Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

by Jason L. Riley

Today we have people trying to help blacks by making excuses for them. Thus, the achievement gap is not the product of a black subculture that rejects attitudes and behaviors conducive to academic success; rather, it results from “racist” standardized tests or “Eurocentric” teaching styles. Multiculturalists like Geneva Gay, a professor of education at the University of Washington–Seattle, tell us that black kids are underperforming in public schools because of how they’re being taught. “Standards of ‘goodness’ in teaching and learning are culturally determined and are not the same for all ethnic groups,” she wrote. The structures, assumptions, substance, and operations of conventional educational enterprises are European American cultural icons. A case in point is the protocols of attentiveness and the emphasis placed on them in classrooms. Students are expected to pay close attention to teachers for a prolonged, largely uninterrupted length of time. Specific signs and signals have evolved that are associated with appropriate attentive behaviors. These include nonverbal communicative cues, such as gaze, eye contact, and body posture. When they are not exhibited . . . students are [unfairly] judged to be uninvolved, distracted, having short attention spans, and/or engaged in off-task behaviors.