had such a weak grasp on civilized behavior. Emigration from Britain was not haphazard. Most of the Britons who settled Massachusetts came from within sixty miles of the town of Haverhill in East Anglia. By contrast, most of America’s southland was populated by whites from England’s northern borderlands, a centuries-old no-mans-land. Other southern settlers came from the backward and brutish Scottish highlands and from Ulster County, all of which were lawless regions in constant turmoil. Here’s a quote from Thomas Sowell’s Black Rednecks and White Liberals:

“What the rednecks or crackers brought with them across the ocean was a whole constellation of attitudes, values, and behavior patterns that might have made sense in the world in which they lived for centuries, but which would prove to be counterproductive in the world to which they were going – and counterproductive to the blacks who would live in their midst for centuries before emerging into freedom and migrating to the great urban centers of the United States, taking with them similar values.

“The cultural values and social patterns prevalent among Southern whites included an aversion to work, proneness to violence, neglect of education, sexual promiscuity, improvidence, drunkenness, lack of entrepreneurship, reckless searches for excitement, lively music and dance, and a style of religious oratory marked by strident rhetoric, unbridled emotions, and flamboyant imagery. This oratorical style carried over into the political oratory of the region in both the Jim Crow era and the civil rights era, and has continued on into our own times among black politicians, preachers, and activists. Touchy pride, vanity, and boastful self-dramatization were also part of this redneck culture among people from the regions of Britain ‘where the civilization was the least developed.’ ‘They boast and lack self-restraint,’ [Frederick Law] Olmstead said, after observing their descendants in the American antebellum South.”

The word cracker is an abbreviation of “wisecracker,” a braggart. The name perfectly captures the overblown self-esteem of people who have accomplished little but who nonetheless demand an exaggerated deference from everyone around them. To put it bluntly, the worst behaviors of the most uncivilized inhabitants of the lawless northern borderlands of Eighteenth Century Britain are being kept alive today by some American blacks. The collective voice of gangsta rappers, hyperventilating itinerant preachers like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, and hyperbolic congressfolk like Jesse Jackson, Jr. and Sheila Jackson Lee are all an echo of the dying white cracker culture.

Unfortunately for all of America’s youngsters, the trashiest values of the black cracker culture have had thirty years to seep into the national bloodstream. The modern repackaging of black redneck values is called hip-hop. Hip-hop emerged from the ruined moonscape of the 70s-era South Bronx; its commercialization created the “hip-hop generation” with a mindset shaped by the cultural movement that was inspired by hip-hop musical expressions, the most pernicious of which is rap. In the mid 70s hip-hop was confined to the South Bronx where three of every four kids doesn’t finish high school and the turf is divided among street gangs such as the Black Spades and the Savage Nomads. Hip-hop is an expression of the uneducated and the unemployable: rappers, break dancers and graffiti “artists.”

An early disease vector of hip-hop redneck culture was a former gang leader named Afrika Bambaataa who spread the beat and the hip-hop attitude to gang bangers throughout the Bronx, then across the Harlem River, then to downtown Manhattan. Once the art bands picked it up it became “fashionable” because it was perceived to be edgy and “authentic.”

This new fashion took off like a rocket. By 1979 a New Jersey group calling itself the Sugar Hill Gang cut a rap single that sold over a million copies; rap had proven its potential to be a money mill and the “revolutionary movement” was quickly industrialized by promoters. Never before had there been so many opportunities for so many trashy rednecks to display their moral poverty. The stars of corporate rap took turns insulting Asians, Jews and white folks in general; they devalued women with lyrics both lurid and obscene; they glorified casual violence; they disdained the rule of law; their cliquish argot made a fetish of the slum dwellers social isolation. Corporate rapsploitation promoted a notion of success rooted in little more than poses and attitude, tarted up with a gaudy wardrobe and a pimped out SUV. What would these uneducated rhymers do when the kids lost interest in their latest CD? Go back to the carwash?

All in all, the values of hip-hop are the values of the black redneck culture that inspired it: anti-intellectual, emotional to excess, short sighted, impulsive and violent. Hip-hop is a redneck revival. The influence of its toxic anti-intellectualism on the young has been ruinous.

The natural consequence of embracing redneck values is to be found in Detroit, the blackest big city in America. In 1950, just four years before the Brown decision, Detroit had a population of just under two million souls. A gentle migration to the suburbs had been going on since the end of the Second World War. This outward flow was accelerated by a decline in the automobile industry. A post-war migration of southern blacks to northern cities shifted the racial composition of Detroit even more. The middleclass exodus really kicked into high gear with the nationwide judicial fashion of forced busing to achieve “racial balance.” A soaring crime rate and the ruinous crime festivals the media called race riots were all the convincing that civilized people needed. By 1990 Detroit had lost nearly half its population; the white folks and a lot of blacks had chosen to leave what was now an enclave of the Black Cracker Nation.

About the time forced busing was imposed by federal dictate, Motown Records owner Berry Gordy, Jr. moved his entire empire to Hollywood, an event that signaled the city’s inevitable decline. The Motown sound had been rooted in blues-based idioms that emerged during Jim Crow and the failed dreams of Reconstruction. Hip-hop, by contrast, was spawned in neighborhoods where redneck values ruled the schools and three out of four kids didn’t bother to finish high school.

Every Halloween morning the Detroit newspapers report the number of arsons started the night before. In 1984 the number of blazes peaked at 810. Detroit firemen printed the Devil’s Night arson numbers on T-shirts made every year to commemorate the annual arson festival of the Black Cracker Nation. One T-shirt read “Detroit: Where the Weak Are Killed and Eaten.” Detroit’s flamboyant black mayor from 1973 to 1993, Coleman Young, explained his burning city by saying that “to a unique degree, Detroit had buildings to burn.” Indeed it did after the departure of so many people seeking refuge from redneck behaviors. Today black Detroiters, who now constitute almost the city’s entire population, continue to blame their failures on “institutional racism” even years after blacks have taken complete control of every institution in Detroit. When viewing this mess liberals always get it wrong; poverty doesn’t create trashy values, trashy values cause poverty. Throwing money at dysfunctional cultures will only subsidize more dysfunction.

Three quarters of American blacks have achieved a middleclass existence. They did this by embracing traditional values and simple proven formulas for success: stay in school; get married; don’t create new life without first creating a stable home life. The lawless European regions from which the rednecks came to America have long since been civilized; the same cannot be said of places like Detroit and the South Bronx.

The best hope for the inhabitants of the dysfunctional Black Cracker Nation is for everyone else to unite in an effort to suffocate the black (and white) redneck culture. This should be done with a vigorous campaign of criticism and ridicule. Redneck behaviors should be the targets of daily disdain in the media and a punching bag for humorists. It’s a winning formula: once upon a time even minor sleights, real and imaginary, prompted deadly exchanges with dueling pistols. The twitchy homicidal pride that prompted duels was an artifact of the old European redneck culture. Dueling was a scourge; it claimed the lives of countless good men whose pride prevented them from avoiding the “field of honor.” The most reasoned and impassioned treatises against dueling had no effect on the practice. It was only after humorists began to ridicule the practice and to make it appear ridiculous that the prideful contestants ceased shooting at one another. It is now high time to serve the black urban gang bangers (duelists, really) a heavy dose of life-saving mockery. The liberals are killing the black underclass with kindness; their habit of treating every culture with respect is preserving the worst aspects of redneck culture. We can thank Franz Boas and his disciples for this nonsensical world view. Some cultures are clearly not life enhancing.

The Forced Busing Horror

The arrogant assumption of legislative and executive powers by the robed lawyers of the Supreme Court had so emboldened them that in 1971 the Court made explicit what had been implicit in the decision of Brown v. Board of Education: Henceforth the children of America were the property of the government. In 1971 the Supreme Court gave the federal district courts free rein to dictate which school a child would attend. School districts were elaborately gerrymandered; complex formulas determined which child would be transported to which school; the whole scheme was put on wheels with baroque busing schedules.

Parents of all races hated being under this court-ordered boot heel; the obnoxious assertion of government power gave parents an enormous incentive to escape from government control by migrating to some place, any place, where they could regain control of their personal destinies. This is why forced busing failed. Whites were the first to bolt, but they were followed by blacks as soon as access to suburban neighborhoods became available to them. Parents hated having their kids bused around, sometimes for hours each day, when there was an acceptable school within walking distance. Ironically, little Linda Brown, whose father only wanted for her to attend her neighborhood school, never got her wish. After the Brown decision Linda Brown was bused to a remote school far from her neighborhood. Some communities have been strained by court-ordered busing schemes for over thirty years. Meanwhile, black test scores continued to lag.

Resentment and conflicts over forced busing programs sometimes turned violent. The energy consumed in the struggle against forced busing distracted everyone from the business of seeking better solutions to black poverty and social immobility. Further resentment was engendered by the peculiar formulation of the Brown decision which prevented the lower courts from ordering cross-district busing. As an artifact of history northern school districts were small and many in number; therefore northern school districts were, and remain, mostly white enclaves. In the South, school districts were usually defined by county borders, so southern busing schemes caused much greater disruption in the lives of ordinary people. Northerners made things worse by smugly criticizing southern resistance to compulsory racial integration while they themselves remained snug in stable and secure and mostly white little school districts. Safe in their Blue State districts, northerners thought forced busing would be a good thing for southerners. An ironic consequence of all this hobnailed utopianism was that lots of southern white folks founded lots of private schools. To make these schools less costly most of them were founded in association with churches that enjoyed a favorable tax status. So lots of southern boys and girls were educated in fundamentalist and evangelical school environments. Today the Blue State people are perplexed by the popularity of religious perspectives; where did all these Jesus lovers come from? Well, they are the unintended consequence of a leftist utopian experiment in social engineering; the meddlesome utopians unintentionally created lots of the very sort of people they fear the most.

Meanwhile, back in the North, eighty-five percent of Boston’s public-school students are non-white. Three decades after an imperious court unveiled its racial homogenization plan for Boston, most white kids go to private schools. Boston’s expensive busing program serves no purpose, it simply squanders mountains of money that might otherwise be used to improve Boston’s worst-performing schools.

A Little History

Before America became subject to compulsory government-monopoly schooling just before the Civil War, Americans managed to educate themselves. At the time of the American Revolution literacy was nearly total among non-slaves living on the eastern seaboard. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense sold 600,000 copies to a population of 3,000,000, a fifth of which were slaves and half of whom were indentured servants.

Any of the basic skills of reading, writing and arithmetic can be communicated to an eager student in one hundred hours. That’s why I can say with confidence that most of the government-monopoly school enterprise is a jobs program for overpaid teachers and a baby sitting service for parents. Pick any fifth grade math book from the year 1850 and you’ll see that it’s pitched to what would be considered college level today. Modern education is a bloated scam; keeping children in school for twelve years in order to teach them so little is a crime against their youthful spirits. What schools teach best is emotional and intellectual dependency and conditional self-esteem. Schools condition the young to accept constant surveillance. The nurturance of special genius is minimal or it is suppressed altogether in the name of egalitarianism. Originally conceived as a device to regulate the poor, America’s sprawling school bureaucracy and the hidden horde of industries that profit from the industrialized school monopoly, have extended their grasp to capture the children of America’s middle class. Before the Civil War students volunteered for the kind of education that they desired, whether it be a religious school or an academic school or a craft school or a farm school. Many chose to educate themselves, which didn’t hurt Ben Franklin a bit.

Today’s model of the compulsory school was concocted by the State of Massachusetts sometime around 1850. The sensible people of Massachusetts hated the newfangled regimen and an estimated eighty percent of them resisted its imposition – sometimes with guns. The last holdouts were the people of Barnstable on Cape Cod who refused to surrender their children until the 1880s when the area was overrun by the state militia and the children of Barnstable were frog marched to school under the watchful eye of guards. Prior to the imposition of compulsory schooling the literacy rate in Massachusetts was ninety-eight percent. It has never been that high since. The home schooling movement now educates one and a half million American children. Studies of these children reveal that as a group they appear to be five to ten years ahead of their government trained peers in their ability to think.

It’s bad enough that the modern method of American mis-education compels the young to live absurd lives, locked away in confinement with people of exactly the same age and maturity, isolated from daily variety, under constant surveillance and forced to move from place to place at the sounding of a gong. After the Brown decision the utopian Left also demanded that the children of the American middle class be drafted into the original enterprise of the government-monopoly school system: regulating the poor. What puzzled whites throughout the decades of forced busing was the simple question, “Why don’t black parents just oversee the education of their children the way everyone else does?”

In the end, it was the Black Cracker Nation’s casual acceptance of violence that sent sensible people packing. One judge who took over the Boston school system and tried to compel a forced association of two very different cultures relinquished his control after a decade. By then the Boston public schools were mostly black and were educating only 2% of Boston’s white students. When interviewed the judge was proud of what he had done; his heart was in the right place; he just couldn’t get it through his head that sensible people will never voluntarily associate with rednecks of any race.

A precondition of successful racial integration is the extirpation of offensive cracker social behaviors, the same behaviors that produced a 70% out-of-wedlock birth rate in black communities, which guaranteed widespread black poverty. It was naïve to believe that racial integration would give blacks political or social equality. What ails poor black communities cannot be cured by a forced association with other social groups; it can only be achieved by a radical behavioral transformation. But don’t tell that to the cultural relativists who believe that the black redneck culture and its hip-hop offspring are every bit the equal of mainstream American culture.

Thirty-four years after the imposition of court-ordered busing the New York Times (9/25/05) did its best to put a happy face on the doctrine of the white child’s burden with this report from Wake County, North Carolina:

“Since 2000, school officials have used income as a prime factor in assigning students to schools, with the goal of limiting the proportion of low-income students in any school to no more than 40 percent.”

Was anyone fooled? This scheme simply uses income as a proxy for race in Wake County, NC. The Times gushes that black and Hispanic students have made “dramatic strides” in reading and math tests; there is no mention of any advantage for the white kids who were drafted into this social experiment as role models for the kids from anti-intellectual cultures. Like most school districts in the South “The school district is county wide, which makes it easier to combine students from city and suburbs.” The word “combine” is used here as a euphemism for “compulsory association.” When the government believes that it owns your children it is emboldened to do such things.

The Times tells us that “The county has a 30-year history of busing students for racial integration and many parents and students are accustomed to long bus rides to distant schools.” How sad. Having been used as lab rats in an extravagant social engineering experiment, the parents are “accustomed” to long tedious periods of transportation to remote locations. Now these well-conditioned and docile test subjects are introducing their offspring to the same tiresome grind.

The Times goes on: “To achieve a balance of low- and middle-income children in every school, the Wake County school district encourages and sometimes requires students to attend schools far from home.” So the comfort, the sense of community, the tradition of the neighborhood school, and the physical safety of white children is sacrificed to an experiment that uses them as role models for minority kids from redneck homes. None of this would be necessary if minority parents got off their butts and showed a genuine interest in their kids’ education, but caring about education is not part of their redneck value set.

The Times admits that “Some parents chafe at the length of their children’s bus rides or at what they see as social engineering.” Really? They “chafe”? Only a veteran Times writer could reduce an offended people’s moral outrage to the status of a heat rash.

More to the point: “Every winter, the district, using a complicated formula, develops a list of students who will be assigned to new schools for the following academic year, and nearly every year some parents object vehemently.” One parent, Cynthia Matson, cut right to the heart of the matter: “Kids are bused all over creation, and they say it’s for economic diversity, but really it’s a proxy for race.” Of course it is; it’s the institutionalization of the doctrine of the white child’s burden, which suits Wake County’s black school superintendent, Bill McNeal, just fine. Eighty-five percent of Wake County’s low-income students are non-white. With the kind of tortured logic that typifies so much “progressive” chatter, Times writer Alan Finder tells us that “The neighborhood school has been redefined, with complex logistics and attendance maps that can resemble gerrymandered Congressional districts.”

What a preposterous statement. When the definition of “neighborhood” is stretched to include an entire county then any meaningful notion of “neighborhood school” has been obliterated. County-wide busing is the death of the neighborhood school. Orwellian redefinitions of commonly understood words only serve to expose the creepy agenda of the far-Left social engineers. Parent Cynthia Matson, white and middleclass, was provoked to found Assignment By Choice, an advocacy group promoting parental choice in a county run by nanny-state paternalists.

Nowhere in the Times love poem to synthetic socialization does the newspaper mention even a single small benefit that the Wake County long-distance busing marathon bestows on white children. It’s all about how much good pushing white families around is doing for people from minority cultures. The Times doesn’t even offer the usual “progressive” boiler plate about how white kids are “enriched” by their compulsory close association with people whose slacker values they have been drafted to ameliorate by modeling superior social behaviors and attitudes. Every good parent knows that the best thing a parent can do for their child is to keep them away from peers with dysfunctional values. But in Wake County children who have been properly imbued with positive values are forced by the government into a daily intimate association with kids whose values threaten to undo the best efforts of their middleclass, and usually white, parents. The last time I looked, forcibly exploiting a group of people without compensation was called slavery, but that’s life down in Wake County on superintendent McNeal’s government-school plantation.

The demonstrated fact that school integration has failed to attain the goals sought in the Brown case a half century after the decision and three decades after the imposition of court-ordered forced busing does not alter the enthusiasm of the utopian integrationists even a little. While Kenneth Clark went to his grave lamenting the failure of integration to elevate the black underclass and W.E.B. DuBois became a staunch separatist, writing “Any planning for the benefit of American Negroes on the part of the Negro intelligentsia is going to involve organized and deliberate self segregation . . .,” while these men saw the fake promise of integration for what it was, diehards like Jonathan Kozol just won’t let the false light flicker out.

Spotlight on an Integrationist

Every Sunday the New York Times uses its slick magazine section to showcase one of its favorite people. The September 4th, ’05 issue included a mash note to Jonathan Kozol. The article is titled “School Monitor” and it includes a full-length photo of a slouching Kozol complete with the unsmiling demeanor of someone who is self-consciously “an intellectual.” Kozol has written another book and the Times wants to remind readers that the “school monitor” is still alive and possibly relevant.

Kozol says he wants to nationalize all educational funding in America; it bothers him terribly that some communities spend more on their kid’s education than do some big city administrations. He makes no mention of places like my suburban town where property owners are milked to fund schools in other communities, such as Newark, NJ. Newark lavishes more money on each of its pupils than does my town but the performance of Newark students remains inferior. Self-appointed “progressive” critics like Kozol continue to hide behind the funding issue when the real problem is the persistence of entrenched black cracker values, which are values cherished by “progressive” cultural relativists like Kozol as “authentically black.” These are the same dimwits who want to teach black students in “ebonics”, the insular and isolating street argot of the inner city slums.

With feigned innocence the Times asks Kozol, “Do you not approve of private schools?”
Kozol: “They starve the public school system of the presence of well-educated, politically effective parents to fight for equity for all kids.”

In other words, he believes that mainstream Americans are selfish for not devoting their energies to missionary work to save the rednecks from themselves. Kozol can’t get it through his head that failing schools are caused by parents and students who just don’t care about cultivating their intellects. Failed schools are an organic consequence of redneck anti-intellectualism. Private school parents are taxed to support a parody school system and they are billed to purchase a sensible education for their children. That’s more than enough giving for anyone. Having been driven from the public schools by the toxic presence of redneck “students,” Kozol calls these good parents bad people for not saving the rednecks from themselves.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Kozol was never a parent. “I don’t have children of my own,” says Kozol, “I was married once long ago, and divorced, and we weren’t married long enough to have children.” He now lives alone, his dog Sweetie Pie having died. So the most profound human relationships were never a part if his life; he’s just a theorist. Reflect on this fact for a moment: The people who understand America’s public schools best, the public school teachers, usually prefer to send their children to private school and pay the bill with salary hikes extracted from already overburdened taxpayers.

Kozol the Theorist has a new book; it’s called The Shame of the Nation and subtitled “The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling.” I’ll save you twenty-five bucks by summarizing it right here. Mr. Kozol quotes Gary Orfield of the Harvard Graduate School of Education who wrote in the year 2004 that “American schools are now 12 years into the process of continuous resegregation . . . During the 1990s, the proportion of black students in majority white schools has decreased . . . to a level lower than in any year since 1968.” This bothers Kozol immensely but he has little to say about why this is happening. His use of the word “apartheid” in his title suggests a social policy to isolate minority peoples; the truth is more prosaic. In many cities the judicial overseers of desegregation plans have abandoned those plans because there are too few white students to meet the racial quotas and because the plans were not resulting in any significant educational gain for minority students. Furthermore, a heavy influx of immigrants has greatly increased the number of minority groups that must be shuffled and dealt throughout metropolitan school systems. Some of these minority groups greatly resent the fragmentation of their communities for the questionable benefit of compulsory cross-cultural association. The racial bean counters in San Francisco must process nine identified minority groups through their complicated ethnic blender formulas. Kozol mentions none of this. He is not the least bit curious about whether a fading interest in integration by black folks may be contributing to the trend toward racial homogeneity. Has white resistance increased since 1971? He doesn’t even ask.

Neither does Kozol expend much energy on whether race mixing improves black academic performance. He frets over a New York Times article that told of parents who want to exclude from local schools “thousands of poor black and Hispanic students who travel long distances,” so that the community children can attend their neighborhood schools. The Times had observed that desegregation efforts had “produced lackluster academic results” and that schools had “lost their distinct neighborhood character.” Jonathan Kozol is unmoved; for him the only goal is integration. The promise of the 1954 Brown decision holds him transfixed as by a talisman even though it has proven to be a false promise. Kozol points a finger of blame at spending disparities between city and suburbs, even though studies have demonstrated that increased spending does not raise academic performance. In the 2002-3 school year New York City lavished $11,627 on each pupil, even though parochial schools were doing a better job for far less. In any case, New York’s per-pupil expenditure rose by two-thirds since 1991, which far exceeded inflation; this increased spending had no measurable effect on student accomplishment.

For Kozol the big impediment to the flowering of the black underclass is white indifference or, more darkly, racism. This frumpy academic who never had children and who now lives alone since his dog died can’t grasp the fact that normal people living normal lives are moved by values such as the value of a neighborhood school or the value of local control of education or freedom from the autocratic misappropriation of their children to fulfill other people’s utopian visions. The evidence indicates that wherever minority students are failing, their failure is rooted in the anti-intellectual traditions of their families. Lavishing money on students with anti-intellectual attitudes, while simultaneously showing deference to the students’ anti-intellectual cultural values, is a formula for failure; it’s subsidizing failure. We have historical examples of black ac