Coleman Hughes and “The End of Race Politics”: Necessary but not Sufficient
Yes, the racial divide in the U.S. is not nearly as wide as the wokies say. No, Coleman Hughes does not have all the answers.
Coleman Hughes’ new book The End of Race Politics Arguments for a Colorblind America is deservedly getting high praise as an antidote to all the woke posturing over the past decade. In my opinion, the questions he asks are excellent, but the answers come across as “incomplete”, which is not surprising. As I think I’ve said before, questions that are easy to answer aren’t worth a book. This post, which is rather a long one, for the most part runs parallel to Hughes’ narrative rather than commenting on it, providing alternatives more often than simple criticism.
Hughes’ first big question—and it’s a very good one—is “why now?” Why, after decades of progress, have we reached a point when the rancor over racial issues has been escalating—with more and more people heading towards angry extremes, with apocalyptic imagery quite popular on the far ends of the political spectrum. What happened?
Hughes cites a 2021 Gallup poll charting black-white attitudes on the status of race relations in the U.S. since 2001 as “is perhaps the single most shocking graph relating to American race relations that I am aware of.” According to the poll, in 2001, 70% of black adults and 62% of white adults thought race relations in the U.S. were either “very” or “fairly” good. Twenty years later, the figures had fallen to 33% and 43%, respectively. Again, what happened?
Hughes comes up with a couple of “big picture” arguments—the end of the Cold War, depriving Americans of a “common enemy” and the decline of Christianity—that I don’t think explain much. I agree that the end of the Cold War destabilized American politics—in fact, I have complained about it endlessly (and I mean endlessly) but, frankly, I don’t see the connection. The Cold War ended circa 1990, after all, and the sharp decline in the “very” or “fairly good” numbers doesn’t occur until 2013.
The same applies with regard to the decline of Christianity. The old-fashioned, openly segregationist south was intensely Christian, and intensely racist, at the same time. The decline of Christianity, and the accompanying revolutions in sexual mores that have occurred since 1960, have had enormous effects on American society, but I don’t see them as contributing to the sharp change in attitudes that occurred in 2013. Hughes says
“It’s not an exaggeration to say that whatever happened after 2013 represents the biggest setback in American race relations in at least a generation. So what happened? Why did people’s attitudes toward race relations take a nosedive in 2013? We can rule out a few explanations. It probably was not the election of President Obama, since he presided over five years of good race relations. And it probably wasn’t President Trump either, as the downward trend began three years before he was elected, and hasn’t reversed itself since his departure from office.”
Instead, says Hughes,
“The more plausible explanation is that 2013 is about the time that a critical mass of Americans had two pieces of tech: camera-enabled smartphones and social media. The widespread use of social media and smartphones increased the speed at which content could spread throughout the world. But not all content was able to take advantage of this development equally. Neoracist ideas were able to take advantage of this development in a way that other ideas could not.”
Photos and video taken with body cameras and smartphones certainly provided “clear and convincing” proof of police brutality, while the continuing expansion of social media allowed people to communicate viciously and anonymously in an ever-increasing cycle, but I think there is more to the story.
First, there is the “back story”—latent factors that would, I think, come increasingly in play once the “turning point” in 2013 had been passed. Ever since the beginning of the feminist revolution as far back as 1970,1 the American school system started to become the setting for an explicit campaign of cultural indoctrination, as the “habits” of patriarchal oppression were deliberately corrected: No one has the “right” to snap your bra or pat your ass. No one has the right to embarrass you with a crass remark, a dirty joke, or any form of sexual innuendo. By the 2000s, of course, the list of “do nots” was included to protect the sensibilities of gay students: No one has the right to call you a queer, or speak in a lisp in your presence. And so on.
None of this was entirely new. The use of racial and ethnic epithets became suspect and then banned during the 1960s, though the rapidity with which this occurred varied greatly according to region. Much of the purpose of the Anti-Defamation League, founded in 1913, was to guard against such “microaggressions” as using the word “Jew” as either an adjective or verb, and quite correctly, too, for describing a Jewish author as a “Jew writer” is a very obvious act of antisemitism, and anyone who speaks or writes that way and insists that they “didn’t mean anything” by it is a liar and an antisemite.
But the scope of banned behavior kept growing throughout the 2000s. Any sort of insult—making fun of someone for being fat, or stupid, or ugly—something children (and adults) have been doing for millennia—was similarly condemned. And anything that made anyone feel emotionally threatened meant that they felt “unsafe”, which “meant” that they also felt physically unsafe, and it was wrong to make anyone feel unsafe.
The whole notion that students have an “inalienable right” to feel safe, whatever that meant, was given enormous force by the terrible pattern of school shootings (and the terrible pattern of cowardly police responses to those shootings) that plagued the country starting in 1998. The “zero tolerances” that so many schools instituted—resulting, for example, in students being sent home for having aspirin—were instituted, not because school officials were stupid, but because parents demanded them. It became “easy” to commix and equate the notion of “emotional safety” with that of physical safety, particularly when fighting the forces of patriarchal capitalist oppression, a notion that itself had an increasing emotional attraction to many teachers at all levels, from elementary to graduate, who were increasingly disgusted by the gigantic fortunes compiled by the lords of the digital world, whom they regarded as their moral inferiors, and entirely undeserving of the enormous power they wielded in society. This attitude was enormously intensified after the stock market collapse in 2008, and the continuing hard times that lasted into the sixth year of Barack Obama’s presidency.
Given the perversity of human nature, of course, tools of defense against harassment and bullying were quickly converted into tools of offense: people who made people feel “unsafe” deserved themselves to be made to feel “unsafe”. The people who argued for these changes saw themselves as revolutionaries because, to a certain extent, they were revolutionaries, seeking to overturn the status quo, and necessarily rejecting the validity of the past in toto. And so the upholders of the past, who very often were in positions of authority, had to be discredited and removed from power, “by any means necessary”.
It is the “essence” of revolutionary thought that it is self-validating. The notion that “the Revolution” should have to submit to the judgment of any supposed outside—outside and superior—authority, particularly such devices of bourgeois oppression as free inquiry and majority rule, is anathema to the true revolutionary. Indeed, such devices must themselves be overcome by any means necessary.
In a (very) long post, CRT v. Anti-CRT: Wait, Wait! You’re BOTH Right! Occasionally., I discussed how both the Vietnam War and the racial crisis of the 1960s led to the radicalization of the American academy, and the spread of “revolutionary” intolerance, as well as how the development of new fields of study, devoted to “victims” of the oppressive past—blacks, women, homosexuals, Hispanics, and American Indians, for example—contributed to an increasing rejection of the ideal of free inquiry in the academy: instead, each of these fields constituted a world unto itself. Outsiders were not allowed to offer criticisms. Intellectual segregation was soon reinforced with physical segregation as well. Once established, of course, these intellectual fiefdoms had every reason to seek to maintain themselves in perpetuity.2
It is often said that in the academy the battles are so fierce because the stakes are so small, but this bon mot is more clever than accurate; in fact, the battles are so fierce because the world is so small. For someone to move up, in nine cases out of ten, someone else must move out. And, also in nine cases out of ten, a lever must be supplied.
The Obama administration had already provided such a lever, in the form of the infamous 19-page, single-spaced “Dear Colleague” letter issued by the Office of Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Education on April 4, 2011, that “ordered” colleges and universities to drastically limit the ability of students charged with sexual harassment (very broadly defined) to defend themselves against disciplinary action, including expulsion. The letter was a gross abuse of bureaucratic power, because it had not gone through the legal process necessary for the issuance of an actual regulation, which would have given it legal force, yet clearly the Obama administration intended to aggressively punish any college or university so temerarious as to defy its will.3
On January 8, 2014 the Obama administration issued another “Dear Colleague” letter, from the Offices of Civil Rights of both the Departments of Education and Justice, Overview Of Racial Disparities In The Administration Of School Discipline, asserting the authority of the federal government over any policies in public and private elementary and secondary schools that had “disparate impacts” on racial groups, a claim skeptically assessed in this paper by Gail Heriot and Alison Somin, a publication of the University of San Diego School of Law. This second letter reflected a conviction prevalent among liberal educators that all disparities disfavoring students from marginalized populations were conclusive proof of discrimination, effectively demanding that schools eliminate such disparities regardless of the consequences. For example—and the particular issue at hand—if “too many” black students were being punished for disrupting class, black students should be held to a lower standard of behavior than other students, regardless of the consequences for class discipline and student performance.
The administration’s policies, which of course could also be found at the state and local level wherever liberals were in control, reflected the lessons learned by President Obama at Harvard Law School, that “due process” is the tool of the ruling class and should be “corrected,” when the stakes are high, by what one could call a “mild” form of revolutionary justice,4 one that leaves the accused sans career and reputation, even though the head, at least, remains in place.
However, the first great racial controversy of the Obama years, not even mentioned by Hughes, emerged from the “bottom” rather than the top—the shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin by 28-year-old George Zimmerman on Feb. 26, 2012, an incident that was not recorded on video but became the subject of intense controversy first when it was learned that the police had closed the investigation of the fatal shooting of an unarmed black man by an armed white man entirely on the basis of the testimony of the shooter, for there were no other eyewitnesses. Zimmerman then was indicted and brought to trial, resulting, of course, in acquittal, which I believe stunned millions of black Americans and distressed millions of white ones as well.
For many black Americans, I think, this was not the sort of thing that was supposed to happen in Barack Obama’s America. To my mind, the initial handling of the case—that is to say, not bringing the shooting before a grand jury—showed clear evidence of racial prejudice. The police said that there was no evidence to contradict Zimmerman’s claim of self-defense, but of course there wasn’t, because there were no eyewitnesses other than Zimmerman himself. Zimmerman said that Martin attacked him. Was that true? Zimmerman said that he only drew and shot Martin when Martin tried to take his gun. Was that true? Or was it Zimmerman who started the fight and Zimmerman who, discovering that he was losing, stepped back and then shot Martin out of anger rather than in an act of self-defense? The physical evidence—Zimmerman suffered a broken nose and had contusions on his face—was “consistent” with both stories, and Zimmerman had “every reason” to offer false testimony.
But, at the same time, the eventual acquittal, on July 13, 2013, was “reasonable” as well—that is to say, Zimmerman’s account was believable, and consistent with the physical evidence, and thus a reasonable doubt existed as to his guilt, and under the centuries-old tradition of Anglo-American law, which I support, it should be hard, not easy, to deprive a human being of his freedom, and the high standard set for conviction should not be diminished simply because the allegations against the accused are emotionally upsetting.
The deep anger the verdict provoked was a reflection, in my opinion, of the deep emotional divisions that persist between black and white, regardless of the passage of time, and regardless of the improvements in racial relations in the U.S. that Hughes correctly stresses. The disparate reactions to the acquittal of O. J. Simpson all the way back in 1995 tell a similar story, with many—though not all—black Americans feeling that the outcome was “just”: the state failed to meet its burden of proof. There was “reasonable doubt” as to Simpson’s guilt, and thus Justice demanded that he be set free. Most white Americans, I think, felt the other way. In the Trayvon Martin case, the reactions were largely flipped.
President Obama, I am afraid, did not help matters with the statement he delivered in response to the verdict in the case:
“The judge conducted the trial in a professional manner. The prosecution and the defense made their arguments. The juries were properly instructed that in a case such as this reasonable doubt was relevant, and they rendered a verdict. And once the jury has spoken, that's how our system works. But I did want to just talk a little bit about context and how people have responded to it and how people are feeling.
“You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago. And when you think about why, in the African American community at least, there’s a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it’s important to recognize that the African American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn’t go away.
“There are very few African American men in this country who haven't had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me. There are very few African American men who haven't had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me -- at least before I was a senator. There are very few African Americans who haven't had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off. That happens often.”
I think it was painfully self-indulgent of the president to personalize the case the way he did. No president—and indeed no public official—would dream of uttering such commentary if a black man had killed a white man. Furthermore, in his self-righteousness the president conflated several issues. It is indeed likely that Zimmerman would not have confronted a white man under similar circumstances, but to imply—as the president very much did imply—that George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin because he was black and for no other reason, and that this oppression of “black bodies”—as the soon to be famous author Ta-Nehisi Coates put it—was and is, in effect, “the story of America”—that every time a black man walks down the street in America he is taking in his life in his hands, that everywhere he goes there is a white man who just might be waiting to kill him, a white man who would be allowed to walk free despite his crime—was an utterly grotesque exaggeration of the state of American society, a society where the great majority (about 90%) of black murder victims are killed by black assailants, and not white ones, a fact mentioned in public only by professional (or amateur) troublemakers like myself. Yet the fact that a black man who had experienced so little prejudice—had, in fact, enjoyed almost nothing but one triumph after another in his life—could have such bitter emotions strongly suggests that a deep emotional divide existed between black and white Americans of almost every class and region, however “irrational” that might be.
A few years later, the underlying assumptions of the president’s homily were contradicted by a study conducted by Harvard professor Roland Fryer, An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force, which a startled New York Times reviewed under the headline Surprising New Evidence Shows Bias in Police Use of Force but Not in Shootings. (Unsurprisingly, Fryer himself needed armed guards after publishing the study.) If the president had a response, well, I haven’t heard it.5
The exoneration of George Zimmerman was the trigger for the creation of the movement/organization Black Lives Matter, which for a few years seemed to be on the forefront of meaningful reform for police procedures, rolling back the “protections” written into police union contracts that made it virtually impossible to convict the police even in the case of wanton crimes. However, the movement quickly succumbed both to “wokeness”—for example, subjecting any well meaning person so morally blind as to say that “all lives matter” to furious denunciation—and later to simple self-dealing, including the purchase of a $6 million mansion dedicated to the private use of the BLM leadership and lavish “consulting fees” for connected insiders.
On August 9, 2014, police in Ferguson, Missouri shot and killed Michael Brown, a case producing even wider outrage and based on even more confused “facts”, for the basis of the initial outrage was the entirely false rumor that police had shot and killed Brown as he had his hands up, trying to surrender. As Hughes says, the rumor spread because it told people what they wanted to hear, leading almost immediately to wide-spread protests, many of which were marred by violence, arson, and looting, particularly when the investigation led to the exoneration of the police officers involved. Black activists like Al Sharpton, who came to Ferguson to offer “leadership” and organize its black citizens, were embarrassed to discover that blacks formed a majority of the city’s population, but almost none of them could be bothered to vote, leaving the control of the city in the hands of the white minority. The events of Ferguson demonstrated very poorly on the black citizens of that city, but of course few people wanted to draw that moral.
Hughes sees the Michael Brown riots as an illustration of the impact of smart phones, Twitter/X, and all the other means of digital mass communication that had spread across the country as a result of the new technologies. They certainly played a dramatic part in succeeding events—most notably the murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police six years later, on May 25, 2020, but I also feel that there was a sense of frustration among many in the black community that, now six years into the Obama administration, “nothing” had changed. According to the Urban Institute, in 2004 the wealth of the average black household stood at about $146,000, compared to $715,000 for a white family. In 2013, the figures were $102,000 and $717,000, respectively, and in 2016, $140,000 versus $919,000. Despite the worst recession in living memory, white families had increased their wealth by more than 30% in little more than a decade, while blacks were not yet back to square one.
Any many white Americans were not sharing in the rebound either. Many lost their homes, while others, who had bought out of desperation at the peak of the market circa 2004-2007, were stuck with mortgages that were likely to remain under water for decades. Thousands of college students at both the undergraduate and graduate level had taken out massive loans, which, it now seemed, they would never be able to pay off. Instead of reading about oppression, they were experiencing it. Their lives were being turned upside down, it seemed, at the behest of the super rich. History was happening to them, and it was teaching them that society was a hustle.
This disconnect manifested itself in a rebirth of “progressivism”—a rejection of the business-friendly neoliberalism of the Clinton/Obama era and a return to the cult of the rebel, defined by his alienation from society rather than his success within it. Society had rejected them, so they would return the favor.
Many liberal Democrats, not to mention the “progressives” to their left, had had their problems with President Obama almost from the beginning. Despite the euphoria over the election of the nation’s first black president, the slant of the administration, making very little effort to differentiate itself from the Wall Street friendly policies of the Clinton administration, now increasingly in disrepute, frustrated many. The great liberal centerpiece of the new administration—the Affordable Care Act—was a profound disappointment to the left, who were hoping for much more sweeping legislation—neither the “progressives” nor the “moderates” realizing that universal health insurance was something a large majority of the American electorate did not want any universal health insurance program at all—because they already had health insurance, and didn’t want to end up paying for health insurance for those who couldn’t afford it—which, of course, is the entire purpose of any universal plan, something liberals have never been willing to address. Since people ought to want universal health insurance, then that proves that they do want it.
The enormous political backlash that Obama’s entire legislative program provoked, coupled with the depth of economic recession, which caught the administration completely off guard, destroyed any hope of the great liberal renewal that liberals looked forward to when Obama was first elected. His subsequent efforts to please Wall Street by “making a deal” with Republicans in Congress to balance the budget, largely by trimming entitlements, only infuriated liberals all the more, because the “Tea Party”, hailed as “true conservatives” by establishment wise men like George Will, were in fact anarchic ignoramuses, quite willing to pull down the U.S. economy as long as they could bury Obama beneath it. Obama spent years running himself ragged trying to appease these mindless ruffians, while the mainstream press hooted and sneered, labeling him a pussy in the White House who couldn’t seal the deal.
At the same time that Obama was discrediting neoliberalism on economic issues, perhaps the grandest neoliberal project of all, education “reform”, a bipartisan effort that had been running for decades, was facing collapse. The call for educational reform was sounded all the way back in 1983 during the Reagan administration, when then Secretary of Education unleashed a fervid jeremiad on the subject titled A Nation at Risk. Seven years ago, I chronicled, a bit scornfully, the path of educational reform from that date until the advent of the Trump administration in a long post bearing the title A Limo at Risk, Part I: A skeptical view of American education reform, 1983-2017.
The first Bush administration championed the idea of educational reform more than any substance—more interested, I suspect, in reducing the political power of the teachers’ unions, which were at that time one of the most powerful lobbies in DC, than in actually improving educational outcomes. Opinion leaders on both the left and right naively blamed the entire U.S. educational system for not reflecting their own upper middle class values, which made a fetish of competition and credentialling. If the Bushites had bothered to read the reports that the U.S. Education Department was actually publishing, they would have discovered that black student performance in both mathematics and reading was climbing, from the early 1970s until the late 1980s, when it stalled.
The Clinton administration took up the cudgels for educational reform when it took office. While black scores had been rising, the gaps were still substantial—and static—and the movement of blacks into the higher reaches of the American economy remained slow. And, in fact, the Clinton reformers were almost as impatient with the teachers’ unions as the Bush people had been, seeing the unions as more interested in protecting the jobs of dysfunctional teachers than in improving the education of struggling kids.
The second Bush administration turned up the heat on American teachers and schools ten-fold with the passage of the largely bipartisan “No Child Left Behind Act”, which I wrote about for a living under contract with the Education Department from 2002 to 2015, discussing results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (“NAEP”), administered by the National Center for Education Statistics (“NCES”). “Nicklebee”, as it was sometimes called—or at least pronounced—set in motion an enormous system of student testing, to be carried out at the state and local level, intended to assess the performance of every student and to hold teachers and principals accountable for failure of students to reach minimum levels of competence.
There was some overall improvement in student scores after the first few years of NCLB. After that, however, scores flatlined. There were plenty of downsides to “teaching to the test”. Schools naturally focused their efforts on students who were performing just below the minimum levels of competence. The bright students had to sit through drills on material they had already mastered and waste their time taking tests they could pass easily. Students who “needed” the drilling often were not interested in the “challenging” material the reformers insisted they should learn. Contrary to the unanimous conviction of the “experts”, most parents didn’t want their children to be fed a steady diet of “challenging material.” They hated seeing their kids being made miserable over “useless” information. Who needs algebra in the first place? And what is the deal with the “binary” number system? Who needs that?
It was the teachers and principals, of course, who were most hostile to NCLB. They hated being evaluated, particularly when they had good reason to believe, based on their experience, that most students were never going to meet the standards that the reformers had set, standards that, often, the reformers regarded as minimal and in need of “improvement”.
At first, the Obama administration merely increased the rigor of NCLB. Like the Clinton administration, many of the reformers in charge of the Education Department during the Obama years saw the teachers’ unions as the enemy. They were more accommodating than the Bush people, to a degree, but they were equally set on demanding significantly higher performance from all students—particularly black students, of course—improvements that the teachers’ unions, though they could not say so publicly, privately believed to be impossible.
By 2014, NCLB had far more enemies than friends. The evangelicals had always hated NCLB, which they saw as a plot for federal indoctrination. The Tea Party hated it because they hated all things Obama. The “traditional” Republicans had lost interest in it because they no longer saw it as a way to undermine the teachers’ unions. The teachers’ unions had hated it from the get-go. Parents hated it because they hated seeing their kids being pressured to perform—and, of course, their kids hated it too.[ Worst of all, after more than a decade of “reform”, student performance hadn’t improved at all. NCLB had, in effect, refuted itself. The Obama administration’s plans were growing ever more grandiose and demanding at the same time that support for any educational reform was disappearing.
The doctrines of critical race theory and systemic racism came as manna from heaven to the teachers’ unions and for all the “progressives” on the left who felt that the Clinton/Obama creed of neoliberalism was simply a sellout to the right. Neoliberal “reforms” like NCLB were part of the problem, not part of the solution! Testing was not the cure for racism! Testing was the greatest tool of racism! All the bitterness that progressives felt over the Obama years, the failure of the new millennium to materialize in the first place, the brutal, prolonged recession that left millions struggling with debts they couldn’t have imagined only a decade before, the stubborn failure to “solve” the racial divide, the exponentially expanding fortunes of the mega-rich—all of this could be explained as the result of the white capitalist patriarchy, and that was what kids needed to know, not algebra and the Federalist Papers!
The doctrines of CRT and systemic racism were, if anything, even more welcome at the college and university level, where various “postmodern” doctrines had been attacking all “bourgeois” values for decades, increasingly picturing Western civilization as the worst, rather than the best, on earth. Many academics, of course, had suffered personally during the Great Recession. While the Obama administration had poured money into the K-12 system to prevent states from reducing educational spending, they had not been able to match that effort at the post-secondary level. The further the academic community moved to the left, the more willing state legislatures were to cut their funding. The more funding was reduced, the more morale was reduced.
Furthermore, the colleges and universities faced enormous problems in practicing what they preached. They were struggling to live up to their own standards for racial tolerance in the makeup of both their student bodies and, especially, their faculty—struggling, and failing, because the difficulties they faced in living up to their standards were literally insurmountable.6
The simple fact is, there aren’t many black high school students with the sort of established academic proficiency that would allow them to succeed in competitive schools like the “flagship” universities in major states like California and Texas, let alone the highly competitive schools like Stanford and the Ivies. The percentage who could graduate from highly competitive schools and go on to advanced degrees is even smaller. It is simply impossible to achieve student bodies and faculties that “look like America” without admitting black students who are significantly less qualified than many of the white and Asian students who are being turned away. Here are the reasons why, drawing on data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
The NAEP assessments for reading and mathematics were last administered at the grade 12 level in 2019. At that time the percentages of students in the top four racial/ethnic groups in the nation’s public schools were as follows: White, 47%; Hispanic, 27%; Black, 15%; Asian, 5%. While NAEP results only indicate how students do score on NAEP, a separate organization, the National Assessment Governing Board, sets policy for NAEP, including “Achievement Levels” that indicate how well students should score (in the Board’s opinion), setting three levels—Basic, Proficient, and Advanced. Roughly speaking (roughly, because I’ve forgotten the name of the report that made this argument), students at the Proficient level should be ready to perform college level work without remedial courses. In 2019, achievement level results for the four major groups for “at or above Proficient” and “Advanced” were as follows, first for mathematics and then for reading: White students, AA Proficient, 32%; Advanced, 4%; for Hispanic students, AA Proficient, 11%; Advanced, 1%; for Black students, AA Proficient, 8%, Advanced, less than 1%; Asian students, AA Proficient, 50%; Advanced, 14%. For Reading, White students, AA Proficient, 47%; Advanced, 9%; for Hispanic students, AA Proficient, 25%; Advanced, 3%; for Black students, AA Proficient 17%, Advanced, 1%; Asian students, AA Proficient, 49%; Advanced, 13%.
According to a Census Report, also in 2019, About 13.1% of American adults have a master’s, professional degree, or doctorate; about 3.2% of Americans have a professional degree; and about 4.5% have a Ph.D. With a handful of exceptions, these people will be drawn exclusively from the population of students scoring at or above Proficient and indeed, for the last two categories, almost exclusively from those scoring at Advanced. Wells Fargo executive Charles Scharf was forced to apologize for saying that the black “talent pool was very limited”, which was indeed inelegant phrasing, but if he had spoken more “correctly”—that few blacks graduate from high schools performing at an academic level that would make it likely for them to excel in post-secondary studies—I doubt if his words would have received a more sympathetic reception. But he would have been accurate.
It is, of course, figures like this that make CRT look so attractive, and make even liberals who reject CRT to long for some “better” test, one that would give a more accurate—that is to say, more hopeful—picture of black students’ likelihood of success at the post-secondary level. This sort of thinking amounts to a “regression” to the now discredited notion of “aptitude”—still very much around in the form of the “gifted” or “talented”—some sort of outside the box ability that allows its possessor to accomplish feats beyond the grasp of the standard high performers. The simple fact is that no such test exists, and there is no point in searching for one.
The rejection of the neoliberal values of rational analysis and expertise—and “hard work”—and their replacement the doctrines of critical race theory, which blamed “systemic racism” and, of course, the white capitalist patriarchy for all of society’s ills offered a new—a new and quick and easy!—means of discharging the classic burden of “white guilt”—which many students at the “top” schools like Harvard and Stanford did feel, for they were living on campuses designed to cater to the every need of the modern American upper middle class, who demand the “best” of everything, everything from gourmet meals to “world-class” architecture. In a classic “transvaluation of all values”, students at high end universities all across the country quickly learned the “lesson” that western civilization was the worst, rather than the best, civilization that had ever existed, even as they hoovered up its benefits, and even though the values the newly “woke” students possessed—of racial, sexual and social equality—were the creations of western civilization, rather than the often oppressive non-western cultures the students insisted on romanticizing.7
In such an atmosphere of frustration at the failure of neoliberalism, even with the first black president in American history at its head, to solve the problems of racism, the call for “reparations” sounded by Ta-Nehisi Coates in his famous article in the June 2014 issue of the Atlantic monthly, The Case For Reparations , had an enormous impact. Here was an immediate solution, one that would be enormously popular with black Americans—unlike educational “reform”, with its endless demands for “rigor”, “challenging material”, “testing”, “tutoring”, and the like, which all failed and all ended up blaming “someone”, and that someone usually being the victim, the victim of a racist society. The call for reparations ended all that.
What was perhaps the final blow to Clinton/Obama neoliberalism was administered by the November 2014 congressional elections, resulting in another humiliating defeat for the Obama administration. The Republicans won control of the Senate, picking up an impressive 9 seats, the Democrats winning only 10 of the 33 seats in play. In the House, Republicans added another 13 seats to their majority. Obama bitterly realized that the Republicans were going to do everything possible to thwart his dreams of having a “transformational” presidency. As a result, instead of struggling to “compromise” on issues like gay marriage and immigration, the Obama administration issued a stream of executive orders—some of them of dubious constitutionality—intended to enforce an unadulterated “progressive” agenda.
The Supreme Court’s June 2015 decision declaring that same sex marriages were a guaranteed right under the Constitution, and the decision of the administration to endorse that ruling, seems to have had a “liberating” effect on liberals across the country, turning the previously unknown issue of “transgender rights” into front-page news less than one year after the Court’s ruling. The nation’s schools, and school boards, quickly became the front lines of the culture war, leading to endless struggles that almost invariably drove left and right further and further apart.
It was these events, I think, coupled with additional police shootings of black men under questionable circumstances, additional riots, the police shootings in Dallas in July 2016, when a black man shot and killed five police officers and wounded nine others, as well as the terrorist attacks in San Bernadino, Cal. in December 2015 (14 dead) and in Orlando in June 2016 (50 dead, 53 injured), that led to a sense of chaotic disorder, capped off by the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in May 2020, which led to rioting throughout the country.
The sense of a polarizing partisan divide that “explained everything” grew among both Democrats and Republicans. The Republicans, of course, surrendered entirely to Trumpian irrationality—the “real Republicans” like Mitch McConnell believing that, in effect, they “had” to lie and cheat (because they couldn’t win honestly)— while the Democrats coexisted uneasily as a sort of two-headed monster that could never quite conjure up the “natural Democratic majority” that they were sure existed (somewhere).
So that is my semi-coherent guide to the causes for the great widening of the racial divide that Hughes points to. His “solution”, rather surprisingly (or not), is simply “No Child Left Behind” on steroids:
“The majority of effort channeled toward achieving racial equity hasn’t been applied to the part of life that has the biggest influence on people’s skills and mindsets: namely birth to eighteen years of age. Think, for instance, of affirmative action. It typically kicks in when young adults are applying to college. By that point in life, many skills, attitudes, and habits have already been formed. We can have a much bigger impact on people at younger ages.
“Efforts to achieve true equity should focus instead on high-quality kindergarten and pre-K, high-quality weekend learning programs, high-quality charter schools, and high-quality after-school tutoring. By “high-quality” I mean programs, schools, and tutoring that focus on skills development. If we want to move toward true equity, we need to intervene early and provide programs that close the skills gap. If we do that—if we equip people in society with the skills they need to flourish—then, within limits, a shrinkage of outcome gaps will follow naturally.
First of all, I would say that Hughes’ notion that the period from “birth to eighteen years of age” has been neglected is woefully inaccurate. Enormous expenditures have been made for decades, first of all to reduce poverty. See, for example, this report, Economic Security Programs Cut Poverty Nearly in Half Over Last 50 Years, issued by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities in 2019.
What about “high-quality kindergarten and pre-K”? The federal government has been operating the “Head Start” program since 1965, currently spending $10 billion a year serving about 1 million low-income children. A 2021 study published in the American Economic Review says the program had significant positive impacts, using data from 1965 to 1980: “Participating children achieved 0.65 more years of education, were 2.7 percent more likely to complete high school, and were 8.5 percent more likely to enroll in college. However, as I pointed out earlier, NAEP scores for black students have flatlined or declined since the late 1980s. Furthermore, many studies conducted of Head Start programs back in the 1980s and 1990s failed to show any long-term gains in student reading and math scores.
A recent study of a pre-K program in Tennessee showed negative effects on student learning. New York City, under Mayor William de Blasio, instituted universal pre-K back in 2013. Children who participated in the early years of the program would just be reaching the fourth grade in 2022, the most recent year of the NAEP “Trial Urban Assessment” (TUDA), but the results for New York City for that year (lower scores for both grade 4 reading and math and a lower score for grade 8 math only), can be dismissed on the grounds of the effects of COVID. NAEP results for 2024 should give us more information.
Whether pre-K does anything other than serve as child care rather than education is very much an open question, and the notion that we can somehow summon “high quality” programs just because we want them, even though they never appear in practice other than a few isolated settings that invariably prove to be unreplicable on a large-scale basis, amounts to nothing more than verbal hand-waving. I knew a woman who had worked at a high performing charter school and I asked her why she left. “Because I got tired of working a 60-hour week for $25,000 a year,” she told me. W. Edwards Deming, the once legendary efficiency expert, liked to tell employers “Fifty percent of your employees are below average.” His point was, that’s not something you can change. It’s something you have to deal with. After decades of massive investment in educational reform, going back to the 1980s, the main improvement in scores for black students ended at the same time that commitment to educational reform was just getting off the ground.8
The great “panacea” for those who still believe in old-fashioned educational reform are charter schools—schools receiving public funding but operated separately from the local educational bureaucracy. Charters are now detested by “woke” liberals who idolize government bureaucracies and labor unions and despise anything that smacks of “capitalism”. Unfortunately, the data for charters are more “mixed” than their champions are willing to acknowledge. Matthew Yglesias, an ardent and well-informed “old school” education reform enthusiast, points us to a 2023 study of charter schools conducted by Stanford University , the third in a series.
According to the Stanford study,
“Looking at year-to-year academic progress from 2015 to 2019, the typical charter school student in our national sample had reading and math gains that outpaced their peers in the traditional public schools (TPS) they otherwise would have attended. We report these differences as marginal days of additional (or fewer) days of learning on a learning benchmark of 180 days of learning each school year for matched TPS students. In math, charter school students, on average, advanced their learning by an additional six days in a year’s time, and in reading added 16 days of learning.”
Well, that sounds good. But some other data are a bit confusing. According to the study, only 36% of charter schools had stronger student growth in reading than similar public schools in their area, and the same was true in math.
However, the big point, not addressed either in the Stanford report or Yglesias’ own discussions of charters, is this: it’s really not “correct” to compare charters with public schools. Why? Because charter school students are a self-selected sample (usually selected by their parents, of course, but the point is, there is selection). In most cases, students go to charters because they and their parents particularly value education.9 This is not necessarily true of public school students. In particular, this is not necessarily true of many black parents and children in large urban areas, who simply do not see the value of education in their lives, where schools are often as the source of good jobs for adults rather than good education for children. I know this sounds unkind, but it is very often true. Since self-selected samples are necessarily different than non-self-selected samples, the results are very likely to be different as well.
Am I saying that not all parents value education? Yes, I am. Am I saying that not all students value education? Yes, I am. Yglesias, in his write-up of the Stanford study, says this:
“The evidence [that charters work] comes from Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes, which takes advantage of the fact that when a charter school has more applicants than it has seats, it must choose who gets in via lottery. This allows for an ideal research design, comparing outcomes for students who win the lottery to those who don’t.”
Except that it isn’t ideal. The students who win the lottery are placed in a peer group of children who are there because they (or their parents) value education. The students who “lose” the lottery are placed in a peer group who may or may not value education. And it is my contention, expressed in both my A Limo at Risk and CRT v. anti-CRT posts, that the outstanding variable in predicting student performance is the attitude of the student, not the inputs derived from teachers, principals, school facilities, curricula, etc.—all the variables that reformers want to believe are determinative because they believe they can (in theory) control them, whereas they can’t, of course, control the student, nor can they control the peer group—and it is an additional contention of mine that students are far more desirous of the good opinion of their peers than of their teachers. If your peers want to go to Harvard, you will want to go to Harvard. If your peers want to become drug dealers, you will want to become a drug dealer.
It is for this reason, I believe—a fundamental misunderstanding of what drives student performance—that so many “model” programs that have appeared ever since the 1960s fail to be replicated on a large scale.
There is a state—Mississippi—that has made demonstrable progress in improving reading scores for all its public school students—and, of course, Mississippi is a poor state with a large black population. I discuss Mississippi’s results (eventually) in a long, rather strangely constructed post, How to improve kids’ reading: First, do the math that begins by complaining about the misleading publicity generated about Mississippi before praising the actual results. The 2024 NAEP results for Mississippi should be informative—particularly, to see whether the gains at fourth grade carry over to the eighth grade, for grade 8 reading scores rarely show improvement. It is not impossible that the methods used in Mississippi will prove to be replicable in other states—though, as I’ve said before, previous successful programs have not proved replicable.
According to this map, prepared by NCES,, there are large percentages of students attending charter schools in states like California (12%) and Michigan (11%) with low-performing black students, as well as states like Florida (13%) with high-performing students. In addition, only 1% of students in Mississippi attend charter schools.
NAEP only tests public school students at the state level. Many “red” states are now enacting legislation that would effectively fund private schools, with the obvious goal of undermining public schools entirely. NAEP does not assess the performance of private school students at the state level. What effect this legislation will have is unknown, though, in my opinion, it could be terrible. There is already a very real danger that “woke” educational practices intended to de-emphasize academic achievement will drive the upper middle class out of the public school system. If that happens, the upper middle class will eventually take their money with them, and public education in the U.S. will be seriously degraded.
As many people have argued—and I agree with them—that much of the increase in racial tensions in the U.S. have been driven by a “culture war” waged very largely by upper-middle-class whites—and the angry response of more conservative whites to that war. See, for example, Kevin Drum’s If you hate the culture wars, blame liberals . However, the continuing deep bitterness of many blacks—the willingness to believe more or less any rumor of unfair treatment of black people by white cops, for example—which is manifest “even” in someone as well integrated into the larger white culture as Barack Obama still demands further explanation, in my opinion. I agree that the educational gap remains immensely significant, because it guarantees the economic, and thus the social segregation of blacks in America. As I’ve indicated, I don’t believe that any of the proposals for educational reform are likely to have the sort of success that their proponents hope for, because none of them will accept the argument that it is the student, not the school, who is the “independent variable”.
I make a few recommendations near the beginning of my CRT v. Anti-CRT post for reforms that I believe would improve the economic status of many blacks and would reduce incarceration rates as well. I believe these reforms, which would be very difficult politically to enact, would help reduce the level of alienation among blacks, and give them more confidence in white culture’s willingness to accept them and more willingness in their own ability to succeed in that culture, and so we will hear fewer complaints about “white math”—complaints that reveal ignorance and “bad faith” rather than acumen. My recommendations are scarcely panaceas. But, as Hughes points out, there has been real racial progress in the last 70 years, and this should be recognized. However, the continuing alienation of so many blacks from American society is powerfully reinforced by the economic divide in the country, and so, according to my argument, this divide will not be resolved soon.
Afterwords I Coleman Hughes goes to the Dark Side!
Well, so it seems. Radley Balko, who maintains an excellent substack blog, The Watch, has a long guest post at the Unpopulist, The War on the Woke Trumps the Truth for Many Heterodox Thinkers, “explaining” an elaborate controversy between himself and Hughes, arising from a meretricious (as Radley will explain) pseudo-documentary, The Fall of Minneapolis, contending that Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was wrongly convicted of the murder of George Floyd. Hughes wrote a column for The Free Press What Really Happened to George Floyd? “suggesting” that the case against Chauvin was less than air tight. Recently, Balko and Hughes had a debate on the issue, during which, Radley says, and I agree with him, that Hughes stays in a defensive, “just asking questions” crouch throughout the debate and won’t acknowledge the valid (to my mind) points that Balko makes. If you want to get into this, I suggest you start with Radley’s Unpopulist post and work backwards as far as you please. I don’t know what the future holds for Coleman, but his book, I contend, is well worth reading.
Afterwords II Radley Balko doesn’t always get it right!
In a recent post, Radley says “Polling after George Floyd’s death found that 70 percent of black respondents had at least one bad experience with police. Nearly half feared for their lives.” However, the poll that Radley links to, from “KFF”, says “7 in 10 Black Americans Say They Have Experienced Incidents of Discrimination or Police Mistreatment in Their Lifetime, Including Nearly Half Who Felt Their Lives Were in Danger,” which is not the same thing. For “police mistreatment” (on account of race), 41% (not 70%) of blacks said they had been stopped or detained by police on account of their race, and 21% said they had been a victim of police violence.
I am white (very). I have never been arrested. However, when I was much younger I was stopped unfairly twice by the police, once for looking like a homo (not true) and once for looking like a hippie (also not true, at least not really). On the first occasion, I was stopped by the Chicago police in 1967 as part of their “aggressive patrolling” program (much like Mayor Bloomberg’s “stop and frisk”). They let me go when (wait for it) they discovered that I had graduated from Oberlin College. (I still had my student ID and the cops probably figured I was some rich kid from Oak Park.)
The first blast of the trumpet of modern feminism was, inarguably, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), but the first “Women’s Pride Day” in New York City, which I attended purely by accident, didn’t occur until the summer of 1970.
Recent “defrockings” in the mainstream press of racial/ethnic poseurs—The Native Scholar Who Wasn’t , A Professor Claimed to Be Native American. Did She Know She Wasn’t?, The Layered Deceptions of Jessica Krug, the Black-Studies Professor Who Hid That She Is White—demonstrate the extent to which these programs simply amount to much ado about career building.
The deleterious effects of this Obama power grab were well described six years later by Reason’s Robby Soave, Six Years Ago Today, Obama's Education Department Made All Sex Unsafe on Campus.
I discussed this sort of thinking at length in this extensive (and unsympathetic) review of Harvard Law Professor David Kennedy’s A World of Struggle. The professor’s book was not published until 2016, but it clearly was a summation of existing attitudes rather than a “revolution” in thought. Indeed, it was little more than a reworking of Nietzsche’s notion of the wille zur macht as the sole motive force in human affairs done as an exercise in wokeness, the problem being, of course, that if this is true, any assertion of so-called “moral” values, which Kennedy, of course, does espouse, is simply another ruse of the wille, and so the unmasker, however ingenious in his “final” analysis, can never do other than unmask himself. And the results are not pretty. (“Wokeness”, by the way, is a word, says Word, something I should have seen coming but did not.)
Critiques of Fryer’s study are here . I haven’t the competency to referee the matter, but the tone of the critics leave me skeptical. Fryer’s study cannot be considered “conclusive”, but if his critics want to refute him, they need to come up with a better study of their own, and if one exists, I haven’t seen it.
The futile and hypocritical attempts to overcome these discrepancies inevitably discredited the affirmative action programs recently overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. Harvard, the Court doing liberalism a favor, though the liberals did not know it, or at least pretended not to do so.
It is “interesting” that, even though people are being oppressed all over the world, the wokies can only find time to feel sorry for the Palestinians—because only the Palestinians are being oppressed by “white” people.
Why was this the case? I can only speculate, but I will. It was, I believe, only in the 1970s that U.S. public schools began to concern themselves seriously with the “lower half of the distribution”—low performing students. Prior to that time, schools were quite likely to encourage drop outs—it improved the overall average and made classes easier to manage. In some southern states
This is not invariably the case, of course. Parents may move their children to a charter school because they are struggling in a public one.