by Xen

Created on: May 01, 2010   Last Updated: May 02, 2010

I hate that the Advanced Placement classes where I substitute teach are disproportionately peopled by Caucasian children. I hate much more that I notice. (If it helps any, I am apparently sexist as well, because girls outnumber boys two to one in any advanced classes and I am quick to trot out the factoid that they mature faster.) And I hate most that, in researching this, I realize how common this complaint is, how honors classes have been accused of being a front for re-segregation for exactly this observation.

I don't want race to matter so much (though I could do without Williams Syndrome, which deletes a few genes to prevent children from caring about race but adds in cardiovascular and developmental problems). It shouldn't. Aside from a few genetic maladies (sickle cell anemia) or assets (Japanese people can digest seaweed), there are very few physiological differences between people based on their ancestral origin and almost none related to cognitive ability. (As point of fact, Jared Diamond argues in Guns, Germs, and Steel that aboriginal people still living primitively should be more intelligent because they still have the evolutionary strain of survival thinning out the dullards.) The human race is so related (thanks probably to the Toba Blast, which reduced the breeding population of humans to a few thousand) that incest is still a necessary taboo, something that plagues few other species that aren't selectively bred by us. You are likely more related to your neighbor, no matter whether they are ecru or charcoal, than your mutt is to his mutt. As such, there is no reason you should assume said neighbor is a so very different from you in the ways that matter. Most importantly, there is no reason the neighbor should believe in his racial own supremacy or inferiority.

This reduces the differences to cultural and societal, students who are told that they are the wrong color and thereby can't learn. Once they have internalized this lesson, they will seek to make school hell for anyone around them, because it is better to be seen as bad than stupid. Learning isn't something they feel allowed to do, unless it is what mass media saturates their mind to believe; that they should know how to break into a car, the street value of ten variants of narcotics, and where to buy a gun with no questions asked. Of course, the students aren't thugs, however much they treat prison as their destiny in the way they ought to regard college, but they proselytize

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