Saturday, April 16, 2016

Work Ethic x Generations = Privilege. Lack of Work Ethic x Generations = Burden.

A (presumably) black activist pays White America an inadvertent compliment:

“The racial narrative of White tends to be like this: Rugged individual, honest, hard-working, disciplined, rigorous, successful,” she said. “And so then, the narrative of U.S. public education: Individual assessments, competition, outcome over process (I care more about your grades than how you’re doing), ‘discipline’ where we care more about your attendance and making sure you’re not tardy than we care about your relationships … proper English must be spoken (which is just assimilation into standard U.S. dialect), hierarchical power structure, and heavy goal orientation.”

While the traits listed may simply be regarded as positive traits for success in the modern world, Hackman described them as specific cultural traits chosen and emphasized to favor whites to the detriment of non-white groups, who are forced to assimilate white traits such as good discipline and goal orientation or else be left behind.

Hackman’s natural solution, then, is to train teachers to move away from all these aspects of white privilege in education. She routinely touted the benefits of collective assessments (measuring student learning at the class level instead of determining whether each student knows the material), as well as eliminating all school grades entirely.


This is the dirty little secret about "white privilege" and black burden. If whites today are privileged, it is because they receive the benefit of the doubt based on the collective work ethic of generations of whites who lived before them. If blacks today are burdened, it is the result of collective lack of work ethic of blacks who lived before them. The Gods of the Copybook Headings will not be denied.

2 comments:

ProudHillbilly said...

How horrible that anyone needs to absorb good discipline and goal orientation to ... survive. We've gone way too far in not letting Darwin thin the herd.

ProudHillbilly said...

How horrible that anyone needs to absorb good discipline and goal orientation to ... survive. We've gone way too far in not letting Darwin thin the herd.