It makes me so angry to see these kinds of comment, which I saw echoed downthread the diary, because it just
isn't true. But the persistence of this particular stereotype just proves that magical thinking about race thrives, even among people who believe themselves to be highly intelligent and wholly rational.
The idea persists that kids magically acquire academic ambition. People who hold these views obviously think that the Fairy Bookworm flies through the bedroom window of all those high-rise projects, and leaves it under the pillows of inner-city kids. Or the Ghost of Mr. Chips wafts over from England, systematically visiting every school in Compton, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and East St. Louis, where he hovers over their right shoulders whispering encouragement. Most of the people who hold those views aren't quite sure just exactly how it works, but they know -- they just have a feeling -- that academic ambition comes after you rub the Magic Inkwell. That's if you're black, of course. For whites, that's not how it works; for whites, academic interest is instilled, nurtured, prodded, disciplined, fed, encouraged, supported by a host of real, tangible, fungible, bread-and-butter resources. But for blacks, it's not. For blacks, it's magic.
What is the arc of academic achievement? In other words, what are the systems that support academic achievement, and what systems does academic achievement support in turn?
The arc of academic achievement is, at least in our society, seems to go something like this:
1) an environment that has the resources to provide a good education;
2) a continuing education that is more and more tailored to individual interests and preferences;
3) a job that complements and supports individual ambition;
4) a remunerative job;
5) a job with some status;
6) a secure niche in our economy;
7) some real autonomy and power over life-choices.
Now, for the average white, middle-class kid, this roughly works out to:
1a) a school that has staff, supplies, expertise, and security, truly adequate to providing a good, well-rounded education, including an education that informs students of the overarching educational process; which leads to....
2a) an expectation that high school will lead to college, college to grad/master's, master's to PhD, with each successive stage reflecting more specific interests, and developing more specific skill, of the student; which leads to....
3a) an expectation that the high school student will be able to get a job that helps him/her get into the college of her choice; the college kid gets a job that helps him/her into grad school, and the grad student gets a job that helps shoehorn the student into a career. (For "job," especially at the high-school level, include "experience, hobby, etc.," and at the college or early post-grad years, include "unpaid internship.") An early-career job leads to....
4a) an expectation that the sacrifice of salary in unpaid internships or low-salary at entry-level jobs will reliably presage a job that pays a living wage and allows the financial passage into true adult life. That is, a job that will support having a spouse, a child, a home, and some luxuries. This sets up....
5a) an expectation that a reasonable amount of work and dedication to the job will yield some status; pay raises, promotions, increased responsibility, increased visibility, and especially, a recognition by one's peers that your job lies within the cultural norms of middle- and upper-middle-class jobs. Then ...
6a) an expectation that, following reasonably prudent economic stratagems, you can survive economic shocks and provide for yourself in old age; which yields....
7a) an expectation that in the middle-to-later years of your working life and especially, in retirement, you can pursue your own interests, whether or not those interests are remunerative.
Above all, for the average middle-class kid, academic achievement has a context. To be sure, some relatively small percentage of kids are going to be imbued with a desire for achievement strictly for its own sake. But for the vast majority of kids, achievement has a context -- academic achievement is part of a larger narrative.
Race -- the status of being non-white -- breaks the flow of the narrative. Schools don't include non-whites into either the creation or the structure of this narrative. And the material world of non-white students doesn't support the narrative either. Notice that I say "the material world." There are non-material elements, elements like love, encouragement, values, that support kids. But those non-material elements support and give shape to the kids themselves -- they don't, and can't -- support the substantive elements of the narrative. Love doesn't pay bills, encouragement doesn't create jobs, values don't hire teachers. Magical thinking substitutes non-material entities, or non-material states, for material entities or states. Magical thinking equates the power of love with the presence of a library; magical thinking mistakes esteem for an education, for passage of a school budget; magical thinking tries to make dinner from the smell of a steak, and tries to pay the light bill with the sound of some money.
At the early stage, where kids are supposed to get exposure to interesting, vivid, fascinating things, things to spark their interest, they don't get those things. The poorest districts don't have enough money to provide the foundation for a motivated academic life. No money for class trips, no money for new media, no money for librarians, music, art, dance, or theater teachers ...no money to expose kids to the experiences that spark the imagination and ignite the desire to follow exposure with more experience, and more, and more, until the set of experiences becomes itself a mini-narrative that the kid wants to see through to the end.
The early academic environment makes no provision for -- doesn't have the resources for -- an increasingly tailored, increasingly interesting, increasingly skills-building education. You get the 3 Rs, and that's all you get... whether you're at first, second, third grades, at middle-school, or at high school. It's not going to get any more interesting, because it's not going to get any more varied. So you don't get kids who were exposed earlier on to, say, music, and then at the later stages get to follow up that exposure with trips to the opera house, or concert hall, or jazz club -- much less with trips overseas to Bayreuth, or La Scala.
Next, at the stage where school provides a context for getting a job that leads to college, the kids get to compete ferociously for the few jobs that their inner-city neighborhood small businesses will support. Likely, these jobs at most will help you with the money you need to pay for college. But they won't be the kinds of jobs that help you get into college -- they won't be the kinds of jobs that will impress an admissions committee. No working on an archaeological dig, no being a guide at the historical living museum, no internship on the city planning commission. You get to work at McDonalds, if you're lucky; not much there will spark your intellectual curiosity.
That will be your experience from the day you get your first working permit, right through grad school, and into the early stages of your career. At every stage, you will be less likely to get a job that either impresses the admissions people at the next stage, or that will complements your academic interests. Like medicine? Too bad. Interested in space? Tough. Think maybe you'd be good at building bridges? Keep dreaming. Your school does not have the resources to flesh out those interests. And neither will your neighborhood.
The movie theaters in your neighborhood will play a steady stream of kung-fu and Snoop-Dogg movies. It will be expensive to get to suburban multi-plexes to see more mainstream fare, and forget about a foreign film; you'll be lucky if there is an art-house theatre anywhere within public transportation, or a newspaper that carries notices of what gets played there. If you do get to college, your college classmates may well understand the reference to Death playing chess in a Woody Allen movie, but if you saw it at all, you saw it in a Bill and Ted movie, you have no idea what connection it has to Sweden, and it just doesn't have the same cultural resonance. So fuck you.
The narrative that starts pre-kindergarten and links academic achievement to the story of your entire life, is not reflected in your poor neighborhood. You are not surrounded by people who have lived out the entire arc of that narrative, and who can therefore model it for you. And anyway, the stuff of the narrative isn't there.
You will go to museums entirely on your own initiative or the initiative of your parents, but the admissions fees. will have to come out of the family's food money, clothing budget, and/or medicine. So, even if you absolutely loved looking at the dinosaurs at the Museum of Natural History, you are likely only to be able to see them once; you won't be able to come back again and again and see them a little differently, a little more deeply, each visit. In addition, you will find yourself utterly bewildered by the fact that your ancestral culture is displayed in the Natural History museum along with the animals, while white ancestral culture is displayed in "Fine Art" museums. No one will make explicit why this is so, no one will admit making the deliberate choice to equate your people with animals, and everyone will act really, really shocked by the spoken suggestion that your culture is in any way inferior, although the tacit suggestion is, of course, entirely acceptable now as always.
If there are six people in your family, it will cost your parents approximately $50 just to take you out to see a movie; it'll be a lot cheaper to rent a video. But your local video store will not have a foreign film section, except for its extensive kung-fu and anime collection. So, unless you're very, very lucky, you won't have seen March of the Penguins, The Hellstrom Chronicles, or that wonderful documentary on the migration of birds. (The younger you are, the less money your family is likely to have to spare on intellectual fodder for you). The same will be true in spades for going to the planetarium, the zoo, the aquarium, or any I-MAX type film. A Broadway-style play will be outside of your budget entirely. Some teachers will start to wonder why you have no academic curiosity about, say, snakes, although your exposure to snakes has pretty much been limited to seeing Sam Jackson yelling about some muthafuckin snakes on a muthafuckin airplane. Not one of your teachers has ever used the word 'herpetologist' in your presence. They don't expect you to know it, and that's good enough for them. In this regard, there will be little difference between your kindergarten teacher and your high school teachers; the word "entomologist" will never be spoken, and why talk about "Woods Hole" when you know black people can't swim.
The standardized tests, which are written by whites for whites, won't reference more than one (1) book by a non-white author. Because your school only has enough resources to prepare you for the standardized tests and nothing more, you will read Middlemarch, The Catcher In the Rye, some Shakespeare, and Native Son; you will not read anything written after about 1960.
Your family may or may not have an explicit discussion about it, but you will have picked up, by now, whether or not you will have the financial resources to go on to college; if you don't, you will have to decide whether to put your energies into continuing an academic life, or direct them towards finding a local job. By the time you're finishing up high school, you'll have heard, over and over again, how much Jews value a good education. You will try to tell them, in vain, that it was your people, not theirs, who fought and died for the privilege of just learning how to read; you will want to say that valuing education is equally true of your own culture, but you know damned well no body's listening. And anyway, they will never have been taught about Mary McLeod Bethune. But they will have been inculcated, by now, with a mild contempt for historically black colleges.
If you do decide to go on to college, you will have to start developing a very thick skin, because you're going to start hearing, over and over, that "many African American kids feel that academic accomplishment is somehow anathema." You will not have had a yoga class to help you calm down when you feel like slapping the shit out of the speaker. Most likely, you'll control yourself, because you've been taught better than to resolve conflicts by fighting. If you by any chance give in to the impulse, you'll be arrested.
