Separate is Unequal

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14 May 2010

Even though the politics of most teachers’ lounges make In general I am against politicians meddling with school curricula. When lefties get involved in the classroom, the end result is obsessive-compulsive kids who hector their parents about recycling but still can’t do long division. When righties get involved, there is always the danger it will end with a field trip to the Creation Museum.

Yet Arizona’s governor, lately in the news for trying to do something about the estimated 450,000 (out of a population of 6.6 million) illegal immigrants, has just signed a law that should be applauded, for it injects a good deal of sense back into an American school system that had reportedly been riven by separatist ethnic studies programs. The bill targets anodyne stuff: classes that promote the overthrow of the United States government; promote resentment toward a race or class of people; are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group; and advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.

Of course, this is seen by some as yet another step towards the arrival of fascism in America (though as Tom Wolfe famously said, fascism seems to always be descending on the United States, but somehow always lands on Europe). And in Arizona’s favour, among the legislation’s critics are six UN human rights “experts": brickbats from an organisation that puts the Saudis, the Syrians and Sudan on the Commission for Human Rights are a sign you’re doing something right.

More broadly, there is good reason for attempting to wind back ethnic chauvinism in schools, and Arizona is to be applauded for attempting to stop the rot that has crept in across American academia from trickling down to primary and secondary schools. Interestingly, this legislation comes at a moment when research is beginning to confirm what many of us suspected, namely, that a mindless focus on ethnic separatism, cloaked behind support for the increasingly meaningless concept of “diversity” is doing more harm than good. Steve Chatman of the University of California, Berkeley, has just published a paper that strongly suggests that academia’s attempt to raise racial consciousness may do more harm than good, and lead to more rather than less-polarised campuses.

All of this is a challenge to American liberals who have, over four decades, comprehensively abandoned Martin Luther King’s vision of a country where the content of one’s character reigns supreme in favour of a country Balkanised by identity politics. Pointing this out is a threat, and why they are so quick to deploy charges of racism at every turn. At the more benign end of the spectrum, this leads to feel-good motherhood statements such as Sonia Sotomayor’s claptrap about the superiority of a wise Latina’s jurisprudence, but this quickly descends to the notion that in-born characteristics lead to shared solidarity and wisdom. From there things can get much more sinister – watch this video to the end to see how poisonous things can get when students are encouraged to allow "solidarity" to trump humanity.