s i s ie American Scene (2)

The race for racism

Qeoffrey Wagner he latest moves towards racism by Federal Hat in America approach some parody by I fuxleY or Waugh. Unfortunately, they are }let. When two years ago the Department of ealth, Education and Welfare (HEW) required schools and universities to adopt 'affirmative action' programmes in matters of ,,rninority admissions, hiring and the like, no urie with a shred of social conscience object ecl. The principle then grew a little less genial 3 !inder the blackjack of fund confiscation, but In general we all tried to comply. :Throughout the US, school districts live or clle by Emergency School Assistance Act

egrants, and you won't get one unless you

,°Ilaborate with the new racists in WashingMI, all of them imagining they are fighting ,cisrh. For HEW is a huge, unwieldy and (in *' dealings with them) singularly stupid uePartment. May it be long before England achninisters education under such an absurd collective as this. thrhe situation has grown ugly of late since tie issuance of an 'Elementary School Ques ,c'nnaire' which has to be given to fourth fifth-grade students (children of eight or elrle), or else. This questionnaire deliberately lloourages the child to do something that any ' 1,ance at any playground anywhere shows

; child disinclined to do — namely, to

fur iltify himself or herself by skin colour. The fjst question asks the pupils: "Which of 'ese are you? ... I am Black ... I am White ',• am Brown." The child must tick off the ,–'evant hue. Yellow or other shades (such as own purple when I first read this) are nveniently omitted. 1) But the questions, all solemnly sponsored Washington, grow ever more repulsive as tle Johnny is encouraged to spy on his "arents: "How do you think your parents feel

'bout Black and White students going to the

ssatnle school together? . . . If both kinds of

, tents don't go to your school, how do you

0fItl„k your parents feel about the idea s, slack and White students going to the a"„tne school together?" Multiple-choice h"sWers of Black, White and Brown are e'rovided. Orwell's child 'Thought Police' °L.ild have done no better.

to ret next the American infant is encouraged dosense incipient racism in his teacher: "How a„ You think your teacher feels about Black. t0"1 White students going to the same school regether? ... How do you think your principal kels about all different kinds of students go17 to the same school together?" What we 1.4Ve all fought for for so long — namely, to tieleognise the common human bond rather 'de skin 'differences' — is brutally brushed by the new governmental directives. An ehrPbattled Nixon, beset by bigger problems, vrObably barely knows what's going on here. I As a teacher in the New York City system, w4111 obviously appalled by all this. One to°nders if its repercussions will ever get back 0 thgland. Here our protests have little effect the Federal juggernaut. I have received 'ecent directives from my own college adrrtin.

,istration actively urging me to sniff out s'Pshi in my colleagues (though never, for

gtrne reason, in my students). It was thus katifying to see that the President of the City :■.)ard of Education and the NYC Chancellor, '4k Well as several courageous black teachers 411d black superintendents have refused to OW the questionnaire in question to be dis

tributed to their pupils. HEW's answer? To refuse $1 million in granted funds for the children of New York's over-crowded District 19.

In the same way Columbia Univerisity was put into a back-to-the-wall position over such 'affirmative' decrees, viz, to hire certain groups or relinquish Federal fundings. This was particularly ludicrous since here was a university notoriously sympathetic to minority groups, including women; but it was forced to hire a large and costly legal staff in order to explain to HEW that it couldn't suddenly fire about half its faculty who had legal tenure in order to satisfy the latest political guidelines. The new grade-school questionnaire from HEW has come in the wake of two important educational happenings in the field. Let us hope they don't happen in England.

The first was Harvard's refusal to allow a debate between Roy Innis, a self-appointed black leader and spokesman, and Dr William Shockley, a Nobel Prize physicist and theoretician of genetics who has aired what is usually hushed-up in academic findings, that is, a hint of ethnically inherited intelligence traits (why are my Chinese students so consistently excellent?).

Shockley was shouted down at Dartmouth before he could open his mouth and similarly disallowed utterance on Staten Island the other day. This is one hell of a way to judge a theory. A few years ago an Oklahoma sociology professor came out with the 'finding' that the British make the worst immigrants to the US — hence, by implication, should have their quotas cut down. The theory was that we English regard America 'paternalistically,' invest less psychological capital in the new country than do other groups, and return to base more often. I can't say I much like the theory — after all, we were slaves, too, to the Romans, and our Queen Boadicea allegedly took her life after having been publicly flogged (the origin of le vice anglais, Perhaps?) — but I don't try to clobber anyone who utters it. Here the Shockley case has aroused indignation in the most leftist circles, including Village Voice's journalist in the field, Nat Hentoff — for today's Shockley may be tomorrow's Germaine Greer. Black Moslem groups have been repeatedly obstructing free expression by feminists.

The second case involves a white graduate of the University of Washington, Marco DeFunis, who challenged his college's Law School with discriminating against him because he was white. He had the evidence. He was rejected but found that thirty-eight other applicants, all coloured, had been given admittance on worse grades and scores than his. With the lawyers of the ever-admirable Anti-Defamation League of the B'nai B'rith behind him, DeFunis charged that the Law school had two sets of standards in operation. The Washington Superior Court ruled for him and ordered him admitted to the Law School. On appeal (from the university, no less!) the State Supreme Court reversed this decision, and now the US Supreme Court has agreed to consider the case. The finding will be interesting.

When recently confronted with this case, Walter Leonard, in charge of affirmative actions at Harvard, fudged as follows: "A minority student, who in many instances has come through and has reached the point where he's knocking on the grad-school door — well, just the fact of his survival that far becomes a sign of his toughness, and is predictive of his ability to survive as a student." As if the Jews I have had in my classes had not seen their parents go to their deaths in concentration camps and thus had "a very crippling educational background." But in this area an American agency like HEW will always listen to blacks before Jews. The recent conflict in the Middle East has only exacerbated these tensions; black students here have openly sided with the Arab nations and called for the annihilation of Israel. • The final irony is that at my own college, which has for the past century been almost wholly Jewish, it has now been found necessary to start a Jewish student newspaper.

These repellent polarisations are doing true damage to the American social fabric which depends on co-operation today as never before. To its honour the union to which I, as a city teacher, belong, the United Federation of Teachers, recently refused to collaborate with a national television network in supplying a spokesman for 'the Jewish point of view' in education, in order to pit such against the black 'point of view.' We argued that such a confrontation, even if deemed dramatically desirable alongside old Perry Mason films and the like, was educationally pernicious and factitious. There was no Jewish point of view about basic pedagogical principles any more than there was a Black or left-handed point of view. There was education, and we wanted to get on with it. The network chose someone of their own. It's the same with Washington. Earlier this year HEW appointed an Ombudsman, twenty-eight-year-old Samuel H. Solomon. He began to come up with evidence of 'reverse discrimination' or vastly preferential treatment for colour minorities. He was soon reproved by his seniors. A race by any other name . .