Northam Democrats and the Condescending Bigotry of Lowered Expectations
Once again, Virginia Democrats weaponize race in order to strive for mediocrity.
Americans, quipped Winston Churchill, can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted. So too, it seems, can RPV’s State Central Committee after a pendant meeting on Sunday that will permit religious persons to vote on Friday between 3pm and 6pm.
There is also a provision that ballots will be sent via armed guard to an undisclosed location in or near Richmond for ballot integrity purposes. Let’s hope we are talking off-duty police officers rather than (ahem) alternatives.
If you haven’t introduced yourself to John McWhorter, you should.
McWhorter is a linguist and an associate professor of English at Columbia University, but just might be one of the finest American linguists alive today. His book Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue is a short book, but perhaps one of the most well-written discourses on the English language of the last 50 years. What Language Is remains one of those post-Esperanto books discussing how language develops and is employed in nothing short of a tour de force (emphasis on tour).
Yet McWhorter’s books and essays on race relations are equally powerful, if not for their perspective, then certainly for the path that he demonstrates moving forward. Authentically Black was written in 2003, but could just as easily have been written today. His earlier book, Losing the Race was a self-describe series of essays on “black self-sabotage” and the culture of self-defeatism that was my first and earliest introduction to McWhorter’s writing having worked in the empowerment movement in the late 1990s. His latest book, Nine Nasty Words, certainly evokes the late comedian George Carlin and will be published in May.
McWhorter’s current essays on Substack — all directed towards puritannically-inclined white progressives and their intentional abuse and manipulation of black suffering for political ends — are intended as a draft for a future publication, much how McWhorter collected his thoughts for Authentically Black.
In short, McWhorter thoughts on race relations seeks to focus on suffering as a path towards excellence and the standards of aristos.
Everything else is divestment.
Of course, this isn’t stopping the prevailing sentiment among the purveyors (and distorters) of Critical Race Theory.
Virginia Governor Ralph Northam (D) doesn’t exactly have a great record when it comes to race relations. Indeed, his long effort to prove to the rest of the world that he isn’t that racist is producing a series of actions that merely trim the institutions that have failed minority communities.
Take a statue down here, remove a plaque there, but at the end of the day Planned Parenthood and Clean Virginia are going to boost two white males for the most powerful positions — McAuliffe for Governor and Herring for Attorney General — while giving the least powerful and least influential position to a BIPOC (black and/or indigenous person of color).
In short, the Byrd Machine is electing to put on the airs of wokeness, but when it comes to who is calling the shots? Virginia’s Democratic elite doesn’t trust minorities with anything approaching true power.
Of course, if there is power in education? Virginia’s Democrats don’t seem terribly interested in extending such power in any meaningful way to our students.
Which is probably why the soft bigotry of lower expectations is rearing its head in the Virginia Department of Education (again) with a proposal that borders on the condescending.
In short, any accelerated math program before 11th grade? GONE.
Of course, this is precisely the sort of condescension against which McWhorter and his fellow travelers bristle with something akin to contempt.
The organization 1776Unites, founded by my mentor and model Bob Woodson, has tweeted out a video where various black people decry a now fashionable idea that “whiteness” includes being smart. As in, precise, objective, fond of the written word, oriented towards dispassion, on time.
Those things are all manifestations of intelligence, vigilance, discipline. But according to our Elect folk, we black people are best off channeling our Crazy Badass Mothafucka. Because that’s more “authentic.” And, I get the feeling, fun to watch.
Because so many think that the battle that I and others are waging against Critical Race Theory’s transmogrification into education for children is an obsession with something that isn’t a real problem, I want to explore a bit. Someone I deeply respect not long ago surmised to me that the idea that black kids should be exempt from real standards is something being promulgated via mere paper “handouts,” and that the real problem is censorship from the right. I just don’t think so.
McWhorter points to this 2 minute video as an introduction to a wider argument that is entirely worth your time:
Specifically, what McWhorter is seeking to challenge here is the idea of excellence is something meant for only white people. Or worse, that black people (or minorities in general) are somehow incapable of achieving such excellence:
This view of precision and detachment as white is a view about, more economically, reason. The idea is that to master close reasoning is suspect. It is exactly the roots of the “Math is Racist” notion, and if you want a whiff of how religiously people can glom on to such ideas, take a look at my Twitter feed in the week after I posted about that here.
This right here is where honest objections to Critical Race Theory arise, regardless of racial background or political inclination.
That the color of one’s skin holds some sort of deterministic and invincible diktat on your capacity of excellence should be anathema. It is racist. Such sentiment is bigotry. That it is embraced by self-declared “progressive” doesn’t make the racism or bigotry — or more insidious, that old Byrd Machine condescension — any better.
To borrow McWhorter’s sentiment:
Any white person who embraces the idea that precision is “white” is, quite simply, a bigot.
I pity them because what made them a bigot was infection by a virus idea.
Of course, McWhorter’s target in all of this is nothing more than Ibram Kendi’s How To Be An Anti-Racist — another short book that (yes) you should read if for no other reason than to understand where this strain of Critical Race Theory is coming from.
I’ll summarize the finer points of CRT:
That the identities that divide us are social constructs created by institutions, designed to divide and control wide swaths of humanity — and none more pernicious than race.
That these institutions are irredeemably flawed, violent, and destructive to the integrity of both the individual and society and must be reimagined, reconstructed, and reoriented to the common good.
None of this sounds terrible, right?
Think for a second about public education. As conservatives, we struggle against this institution every day. Try being a conservative and an educator; find out what happens. Try being a Christian student in a public school and listen intently as your values and ideas are openly mocked by students and teachers alike.
Conservatives have pointed to the institution of public education as failing our families for over nearly five decades running. Yet when black families do likewise and clamor for charter schools, different curricula that emphasizes their values and their perspectives on history, and so forth.
That’s the influence of critical theory among those struggling against the old Byrd-era institutions we have created in Virginia.
What Kendi et al. are asking for is a critical rethink of the institutions writ large. Where Kendi separates from McWhorter — and I suspect, most Americans — is that Kendi desperately wants the new institutions remade in the likeness and image of CRT to be imposed upon others. All of us together, so to speak. Which is why advanced classes are the problem, because those who are already ahead (and benefiting from the institutions) are predominantly white or Asian, predominantly middle or upper class, and predominantly beneficiaries of the present day meritocracy.
Yet this is where McWhorter et al. bristle at the idea of the lowest common denominator as the new standard for the demos. The problem with socialism, after all, is that everyone gets a pair of shoes but they are all the wrong size. So too with education when young minds are crammed into an intellectual Bed of Procrustes in the hopes that this alone will create the equity that the world-builders will use as a shortcut to justice.
The word education has a Latin root, namely to lead forth (ex ducare). What Kendi and the advocates of Critical Race Theory are asking for is not a leading forth, but a dumbing down.
Where Northam and his Department of Education are failing is that — instead of offering opportunities for advancement — they are quite literally lowering the standards for excellence. By cramming every student into their own Bed of Procrustes, some students are stretched beyond their capacities; others have their legs chopped off during their most critical and formative years of development.
The grand solution? Student vouchers where students can go be excellent wherever their parents choose to have their children educated.
Now one might think that this would be music to the ears of any CRT advocate seeking the reinvention and reimagining of the institutions. Yet despite the growing popularity of school choice and student vouchers in a world run ragged by COVID? Progressives and the CRT advocates leading them by the nose are allergic to such a solution, albeit for different purposes. For the CRT professionals, it defeats the purpose of reimagining all of the institutions; for the progressives, it defeats the purpose of controlling the institutions.
That’s how you get two white guys for the Democratic nod for the positions that matter, and one BIPOC for the Governor Lite position that doesn’t matter.
So how should conservatives respond?
One method is to simply pay the left back in their own coin and impose our will. Which means becoming everything the Democrats peg us to be and forcing Christian values into the classroom, imposing a version of history along the lines of the 1776 Project (not to be confused with McWhorter’s 1776 Unites), and letting the chips fall where they may.
Another method?
Opt for freedom.
A system of student vouchers backed with state testing standards such as the Standards of Learning would be ideal. Just the state dollars would do; let the federal dollars stay with public education.
That way, the safety net sees a net increase (because they get federal dollars for children they never have to educate) while private and parochial schools rip up the old anti-Catholic and bigoted Blaine Amendments. Charter schools to help failing public schools would still get the full and deserved dose.
Yet the wider criticism that McWhorter offers to The Elect (his term for the postmodern Puritans) — and it is one hell of a critique — is that this chase for equity as a substitute for and shortcut towards justice isn’t justice at all. Instead, it is the substitution of a meritocracy for a mediocrity creating new injustices, prejudices, bigotries and partialities of their own.
Virginia Republicans would be well served to address the taproot of what Critical Race Theory represents, if for no other reason than we share its complaints.
In contrast, Virginia Democrats own every inch of the present-day failure. No degree of over-the-top virtue signaling should save them from the racist and bigoted Byrd Machine era institutions they continue to preside over for over five decades. Nor should we trust them with so-called reforms.
Reshuffling the deck doesn’t improve the results if the dealer never changes and the house always wins. We have tried that before. It failed.
Time for a new dealer and a new house. School choice offers both.
In the best spirit of Jack Kemp and the empowerment movement, the best way to achieve equity and justice in this world is not going to be the heavy handed mandatum of the state in pursuit of the mediocre, but rather a respect for the inherent libertas of families to lead their own children forward in pursuit of their idea of excellence.
That Virginia Democrats refuse to trust minority students and underprivileged families with their own destinies isn’t just bigotry; it’s asinine paternalism and brutally stupid condescension from bureaucrats too comfortable with their jobs to divorce themselves from worn out 19th century mentalities — simple as that.
Conservatives see it.
Progressives see it.
Minority families see it.
Faith traditions see it.
Our students live it everyday.
Maybe trusting families rather than systems accomplishes more than the bureaucrats who subsist on mediocrity would produce the results most Americans can’t seem to get from one-size-fits-all public education?
Maybe the platitudes are worn out Soviet-era groupthink? Maybe the bureaucrats are the whip-and-buggy? Maybe our children deserve better than a 19th century methods attached to 20th century funding mechanism attempting to produce a 21st century education? Maybe minority voices deserve excellent options rather than enforced mediocrity from Byrd Machine bureaucrats?
Perhaps it is time to listen to voices such as McWhorter who see the problem clearly and then take the advice that lends itself to excellence without partiality, rather than the partial and obstinate insistence of those-who-know-best.
All else is condescension. Frankly, I’m tired of it — we should be bolder in saying so.
Shaun Kenney is the editor of The Republican Standard, former chairman of the Board of Supervisors for Fluvanna County, and a former executive director of the Republican Party of Virginia.