Black Educator

2012-01-27T08:15:00.000-05:00

Cuba: A Model For What to Do When the World's Oil Flow Becomes Drops

One thing we know: "The Oil Binge Party Is Over." The supply of oil will not be able to meet the global demands of the 21st Century. How are humans going to handle this crisis? How do humans take this crisis and make it an opportunity to improve societies by sharing the tremendous wealth that capitalism's use of oil helped to produced? What alternative energy sources are there? And how do we bring them into our lives?

These and many many other questions were raised during Cuba's "Special Period" where oil was extremely scarce in an oil dependent society. The Cuban people and their government found creative ways to survive... and thrive during this "Special Period." We can say that Cuba has survived the imperial blockade onslaught and their oil scarcity crisis.... Thru the 1990s and 2000s, Cuba had reversed an economic and social crisis, transforming its society into one that is now heading more in the direction -not without serious problems- of growth and development.

This documentary shows how Cuba's socialist/people-centered approach to the crisis of oil scarcity was able to help prevent famine and environmental degradation that actually improved the health of Cuba's citizen.

The will of the people in relationship to the state's cooperating infrastructure was/is essential in overcoming this oil scarcity crisis.

In the US, we may have the former. But US capitalism is the key enemy to resolving the coming repercussions of the oil scarcity crises.

Revolution is the Order of the Day!

2012-01-25T09:51:00.001-05:00

Tuscon Students Walkout In Protest of Ethnic Studies Ban!

Tuesday, January 24, 2012 by Common Dreams

Students Step Up Tucson Walkouts
Protest School District Folly and Mexican American Studies Banishment

by Jeff Biggers

note: For those who did not sign the National Black Education Agenda's petition in support of repealing this racist ruling, please go to: http://signon.org/sign/repeal-the-arizona-governmen

As the nation watches the Tucson Unified School District’s spiral into disarray, hundreds of students walked out of their Tucson schools Monday in a coordinated protest against the banishment of the district’s acclaimed Mexican American Studies program.

(Photo: D.A. Morales)

Pouring into the downtown Tucson area from Pueblo, Cholla and Tucson high schools, among other institutions, the students brought their march to the offices of floundering Tucson Unified School District (TUSD) administrators. In recent days, administrators and board members have issued a series of conflicting and inaccurate statements and carried out the extreme actions of confiscating books in front of children. Last week, a recently hired assistant superintendent from Texas made a troubing call for the deeply rooted Tucson students–many of whom trace their ancestors to the town founders– to “go to Mexico” to study their history.

In a district with over 60 percent of the students coming from Mexican American backgrounds, the TUSD board “dismantled its Mexican-American studies program, packed away its offending books, shuttled its students into other classes,” according to an editorial in the New York Times on Sunday, because “it was blackmailed into doing so.”

The New York Times referred to the extremist measures of Arizona state superintendent of public instruction John Huppenthal on January 10th, who threatened to withhold millions of dollars if TUSD didn’t terminate the nationally acclaimed program immediately.

As her Tucson school district prepares to celebrate the 140th anniversary of its founding by Mexican American immigrant Estevan Ochoa, Cholla High School student Ahtziri Iñiguez noted that she was following the march in the footsteps of her brother, a graduate of the Mexican American Studies Program.

“I think it’s very unfair that people here don’t let us learn about our own culture,” she said. “My brother took (Mexican American Studies) classes his junior year and he would go home and discuss with my Mom and interested me in education, so I knew I wanted to take these classes.”

Less than two months away from the anniversary celebration of Arizona native and United Farm Worker leader Cesar Chavez, Iñiguez added: “We did this walk out to prove if you want something you should fight for what you believe in, because if you don’t do anything, nothing will change.”

Known as the “Sheriff Arpaio of Ethnic Studies,” Arizona education chief John Huppenthal defended his campaign slogan to “stop la raza” in an extraordinary Democracy Now debate on TV last week. The Tea Party activist Huppenthal has referred to Mexican American students as “Hitler Jugend,” and raised concerns across the nation about possible criminal behavior last summer when he openly misrepresented the results of an independent audit that praised the Mexican American Studies program and found it in compliance with Arizona’s bizarre Ethnic Studies law.

State Rep. Sally Gonzales introduced a bill to repeal the Ethnic Studies crackdown last week. A similar bill to repeal Arizona’s notorious SB 1070 immigration law was also being introduced.

Instead of surrendering to Huppenthal’s crackdown, many community leaders in Tucson called on the Tucson Unified School District board to join a federal court suit against the state and summon the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice to follow up their investigation of Arpaio and investigate Huppenthal for racial profiling, hate crimes, fraud and even extortion.

Last month, when the DOJ charged Arpaio with “chronic culture of disregard for basic legal and constitutional obligations” and a “widespread pattern or practice of…activities that discriminate against Latinos,” Tucson supporters of Ethnic Studies wonder if similar charges could be made for Attorney General Tom Horne and Superintendent Huppenthal, who have invoked violent imagery and pathologically singled out only Tucson’s Mexican American Studies program.
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Jeff Biggers is the author of The United States of Appalachia, and more recently, Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland (The Nation/Basic Books).

note: For those who did not sign the National Black Education Agenda's petition in support of repealing this racist ruling, please go to: http://signon.org/sign/repeal-the-arizona-governmen
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The dismantling of Mexican-American studies in Tucson schools
By Stephanie Siek, CNN

(CNN) – Nearly two weeks since Tucson, Arizona's, Mexican-American studies classes were suspended, some books have been removed from classes, teachers are uncertain about what curriculum to use and some students said they'd like to give district and state school administrators some homework: Listen to the students affected by the decision.

"I just want to talk to them," said Nicolas Dominguez, a senior at Tucson Magnet High School, where administrators removed several seminal Mexican-American studies texts last week. "I want to talk to them about all of this, and I want to get to know them, because you have to get to know people before you can change them. I think it's essential to become friends with the state superintendent and work together."

The Governing Board of the Tucson Unified School District voted January 10 to suspended its Mexican-American studies program after an administrative law judge ruled it violated a new state law and the state said the local district was going to lose $15 million in annual aid. In a district where 60% of the 53,000 students are Latino, some said they felt like Chicano or Mexican-American perspectives on history have become unacceptable.

This week, seven textbooks associated with the Mexican-American studies program were removed from classrooms, provoking claims of censorship. District leaders said they aren't banning the books, but have removed them from classrooms while their content is evaluated.

The district's Governing Board President, Mark Stegeman, said that copies of some of the books were still available in school libraries. But a search of the Tucson district's school library online catalog, only a handful of copies of each book were available in any of the 11 high school libraries searchable online.

"I feel really disheartened," said Maria Therese Mejia, a senior at Tucson Magnet High School. "Those are our history, you know? It's ridiculous for them to be taking away our education. They're taking (the books) to storage where no one can use them."

Opponents of the book removals say district leaders cut off access to books that give an account of American history from the perspective of Latinos and indigenous people who lived in the Southwest long before Arizona was a state. The books were removed from classrooms on Friday, in at least one instance during class as students looked on.

The Tucson Unified School District issued a statement late Tuesday calling reports of book banning "completely false and misleading."

Contrary to earlier reports which indicated that dozens of books listed as class materials had been taken away, the statement said only seven titles were affected:

"Critical Race Theory," by Richard Delgado
"500 Years of Chicano History in Pictures," edited by Elizabeth Martinez
"Message to AZTLAN," by Rodolfo Corky Gonzales
"Chicano! The History of the Mexican Civil Rights Movement," by Arturo Rosales
"OccupiedAmerica: A History of Chicanos," by Rodolfo Acuna
"Pedagogy of the Oppressed," by Paulo Freire
"Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years," edited by Bill Bigelow and Bob Peterson

"Each book has been boxed and stored as part of the process of suspending the classes," the statement read. "The books listed above were cited in the ruling that found the classes out of compliance with state law."

Arizona State Superintendent John Huppenthal ordered on January 6 that about 10% of the district's state funding, about $15 million over the course of a year, be withheld, retroactive to August 15, 2011, if it did not dismantle its Mexican-American studies courses.

That order followed a December administrative law ruling that the program was teaching "in a biased, political and emotionally charged manner," and upheld a state finding that it violated a 2010 law that bans ethnic studies classes which "promote the overthrow of the U.S. government, promote resentment toward a race or class of people, are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group or advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals." In Tucson, only Mexican-American studies classes were affected.

An education company's independent audit of Tucson's Mexican-American studies program done concluded in May that none of the courses were in violation of that law, that they benefited students and contributed to a climate of acceptance in the schools. The audit suggested a review of two books for curriculum and age-appropriateness: "Message to AZTLAN," a book of speeches and other writings by Chicano civil rights activist Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales, and "500 Years or Chicano History in Pictures."

"I think in most cases these books never went through a proper review process in the beginning, and they are now being removed, not in a specific review process but in that the state has decided these courses not be taught," Stegeman said.

Stegeman said it's possible some books could be reapproved for the classroom after a review. He said the review might take place before the summer break.

But in the meantime, the district's decisions suspended classes called Latino literature, American history/Mexican-American perspectives, Chicano art and an American government/social justice education project course. With the curriculum dismissed and books removed, teachers say they haven't received clear guidance on how to proceed with teaching their classes for the rest of the school year. They've been told that the district will issue a new curriculum that includes "a balanced presentation of diverse viewpoints on controversial issues," but it hasn't come yet. Teachers said their old curriculum already complied with those standards.

Curtis Acosta, a Tucson High teacher who has been with the district for 17 years, half of them as a teacher of Latino and Chicano literature, said he's frustrated to be without a plan to move forward.

"Now we're told we can talk about race, but it has to be through a multicultural perspective. And if you looked at our (old) curriculum, it was from a multicultural perspective," said Acosta, who said he used the writing of Sherman Alexie, Martin Luther King Jr., William Shakespeare, Ronald Takaki and Jonathan Kozol in his classes.

"I'm not confident one bit to move forward with any writer that has that social justice streak in them," Acosta said. "I have already built something that's multicultural, centered around empowerment of youth and liberates them to make decisions critically and find their own academic integrity."

Students said they're learning a hard but practical lesson about politics.

"For me, what I've learned through all this is that students and youth have a lot of voices that we don't get to express," Mejia said. "We're the ones who will be changed by this situation. We will be the ones who speak out and do marches, and we will be the ones making the future. And no matter what, we have the power to stand up for what we believe."

Students have already staged several marches and a class walkout since the state law was passed in 2010, and another walkout is planned for January 24; students said they will attend a teach-in about Chicano history by University of Arizona professors.

A group of students and teachers, including Dominguez and Acosta, have filed a suit in federal district court to overturn the state law barring ethnic studies.

Outside organizations might get involved, too.

Barbara Jones, director of the American Library Association's Office of Intellectual Freedom, said the removal of the books was a big topic of discussion at the association's 2012 midwinter meeting, which began last Thursday in Dallas. Groups including REFORMA, the Latino librarians' group, the American Indian Librarians' Association and the Intellectual Freedom Committee planned to respond and a coalition of civil liberties groups were researching possible legal action and expecting to release a statement this week, Jones said.

Regardless of the words the district used, Jones said, it's actions restricted access to books, which leads to censorship.

"We're gathering facts. Right now it looks like it's just the curriculum that's affected and not school libraries," Jones said. "But we know from experience this will eventually affect books in the library."

Jones said there have been similar moves in Texas and other states to censor materials reflecting ethnic points of view. Such actions rob students of opportunities to form their own opinions, Jones said.

"If (school officials are) listening to their communities, they should understand that to take ethnic diversity out of curriculum in the 21st century is damaging and hateful," Jones said. "It stifles the conversations we desperately need to have in this country about inclusion, about preparing all people in this country to go in the workforce, to go to college, to be successful in life. And to ban discussion about these types of issues is very damaging to our country and our democracy."

2011-12-08T06:25:00.001-05:00

30 Feet Apart

Students at Bayard Rustin High School Created a Short Documentary About Their Separate and Unequal Schools Reality.

30 Feet Apart is the culmination of six months of research, interviewing, filming and editing by the TORCH high school participant. The documentary illuminates the disparities that exist between two high schools just footsteps apart from each other. Many of the TORCH participants attend the schools focused in the documentary.

2011-11-29T14:08:00.001-05:00

VIDEO: Israeli Apartheid Learns from US Apartheid of the Jim Crow Error

2011-11-20T12:15:00.001-05:00

"Love, That's America"
Melvin Van Peebles' 1978 Song Still On Point 33 Years Later

From BWMovingImages on Nov 14, 2011

Love, That's America is a song written by iconic, legendary and revolutionary filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles, who is best known as the Godfather of Blaxploitation film.

He wrote this song in 1978 as a poignant criticism of the state of race and class in the U.S.

The great irony is that thirty-three years later, the song couldn't be more relevant given the treatment of black, brown, red, yellow and poor people the world over.

It is his testament against endless wars, police brutality, racism, class-ism, sexism and predatory corporatism.

But most importantly, it is his testament of love for the people.

The song has found new life on the internet, and this video, produced by BW Moving Images.(www.bwmovingimages.com)

Thank you to all of the independent media outlets and camera phone videographers who were brave enough to capture this footage and make it available for the world to see.

2011-11-19T12:15:00.001-05:00

Increasing Poverty Within the US Workingclass

Marx Was Right! Capitalism is about pushing more and more people into poverty and extreme poverty because of a combo of super exploitation and disappearing jobs

2011-11-14T20:11:00.001-05:00

Ugandan Students design an Electric Car
By Paul Ndiho
November 8, 2011- vipiafrica.com

Students from Makerere University faculty of technology test drive an electric car they have built and plan to use the prototype to entice potential investors to start mass production.

Like many capital cities, Kampala in Uganda has its share of pollution. A fast growing population and rapid urban development has meant more cars on the road and more fumes in the atmosphere.

Environmentalists warn the high level of urban pollution is set to rise, leaving Kampala residents at risk of health problems and adding to the country's carbon footprint.

But all that could change if a group of students from Makerere University in the capital have their way.

They've designed their very own version of the electric car, already making waves elsewhere in the world where it’s been touted as the solution to eradicating global car emissions.

Appropriately painted green to demonstrate its environmental credentials the Kiira EV can reach speeds of up to 60mph and lasts for three to four hours before it needs to be recharged.

It was test driven through to streets of Kampala last week. Jonathan Kasumba, a local resident who turned out to witness the green car's virgin outing said this is the best thing that has come out of Uganda in a longtime.

"To me it is a great achievement, it is something I would personally say, it's a change to the norm, everybody thinks this is from outside, this is from outside, now they can see, it is coming from within."

The prototype for Kiira EV cost around 35,000 US dollars but engineers say that cost could be bought down to as little as 15,000 US dollars when it is mass produced.

Meanwhile, its designers already have their sights set on expanding the brand to include bigger vehicles. Paul Musasizi lead EV kiira engineering team.

"You know Uganda is well endowed with solar energy, we would like to tap that and put it into that commuter bus so that is where our energies are focused now that we know we can build a car, that one we have done, that one is history”.

The car was assembled by a team of eight engineers, supervised by one of Uganda's leading professors in electrical engineering and computing, Tickodri Togboa. It was funded mostly by a government grant given to the engineering department to propel technological research over a period of five years.

Mukibi Dan, a Ugandan environmental activist says the car represents an important milestone for Uganda, not only demonstrating a level of commitment to top level teaching and design in Kampala but also an assurance that green issues are high on the agenda.

"The issues as we talk now is about environmental protection and I think this prototype, being that it is not going to use fossil fuel as it were to be able to move, I think it is an innovation that as a citizen and an environmental activist am proud off".

The car is yet to be fitted with a speedometer or a system to power its electric windows, but according to students they have already had requests from interested members of the public hoping to buy one when they hit the shops sometime in the future.

2011-11-11T13:55:00.001-05:00

Cholera, Haitian Genocide and the UN: Recolonization On Steroids

Exclusive: 5,000 Haitian Cholera Victims Sue U.N. After Deadly Epidemic Kills 6,000, Sickens 450,000

A lawsuit has been filed on behalf of more than 5,000 Haitians against the United Nations over the cholera outbreak that has further devastated Haiti in the aftermath of the January 2010 earthquake. Some 450,000 Haitians have been sickened, and more than 6,000 have died, since the cholera outbreak erupted in October 2010, just over a year ago.

It is widely believed the cholera was brought to Haiti by a battalion of Nepalese troops with the U.N. peacekeeping force. In a complaint to the United Nations, the attorneys for the Haitian victims also accuse the organization of reckless failure in containing the outbreak, arguing it is "directly attributable to the negligence, gross negligence, recklessness and deliberate indifference" for the health and lives of Haitians.

"Time after time, the response has been to deny the allegations. We’re hoping that this is the case that’s too big to fail, that the evidence against the United Nations is so overwhelming here that the U.N. will have no choice but to finally take responsibility for its malfeasance," says attorney Brian Concannon of the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti.

"What we are asking for, what our clients are asking for, is the U.N. and the international community to step up and to give Haiti the sanitation infrastructure it needs to stop the epidemic."

Video is from DemocracyNow.org

2011-11-06T10:39:00.000-05:00

Racism, Eugenics and Testing -- Again

Ole School Racism on Intelligence

FROM: http://fairtest.org

The historical association between racism and standardized testing recently returned to haunt the American Psychological Association (APA) and the American Educational Research Association (AERA). The APA was scheduled to present a lifetime achievement award to Raymond B. Cattell, a leading developer of standardized personality tests, until anti-racist groups revealed Cattell's work in the eugenics movement.

The Anti-Defamation League of the B'nai B'rith argued that Cattell "exhibited a lifelong commitment to racial supremacy theories," a criticism reinforced by others who have studied his work. The APA then postponed the award and appointed a committee to investigate the issue. Meanwhile, the AERA, which has an educational research award named after Cattell, said it also would investigate the claims.

Eugenics presents itself as a science which seeks to improve genetics by preventing people with "inferior" genes (as evidenced, for example, by their IQ test scores) from having children. Historically, it has claimed that Europeans, particularly those from northwestern Europe, are genetically superior intellectually, physically and morally. Beginning in the 1920s, and continuing in some European nations until at least the 1960s, women have been sterilized in the name of eugenics. Hitler pointed approvingly to the work of early eugenicists, many of whom were prominent in the history of the development of standardized testing.

Cattell responded that the critics have taken his writings from the 1930s "out of textual and historical context," and denied being a racist, saying, "I have not ever studied racial differences." He also said his "views of eugenics have evolved over the years," and he supports it only on a voluntary basis.

However, Cattell is the founder of the Beyondist Foundation, whose first newsletter dates from 1993 and which openly espouses eugenics, stating "the need is to lessen the excessive birth rate in the below 100 IQ range." People of African, Latin American and American Indian descent in the U.S. are disproportionately likely to have IQ scores below 100.

Cattell also has been on the editorial board of Mankind Quarterly, founded in 1960, which was denounced by U.S. Rep. Cardiss Collins as "a sinkhole of racist maundering." The work of the quarterly also received attention through criticism of Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve. Charles Lane, writing in The New York Review of Books, exposed the quarterly's racist orientation and the extent to which The Bell Curve relied uncritically on spurious "research" printed in the journal.

Institutional Implications

The claim that the APA and the AERA had no knowledge of Cattell's past is itself curious. It suggests that either the organizations and their leaders consistently separate their research from social context or that a racist and eugenicist approach is so common in the profession of psychological testing that Cattell simply did not stand out. Another researcher who has argued that IQ tests prove genetically-based racial inferiority, Linda Gottfredson, released a survey a few years ago noting that most "intelligence researchers" agree with her position. (Ironically, this came at a time when evolutionary biologists have reached wide agreement on the meaninglessness of race as a genetic concept.) Thus, the APA award to Cattell is a reminder that the racist history of testing is by no means over, but remains pervasive in at least some areas of mental measurement, despite condemnation by others in the profession.

Cattell has been praised as one of the foremost developers of personality tests. A skeptic might wonder what sort of person would be deemed "normal" by a eugenicist who has been quoted as saying that Hitler was in some ways reasonable.

As Stephen Jay Gould, among others, has shown, research into "intelligence" has been powerfully shaped by the social views of the researchers. The same may be true of the designers of "personality" tests, such as Cattell. Thus, the Cattell incident should raise questions about the extent to which purportedly "objective" tests continue to perpetuate race, class and gender biases rooted in the views of test designers and users.

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SECRETS OF THE SAT TEST--
The Fascist Origins of the SAT Test

NOTE: This interview was written back in 1999.

How did our obsession with the SAT begin?

The story starts with the invention of IQ tests. That was 1905. Here's the brief history. Alfred Binet, a French psychologist, invents the first IQ test in 1905 in Paris. The second important thing that happens is that Lewis Terman, an American psychology professor at Stanford...took Binet's idea, used it in a slightly different way and really became a proselytizer for IQ testing and its widespread use in American education. And the reason was to pick people to become part of a new elite.

The big milestone moment was during the First World War when IQ testers persuaded the army to let them test all recruits. Before that, IQ tests were given one on one. There would be a test administrator and a test taker. For the first time during the First World War, an IQ test was given to millions of people with ...mass results, so that was the real moment of arrival for the IQ testing movement. After the war, the people who had worked on these tests spread them throughout the country, made use of them in schools and so on, and some of the people who had worked on the World War I test worked on adapting it to use in college admissions.

One of those people was Carl Brigham, a psychologist at Princeton University. He had worked on the army test, and his adaptation of the army intelligence test, called the Army Alpha for use in college admissions, was the SAT. Carl Brigham is the guy who wrote the SAT, which at that time stood for the Scholastic Aptitude Test. So he was sitting in Princeton, he invented this test, marketed it, sort of test marketed it to various schools including the military academies, and some of the Ivy League schools. He was then discovered by Henry Chauncey and Bill Bender, two assistant deans to Harvard president James Conant, and they adopted the SAT for use as a Harvard scholarship test. That happened during the 1930s. Then it was used even more widely in the late 1930s as a scholarship test for all Ivy League schools.

And then, with the advent of the second World War, the army and navy gave an adapted SAT called the Army-Navy College Qualification Test to 300,000 people on the same day. That's a big event. Before the Second World War the SAT was being given to maybe five, ten thousand people a year, so it wasn't a big project. It's complicated to give a high stakes test under secure conditions to hundreds of thousands of people at sites all across America. So, this fateful day in 1944 was the first time that the people who were in charge of the SAT were able to show that they could give it on a mass basis.

Is our society obsessed with the SAT?

The kind of extreme SAT hysteria, such as spending tens of thousands of dollars on test prep, prepping for five years, that kind of thing--I think that's pretty much irrational.

When Conant set all this stuff up, two things didn't occur to him. It didn't occur to him that there would be this whole culture around getting admission. The whole system was supposed to just sort of do a scan that people weren't even aware what was going on and to just pluck out a few people.

And then, you weren't supposed to want to be picked so you could "make it," or so you could be a success or make a lot of money or get prestige. Conant explicitly said in his writings, 'these people would be no better than anybody else.' They would not get any special privileges. It would horrify him to see the way in which people regard getting high test scores and getting selected for these universities as a kind of way to get stuff--to get the goodies in America. That is not what the system was built for.

There are kids who are twisting their lives, and the parents, too, who twist their lives and rob themselves of their own childhood so that they can get into one of two or three or four schools. I think they're being irrational, or they're being obsessive.

Because, thank God, in America today it still doesn't matter that much where you went to college. I think it matters too much, and I hope it starts to matter less in the future. But it still doesn't matter as much as it does in England or in France or in Germany or in Japan or in Taiwan. Thank God. It shouldn't matter that much. There is no job in the United States that you have to have gone to x college to get--we're not at that point yet.

What was Henry Chauncey's role?

Chauncey worked for Conant, the President of Harvard. Chauncey and Conant had been playing around with admissions testing all through the 1930s, with the idea, really a small idea in mind, and that is bringing scholarship students first to Harvard and then to other Ivy League schools. You're really talking about a handful of people, and only a handful of people took these tests. In 1941 I found a fascinating thing in the Harvard archives, which is Conant in 1941 wrote a whole unpublished book at the outset of the war called "What We Are Fighting For". And he also wrote several articles on this theme, but never published the book. The most famous was called "Wanted American Radicals". It was published in 1944 in the Atlantic Monthly. So Conant, who was really running the testing operation, switched --and this is really important-- he switched from saying "This is all about picking a few scholarship kids to send to Ivy League schools" to instead saying "No, we have to revamp the entire American society". The level of ambition of his project just ratcheted up a hundred times, because he went from testing a few people to using testing as a tool to accomplish these incredibly grandiose goals. Conant believed America had previously been a democratic society and was now becoming a class-bound aristocratic society like England very rapidly. That was dangerous. It was going to destroy the country, possibly lead to Marxism taking over in the United States, and it had to be destroyed. You had to create a classless society, and the way to do that was through testing and higher education.

So, all this stuff was being undertaken with the idea of starting a kind of social revolution that would affect everybody in the country. And it did, although it didn't turn out the way Conant thought it would.

What was Conant's intent?

He had what he considered a kind of vision of radical democracy in the United States. There was a group of people who constituted the establishment at the time, and in the book I call them the Episcopacy. They were all male, all white, all Protestant, most Episcopalian. They were kind of high Protestant white men, very high-minded and decent people, but it's a very closed world and they're descended from basically the Puritans who came and settled this country. And, especially from Conant's point of view--that's who ran America, and they had it in a tight grip and nobody else could get any power in the country.

So he wanted to unseat those people and replace them. The idea he had in mind was an idea of Thomas Jefferson's that Conant had picked up on -- the idea of a natural aristocracy. He believed you would look out across America and you would find just out in the middle of nowhere, springing from the good American soil, these very intelligent, talented people. You would find a way to find them and let them run the country instead. So that was the quiet coup d'etat that he had planned, to engineer this natural aristocracy--identify them, train them, organize things so they got the power instead of this old group of people descended from the original settlers of America.

Can you talk a bit about Thomas Jefferson?

Thomas Jefferson, after having retired as President, struck up a correspondence with John Adams who was, of course, also a retired President. Jefferson is in Virginia, Adams is in Massachusetts. And they wrote these really remarkable long letters to each other--very scholarly. Parts of them are in Greek; parts of them are in Latin. You can't imagine ex-Presidents writing this stuff today. Anyway, there's a famous letter, written from Jefferson to Adams in 1813, and Jefferson says "I propose to you that there is a natural aristocracy among men, made up of people who have virtues and talents." And then he contrasted it to what he called a "tinsel aristocracy," based on wealth and birth. And he said America should be run by the natural aristocracy.

I don't know exactly when Conant found this letter, but it's clear that when he found this letter he just thought--bingo, this is what I believe. And it's more than just that Conant found this letter that he loved. Conant had a lot of power and it's very clear he thought, "Thomas Jefferson had this idea, but he didn't have the means to put it into effect; I, Conant, for various reasons, do have the means to put it into effect". So he really thought of himself as the person who was lucky enough to be able to carry out, in the last half of the twentieth century in the United States, Thomas Jefferson's idea about a natural aristocracy. He referred to this letter again and again in his writings and it's quite clear that he thought he was the person who was putting into place Jefferson's dream.

You said Carl Brigham wrote the SAT. Was he a racist?

Brigham was a reformed racist, basically. You have to be careful about how you use words like racist, because one of the difficult things about history is not being anachronistic. That is, not applying the standards of the present to the past. So it must be said that in 1920 virtually every respectable person in the United States was an unacceptable racist by today's standards. Just as an example, remember, you could not find a man who believed that women should occupy positions of authority in 1920.

Anyway, a very popular movement, particularly among establishment types in the teens and twenties was the eugenics movement which held that the kind of breeding stock of humans was worth looking at and that it was endangered. Eugenicists believed in the innate superiority and inferiority of races on a scale. They were very worried--remember that we had no immigration laws then--they were very worried about unimpeded immigration and how that would lead to a dilution of the superior racial stocks in America. This wasn't just a few nuts who thought this. This was Theodore Roosevelt, Oliver Wendell Holmes. All respectable people thought this stuff, or almost all, a few heroic ones did not. And by the way, when you say racist, these people didn't think in terms of whites and people of color. What we would call the white race they divided into a lot of little sub-races in order of superiority and inferiority. In particular there were three white races, according to this theory--Nordics, Alpines and Mediterraneans. So it was a cause for alarm, not just that non-whites were coming to the country, but that too many of the lower class of whites--Mediterraneans--were coming to the country.

Brigham wrote a book in 1923 called A Study of American Intelligence. This was based on his work on the Army Alpha Test. He analyzed the test results by race and found--as people who do that have always found--that people of color, Jews, Mediterraneans, anybody who wasn't a kind of what he would call a Nordic, was inherently intellectually inferior. And that the country was in big trouble because two many of these people were coming into the country. So this book is a kind of very ripe, racist book by today's standards, typical of establishment thinking of the time, although Brigham, you know, bothered to write it down. And it just stands up very well as an offensive piece of writing. Now, Brigham renounced it within about five years. To his great credit, he specifically disowned the book. He changed his mind, he broke with the eugenics movement and by the end of his life, was really one of the leading critics, of the eugenics movement. So he came around and deserves a lot of credit for that.

Is the SAT an IQ test?

According to people in the field--especially if they're sort of letting their hair down--they will say the SAT is essentially an IQ test, particularly the verbal portion is essentially an IQ test. I want to step back a little from the idea that the IQ test is a scientific measurement of intelligence. From the beginning, IQ tests essentially traffic in vocabulary items: antonyms, analogies, reading comprehension, it's a test of vocabulary fluency and accomplishment. So, the premise of an IQ test is that it is the same thing as intelligence. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. It's measuring one specific thing. It's not a magical, mystical test. The SAT grew out of an IQ test and the verbal in particular takes the oldest chestnut IQ testing techniques and applies them to high school seniors. And you know very widely, including in the Bell Curve itself, the SAT verbal score is used as a proxy IQ score, or is used as interchangeable with IQ scores. It's the thing that--to the extent that there's a sort of secret about Educational Testing Service, which administers the SAT, the secret is that at least the test makers there know that what they're doing is administering a mass IQ test but the organization's very invested in denying that.

It's not an accident that the emphasis was put on aptitude instead of achievement and as a matter of fact that Conant pretty much insisted on it?

First of all, Conant himself, although he was never a card-carrying member of the eugenics movement, clearly believed in the basic theory that intelligence is an innate and sort of biological quality and that it's the most important human quality. So that's the starting point. But on a more practical level, when he's starting the system in the 1930s and 40s, American education is highly various--it's a big country, you know, air travel and long distance telephony are in their infancy.

Schools are just very different from place to place. There's no national curriculum. So you need a way to perform a straight-up comparison of high school students who have been exposed to very different kinds of education. And to Conant the IQ test or aptitude test is the best way to do that. He was quite insistent on that.

Conant had this kind of idealistic belief in creating a classless society. He was very, very tied to the idea of not favoring people who had been born into a privileged class, which is highly ironic today. So he thought that if you had tests that were achievement tests, or tests of mastery of the high school curriculum, it would be unfair to poor kids because they wouldn't have gone to good high schools. Anything that would help the rich kids who had been to fancy prep schools in the East Conant was against. So in his meetings with Chauncey about the SAT he would say over and over again, according to Chauncey, "Now are you sure this isn't an achievement test? Are you sure this is a pure aptitude test, pure intelligence? That's what I want to measure, because that is the way I think we can give poor boys the best chance and take away the advantage of rich boys."

What Conant wanted was to take an old elite and substitute for it a new elite. Is it fair to say that this is what Chauncey wanted or this is really only what Conant wanted?

The difference between Conant and Chauncey, one of the differences is that Conant was a man with a highly specific social vision. He had a particular idea about America that he wanted to put into place. He wanted to change the structure of the country in a specific way. Chauncey was a guy who was in love with testing. He believed testing is a miracle and it will solve all the problems of the world. He didn't have a particular vision of what he wanted the society to look like. He just believed in the technology totally and he thought, you know, the more you can test the better a country it'll be. If a problem arises with a testing regime, hell, let's just invent more tests and solve the problem that way. So he just believed in the technique of testing.

Conant believed that a narrow constricted group of wealthy descendents of the early settlers of America - people born into money, privately educated, often in New England boarding schools, usually Episcopalian - had formed a kind of club. They weren't especially able, to Conant's mind, and they kind of controlled everything, they had a grip on everything. And they had built a system in which the word meritocracy wasn't around, but they built a sort of fake meritocracy in which the rules were rigged so only they could win.

Conant's primary goal, as far as domestic life in America, was to break the hold of this old elite and put in its place, a new elite that would be made up of people from a national group, people from all over the country, people selected on pure intelligence, not on their background. These would be people who he assumed would have come from very modest backgrounds and would have gone to public school rather than private school--people who would be more liberal, ideologically, than the predecessor group.

He wanted to break the old group's hold, create the new group, and put them in charge of the country. I mean, it's astonishingly ambitious. America's filled with these utopian experiments but they're usually one little town or one house or something. Conant had the ability to do a utopian experiment on the whole country and it worked, in a sense, although it didn't turn out to be a utopia.

What did it turn out to be?

Well, the fundamental irony of the American meritocracy, the system that Conant set up, is this: people will start madly manipulating the system to their favor and to the favor of their children. And the people who have more money and more power and more sophistication will be able to manipulate it more successfully. So, the sort of the tragedy of Conant's system is that some of his ideas just seem laughable today. The idea that America would become a classless society through the use of these tests. The idea that the people who score high on these tests would care only about public service and the good of the country and would be indifferent to money and power. The idea that they would be admired by ordinary people in the country. The idea that they would turn social arrangements completely upside down in the country.

The idea that they would be enemies of privilege--they wouldn't want to privilege themselves above others, they would want to wipe out all privilege in America.

I mean, these ideas are appealing but today they just sound impossibly naïve. You can't set up a system to distribute rank and privilege and assume it won't be used for that purpose by people and that people won't eventually figure out how to game the system and use it to pass on advantage. Every conceivable meritocracy, degrades over time into an aristocracy. It just has to happen that way.

What's the history of the word Meritocracy?

Meritocracy,what's interesting about it is today, if you say the word meritocracy people think, "Oh, meritocracy that must be good." It's an automatic good. It's up there with mom and apple pie.

The word was invented to be made fun of actually. It was invented by Michael Young a British sociologist in 1958, who wrote a kind of weird little novel, or novella, called The Rise of the Meritocracy. Young was a socialist who basically was arguing if you set up a meritocracy it will destroy social justice. So Young thought of himself as kind of a critic of meritocracy and invented the word in order to show that it was a bad idea.

Meritocracy means "ruled by the best," but it's Latin and Greek mixed.

Michael Young used the word meritocracy as a kind of bastard hybrid word. Because aristocracy no longer meant what it literally means, ruled by the best. It meant, ruled by dumb inheritors.

Well, as we now understand meritocracy, it's all prefix and no suffix. It's all merit, and no ocracy. All of our attention goes to how do we select people. And what we're selecting them for is just to win the lottery. To have these fantastic rewards showered on them. We've completely forgotten that the whole system was set up to create public servants. That's been dropped. Once they've been selected, they don't have to do anything in particular, and they don't think of themselves, and the country doesn't think of them as the leaders, as Jefferson and Conant wanted. They're just people who get to be investment bankers.

Central to the concept of Conant's meritocracy was the notion of public service. Can you discuss that?

Very high on the list of ironies about this system Conant created, as it's turned out, is it's seen by everybody as a system to confer rewards on people. All reward, no obligation. The reason that there's this kind of crush at the gates of these universities, the reason everybody's taking test prep, the reason everybody's gone crazy trying to get good scores on these tests, and get into elite schools is 'cause they'll make a lot of money. That's what it is! It's your ticket to success in America.

How did the Educational Testing Service (ETS) become such an influential organization?

One thing that's very important to understand about ETS is how it is financed. It's a private business although it's a non-profit. So it has to kind of make a living for itself. And the essential trick of ETS is, the test takers pay the fees individually. So the clients, it's marketed to colleges. The college orders the test, but the test taker has to pay the fee. So an ETS sales person can say to the college, "This is free. This is a freebie for you. You require this test, it won't cost you a penny because the takers take the test." But the point is, ETS has to make money for itself. It has to operate as a business or it's just out of business...It's not a government agency.

In the early going, ETS was broke because many colleges hadn't required the SAT yet. And that took a long time to get them on board. It also had cash flow problems. They needed ways to make money. And the big thing that saved them in the early years was they got a big contract from the Selective Service Administration to run a test during the Korean War for college students that would defer them from the draft.

There was a huge fight going on in the country at the time over who should serve in the military. Conant, who as you know was obsessed with making this a classless society, was the leading proponent of the idea that everybody should have to serve. He was for universal service. General Hershey, the head of the draft bureau, was for administering a test to college students and saying to the high scorers, "You can stay in college. You don't have to serve at the front lines."

There were a lot of reasons for this, but one was a kind of Cold War reason. That what if the person who's going to be our Werner Von Braun, the person who's going to invent the next great military weapon gets killed in a trench somewhere? You can't have that. So Hershey got the idea of giving essentially an IQ test to all college students and the high scorers would not have to go to Korea.

Well it turned out that America hadn't gotten used to this system yet. This is 1951. It was wildly unpopular. People said, "Hey wait a minute! You're going to give this IQ test to college kids and people who have high IQs don't have to fight for their country? Let the poor and the dumb go fight? Keep these guys out of the line of fire? No way!" So there was a blizzard of controversy. Editorial cartoons, radio commentary, it was very, very unpopular.

So Chauncey had to sort of go out and sell America on this test and kind of quiet all the storms. And he did that very, very effectively. He ran the test with his usual administrative skill and the test made a huge profit for ETS and sort of got it through it's initial crisis financially. And by the time they ran through that money they had been adopted by enough colleges that they could make money from operations.

It was a key moment for ETS, it was a key moment for America, because it sold the idea of putting people who get high IQ scores into a separate category where they get special treatment. And that it is a good idea.

Was the Selective Service test an SAT test?

Interestingly, Hershey wanted to just give an IQ test, and Chauncey was smart enough to know, and sort of take him aside and say General, that's not a good idea. That's very bad PR. Let's instead give the SAT.

In 1947 Henry Chauncey had actually setup a branch office out in Berkeley, California. Can you talk about Henry's California plans?

ETS grew out of an organization called the College Board. College Board still exists in a different form. But the College Board was a trade association of 40 or 50 prestigious private colleges in the Northeast. The Ivy League schools, a few liberal arts colleges, Seven Sisters schools, and so on. That was the College Board.

So the SAT was the test for the College Board. Conant and Chauncey didn't want to be in the business of administering a test for admission for a few fancy, private Eastern schools. These are guys who thought big.

But the key thing really, the key idea from the very beginning, even before the beginning, was to get the University of California as a client. Number one, it nationalizes the whole testing system. Because it's all the way over on the West Coast.

Number two, California, it was clear then, was on it's way to becoming the biggest state in the country. It's a big, important state. The university system is the biggest university system, or on it's way to becoming. So, if you could get the University of California that would be the kind of anchor client for the whole testing system. It would show that it was national, it would show that it was public as well as private, and more mundanely, there's a lot of test takers there. And a lot of revenue there. It's a big customer. It's ETS's biggest customer.

So it was very important and ETS waged a lengthy campaign. And it had to be lengthy 'cause it took a long time. There was a lot of resistance. It took 20 years from the time the first ETS West Coast office was opened in Berkeley until the SAT became a requirement for all applicants to the University of California.

Tell me about Conant and Clark Kerr.

Clark Kerr really built the great University of California system and Conant built ETS, they sort of go together. They to my mind are the two big visionaries in the American meritocracy. And of course they were friends and had an elaborate respect for each other. And you know, paid state visits to each other's universities. They had essentially the same vision for America: that you would have this new elite made up of people who were very high intelligence, high academic skills.

They would preside over a kind of big, liberal society with big government, but universities, would be technocratic, selfless public servants.

Kerr built a lot of new schools and so on. But both men at heart were elitists. That was the prime thing. Kerr was on the board of Educational Testing Service all through the '50s. And was clearly an ally to ETS in the struggle to use the SAT as an admissions device at the University.

Kerr, in his master plan for education, which made him famous around the world in the early '60s, he very much tightened the access to Berkeley in particular. He wanted Berkeley to be a highly selective world class university...and a world renown research oriented faculty. He wanted to change the nature of Berkeley.

Not dramatically overnight, but move it distinctly away from being a state land-grant college which it was originally, into being a kind of German style, high end research university that had a star faculty and identified and trained the elite of the state of California. He moved it very effectively in that direction. And requiring the SATs was part of that move.

Can you talk a little bit about the history of the acceptance of the SAT at Cal?

Here's what happened with the SAT. ETS setup it's first office in Berkeley in 1947, and began sort of establishing relations with the University of California, with the powers that be there, in hopes of getting them to adopt the SAT as a requirement. Clark Kerr in the early '50s was put on the board of ETS when he was a sort of young rising star.

What is amazing is how long it took. It took 20 years to get the SAT required. It was first used on an experimental basis. Then it was used as an admissions device for out of state students, but not in state students. There was a real resistance in the legislature, and even the older faculty to making California high school grads jump over that SAT hurdle in order to get to the University. It just took a long time to put that across.

Why the resistance?

The idea was that it's a public University. It's our University. It should be, if not open to all, relatively open and with easy access. The idea that Berkeley existed to create a meritocratic elite was not an idea that had much relevance in the state of California, you know, outside of Clark Kerr's head in the 1950s or even in the 1960s. That just wasn't the purpose of the University at the time.

It was like a public utility or a public park or a freeway. It was supposed to be as open as it could be to all.

And at one point in 1962 the University said it wasn't going to use the SAT?

There was a long see-saw battle over the use of SATs. They were used experimentally. They were required for out-of-state, they were briefly required for in-state, they were then dropped for in-state. But then they were reinstituted for everybody. The real key points here are, number one it shows you that it was controversial, adapting the SAT. It took 20 years to get them adopted at the University of California. It didn't just happen like that because it went against the vision of the University as an open land-grant public university. Second thing is, Kerr's master plan in the early '60s was what really set in motion the processes that led to requiring the SAT, because it tightened eligibility, and it explicitly provided for the use of standardized tests in admissions in a piece of legislation.

So the master plan sets the stage. And then the other shoe drops in the '80s when applications just go through the roof. And then you have another complicated series of admissions events that leads to the SAT being used as the way to decide who gets this scarce, precious resource, admission to Berkeley.

You mentioned the Asian explosion in the '80s... You make an interesting comparison between the Jews in the '20s and the Asians in the '80s. Can you talk about that?

The first group to use this meritocratic system to make it were the Jews. And Jews were rising very fast through the system, particularly in the immediate post-World War II decades.

And then starting around 1980, the action shifted, and the rising group that was outperforming where they were in the society tended to be Asian-Americans--in particular, Chinese-Americans. Now why does that happen? There's a whole lot of reasons. One reason is just people are hungry and motivated, and they see this as an arena of opportunity.

But there's a more particular reason which applies in different ways both to Jews and to Asians, which is, given what the system is, given how the system defines merit, it basically defines merit as studiousness, and ability to get good grades in school. And it tremendously glorifies book learning and study. In both Jews and Asians, you have people who come from long cultural traditions that are already in that place that American society got to in the late twentieth century...Within the ethnic culture there's a tremendous value put on studying, learning, scholarship, in the case of Asian-Americans, specifically on testing.

For well over a thousand years, there's been in various Asian countries starting with China, systems of distributing prestige and rewards on the basis of how you do on exams. So this stuff is really rooted culturally, and people who grow up in the culture tend to be unusually well-equipped to sort of deal with the American meritocracy.

UC admissions is a very complicated subject because they keep changing the rules every few years. Every few years there's an outside event, or there's a new commission, or something leads to a change in the rules. But during the period from the late 1980s up through the mid 1990s, in other words, the period leading up to Prop 209,Berkeley probably had the most SAT-dependent admit policy of any school in the country. And the reason is Jerry Karabel, a professor of sociology at Berkeley, headed a faculty committee to reform admissions policy. Karabel is portrayed as a wild-eyed radical.

But he actually pushed Berkeley admissions to the right a couple of notches.

Karabel instituted, and the faculty later put in place a policy where half the class of Berkeley was admitted by pure numbers--the computer would tell you who to admit, for half the class.

Half the places were reserved for those people. And it was a formula mixing SAT scores and grade point averages in high school. Problem is, because of another ETS test, the AP exam, lots and lots of thousands of high school kids in California graduate from high school with 4.0 averages. Berkeley would then only record a 4.0 average. So half the applicant pool, or something like that, would be topped out on grades, and so the only way to distinguish these kids were their SAT scores. So that's where I say that half of the class was being admitted almost solely on the basis of SAT scores for that period of time.

It's not true now?

It's not true now, because they've changed the admissions policy twice since then.

So they admit over the 4.0s?

The main change at Berkeley at admissions has been their moving toward the Ivy League, the expensive Ivy League system of the kind of holistic assessment of each applicant individually, rather than feeding them into the computer according to a formula.

What's the significance of the book, The Shape of the River?

In one sense, The Shape of the River is a book that's written for an audience of nine people--the nine people that the book is really aimed at are the nine Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Everybody in the liberal, higher education establishment knows that there is going to be a big higher education affirmative action case. There hasn't been one since Bakke in the mid 1970s. So it's been a long time. It's been more than two decades now.

The whole situation is just begging for a Supreme Court decision, because it is just all this fighting and contention about the key issue, which is "can universities take race into account as a plus factor in admissions decisions? Is that constitutional or not?"

And what Bok and Bowen are doing in that book is they know that case is coming. It's probably going to be the University of Michigan case. It might be some other case. And they want to arm the Supreme Court with the best possible arguments in favor of taking race into account in admissions.

So that's one thing that The Shape of the River is. It's a very elaborate, kind of an amicus brief for a Supreme Court case that is coming, but hasn't happened yet.

And the other thing is, all through the '80s and '90s, there was an outpouring of anti-affirmative action writing by a wide range of people. Shelby Steele, Abigail and Stephen Thernstrom, and they're only the beginning. The whole argument developed against affirmative action, and what you tended to have was--it went unanswered. The anti-affirmative action people were the outsiders and renegades who had voice. And the people who were for affirmative action were the authority figures, the university presidents who kind of did things behind closed doors, and they were silent.

So you had an attack going on, and you didn't have a defense to the attack from the people who were being attacked. I think Bok and Bowen's book represents those folks, or at least two of those folks deciding, "You know what? We've got to answer these arguments now. We can't just ignore them, and think they're being made by nuts. We've got to take them seriously and answer them."

Do you think that the arguments are persuasive?

I think it's very persuasive on what is not that broad of a point. It's very persuasive on the idea that at the Harvard and Princeton style of university, affirmative action works. And that the leading arguments against it at that kind of university are wrong.

It's incredibly good on that point, and very, very persuasive. Where it doesn't really address the question is a university like Berkeley or other public universities. It's really about university admissions at universities that have big admission staffs that read each applicant's folder and discuss it individually, and make very nuanced judgments.

It's not about schools that admit by machine, that pay very cursory attention to each application, or about schools that have high drop-out rates. It's just not about that part of the world nearly as much. So the model isn't applicable to most public universities.

Wouldn't you think that their arguments could just as easily apply to universities like California or Texas?

As you read the book, and you hear them speak, really what they're talking about is a model of folder reading admissions. They're saying: "This is how a university should decide who to let in. They should take the applicant's folder, which has a whole bunch of information in it, including as essay, including recommendations, transcripts, test scores. They should consider it as a whole. They should try to build a picture of the applicant. They should talk with each other about it, and they should make a nuanced judgment about whom to let in, and whom not to let in." And by the way, they can consider racial diversity as a plus factor in making that decision.

There just aren't that many universities in the United States that are set up to operate that way. Berkeley is sort of setting itself up to operate that way. University of Texas is not set up to operate that way. And it will be a long time before it is. And most public universities aren't set up to operate that way. So their model is a little bit narrow.

If Bok and Bowen find that a kid with an SAT score that's even three hundred points less than another kid fares well at an Ivy League school, shouldn't the same apply at Cal or UCLA?

There are a couple of points that are tricky here. The strongest argument of the opponents of affirmative action is simply that race should be impermissible in any decision. Race is a uniquely offensive factor for public agencies to consider in making decisions. And they should never be allowed to consider it for any reason.

Bok and Bowen are making a practical argument, and so they don't really answer that question. That is a philosophical question which is part of the coming Supreme Court case. They also don't really say, when you read the fine print, and the charts and so on, that 300-point gaps in SAT scores are immaterial to how kids are going to do in school.

Because if they said that, then they would have to say, "Well, let's not have SATs." And they actually argue for, you know, putting the SATs as part of the information in the folder.

They're saying instead, "It's predictive. It's useful. But it's not dispositive and shouldn't be dispositive. And that with enough information and expertise, you can make a kind of nuanced judgment about a person."

So the reason it's not perfectly applicable to a school like Berkeley, or a school like Texas, is you can't say, "I take away from The Shape of the River that we can just ignore SAT scores from now on. We can just throw them out, or even not even require them, and still have a kind of cursory admissions procedure, and it won't matter. You won't have any of these problems if people with low SAT scores are under-performing academically, because Bok and Bowen have shown that such things don't matter."

They haven't shown that. They've shown that really careful, well-run affirmative action systems work. And by the way, Berkeley had that before Prop 209. Berkeley was a real model of how to do affirmative action right. They didn't have any of these sort of disastrously high minority drop-out, and flunk-out rates, or anything like that. They were doing it quite well. It was a success.

Bok and Bowen say with a ban on affirmative action you're telegraphing to various races--you don't have a chance at these universities. And you're also ensuring that certain students won't go to school with students of color.

The worst argument of the opponents of affirmative action, and the one that Bok and Bowen are best at blowing out of the water, is this kind of argument out of false concern, that it is only for the good of the minority students, you know? There's a lot of kind of crocodile tear shedding going on around affirmative action.

"It breaks our heart to see these poor, minority kids being kind of tormented for the sake of white, liberal consciences, by being put where they really can't compete academically, et cetera. And it's only to help them that we want to abolish affirmative action." Well, that's ridiculous. That's not the real motive. Bok and Bowen just hit that one right out of the park. So they're very good on that point.

The other thing about the opponents of affirmative action is it comes back to this idea of what is meritocracy, and what is merit, and what is this system?

It's a system that everybody lives in now, and you just take for granted. It's always existed. It's like the air, it's like the grass, it's like the flowers. It's just part of the natural world. Well, it's not. It's a thing that was built and constructed by particular people for particular reasons. They were idealistic people but they had ideas. Some things won out over other things. But it is not the only possible meritocracy. It's a highly particularized kind of meritocracy.

Now, the people who are most against affirmative action tend to think, you know, this meritocracy is the only possible meritocracy. You know, so if you don't have this kind of meritocracy, and let the chips fall where they may, don't adjust the results of the test scores at all, then, you know, madness is the result. You can't have any system that rewards talent. You can't have any system that is fair. It's this idea that you have to have this particular system that we have, which is assumed to be a kind of natural thing made by God or something, or total chaos, a totally unfair system.

Affirmative action, by the way, is not a threat to this system of meritocracy. The same folks who brought you the American meritocracy are the folks who brought you affirmative action. And affirmative action was built into the system later to correct flaws of the system. But it was supposed to be an integral part of the same system. It's not the opposite of meritocracy. It's a part of this kind of strange meritocratic apparatus we have. It's a patch on the meritocracy to make it run better.

According to people like John Yoo, a professor at UC Berkeley Boalt Law School, the standards were lowered during the past 20 years because of affirmative action.

The standards of 20 years ago were actually much lower than the standards of the affirmative action era. Berkeley's graduation rate--I believe this is still true--has gone up every single year, year by year. In the height of affirmative action it was still going up, the overall graduation rate of Berkeley was still going up every year, including the white graduation rate.

The base line is in a different place from where some critics of affirmative action think it was. And affirmative action does not mean a throwing out of all standards. It means an adjusting of whom you let in. So it's really exaggerated and wrong to say that if you have affirmative action, it means you have abandoned all standards. I mean just, as the Thernstroms point out, even under affirmative action, admissions is fiercely meritocratic for minorities. There's an elaborate selection system for minorities trying to get the best minorities under an affirmative action system that they disagree with. So the idea that all standards are being thrown out is ridiculous.

Can you talk about an inherent tension between meritocracy and the civil rights movement?

In the second half of the twentieth century, you had two big social movements going on in this country. One was the drive to establish mass higher education, elaborately tracked, with standardized tests for everybody feeding into that. And that that would be the kind of personnel system or opportunity system of the country. That's how people got where they were going. The idea was--to make this society better.

The other is to have more opportunity for minorities, particularly African-Americans. Those two goal are in fairly direct contradiction with each other. Because the more you make test scores matter, the more you bring to the fore the historic and still existing, although smaller, racial gap in test scores. So, race inevitably becomes an issue in the operation of a meritocracy.

There's a fundamental problem at the heart of the American meritocracy. And this is what it is. The meritocracy arrived in a great cloud of rhetoric about creating a perfect classless, democratic society with opportunity for all as the main principle. The way the system works is you distribute opportunity on the basis of test scores and educational performance.

When you decide to do that you run right smack into the test score gap. And you end up providing a little bit less opportunity and classlessness and democracy for, on average, African-Americans, who tend to get lower test scores.

Let's talk about the Supreme Court decisions.

The landmark Supreme Court decisions of the 1950's and 60's were almost all unanimous decisions. Starting with the Brown v. Board of Education. And this wasn't an accident. It was important to the Supreme Court to create unanimous decisions so that the public would obey the ruling--to create a sense of this is a really strong position.

Now, you go to the Bakke case. The Bakke case is the least clarion call-like Supreme Court decision imaginable. Let's look at that case, where the decisions were sharply divided. It's five to four one way on one of the two issues and five to four the other way on the other of the two issues. So, it's an incredibly thinly sliced decision. And furthermore, although I don't think they realized this, it's probably one of the most widely violated Supreme Court decisions there is. And proposes a standard that just can't be followed by most universities in America.

So, not only is it really complicated and hard to explain to people, but it is a split decision and also a virtually unenforceable decision. It's a very bad case to have this whole business rest on.

Terry Pell from the CIR said that the University of Michigan violated Bakke very clearly. Are you familiar with all of this?

The Bakke standard is really hard to follow unless you're Harvard. And the wording in the decision came from the Harvard amicus brief. It's all about using race as a factor to achieve diversity in no specifiable way. Well, state universities don't have these big admissions officers with people reading folders and discussing and debating that--and in coming to decisions in kind of subtle, indefinable ways. They have tons of applications flowing in and they like to work by numbers.

They divide the applications into piles. They assign numbers to things. They work much more statistically.

So, what Bakke says is, you can consider race, but you can't consider race in any explicit way. It's very hard to follow. So it just invites universities, especially without lavishly funded admissions offices to violate the ruling. And they have.

What about Thernstrom's notion that if blacks and Latinos don't get to go Cal or UCLA, they're going to wind up at Riverside for example?

We're living in a system that is made explicitly to create very large differences in your life outcome depending on where you went to school. And that's the system we live in. That's the American meritocracy. It was set up to do that. A big theme in The Shape of the River is how much better life goes for you if you go to Harvard or one of their elite schools, than if you go to State U.

And, you know, the people who want to go to UC Berkeley instead of UC Riverside, they're not crazy. They have perfectly good reasons to want to go there, because it is a much better school, and it puts you in the way of more opportunity. The UC did not set itself up to make all the UC campuses functionally equal. Or to make UC and Cal State functionally equal. It's a tracked system. And so, it's quite natural for people want to be on the best track.

The cascading argument can be made in reverse and you know, a few white kids were cascaded themselves because of affirmative action. Some white kids--not that many, a handful--were getting displaced from places like Berkeley, sent a little bit down the line to go to another school, because of affirmative action. And look at the outrage that caused.

What do you think of the suit by the seven kids against UC Berkeley?

You know, what we're having here is the kind of shoot-out at the meritocracy corral. Because, a system was put in place fifty years ago that is really enormously consequential for the way the country lives. In other words, when we wrote the Constitution, we had a Constitutional Convention. We debated everything publicly. And then we voted on it, state by state.

That didn't happen when we set up the American meritocracy. All of these questions have never been really decided by the public--is it okay to distribute a valuable public resource on the basis of test scores? Why are we creating an educationally derived elite? What are these people supposed to do with their lives? Do they owe anything to the society? Who are they supposed to be.

I mean, these are legitimate questions that should be debated. So, in that sense, I think Prop 209 and this lawsuit are both healthy developments. Because it kind of gets a discussion going that should have taken place fifty years ago.

What about the notion you don't have to make a hard choice between diversity and affirmative action, especially with flagship campuses?

I don't really buy that. I mean, the problem is the system has been set up to put enormous emphasis on admission to elite universities and professional schools. That's the glittering prize, you know. There are a finite number of places in these schools. If the system had been set up to sort of let everybody into university who knows a certain amount of stuff, then it wouldn't be a zero sum game. But, it is set up precisely to be a zero sum. That's why Conant set it up. He wanted to take a finite number of places in the elite, kick out the people who had them and bring in new people who had them.

So, you know, unfortunately, this is a tough issue, like a lot of issues. It's not an easy issue. If you eliminate all affirmative action, you're going to have strikingly whiter kind of meritocratic mandarin elite. You just will. And it matters, because the system exists.

What about outreach programs?

Outreach programs are not new and they were not invented in response to Prop 209. Berkeley already had a quite elaborate outreach program. And also, very important in all this, an excellent program to help minority kids once they got to the campus, if they weren't well-prepared for the academic work.

Outreach doesn't obviate the problem, because there is still a fixed number of slots in the school. And there's two things about out reach. First of all, any outreach program that's for minority kids is illegal under Prop 209. You can't take race into account. You can't have programs to help minority kids, because that is illegal. It's exactly what Prop 209 made illegal. You can't do it.

Secondly, you still have to face the question. You have the outreach program. You find the kid. You get him to apply to Berkeley. He's black. He's from the ghetto. And he has lower SAT scores than the white kid from the suburbs.

You're still violating Prop 209. You're still sort of practicing affirmative action, if you let in the kid from the outreach program over the kid with higher score from the suburbs. You just are. There's no way around the dilemma because it's all about setting aside test scores for social engineering type reasons, to distribute a finite number of places.

A lot of times in the public today what you get is an argument between the good meritocracy and bad affirmative action...

Meritocracy and affirmative action are part of the same system. They were invented by the same people more or less. And the purpose of them is to create or engineer through testing and the higher education system an elite to sit atop the society. Meritocracy, what we call meritocracy, is a sort of a particular system of picking people for that elite on one set of abilities. Affirmative action is trying to twist the dials a bit to get more minority representation into the meritocracy--the meritocratic elite.

So they're not opposites at all. They're sort of one system. And then the second system piggy backing on top of this first.

Conant believed too many people were going to college in the 1930's. And consistently advocated cutting the number of people who went to college. So this system was not started by people who wanted to very broadly expand educational opportunity. It was started by people who wanted to create an educationally derived elite. That's the sort of kernel assumption in the system.

No, this fight over affirmative action tends to be a fight between people who have bought into that assumption. The Shape of the River does not really question the premise that there should be a kind of anointed group who go to highly selective schools and are put on the track to something better than everybody else. It just says you should use affirmative action in choosing those people. But, you should still have the elite. The opponents of affirmative action say, don't use affirmative action. But, they, too, buy into the idea that's how you should have this kind of chosen elite in this country.

The really radical position would be to say, 'You know what? We shouldn't have an educationally derived elite.

That's not a good idea.' When John Adams got the letter from Jefferson saying this country should have a natural aristocracy. He wrote back and said, no, no, no, that's a bad idea. Because, the point is not that it's a natural aristocracy, but that it's an aristocracy. This is a democracy. It's not supposed to have an aristocracy.

So, as long as you are wedded to the idea, I really think after many years with this subject that the idea of having a liberal, almost radically democratic and classless society built around the idea of selecting an elite at an early age to go to fancy colleges is just unworkable. This system just does not, in and of itself, promote democracy. Democracy is sort of a separate good that should be promoted in different ways.

It seems that our society has almost wholeheartedly embraced the SAT.

The test has been, you know, fetishized. This whole culture and frenzy and mythology has been built around SATs. Tests, in general, SATs, in particular, and everybody seems to believe that it's a measure of how smart you are or your innate worth or something.

I mean, the level of obsession over these tests is way out of proportion to what they actually measure. And ETS, the maker of test, they don't actively encourage the obsession, but they don't actively discourage it either. Because they do sort of profit from it. I mean, every time somebody takes an SAT, it's money to the ETS and the College Board.

But there is something definitely weird about the psychological importance these tests have in America versus what they actually measure. And indeed, what difference do they make? Because, there's two thousand colleges in the United States, and 1,950 of them are pretty much unselective. So, the SAT is a ticket to a few places.

Do you think that Conant's vision or Henry Chauncey's vision has been corrupted or perverted? Or do you think it has been fulfilled?

I think if Conant were alive, and you asked what he would say. He would say, the system works in a certain way very, very well. What it does very, very well is produce highly trained professionals who are the best in the world. America has really good professors. It has really good doctors. It has really good scientists. It's very important to Conant to create a group of highly skilled technicians at the top of the society. That would be, I think, the thing he was proudest of.

I think there's no way he could look at America today and say, my dreams of a classless society have been--have been fulfilled. I think what would disappoint him is that the system turned out to be, you know, more friendly to the creation and preservation of inherited privilege than he dreamed. And much less friendly to the kind of, you know, big government, liberal society that he wanted to create.

How has test prep changed over the years?

When I was growing up in Louisiana, I was very vaguely aware of test prep, and nobody I knew took test prep. Nobody really worried that much about this whole process. In the world I'm in now on the East Coast, test prep is one of the Stations of the Cross for the upper-middle class of America. And it seems like everybody takes test prep. And everybody has a sort of testing awareness. Even shockingly little kids. There just is this culture of obsession about the SATs that is creepy and unhealthy. It really distorts education because it leads to a very instrumental view of education, that education is about what scores you get on these tests. And it kind of undervalues things like going off and reading a book.

Towns, particularly suburban towns, go insane over their average test scores. Not just SATs but other tests too. I live in a town where the good news is, everybody goes to public school, and the bad news, if it is bad news, is test scores are just supremely important. And the reason they're important is because of real estate values.

2011-10-30T12:56:00.003-04:00

LAUGHING FOR LIBERATION-

Cracking On Capitalism Mounting Crises and Our Magnificent Global FightBack

US White Male Dilemma

2011-10-29T16:46:00.001-04:00

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The Racialized $1 Trillion in Student Debt Obama Aims to Ease?

by Julianne Hing, Hatty Lee
colorlines.com
Friday, October 28 2011

Congress may be gridlocked, but that doesn't mean President Obama's hands are tied. On Wednesday the president announced that he's moving to ease Americans' student debt load with an executive order that would save borrowers "hundreds of dollars a month" in student loan payments.

Called the "Pay As You Earn" plan, starting January 2012 people would be able to cap their federal student loan payments at 10 percent of their discretionary income. Any remaining debt would be forgiven after 20 years. This cap was due to take effect in two years, but Obama's moved the timetable up. In his speech at the University of Colorado at Denver, Obama said that the plan, which would also allow students to consolidate their federal student loans under a lower interest rate, could help around 1.6 million Americans ease their monthly bills.

"Let me tell you," Obama told the cheering crowd. "I remember this. I remember writing, like, five different checks to five different agencies and if you lost one that month you couldn't get all the bills together. And if you missed the payment, suddenly you were paying a penalty."

Obama's proposal isn't exactly a new idea, but rather a revision. It's lifted from the IBR, or the income-based repayment plan, which was signed into law in September 2007 by President George W. Bush. Bush's initiative allowed students to cap their federal student loan payments at 15 percent of their discretionary income, and allowed students to walk away from the rest of their debt after 25 years.

But Obama's executive order comes at an especially dire time, when college costs are rapidly increasing and with it, the amount of debt students are taking on in order to pay for school. Among those who borrow to pay for school, students of color are disproportionately saddled with high levels of debt. We rounded up the latest numbers that show exactly how much debt college graduates are carrying around with them these days, and who's in need of relief.

—Julianne Hing

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A comment on this piece from sandela85

This legislation is bad bad bad and students in countries worldwide have opposed income-contingent loan repayment schemes for years.

This simply means that those who owe more and make less (disproportionately racialized folks, indigenous folks and people with disabilities) pay more in their education through interest because they have much larger terms, even if it will be written off after 20 years. In the end, because the system marginalizes these groups of people, we will be forced to pay much more for our education than the average white person without a disability. Isn't it kinda whack that those who are rich end up paying the least because they have no interest to deal with. Yes. That is whack.

Also, in countries where this kind of legislation is in place, it has led to the skyrocketing of tuition fees, as colleges and universities can now claim that no student will be unable to pay; after all, they will never have to pay more than 10% of their income.

Bottom-line: Student loans are an unsustainable tax on the poor.

Education should be free. The passing of knowledge and the process of knowledge discovery shouldn't cost anything. It's necessary for the survival of any society. And knowledge certainly shouldn't be reserved for the minds of the wealthy few.

2011-10-28T13:38:00.000-04:00

NYC Black/Latino Student-led Study Shows System Ain't Workin'!

To get a PDF version of the report, go to:

http://icope.org/documents/yrnes.pdf

2011-10-23T20:41:00.002-04:00

#OccupyWallStreet:

A Letter from Goldman Sachs

A Letter from Goldman Sachs Concerning Occupy Wall Street
New York - The following is a letter released this week by Lloyd Blankfein, the chairman of banking giant Goldman Sachs:

October 21, 2011

Dear Investor:
    Up until now, Goldman Sachs has been silent on the subject of the
protest movement known as Occupy Wall Street. That does not mean,
however, that it has not been very much on our minds. As thousands
have gathered in lower Manhattan, passionately expressing their deep
discontent with the status quo, we have taken note of these protests.
    And we have asked ourselves this question:
    How can we make money off them?
    The answer is the newly launched Goldman Sachs Global Rage Fund, whose
investment objective is to monetize the Occupy Wall Street protests as
they spread around the world. At Goldman, we recognize that the
capitalist system as we know it is circling the drain--but there's
plenty of money to be made on the way down.
    The Rage Fund will seek out opportunities to invest in products that
are poised to benefit from the spreading protests, from police batons
and barricades to stun guns and forehead bandages. Furthermore, as
clashes between police and protestors turn ever more violent, we are
making significant bets on companies that manufacture replacements for
broken windows and overturned cars, as well as the raw materials
necessary for the construction and incineration of effigies.
    It would be tempting, at a time like this, to say "Let them eat cake."
    But at Goldman, we are actively seeking to corner the market in cake
futures. We project that through our aggressive market manipulation,
the price of a piece of cake will quadruple by the end of 2011.
    Please contact your Goldman representative for a full prospectus. As
the world descends into a Darwinian free-for-all, the Goldman Sachs
Rage Fund is a great way to tell the protestors, "Occupy this." We
haven't felt so good about something we've sold since our souls.
Sincerely,
Lloyd Blankfein
Chairman

2011-10-21T07:19:00.005-04:00

More and More Blackfolk Joining the OccupyWallStreet Movement

Filmmaker Obatala Mawusi said that the days he spent documenting the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York City were "eye-opening." In particular, the diversity he saw among the protesters belied the images of the movement in mainstream media. In early October 2011, Mawusi spoke to some of the Black participants about why the Occupy Wall Street movement attracted them.

A Call for a National Dialog on Black Left Participation in the OWS Movement
By
The Black Left Unity Network and USHRN Labor Working Group

Thursday, October 20, 2011

Over the last two years, the Black Left Unity Network (BLUN) has engaged in a process that focused on reaching out to Black worker activists in the labor movement, and other core social movements that organize and mobilize the Black working class. We have looked for opportunities such as building support for the Hurricane Katrina survivors and organizing and promoting a Reconstruction movement as a strategic flank of the U.S. anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist struggle, using Survivor Assemblies as popular democratic forums; promoting a Thank You Cuba campaign to challenge attempts to isolate Cuba and socialism as a racist regime; and participating in the Human Rights movement to help ground it in mass bases of resistance to help shape and influence its demands and anti-imperialist political character.

While there is much more needed in developing the BLUN as a unity process; a major aspect of the process must be that of forging Black left unity within the context of trying to unify and give a working class and internationalist perspective based in concrete demands to the struggles and upsurges that originate from or may have an impact on the Black masses. Therefore, with the emergence of the OWS as an national phenomenon with developing organizational expressions in various cities across the country, members of BLUN have taken the position that it is important to develop a process for addressing the questions that have quickly surfaced related to the political character of this movement and the role and participation of Black, Latino and Native forces.

BLUN along with the Labor working group of US Human Rights Network, hosted a call on Thursday, October 20, at 3pm EST. Some of the questions discussed included:

1.      While our communities are weakly organized, disconnected from the occupation motion, how might the occupy wall street be used to organize our communities for fundamental social change in the interests of the Black masses? Or can it?

2.      How can the Black left help to build alliances between the Black and Latino working classes in particular and with workers of color in general to begin forging Black and Brown working class unity as key to driving a popular agenda and mandate for radical social transformation in this period?
3.      How can Black left forces direct this anti-capitalist sentiment and energy of the OWS to increase the existing fight backs in the labor movement and the Black communities?

4.       Since labor is an important social force in the capitalist system, how can Black workers influence and help to mobilize the character and content of labors involvement in the OWS?

5.      How can the Black left become a force in helping to promote U.S. accountability to the UN Human Rights Conventions as a transitional program toward internationalizing the OWS movement?
To JOIN this much needed effort and for more info, Contact:
Saladin Muhammad at saladin62@aol.com.

Visit: www.blackleftunity.org

2011-10-20T11:57:00.003-04:00

Brother Sgt. Shamar Thomas Confronts & Vents Against NYC Police Terror

United States Marine Corps. Sgt. Shamar Thomas from Roosevelt, NY went toe to toe with the New York Police Department in Times Square on Saturday 15 October. It was at the end of the massive Occupy Times Square march and demonstration that drew at least 50,000 people.

An activist in the Occupy Wall Street movement, Thomas voiced his opinions of the NYPD police brutality that had and has been plaguing the #OWS movement.

Thomas is a 24-year-old Marine Veteran (2 tours in Iraq), he currently plays amateur football and is in college.

Thomas- a native New Yorker -comes from a long line of people who sacrifice for their country: Mother, Army Veteran (Iraq), Step father, Army, active duty (Afghanistan), Grand father, Air Force veteran (Vietnam), Great Grand Father Navy veteran (World War II).

There is a lot of Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome underlying Brother Thomas's rage against the police. Let's hope as the OccupyWallStreet Movement grows, he will be able to channel that stress in a positive and healing way so that he can advance as a Warrior for Peace and Justice.

2011-09-12T18:31:00.000-04:00

LOWKEY ft M1 (DEAD PREZ) & BLACK THE RIPPER - OBAMA NATION PART 2 Here's serious HipHop soundz about Obama's continuance of Imperialism's atrocities.

Lowkey is a British musician, poet, playwright and political activist of English and Iraqi descent. He first came to fame through a series of mixtapes he released before he was 18, before taking a hiatus from the music business. He would return in 2008 with wider music coverage, featured on BBC Radio and appearing at various festivals and concerts including the Electric Proms, Glastonbury, T In The Park and Oxegen in the build up to his first solo album, as well as collaborating with other famous British musicians to form a supergroup.

QUICK BIO TABLE

BIRTH NAME: Kareem Dennis

BORN: London, UK

ORIGIN: London, UK

OCCUPATIONS: Emcee, Activist, Playwright

YEARS ACTIVE: 2003-present

LABELS: SO Empire Recordings

BIO Lowkey was born in London to an Iraqi mother and an English father. From the age of twelve he began to rap, initially imitating American rappers but soon using his own accent. He began attending the open mic sessions which took place at the Deal Real record shop on Carnaby Street, Central London. The first time he went he introduced himself as Lowkey and was told there was already a regular there by that name; the two had a rap battle over the use of the name which he won.Solo WorkThe first part of his mixtape series Key To The Game, was released independently in 2003. Within a year and a half he had released a second and third volume, all of which gained critical acclaim from UK hip hop circles.

Though the first volume largely used music from other artists, the second was mostly original work in conjunction with numerous artists and producers while the third, which had no skits or short songs like a traditional mixtape would, was mostly his own work. Despite releasing the third mixtape in 2005, it would be another three years until he released his album proper preferring instead to explore other aspects of his career until then.While Lowkey was busying himself with European tours in support of Immortal Technique, Canibus, and Dead Prez, he began to make musical contacts and set about recording his debut album proper. Though stalled by other artistic endeavours, Dear Listener eventually was released in January of 2009. He bookended the year with another release, Uncensored, a mixtape compiling new material and collaborations with highlights from the entire Key To The Game series and Dear Listener.

This was released digitally in December through iTunes.CollaborationsLowkey joined a hip-hop group called Poisonous Poets that released one self-titled mixtape in 2005. Poisonous Poets (sometimes known as Double P) was founded by Doc Brown whom Lowkey met at Real Deal records. The group also consists of Reveal, Stylah, Tony D and Therapist.Lowkey's manager passed on the first two parts of Key To The Game to Jon McClure, frontman of Reverend and The Makers who is also an outspoken activist.

Wanting to mix popular music with politics, and mix indie rock with hip-hop, the two set about making a supergroup, Mongrel, composed of other noted musicians. Also in the band is Arctic Monkeys drummer Matt Helders and ex-bassist Andy Nicholson alongside bassist of Babyshambles Drew McConnell and a revolving set of other musicians. They have had trouble coordinating their busy careers to perform live dates and their debut album has already been pushed back from October to 2009 along with a February tour.

The album, Better Than Heavy, was released for free with The Independent on March 7, 2009.After touring with Immortal Technique, the two made a single, "Voices of the Voiceless" which was released in September 2009 after a one minute preview was officially released on YouTube. The song touches on racism, world revolution, war, colonialism and other global political issues.

In December 2009, Lowkey revealed he would release a second part to "Long Live Palestine" featuring international artists including Palestinian rap group DAM, Anglo-Palestinian soloist Shadia Mansour, The Narcicyst from Iraq, Iranian artists Hich Kas and Reveal, Syrian-Lebanese performer Eslam Jawaad and African-American Muslim Hasan Salaam. The single was packaged in an EP with the first part and an instrumental. It went on to reach the Number 1 position in the Hip Hop Charts of both Amazon and iTunes.

Other WorkIn July 2008 the Theatre Royal, Bath put on a production of 'Max and Beth', a contemporary adaptation of Macbeth by William Shakespeare written entirely in rhyme. Lowkey also helped publicize the NSPCC's Don't Hide It campaign, also contributing a free song to it, in which his lyrics are delivered from the perspective of a female victim of sexual abuse.

He also formed a non-profit organization, People's Army with fellow rapper Logic, who he has also made an unreleased album (New World Order) with, and met up with then-Liberal Democrats leader Menzies Campbell as a representative of his local community.

In February 2009, he traveled to Palestine and Palestinian refugee camps around the West Bank area to perform fundraising shows to help rebuild the Gaza Strip but was detained by the Israel Police for nine hours at Ben Gurion International Airport and interrogated. Later in 2009, he traveled with M-1 of Dead Prez to carry out a humanitarian aid mission and bring medical aid to the Palestinian people in Gaza.

M-1 mentioned in an interview with PyroRadio.com that a collaboration between the two had been made "I met up with a guy called Lowkey over there as well who’s from London as well, I had a chance to meet with him, he’s a good brother, we built a lot, it was real cool, we gotta get the song out." Evidence of the song is still yet to surface.

Collaborations * Poisonous Poets (2005) (with Poisonous Poets) * Better Than Heavy (2009) (with Mongrel)Mixtapes * Key To The Game Vol 1 (2003) * Key To The Game Vol 2 (2004) * Key To The Game Vol 3 (2005) * Lowkey Uncensored (2009)Singles * "Tears to Laughter" (2009) * "We Don't Want Them" (2009) * "Voices of the Voiceless" (2009) (with Immortal Technique) * "Alphabet Assassin" (2009) (with Faith SFX)

=======================

My names Black The Ripper / Samson.

I represent North London, I have been doing this thing for about 4 years, 2 years on a serious level. I’ve released one mixtape (‘Black is Beautiful’) and currently putting in the work for a new one entitled ‘Holla’ Blackt’.

I havn’t been on many DVD’s but I featured quickly on Risky Roads 2. Big up Cold Blooded and Risky for that. I’ve done two videos, both unreleased. I’m currently shooting a video for ‘My Minds Battle’ and that is the first release off my new mixtape ‘Holla Black’.

Black The Ripper (aka Samson, real name Dean West) is a highly respected and favoured hip-hop and grime MC from Edmonton N18, North London. Although previously known on the North London circuit he made his name in the infamous Axe FM clashes, where he duppied off numerous opponents consistently. Black The Ripper is one of the best emcees/artists in the scene at this time & will be for years to come; setting high levels with his consistent conscious bars and undeniable straight star quality that he brings to the mic.

Black remains a solo artist although he has collaborated with many of the grime scene’s biggest names, most notably his Motivation Music series with Cookie G, Moony and Chipmunk. He has also released 2 solo mixtapes - Black Is Beautiful and Holla Black (Samson Samson). Black’s style reflects a sense of self-determination, creative consciousness, and entrepreneurship using subversive style to shock as well as entertain; his work challenges orthodox thinking whilst sticking two fingers up at the establishment.

2011-09-10T08:51:00.002-04:00

Video of 13-year old Autum Ashante's First Day at Norwalk Community College

After much racist drama from the University of Connecticut, Sister Autum Ashante and her father, Batin, weathered the storm and found a better, more welcoming place to start Autum's college educational experience. She is taking a fulltime load of college level classes in Math, English and the Social Studies.You can your support messages to her at:

ashante ashante <ashantewah@yahoo.com>

2011-08-27T13:57:00.005-04:00

A Year Dedicated to People of African Descent

Around 200 million people who identify themselves as being of African descent live in the Americas. Many millions more live in other parts of the world, outside of the African continent. In proclaiming this International Year, the international community is recognising that people of African descent represent a distinct group whose human rights must be promoted and protected.

Members of the Garifuna community near Tela, Honduras. The Garifuna people are of mixed African, Arawak and Carib ancestry and native to the Caribbean Coast in Central America. UN Photo/Chris Sattlberger

This International Year offers a unique opportunity to redouble our efforts to fight against racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance that affect people of African descent everywhere.
Navi Pillay, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights

People of African descent are acknowledged in the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action1 as a specific victim group who continue to suffer racial discrimination as the historic legacy of the transatlantic slave trade. Even Afro-descendants who are not directly descended from slaves face the racism and racial discrimination that still persist today, generations after the slave trade ended.
--------------

Righting Past Wrongs

" This is the year to recognise the role of people of African descent in global development and to discuss justice for current and past acts of discrimination that have led to the situation today. "
Mirjana Najcevska, Chairperson,
UN Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent

The manifestations of racial discrimination which characterised the slave trade and colonisation are still felt today. Racism can manifest itself in a variety of ways, sometimes subtly, sometimes unconsciously, but often resulting in violations of the rights of people of African descent.

In order to combat such racism and racial discrimination, in 2001 the United Nations created the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent which is tasked with studying the problems of racial discrimination faced by people of African descent living in the diaspora and making proposals on the elimination of racial discrimination against Africans and people of African descent in all parts of the world.

The Working Group has found that some of the most important challenges that people of African descent face relate to their representation in, and treatment by, the administration of justice and to their access to quality education, employment, health services and housing, often due to structural discrimination that is embedded within societies.

In some countries, especially where people of African descent are in the minority, they receive harsher sentences than those of the predominant ethnicity and constitute a disproportionately high percentage of the prison inmate population. Racial profiling (The Durban Declaration and Programme of Action defines racial profiling as “the practice of police and other law enforcement officers relying, to any degree, on race, colour, descent or national or ethnic origin as the basis for subjecting persons to investigatory activities or for determining whether an individual is engaged in criminal activity.”)- which results in the systematic targeting of persons of African descent by law enforcement officers – has perpetuated severe stigmatization and stereotyping of Afro-descendants as having a propensity to criminality.

In many countries Afro-descendants have the least access to quality education at all levels. Evidence demonstrates that when people of African descent have greater access to education they are better placed to participate in political, economic and cultural aspects of society and to defend their own interests.

The Working Group emphasises that the collection of data disaggregated on the basis of ethnicity is an important element in identifying and addressing Afro-descendants’ human rights issues. Government policy intended to address racism and racial discrimination cannot be correctly formulated, much less implemented, if such information is not available. Nor can progress be measured.
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AfroBolivians Fight For Complete Recognition... Reparations to Follow

African slavery must not be forgotten

On 23 August we celebrate a vital moment in the abolition of the slave trade – so why has the day received no state support?

- Felicity Heywood
- guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 23 August 2011

Toussaint L'Ouverture was one of the leaders of the rebellion that saw Haiti

become the first black nation in the Caribbean. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Britain woke up on 23 August largely ignorant of the fact that it is a national day of remembrance. Four years ago the government declared it the day to remember those millions of African people who were captured, denigrated, enslaved, tortured and murdered, who rebelled and ultimately survived a period rightly seen as the most heinous crime of humankind against humankind in history. But when was the government going to tell us? And what is it contributing to the day?

It was 220 years ago on 23 August that Africans on the island that is now Haiti rose up against their captors and began a rebellion led first by Boukman Dutty and then by the strategist Toussaint L'Ouverture who defeated the best armies of the British, French and Spanish and in 1804 declared Haiti the first black nation in the Caribbean. Shockwaves ran through the slaving nations and set in motion the beginning of the end of the trade in African people worldwide.

On 23 August last year, communities minister Andrew Stunell – who holds as part of his responsibilities race equality and community cohesion – said: "Acceptance and understanding of our past is important in moving towards a future which is free of intolerance and racism."

He rightly made the link between the world as it is today and past events – this is not about gazing into history as an academic exercise, it is an essential route to understanding how the inequality of African peoples has been embedded into societies worldwide and how it continues today. For instance, it could go a long way to inform us why Haiti is now described as the poorest nation in the western hemisphere.

The government promised workshops to "help black and minority ethnic-led organisations to access funding for educational and heritage events (including those on the remembrance of slavery and the slave trade)". But these failed to take place. A year on, no African grassroots organisations have received funding for events this year.

When one such organisation applied on three occasions for lottery funding to organise events and activities, it was turned down on each occasion. And the Big Lottery Fund, with a £600m purse, has given zero to transatlantic slave trade applications this year or last.

By contrast, Holocaust Memorial Day remembers the Jewish and other genocides on 27 January and has received direct Department for Communities funding annually since 2001. This year, as last, it was awarded £750,000.

Is the government implying that one is more important than the other? Is the 400-year genocide, during which Britain became the leading slave-trading nation, no longer relevant? It appears that "acceptance and understanding of our past" is something the government is unwilling to practice itself.

This month a group of British charities have reported the government to the United Nations saying it is not doing enough for racial equality. They and the government are giving evidence in Geneva today. The UN will report back in September.

One way for the government to put some might behind the equality issue is to directly fund an education programme on the enslavement of African peoples. National community learning programmes would address the need to inform the public about this important historical event and its lasting legacy that has impacted so many nations for richer or poorer. And what better time to do it than in 2011, the UN's International Year for People of African Descent.

2011-08-25T08:15:00.002-04:00

BOOK REVIEW- Inhuman Bondage: On Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights
Eric Foner
Eric Foner, a member of The Nation’s editorial board, is the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University and the author, most recently, of The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (Norton), which was awarded the 2011 Bancroft Prize and the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in History.
This article appeared in the August 29-September 5, 2011 edition of The Nation.

The American Crucible-- Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights
By Robin Blackburn. Verso.

This past spring, television viewers in Britain were treated to a six-part series called Civilization about the rise (and possible fall, if China has its way) of the West, hosted by the historian Niall Ferguson. The series offered a highly reductive version of history, identifying "the West" with qualities such as competition, scientific inquiry and the rule of law, and denigrating societies from Asia to the Middle East and Latin America for lacking these virtues. In effect, it provided a usable past for those who see the world as riven by a clash of civilizations.

One episode explored why after independence, the United States forged ahead economically while the nations of Latin America stagnated. In an unusual twist, Ferguson chose South Carolina, a state governed by a tight-knit planter oligarchy, as a model of Jeffersonian democracy resting on small property ownership, in contrast to the autocratic societies south of the border organized around large latifundia. Only after forty-five minutes of the one-hour show did Ferguson mention the existence of slaves—the majority of South Carolina's population. When slavery was finally discussed, it was presented not as a crucial structural feature of early American society but as a moral dilemma, an "original sin" expiated by the election of Barack Obama.

Among the many virtues of Robin Blackburn's The American Crucible is its demonstration that slavery must be at the center of any account of Western ascendancy. Without the colonization of the New World, Blackburn notes at the outset, the West as we know it would not exist, and without slavery there could have been no colonization. Between 1500 and 1820, African slaves constituted about 80 percent of those who crossed the Atlantic from east to west. More than any other institution, the slave plantation underpinned the extraordinary expansion of Western power and the region's prosperity in relation to the rest of the world.

In two earlier books, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery (1988) and The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to Modern (1997), Blackburn traced the creation of New World slavery and its abolition in the British, French and Spanish empires, covering the years to 1848. These works established him as one of the foremost scholars of slavery as an international institution. Blackburn then took a detour to write two prescient volumes on the looming crisis in pension funding, which had somehow escaped the notice of bankers and credit rating agencies. In part, The American Crucible summarizes his earlier volumes; but it goes well beyond them, drawing on recent scholarship to amplify his previous arguments about slavery's rise and fall and taking the story to around 1900. He explores emancipation in the nineteenth century's three greatest slave systems—those of the United States, Cuba and Brazil. The book is an outstanding example of a major trend in recent historical writing: looking beyond national boundaries in favor of Atlantic or transnational history. Yet Blackburn cautions that while both the growth and abolition of slavery were international processes, they took place "in national histories" and followed no single pattern or path. With its theoretical sophistication and combination of a broad international approach and careful attention to local circumstances, The American Crucible takes its place alongside David Brion Davis's Inhuman Bondage as one of the finest one-volume histories of the rise and fall of modern slavery.

Blackburn emphasizes that far from being static, New World slavery was a constantly evolving institution, and he identifies three broad eras in its history. In the first, which he dates from about 1500 to 1650, slavery was centered in the Spanish colonies, small-scale and urban-based. By 1630 half the population of the great colonial cities Lima, Havana and Mexico City consisted of African slaves and their descendants. But in the countryside, in the silver and gold mines that enriched the Spanish crown and on the haciendas ruled by powerful colonial settlers, the indigenous population performed most of the labor.

At the time, the Spanish Empire lacked an extensive plantation system. That system developed first in Brazil and then quickly spread to the British and French colonies of the Caribbean and mainland North America, launching the second era of modern slavery's history (1650–1800). Sugar and tobacco produced by slave labor, along with African slaves themselves, 6 million of whom were transported across the Atlantic in the eighteenth century, became key commodities of international commerce. Sugar was the first mass-marketed product in human history. By 1770 colonial exports and re-exports, mostly of slave-produced goods, represented between a third and a half of Atlantic trade. The profits swelled merchants' coffers and the treasuries of European nation-states. By this time, too, the slave plantation had become a highly versatile economic unit, well adapted to the demands of the capitalist marketplace and quite modern in its methods of production, marketing and credit arrangements. Far from a retrograde drag on economic development, slavery was "a sinew of national strength" and of economic prosperity.

During this second era, slavery came to play a central role in key features of Western economic development—the spread of market relations, industrialization and the rise of a consumer economy. Carefully examining the old debate about the relationship between slavery and the Industrial Revolution, Blackburn concludes that the vast accumulation of capital derived from slave labor was a necessary, but not sufficient, cause of industrialization. Such profits did not boost manufacturing development in Spain and Portugal. Industrialization required not only money but a large home market and a supportive state, both of which only late eighteenth-century Britain possessed. Once it got under way, industrialization spurred the further growth of slavery, creating a giant market for cotton from the American South and fueling the spread of a "commodity-based notion of freedom," in which ordinary consumers demanded more and more of the sugar, tobacco, rum and coffee produced on slave plantations.

* * *

In the nineteenth century, slavery entered its third era, one rife with contradictions. During the century's first four decades, Haiti, born of a slave revolution, emerged as the hemisphere's second independent republic, and the northern United States, the independent nations of Latin America and the British Empire began taking steps toward abolition. Yet Blackburn cautions against the idea of a preordained, "irresistible advance" toward emancipation. Even as slavery died elsewhere, it thrived in Brazil, Cuba and the American South. Indeed, in 1860, on the eve of the American Civil War, far more slaves (around 6 million) resided in the Western Hemisphere than ever before. And slave-grown products (Cuban sugar, Brazilian coffee, American cotton) played a greater role than ever in the new economy of mass consumption. By this time, to be sure, industry had outstripped plantation slavery in supplying goods for the consumer marketplace. But, Blackburn insists, no purely economic reason existed to prevent slave plantations from continuing to coexist with industrializing economies, supplying their demand for raw materials and consumer goods from the tropics.

Blackburn also rejects the idea that emancipation arose from what he calls "latent virtue," a comforting notion sometimes invoked by American historians to excuse the founding fathers for lack of action against slavery on the grounds that their ideals set in motion the abolition process. High ideals alone did not abolish slavery. And while not neglecting slave agency, Blackburn argues that the concessions and customary rights wrested by slaves from their owners over a long period of day-to-day struggle did not pose a fundamental challenge to the system. Rather, he insists, emancipation emerged from specific historical circumstances—a nexus of slave resistance, ideological conflict and political crisis.

Blackburn examines in detail the myriad strains of antislavery thought—religious, nationalist, humanitarian, economic—and the abolitionists' pioneering use of mass-produced pamphlets, lithographs, petitions and the like to spread their message. By the early decades of the nineteenth century, a genteel antislavery sentiment had become a hallmark of enlightened opinion on both sides of the Atlantic. But Blackburn is quick to note the limited accomplishments of respectable antislavery. Often, early emancipations consisted of "free womb" laws that ended slavery over a prolonged period by freeing future offspring, not living slaves. Moreover, in most times and places, abolitionists represented only a small minority of the free population. Only in times of crisis did abolitionists acquire the power to influence national policy.

It was not the slow accumulation of rights by slaves or the persuasiveness of antislavery arguments that produced emancipation but "revolutionary ruptures" and political crises. In revolutionary France, as well as in a Spanish Empire wracked by wars of colonial independence, a Britain beset by the crisis over parliamentary reform in the early 1830s and Civil War America, slave resistance suddenly gained new salience, and abolitionist arguments found a receptive audience among the general populace and political elites. As in his previous studies of slavery, Blackburn also insists that emancipation was closely connected to the state-building process. The act of abolition presupposed the existence of a new kind of state, one intolerant of the special local sovereignty of slave owners and capable of carrying out radical measures. It gave the state moral legitimacy, allowing it plausibly to claim to be the embodiment of liberty.

Blackburn offers an excellent account of the path toward emancipation in the United States and of Abraham Lincoln's evolving attitudes and policies. The Civil War clearly exemplified the linkage of nineteenth-century nationalism with abolition, and the destruction of the hemisphere's largest and most powerful slave system compelled Cuba and Brazil to reckon with their reliance on slavery. Spain enacted a free womb law for Cuba in 1870, but abolition there, as elsewhere, also involved violence. About half the rebel army in the war of independence of the 1870s consisted of present or former slaves, and patriots demanded equal citizenship for all, regardless of race, in an independent Cuba. Slavery in Brazil finally ended in 1888, seemingly peacefully, although numerous slave revolts and the enlistment of thousands of slave soldiers in the war against Paraguay between 1865 and 1870 preceded emancipation.

When it comes to the consequences of abolition, Blackburn presents a rather somber assessment. Antislavery ideas were always linked to notions of liberty and progress, but less often to racial equality. As they extended their empires across the globe in the late nineteenth century, European powers "claimed to be inspired by abolitionist principles" even when acting in blatantly racist ways. Everywhere in the Western Hemisphere, new systems of racial and labor subordination succeeded plantation slavery. Emancipation's economic impact turned out to be less drastic than many had hoped or feared. The export value of the main crops—American cotton, Brazilian coffee and Cuban sugar—quickly recovered.

Blackburn is particularly pessimistic about the postslavery United States, warning against a scholarly tendency to "exaggerate the gains made by former slaves and their descendants." While acknowledging the remarkable effort during Reconstruction to create an interracial democracy in the South, he sees that era as a minor detour on the road to a new system of racial domination based on segregation, disenfranchisement and economic subordination. He goes so far as to say that in the entire hemisphere, "the blacks of the US South gained least from the ending of slavery."

It is unclear what standard of comparison Blackburn is applying here, because, as he notes, postemancipation societies in general remained highly unequal. Despite its failure, Reconstruction closed off even more oppressive possibilities in the United States. Moreover, the rewriting of the laws and Constitution during Reconstruction to enshrine the idea of equal citizenship rights for blacks established the legal framework for subsequent challenges to the postemancipation racial regime. And the creation of autonomous black churches and schools put in place institutions that would serve as the strongholds for future struggles. Without attributing social change to "latent virtue," one can note that unlike racial systems in other countries, the South's Jim Crow laws remained regional, not national, and that options existed for American blacks not matched elsewhere, especially the possibility of migration to the North and West, where a different (though hardly egalitarian) racial system prevailed.

Slavery and emancipation form two of the three parts of Blackburn's subtitle. The third, human rights, receives less attention but represents a new concern compared with his previous work. In part, Blackburn's discussion is a response to recent scholarship by Lynn Hunt, who locates the origins of human rights consciousness in the Enlightenment and the French Revolution [see "On the Genealogy of Morals," April 16, 2007], and Samuel Moyn, who situates the idea's emergence much more recently, in the 1970s [see "Human Rights in History," August 30/September 6, 2010]. Earlier definitions of human rights, Moyn points out, were tied to the nation-state, as the title of one key such document, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, makes clear. People enjoyed human rights by virtue of membership in a particular polity, not their common humanity. Only lately, Moyn claims, did the idea arise of human rights that transcend and challenge national sovereignty and are thus truly universal.

Blackburn acknowledges the force of Moyn's argument and has no desire to create a selective and ahistorical genealogy of human rights. He insists, however, rightly in my view, that the abolitionist movement played a major role in developing the concept of human rights unbounded by race and nationality. "In the heat of these momentous clashes over slavery," he writes, "a new notion of human freedom and human unity was proclaimed." Indeed, the attack on slavery also involved a critique of the pretensions and power of the nation-states that protected and profited from the institution.

Unlike previous scholars, Blackburn places the slave uprising in St. Domingue—the richest of all the sugar colonies, which became the nation of Haiti—at the center of the early history of human rights. The Haitian revolution, he notes, is rarely given its due by historians. Half a century ago, R.R. Palmer wrote an acclaimed two-volume work, The Age of the Democratic Revolution, that barely mentioned Haiti. Lately, thanks in part to the bicentennial of Haitian independence in 2004, a spate of works have appeared. Drawing on this literature, Blackburn insists that the rebellious slaves profoundly affected Atlantic political culture and human rights consciousness. Not only did events in St. Domingue directly inspire the 1794 French decree abolishing slavery (later reversed by Napoleon); the revolutionary convention's decision to seat black and brown delegates from the island marked a stunning affirmation that the entitlements of the Declaration of the Rights of Man were available to all French citizens, regardless of color.

Ironically, if "the West" is to celebrate the idea of universal human rights as one of its distinctive contributions to modern civilization, part of the credit must go to the mostly African-born slave rebels of Haiti.