Ronald Reagan used to talk about the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” It was his expression for the belief held by many white people that blacks needed special breaks because they simply could not achieve at the same level as other students, workers, etc. In some earlier articles I mentioned the various things we “knew” about colored people during my growing-up years of the 1940s and ‘50s. We absolutely knew that blacks were intellectually inferior and could never be good students or work at occupations that required brainpower. This included being mechanics, football quarterbacks, doctors, lawyers, indian chiefs, and any number of other jobs. There was no real debate on the issue.
But all those things we thought we knew were lies, in the same way that we thought Chinese women were genetically disposed to walk with those funny little steps. The truth, of course, was that the cruel custom of binding the feet of young Chinese girls tightly, so the bones of their feet could not grow normally, produced that curious gait, which we now know to be very painful.
In exactly the same way, generations of colored people in America have been subjected to intellectual foot-binding that kept them from developing normally in schools. The dirty secret of the academic crippling of American minority-children by our educational establishment is exposed in the following Socratic exchange – i.e., a progressive series of questions and answers meant to uncover a particular truth:
Question: Why do college educators think a “diverse” student body is important?
Answer: They believe it improves the quality of education in their schools.
Question: Is there any evidence to support that belief?
Answer: No credible scientific measures have been presented to support it. The “diversity” that administrators seek goes no deeper than skin color. They want their student bodies to look a certain way.
Question: Why are racial preferences needed to achieve the desired racial “diversity”?
Answer: If standard academic admissions criteria were applied, very few black and Hispanic students would be admitted. Their academic levels are too low.
Question: Why do black and Hispanic students have such poor academic credentials?
Answer: Public schools have failed to educate them at an acceptable level.
Question: Is that failure due to lack of funding?
Answer: No. School funding in Washington, DC, for example, is the highest in the nation – $30,115 per pupil in 2020 – while student achievement (of mostly minority students) is the lowest.
Question: Then what is the problem?
Answer: Primarily, it is the “soft bigotry” of low expectations. Educators don’t believe that these minority students can learn like whites or Asians, so they are held to a lower standard.
Question: Is it possible that they are correct?
Answer: No. Like other racist legends, it is a lie. Wherever blacks and Hispanics are challenged to high academic standards, they have shown that they are capable of responding and learning.
Question: Then why are high expectations not applied? Is it all because of racism?
Answer: No. It is because of politics. Some political interests find it valuable to cultivate an electoral power base consisting of low-achieving minorities who need special privileges. Should most minority students become able to compete and achieve on their own, the influence and power of such politicians would diminish. This is why they fight measures like state graduation requirements, higher teacher-standards, and more demanding curricula.
Fortunately, American society has largely emerged from the fog of racist myth. We no longer believe that blacks can’t do things that require intellectual ability. During my professional career I saw white colleagues shake off the long tradition of deep-South racism to learn that minorities could be sound, capable colleagues, valuable neighbors and good friends. Society’s racial attitudes were transformed during my adult lifetime, and millions of colored Americans came out of the shadows into the bright sunlight of American life.
Notwithstanding this hard-won transformation across much of the country, a stubborn residue of bigotry remains among educators. A deeply held belief in blacks’ intellectual inferiority has prolonged educators’ obsession with affirmative action to solve the “problem” of racial imbalance in colleges, universities, and workplaces. But after a decades-long battle over the practice, a Supreme Court decision upheld an amendment to the Michigan state constitution which bans affirmative action in admissions to the state’s public universities. The Court did not say that racial affirmative action cannot be used as part of college admissions policies. But it did say that a state’s citizens have the right to decide whether or not the practice can be used. Affirmative action will no longer be a “football” for the Congress or the federal courts to kick around for political advantage.
Depending on your vantage point, that Supreme Court decision is good, bad or ugly. I view it as a positive step toward breaking our long obsession with race. But many educators and minority “leaders” are outraged – seeing the decision as an intrusion on the “sacred ground” of racialism that they have staked out over the 67 years since Brown vs. Board of Education. Many states will undoubtedly use the Michigan case as a platform for moving away from racially based admissions and hiring, but the issue is far from settled. I expect that we’ll have a deuce of a scrap before we become truly able to treat all people the same, no matter what shade their skin happens to be.
In fact, implicit affirmative action, at the political level, is how we came to elect Barack Hussein Obama as president in 2008 – and re-elect him in 2012. Only aliens newly arrived from Mars could have missed the fact that Mr. Obama brought absolutely no governing credentials to the office. He had no experience running anything, but we evidently didn’t care. We elected him on how he looked and sounded – basically on the fact that he was a “clean, bright, articulate colored guy,” as Joe Biden famously said. We gave him a pass on his lack of executive experience, and judged him against a standard based on the color of his skin. Affirmative action had hit the big leagues, and soft bigotry was playing for high stakes.
Critics of affirmative action commonly ask these questions:
- Would you want to fly on a plane whose pilot was chosen by affirmative-action?
- Would you accept a doctor who was admitted to medical school by affirmative action?
- Would you choose an affirmative-action CPA to handle your business affairs?
Naturally, most people would answer NO to each question because they demand the best practitioners for such critical occupations. Somehow, though, not enough Americans asked themselves the same question about the world’s most powerful and consequential job. Did we assume that the presidency was so simple that anyone who delivered a good speech (from a teleprompter) and looked good in a $3,000 Armani suit could do the job? Did we believe that a person of mixed race brings a special ability to the office? Or did race simply trump all, without reference to competence?
I don’t know what we thought – if we thought at all – but certainly the soft bigotry of low expectations was in play. In retrospect, I believe our collective mind resembled the mind of a teen-aged boy who sees visions of becoming a long-haired, guitar-strumming rock-star. The magical guitar (and perhaps the magical hair) would short-cut the need for long, arduous years of musical study and practice.
Just so, we seemed to believe that a man who sounded bright and had the right skin-color needed no real experience. He would stop the rise of the oceans by the word of his mouth, and bring all warring factions of the world to the Table of Brotherhood. He would heal the economy. He would be the ‘post-racial” president. He would be a rock-star. All would be well. In fact, he received the Nobel Peace Prize a few months after taking office. What a guy!
Unfortunately, we were mistaken about most of that – possibly excepting the rock-star part. The eight-year excursion led by our affirmative-action “general” was pretty rough, and we got knocked all over the place. “Sure, I voted for him,” said one caller to a radio show. “He looked and sounded great. But I never expected him to screw up this badly…”
Soft bigotry can make us feel good about ourselves, but it is not a substitute for ability, experience, and clear thinking in critical areas of governance. We need leadership that is competent – not just good-looking. I had hoped the American people could grasp this before we were presented with another bogus opportunity to elect a president who brought the right race or gender identity, plus doses of soothing talk, to the table as his/her primary credentials.
But at the time of this writing, the signs and portents (as they say) are not auspicious. In 2020 – spooked by societal uproar cultivated by Democrats and their media allies – Americans booted out a successful president on stylistic grounds, and gave the presidency to possibly the least capable (white!) man we could find, and the vice-presidency to the country’s silliest female-of-color. This tandem has spent a year wrecking the booming, energy-rich economy their predecessor had built – thereby blessing millions of citizens with a looming nightmare of Joe Biden falling over and Kamala Harris gaining the Oval Office.
It might be hard for some to accept, but race, gender or style are not good enough reasons to put someone in the presidency. Nor should a presidential campaign conducted from a candidate’s basement give us any confidence in his leadership-chops. We need a pilot who knows how to fly the plane – a general who knows how to fight and win.
Looking (and sounding) good won’t cut it because the presidency isn’t an acting job. It’s a doing job. The country will be ready to fly high when voters grasp this central truth once again. Of course, it goes without saying that order must be restored in our elections to ensure that voters’ choices are tabulated correctly. It’s absolutely fundamental.
Americans have made mistakes before, but we have corrected them and moved ahead. We can do it again, but this time the stakes are really high because of the intrusion of soft bigotry. With Mr. Trump’s energy independence (and low prices) gone with the wind, a fading senior citizen in the White House, and his witless lieutenant waiting in the wings to take over, we’ve got a serious situation on our hands. Unless some real leaders step up soon to take the controls, we’ll end up like the Confederates under the command of General Jubilation T. Cornpone1. But there won’t be anything funny about it.
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- Confederate General Jubilation T. Cornpone (by cartoonist Al Capp’s account) commanded in battles known variously as “Cornpone’s Retreat,” “Cornpone’s Disaster,” “Cornpone’s Rout,” and “Cornpone’s Hoomiliation.”