All History Is Black History

Why Black History Month? If a people has a past worth learning about, they also must have a future worth caring about.

by Mark LeVine
Mark LeVine is a professor of history at UC Irvine.

28 Feb 2012- aljazeera.com

February was chosen as Black History Month because of the births of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln [GALLO/GETTY]

Irvine, CA - When I was a child, Black History Month, which since 1976 has been celebrated in February each year in the United States, used to mean something.

Perhaps it was because I lived in the New York Metropolitan area in the still race-conscious 1970s and 1980s, but during February it was hard not to get at least a hint of an education about African American history and its contribution to the larger American mosaic, whether it was school activities or public service spots on television, or surrounding the growing chorus of voices to make Martin Luther King, Jr's birthday a national holiday.

True, February is the shortest month of the year; but contrary to urban legend that's not why it was chosen as Black History Month. Instead, it was because the birthdays of President Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, perhaps the two most important figures before Martin Luther King in the quest for black freedom in the United States, both occurred in mid-February.

There were plenty of reasons to criticise the "ghettoising" of black American history into one short month. But the idea at least had the virtue of getting kids to think about the fact that there was such a thing as a specifically African American narrative within the larger, and largely white, version of American history we were being taught in school. And if you grew up in an urban, significantly black cultural milieu, the focus on history - that is, on black people having a past worth learning about - added a bit of extra gravitas to the increasing dominance of African American artistic production within American culture as a whole.

Futures worth caring about

If a people has a past worth learning about, then they also must have a future worth caring about. This is true whether one is talking about black Americans or Native Americans, Palestinians or Kurds, Roma or Tibetans, or any of the other dozens of peoples whose pasts, presents, and futures have been systematically deprived of them by more powerful peoples and governments.

At least that was the lesson I learned from Black History Month as a child. It might seem trite or even clichéd, until you imagine what impact a "Palestinian History Month" would have in Israel, or Shi'i or Coptic History months in Saudi Arabia or Egypt, or a Jewish history month in Iraq or Lebanon, never mind the impossibility of imagining them in the present climate. The first rule to denying people the right to live freely on their land is to deny them their historical narrative.

So in fact, it would seem that Black History Month, which began in 1926 as the more modest Negro History Week, constituted an important milestone in the growing realisation that black people had a history - and thus a permanent place and inalienable right to be citizens - in the United States. It is certainly true, as historians Leigh Raiford and Michael Cohen write in their Al Jazeera column on Black History Month and the Uses of the Past, that the present corporatised version of Black History Month is but the latest example of how radical black voices, and the ultimately radical vision of black - and through it, American - liberation of figures like Martin Luther King, have been suppressed from the mainstream narrative associated with the month.

But if we consider how much effort conservatives continue to expend to deny President Obama his identity as a natural-born American citizen (never mind a Christian; that is, a bona fide member of the dominant cultural community), it's clear that, if the focus and even substance of the activities surrounding the month can be debated, the need for continued emphasis on the legitimacy of black history in American society, cannot be denied.

And if we consider that Euro-American historiography has for centuries defined sub-Saharan Africans and Africa as literally having no history (as epitomised by the view of that ur-modern philosopher of modernity, G W F Hegel), the long road before us until black history, and through it black power, is as acceptable as its white counterpart, comes more clearly into view.

Black history as relational and world history

A decade before he established Negro History Month, the historian Carter G Woodson created the Journal of Negro History, which in recent years changed its name to the Journal of African American History to reflect the changing politics of black American identity. Reading through the first issues of the journal, I was struck by the the particular vision of "negro history" it heralded. In its pages we do not see negro or black history merely as one slice of a larger mosaic of American history, in which each narrative is placed next to each other to create the "great American melting pot" without actually helping to form the basic identity of other groups.

Instead, it's clear from the first issue of the Journal that negro history shaped the identities of Americans from the inside, while at the same time remained at its heart a world history. Reading through articles on subjects as diverse as the first black inhabitants of Cincinnati and the passing of tradition among African cultures, I understood that one of the main contributions of my own field, the historiography of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is less groundbreaking than I have long imagined.

Specifically, historians of Israel/Palestine have long struggled against the tendency of both national narratives, albeit for opposite reasons, to describe the two movements as essentially separate and autonomously developing entitites who have had little substantive impact on the culture or identity of the other outside of their conflict. Against this innaccurate but common understanding, scholars have developed "implicate" or "relational" histories of the two peoples, which challenge the dominant narrative of exclusivist nationalism by demonstrating how each community's identities and histories have been profoundly shaped through its interactions and evolution with the other.

Without using terms like relational or implicate, early 20th-century negro historians were clearly thinking along similar lines. Take, for example, this minor character described in an article on the (still today) neglected historiography of 18th- and 19th-century African American women, from the Journal's first issue. According to the historian W B Hartgrove's narrative, one Adolphe Richards was

"a native of the Island of Guadaloupe. He was a Latin of some Negro blood, had noble ancestry, and had led an honourable career. Educated in London and resident in Guadaloupe, he spoke both English and French fluently. Because of poor health in later years he was directed by his friends to the salubrious climate of Virginia. He settled at Fredericksburg [Virginia], where he soon became captivated by the charms of the talented Maria Louise Moore. On learning of his marriage, his people and friends marveled that a man of his standing had married a coloured woman or a Southern woman at all.

"Adjusting himself to this new environment, Mr Richards opened a shop for wood-turning, painting and glazing. It is highly probable that he learned these trades in the West Indies, but having adequate means to maintain himself, he had not depended on his mechanical skill. In Fredericksburg he had the respect and support of the best white people, passing as one of such well-to-do free Negroes as the Lees, the Cooks, the De Baptistes, who were contractors, and the Williamses, who were contractors and brickmakers. His success was in a large measure due to the good standing of the family of Mrs Richards and to the wisdom with which she directed this West Indian in his new environment."

It's hard to overstate just how many threads of American history unknown to most Americans - black or white - are woven into Richard's brief biography. But the central theme is one of the inherent globality of African identity and culture in mid-19th-century United States. The triangular circuit between the United States, the Caribbean, and England; usage of the French and English languages, bourgeois and working class positioning, continual and routine interactions between various races; all these belie the simplistic narrative of slavery-to-freedom most of us learn when we study negro, or today African history (Or should it be African-Caribbean-British-American history?).

Another fascinating article from the first issue of the Journal of Negro History, "What the Negro Was Thinking During the Eighteenth Century", seemingly by Woodson himself, offers powerful and eloquent negro voices against slavery, whose claims both to universal and (through the principles outlined in the Declaration of Independence) at that point still uniquely American rights and freedoms call out for a hearing today as much as they did well over two centuries ago.

"Violence that is at the core of our shared history."

As one writer excerpted by Woodson declared in a 1788 article, "Upon no better principle do we plunder the coasts of Africa, and bring away its wretched inhabitants as slaves than that, by which the greater fish swallows up the lesser. Superior power seems only to produce superior brutality; and that weakness and imbecility, which ought to engage our protection, and interest the feelings of social benevolence in behalf of the defenceless, seems only to provoke us to acts of illiberal outrage and unmanly violence."

The language might be politically incorrect by today's standards, but we would be hard-pressed to find a more succinct description of the predatory mercantilist capitalism, which first joined Europe to the Americas on one side and Asia on the other, through millions of stolen Africans. They became the incubator and even engine of a European-dominated capitalist modernity, grounded not so much in any Protestant ethic as in the blood and oppression of unfettered colonialism and racial slavery without which modernity, and the European (or American) "mircales" would never have occurred.

Enslaved African being burned at the stake in New York City- 1741.

Relational or implicate histories, it is clear from the articles in the Journal of Negro History, do not merely teach us that we have common cultural DNA. They also force us to confront the violence that is at the core of our shared history. Without having to focus on it explicitly, reading the Journal reminds us that black people were not just indigenous to another continent; their passage to the Americas constituted the foundation - and along with the genocide of indigenous Americans, the original sin - of modernity, from which the world, and particularly Africa, have yet to recover.

It is in this sense that I argue that all history is ultimately black history. We might be tempted to qualify this by saying that all modern history is ultimately black history, given Africa's and Africans' central if still subaltern role in the history of the modern world. But as another article in the Journal's first issue, "The Passing Tradition and the African Civilisation", argues, in fact the history of civilisation from its start can only be understood as beginning in Africa.

Ethnic studies' country twang

The Golden Coach with enslaved Africans depicted has become the symbol of the Dutch monarchy because they flaunt where their wealth actually came from.

Most Europeans, never mind white Americans, still have a lot of trouble understanding that they owe so much of what they consider to be their unique cultures and achievements to African minds and bodies. Black History Month tried to correct this by pointing out the achievements of individual black American scientists or inventors (the approach celebrated by Stevie Wonder in his seminal song "Black Man"). I prefer to point out to fans of country music that the famous country twang, not to mention the banjo, that define the quintessentially white American "country music", in fact derive directly from black Muslim African melodies and instruments that came to the United States with the black slaves whose cultures and identities were so ruthlessly, if incompletely, stamped out upon arrival.

Sadly, while corporations use Black History Month to erase their continued combination of marginalisation and exploitation of black American communities, the study of black history, and ethnic studies more broadly, is coming under intense attacks from conservative politicians who are desperate to preserve white cultural-political dominance against all forces that might challenge it (Latinos, gays, blacks, the working class) and from budget-conscious university administrators who see ethnic studies - ironically, along with other smaller fields such as the once-dominant European languages and literatures - as easy fodder for drastic reductions in course offerings, if not elimination. Is it a coincidence that these attacks have risen at the same time that a prison-industrial complex arose in the United States, which has so disproportionately criminalised and incarcerated young black men?

"Our common history, whether 100,000 or 100 years ago, is rooted in or passes through the experiences of Africa."

Even at the grade school level, Black History Month seems to have lost much of its heuristic power. As I began to write this column, I asked my children and several of their friends, ranging from the first to sixth grades, what they'd learned from Black History Month this year. "Nothing," they each replied in turn, explaining that none of their teachers had even mentioned it and only one had ever heard of it before I mentioned it to them.

As I tried to ponder the implications of how marginalised Black History Month has become to my children and their friends, the words of Franz Fanon, the seminal Martiniquo philosopher and revolutionary, came to mind. In his Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon argued that "to speak a language is to take on a world, a culture". The problem, however, is that "sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted... And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalise, ignore and even deny anything that doesn't fit in with the core belief".

Whatever its faults, Black History Month - and indeed, the far more powerful realities of negro/black/African-American history - offered a generation of Americans an entree into a language, a culture, and a world that few would otherwise have the chance to engage, but without which it remains impossible to be fully American. Or indeed, to be fully human, since our common history, whether 100,000 or 100 years ago, is rooted in or passes through the experiences of Africa and its peoples as much as - if not more than - any other of the world's major cultures.

This is a lesson that will take a lot more than one month a year to teach. But February is as good a month as any to start.

Mark LeVine is a professor of history at UC Irvine and senior visiting researcher at the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University in Sweden. His most recent books are Heavy Metal Islam (Random House) and Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989 (Zed Books).

Follow him on Twitter: @culturejamming

The Question of Race Within the Class Struggle...

"To speak of the class struggle is abstract because the real or concrete struggle is being fought by people of color against the various forms of racism which not only disparage and strip people of respect through discrimination, but also dehumanizes them through the reinforcement of economic policies that make resources for People of Color that much worse." WEB DuBois

STOP EDUCATIONAL GENOCIDE AGAINST BLACK & BROWN YOUTH! 

        Art by Seth Tobocman (from Rethinking Schools)

                  Liberate the schools! Close the prisons!                      
 

The Revolutionary Student Coordinating Committee (RSCC)

http://revolutionarystudents.wordpress.com
We charge genocide …

•  Because NYC schools fail to prepare 87% of Black and Latino students for college, according to official stats.

•  Because the NYPD arrests an average of five students everyday in school, 90% of them Black and Latino, and school policies increasingly put our youth on a pipeline into prison.

•  Because CUNY ended open admissions, abolished remedial programs at its four-year colleges and uses standardized tests and tuition hikes to exclude poor, working-class and oppressed-nationality people.

•  Because the NYPD murdered 18-year-old Ramarley Graham inside his own apartment in the Bronx and then detained his grandmother for five hours at the precinct.

•  Because the NYPD conducted a record-high of more than 680,000 stop-and-frisks last year, 87% of them targeting Black and Latino people.

•  Because the US criminal injustice system keeps about 2.5 million people behind bars and another 5 million under supervision. More Black men today are in prison, on probation, or on parole than were enslaved in 1850.

We charge genocide, because the system is killing our communities with its schools, its police and its prisons. Schools are closing. Tuition is rising. Everyday, our people are disrespected in the classrooms by Eurocentric teachers and in the streets by rampaging cops. The same system that oppresses us in the hood oppresses our homelands – Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Latin America as a whole, the Philippines and many other places that suffer from US imperialism.

These conditions must be put to an end. We must organize the youth and students to fight for the most dispossessed, exploited and oppressed sections of our communities. We must unite our communities to fight for survival against genocide. We must struggle for fundamental transformation led by those with nothing to lose and a world to win.

Priscilla's Story: Kidnapping, Enslavement, Love & Resistance

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Priscilla’s Story: Family traces roots to slave island

NBC News Correspondent Ron Allen journeys to Bunce Island off the coast of Sierra Leone. Bunce Island was once a slave trading fortress, which served as the beginning of a tragic journey for tens of thousands of Africans transported across the Atlantic into slavery in the United States. One African-American family, the Martins, was able to trace its roots two and a half centuries back to the island and to a little girl named Priscilla who was sold into slavery when she was 10 years old.

BRIAN WILLIAMS: called America 's original sin. While we're all Americans now, back then Africans were brought here to work against their will. After emancipation, that's when the roots of so many African-American families got fuzzy and jumbled up and lost, except for this story you're about to hear. The one case anyone knows where a family 's roots can be traced from right now, present day America , all the way back. It's thanks really to a little girl who paid a terrible price, and tonight Ron Allen tells us Priscilla 's story.

RON ALLEN: Two and a half centuries ago, thousands of miles across the Atlantic , a young girl was kidnapped and held captive in Sierra Leone , West Africa , on an island so remote, so forgotten, few people ever travel there.

Mr. JOE OPALA: It is literally a ghost town. The impact emotionally on people who see it is just extraordinary.

ALLEN: Our guide is historian Joe Opala . Oh, I see this.

Mr. OPALA: 1796 .

ALLEN: He spent much of his life trying to learn what happened to that little girl , and so many prisoners just like her.

Mr. OPALA: Negotiations for the purchase of slaves would have begun right here.

ALLEN: He took us to a place called Bunce Island , and the ruins of one of the most notorious slave trading fortresses the world has ever known. This is the doorway into the slave quarters?

Mr. OPALA: Yeah, into both slave quarters, men...

ALLEN: Men.

Mr. OPALA: ...and men on this side, and women and children on the this side. So we're going into the men's yard here. In the place where we're standing here, it could hold between two and 300 men, and that the men were chained together in circles of 10 people each to prevent them from climbing over the walls. They would go through this door first.

ALLEN: Tens of thousands of slaves were shipped from Bunce Island directly to South Carolina and Georgia , including that little girl . On a ship called the Hare , her name in the slave trader 's log was Priscilla . She was 10 years old.

Mr. OPALA: We know who sold Priscilla . We know who bought her. We know how much was paid for her.

ALLEN: Opala had an astonishing trail to follow. Tracing Priscilla 's voyage to Charleston , and what's left of an old rice plantation called Comingtee . Edward Ball , writer and teacher, is a descendant of the family that owned this plantation and some 20 others. He discovered an extraordinary record.

Mr. EDWARD BALL: "June 30th, 1756 ."

ALLEN: One that very few African-Americans have.

Mr. BALL: "I bought four boys and two girls."

ALLEN: A paper trail to their past. Ball 's family kept probably the most extensive slave owner 's property records still in existence, 10,000 pages.

Mr. BALL: "These Negroes underwritten had blankets."

ALLEN: Details about the births, deaths, marriages of some 4,000 men, women and children the Balls owned.

Mr. BALL: "Israel, Black Jack , Quaco, Priscilla ."

ALLEN: Including Priscilla .

Mr. BALL: Because Priscilla was a girl, I could almost sense this abandoned child, and it moved me to see if I could make sense of her story.

ALLEN: Ball became tormented as he spent years immersed in the lives of his ancestors. He felt accountable and wanted to do something for the families that his family enslaved. This was a place a lot of people didn't want you to go.

Mr. BALL: Yeah.

ALLEN: You're opening up old wounds.

Mr. BALL: Yeah.

ALLEN: You're airing dirty laundry , literally the family 's dirty laundry ?

Mr. BALL: Yeah. It was a good way of getting emotions on the table. It's like a wound that if you cut it open and you get the poisons out, then maybe the wound can heal better.

ALLEN: And that's why he grew more and more obsessed with that little girl , Priscilla . He learned she had 10 children, lived to age 65.

Mr. BALL: The records were good. I could see who her children were and her grandchildren and her great-grandchildren.

ALLEN: Lattice, Priscilla 's daughter was born.

ALLEN: Remarkably Ball went further, piecing together Priscilla 's entire family tree . It lead him to a retired schoolteacher names Thomas Martin , and then to his daughter, Thomalind Martin Polite , the great-great-great, seventh generation granddaughter of Priscilla . The Martins are believed to be the only African-American family able to trace their ancestry so far back, in such detail on paper. When you think of Priscilla , who was this person?

Ms. THOMALIND MARTIN POLITE: Oh, my God. She was a strong, resilient person is how I describe her. I just couldn't imagine a 10-year-old little girl being kidnapped, taken away from everything that she knows. The only words I can describe are strong, resilient, courageous.

ALLEN: Years after her father first told her of her link to Priscilla , Thomalind and her husband, Antwan , had the almost unheard of opportunity to travel back through her family history to Sierra Leone . The government had learned of her story and invited her to her ancestral home.

Ms. POLITE: Thank you.

ALLEN: And Joe Opala , the historian who has spent years exploring the history of the slave trade from Bunce Island , was there to meet her.

Ms. POLITE: I wish that my father, who started this, could have been here with me, and I vow to represent him and represent my family and represent Priscilla . And I don't think I can say anymore right now. Thank you. That was mind blowing, to be referred to as a little girl who really did exist, you know, who is my ancestor, and to know that the people of Sierra Leone were seeing her spirit. It was sincere, it was real. Just to believe that, you know, Priscilla was here. I'm actually here where she was.

ALLEN: And, of course, she just had to see for herself that powerful and disturbing place, Bunce Island .

Ms. POLITE: Thank you.

ALLEN: Opala took her to the exact spot where his research suggests Priscilla would have been held.

Mr. OPALA: This is the women's and children's area. We cannot rule out that Priscilla was imprisoned in this room. If it's true then they most likely would have taken her first out the door we just came in.

Ms. POLITE: I felt a mix of emotions. I felt, you know, sadness. I felt loneliness, you know, that, you know, gosh, she might have been here by herself. I felt anger, you know, that this happened.

ALLEN: Edward Ball believes as many as 100,000 African- Americans are descendants of slaves his ancestors owned, just like Thomalind and her family . What did you feel like you were giving them?

Mr. BALL: I wanted to give something back, some token, some acknowledgment. Some acknowledgment of what they'd been through.

Ms. POLITE: Like my grandmother always told me, you have to embrace the things that have happened in the past, good and bad, and learn from them so that you can understand the present day and prepare for your future. They gave me this like the very first or second day.

ALLEN: These days Thomalind and her family lead a very private life , for the most part, staying out of the public spotlight, always mindful of their incredible family story.

Ms. POLITE: There are times when I get discouraged with different things that are going on in my life, and I really do stop and I say to myself, come on, Thomalind , look at your situation and look at what your great-great-great-great-great grandmother endured. That strength is passed down definitely through the generations and I have to display that.

WILLIAMS: What a powerful story. Ron , we talk about Black History Month , which we're in the middle of, this is black history .

ALLEN: Mm-hmm.

WILLIAMS: How is this the only one documented thread all the way through?

ALLEN: Well, it's the Ball family papers. It seems to be the most intact collection of papers from that era. So many slave owners burned their papers, destroyed them during the Civil War because they didn't want to get caught with them. The Balls were meticulous record keepers. And these are the birth certificates, the marriage certificates that so many other people have that black people didn't have. We were property back then before emancipation. That's the key to it. And the Martins are talking about this for the first time now because they feel more comfortable with all this. They're a very private family . They've known this for some time, but this is the first time they're sharing this with the public, and that trip to Sierra Leone . They have young children. They didn't want to be icons. They have a very rare story, and now they're really ready to step forward and share it.

WILLIAMS: Thank you for telling it. Ron Allen here with us.

Know Your Capitalist Law--

The 13th Amendment: 

You are "Free" Except When In Prison

 

Imprisoning some 2.1 million US citizens makes the prison-industrial system, the most profitable domestic industrial sector for the past 20 years. Whether the prisoners are working for Victoria's Secret or ATT or just being warehoused in privatized prisons, the Capitalist Class is benefiting at profit margins far greater than within most of the other industrial sectors.

Still Separate, Still Unequal: Racism, Class and the Attack on Public Education

With Brian Jones

Still Separate, Still Unequal: Racism, Class and the Attack on Public Education, with Brian Jones from N Alexander on Vimeo.

Public education is under an unprecedented attack. The powerful people who want to privatize our schools are using many different means: charter schools, mayoral control, high stakes standardized testing, school closures, merit pay and attacking teacher unions are all a part of this assault. Often, these "reformers" claim that the sweeping changes they want will bring genuine educational justice for communities that have long been underserved -- especially for African American families. But will privatization actually create racial justice?

Or will it exacerbate the problem? Will these "reforms" strengthen the educational rights of students and parents, or weaken them? Will turning education over to the free market lead to less segregated schools, or more so? Who is behind the effort to privatize education and why are they pursuing these changes? Is there an alternative way to reform our public schools?

Brian Jones is a teacher, actor, and activist in New York City. He is the co-narrator of the film, The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman, and a contributing author to the new book, Education and Capitalism: Struggles for Learning and Liberation: http://www.haymarketbooks.org/pb/Education-and-Capitalism

New half-hour Labor Beat video exposes hypocrisy and lies behind the CPS 2012 Hit List

What we see unfolding in the struggle to have PeoplePower govern Chicago Public Schools is being replicated in ALL major US urban centers. One difference  from all the other urban schools is that Chicago has a progressive teacher union leadership to help advance the struggle to replace corporate privatizing policies with a human rights-based antiracist education system that directly involves all parents and students.

Watch and learn.-- SEA

David Vance - February 06, 2012-substancenews.net

A new video has been released by Chicago's Labor Beat showing the massive protests against what critics are calling the "2012 Hit List" of schools facing closing, phase out, co-location, or "turnaround." The lengthy film discusses the entire process taking place during the 2011 – 2012 school year. The URL for the video is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=od0hO0Ai9ww
Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis speaking to the crowd protesting against the turnaround proposed for Marquette Elementary School during the march and rally on the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. holiday (January 16, 2012). Substance photo by Sharon Schmidt.



The video, which features Substance News reporter George N. Schmidt narrating the background of the struggle and Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis addressing a march and rally, includes interviews with teachers and students and dramatic footage from the hearings and protests against what people are calling the "2012 Hit List."






Shown among the video footage are interviews with the "Rent A Protesters" who showed up at most of the hearings after having been paid through churches subsidized, in the opinion of critics, by Mayor Rahm Emanuel.







The video pivots back and forth from the Martin Luther King holiday march at Marquette Elementary School to descriptions of the history and context of how the current situation developed. A lengthy description by one Marquette teacher goes over how the Chicago Board of Education, under four “Chief Executive Officers” since mayoral control began in 1995, has sabotaged Marquette Elementary. But as the video shows, the sabotage of Marquette was taking place at all of the schools on the 2012 Hit List during the same time, and the slander against the teachers and people of Marquette and the other nine schools continues, as CPS and Chicago's mayor try to label the schools as "failing schools" — rather than the society as a failing society which leaves millions of children in dire poverty (and in many cases serious danger).







One of the aspects of the hypocrisy of Chicago's latest attack on the city's public schools comes out as parents, students and teachers from the schools constantly remind the hearing officers and the public of the danger the students will face when the schools face changes. For the schools that are slated to "close" (in one form or another) that danger will be in forcing those children to cross communities to get to their new schools. For the schools facing "turnaround", the danger comes because by replacing teachers and other staff who know the communities with outsiders (supposedly trained in superior methods of teaching), the schools are left vulnerable to the kinds of drug gang problems that were often kept at bay by the flimsiest protections.





Although many people speak about the dangers facing the children, the citywide summary is provided by Substance reporter George Schmidt, who served as Director of Security and Safety at the Chicago Teachers Union from 2002 through 2004. Schmidt's job was to develop programs to keep the city's drug gangs at bay around the city's public schools. He discusses how the city covers up the fact that it has one of the most serious drug gang problems in the USA, noting that parts of the real Chicago are like scenes out of the fictional HBO movie "The Wire."







Among the many witnesses warning against the closing of the schools and the implementation of the 2012 Hit List are Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis and a number of prominent political leaders. In fact, one of the signal facts of the current debate is that not one political leader — from local aldermen to Congressmen — had spoken in support of the 2012 Hit List, while dozens have spoken out against Mayor Rahm Emanuel's plans.





The protests that are featured are against all of the schools on the 2012 Hit List, those slated for closing and those facing "turnaround."








The Labor Beat introduction to the video states:








“During January and February of 2012 the Chicago Public Schools, pressured by recent state law to do so, held open hearings on the question of whether to close or turnaround targeted schools in minority and low-income areas of the city. But, as George Schmidt (Substancenews.net) points out, 'the hearings are basically show trials...in a way [they] are a cruel joke played upon the people from the community.'







“Adding to the fact that CPS has already secretly made their decisions before the 'hearings', another underhanded scheme has been exposed. Paid 'protesters' were bussed in to support the school board's view that the schools should be closed or turned around.







“The rent-a-protester ploy was originally unearthed by Substancenews.net in September of 2011, and then in January, 2012 it was picked up by Chicago's corporate media, as the scandal could no longer be ignored. We present dramatic footage exposing the rent-a-protesters, along with scenes from the hearings and demonstrations defending public education.





"Interviews and speeches include: George Schmidt, reporter for Substancenews.net; Karen Lewis, President of Chicago Teachers Union; Marcy Hardaloupas, teacher at Marquette School; Chris Beauford, Generation Y/Southwest Youth Collaborative Center for Change; Katrina Richard, teacher at Dyett H.S.; Rico Gutstein, Prof. in Curriculum and Instruction at University of Illinois-Chicago; Martin Ritter, organizer, Chicago Teachers Union; Mark Carter, community activist. "










[Length - 26:15. Produced by Labor Beat. Labor Beat is a CAN TV Community Partner. Labor Beat is a non-profit 501(c)(3) member of IBEW 1220. Views are those of the producer Labor Beat. For info: mail@laborbeat.org, www.laborbeat.org. 312-226-3330. For other Labor Beat videos, visit YouTube and search "Labor Beat". On Chicago CAN TV Channel 19, Thursdays 9:30 pm; Fridays 4:30 pm. Labor Beat has regular cable slots in Chicago, Evanston, Rockford, Urbana, IL; Philadelphia, PA; Princeton, NJ; and Rochester, NY. For more detailed information, send us a request at mail@laborbeat.org…”]

LibroTraficante!

 

Wet Books: Smuggling Banned Literature Back Into Arizona 

A caravan of cars, full of activists and writers will be heading soon from Houston, Texas, to Tucson, Arizona. 

It's cargo: books that were allegedly banned from the Tucson Unified School District (TUSD). The event, called 'Librotraficante' --which translates from Spanish to 'BookTrafficker'-- is set to take place between March 12th-18th. Among the participants of the caravan will be some of the authors whose books were banned in Arizona, together with advocates concerned with preserving First Amendment rights of equal protection and freedom of speech, according to the event's website.

It sounds romantic--the ultimate anti-establishment literary movement, people fighting for their right to access intellectual material. It was a slew of controversial events surrounding ethnic-studies which prompted the convoy.

The 'Librotraficante' caravan is instigated by the alleged banning of books from Mexican-American Studies (MAS) programs by the Tuscon Unified School District (TUSD) earlier this month. Amid protests, these ethnic-studies programs were suspended after Arizona State Superintendent John Huppenthal ruled that the high school MAS courses were in direct violation to ARS 15-112, a segment of the controversial law Arizona HB 2281, signed by Gov. Jan Brewer in 2010, according to a TUSD press release. 

ARS 15-112 focuses on "prohibited courses and classes; enforcement" and it states that a program in a school district or charter school in Arizona shall not:

• Promote the overthrow of the United States government.
• Promote resentment toward a race or class of people.
• Are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group.
• Advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.

Based on this criteria, TUSD suspended its MAS program onJanuary 10th. The reaction was immediate, and many TUSD students, 60% of which are of Mexican descent, fled the streets in protest.

But further controversy erupted after books from the Tucson High Magnet School--part of TUSD-- were removed from the MAS course while the class was in motion, in the presence of young students.

There is a debate over the semantics, and over who is to blame for the spectacle of books being taken out of the students hands. 

Cara Rene, the Communication Director of TUSD, said in an email sent yesterday to The Huffington Post that "there is not book ban."

In a press release issued by the school it states that the "books were removed from classrooms because the curriculum has changed in accordance with the ruling from the state superintendent."

The confiscation of books only increased the uproar caused across the state by the law.
"This has been brewing for about a year," said Tony Diaz, founder of Nuestra Palabra, an organization that promotes Latino literature and leader of 'Librotraficantes', to the The Colorado Independent.
 
"The boiling point was actually canceling the classes and quantifying the books. What really offended us down to our soul - they took the books out of the classes in front of the kids and boxed them up, and that was such a cultural offense we felt we had to do something."

Some of the titles that were taken away from the class were:

• '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
• 'Occupied America: A History of Chicanos' by Rodolfo Acuna
• 'Pedagogy of the Oppressed' by Paulo Freire
• 'Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years' by Bill Bigelow

The list of banned books is extensive, and it includes important Latino authors and activists' books that are being banished from classrooms. 

Nicolàs Kanellos, Brown Foundation Professor of Hispanic Studies at University of Houston and Director of Arte Público Press (APP), the largest publisher of contemporary U.S. Latino literature, labelled Corky Gonzales as one of the "most important civil rights leaders," . And, Professor Emeritus Rudy Acuña is a respected, well-known and distinguished historian of Latinos in the United States. 

In response to the removal of these books, Diaz and other activists are now going to smuggle them back into the state. 

"We have to be Librotraficantes," Diaz said. "We have to become outlaws again. We're going to take all the 'wet books' that are illegal in Arizona back across the border."
Banned authors who will participate in the 'Librotraficante' caravan include Sandra Cisneros, Guggenheim Fellow Dagoberto Gilb and best-selling author Luis Alberto Urrea.

According to 'Librotraficante's' website, the goal of the caravan is to raise awareness regarding Latino Studies being banned in Arizona, promote books of banned Latino authors and "celebrate many cultures: children of the American Dream must unite to preserve the civil rights of all Americans."

 

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!

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.
------------------------

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
---------------------------------------
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."

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.

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

"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.

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

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.

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

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.

---------------------------------

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.