Blog

Is there such a thing as American culture anymore, or has the push for “multiculturalism” essentially destroyed the values, traditions, beliefs, and experiences we, as Americans, once commonly held?

In an October 2, 2010, article in the local paper, Lincoln Public Schools touted its hiring of four “advocates” to represent African-American and Hispanic students within the school system. One of the new hires “said part of her job is to help parents navigate the system. Often, she said, families from a different culture – whether it’s African American or another nonwhite culture – don’t know how to get over obstacles with school officials of a different race.”

Has it really come to this? Now we’re not only NOT all Americans, we are the product of completely different cultures? If you’re a white employee of the public schools, you can’t possibly understand and facilitate a non-white family’s participation in the school system? In fact, anyone non-white lives in a wholly different “culture” than white Americans EVEN IF THEY ARE NATIVE-BORN AMERICANS THEMSELVES?

I thought the public schools’ emphasis on teaching “multiculturalism” was designed to bring about greater understanding and tolerance. We were all going to join hands and “teach the world to sing in perfect harmony.” Looks like all that’s happened is a segmentation of what was once the American culture into a bunch of “hyphenated-American” cultures (fill in the race or ethnicity of your choice) that cannot communicate with one another effectively without a paid mediator. To use one of my teen-aged sons’ favorite observations — It sucks to be us.

Clearly, LPS’s intentions are good. The goal of the advocacy program is to make connections with at-risk youth and encourage them to stay in school.

But the truth of the matter is that this advocacy program is a solution to a problem created by a previous “solution”. Back in the days of segregated schools, what I’ll call “active” racism really did operate to keep minorities at a disadvantage. In other words, there was really no such thing as “separate but equal.” Minorities were shuttled into schools that were, in real, physical terms, inferior. Although I do not believe most academic problems today can be solved by throwing more money at them, that assumes a certain basic level of economic support, sufficient to provide a building with classrooms, desks, books, teachers, and basic necessities. Minority schools lacked these things at that time.

Fast forward to today. Schools are integrated. The schools within LPS are run by one administration with one budget allocated equally and fairly across the system. So there is no “active” racism in this allocation similar to what occurred before. Integration was supposed to erase all the inequalities of outcomes that were evident and that were, supposedly, the product of the “active” racism of the past. But it hasn’t really worked out that way, has it?

Brown v. Board of Education was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954. That’s sufficient time for almost five (5) “generations” of students (grades 1 through 12) to attend and graduate from integrated schools. Yet, drop out rates are still proportionally higher for minority students — except for Asians. Hmmmm. If the drop-out phenomena is a product of being a minority in a predominantly “white” school system, how is the Asian immigrants’ success within that same system accounted for? If you know your history, you know that Asians were, at one time, imported into the U.S. and used for essentially slave labor — read about the building of the transcontinental railroad, if you doubt me. They were rounded up and placed in detention camps by FDR during WWII. Surely no one would suggest that Asians have had a free and easy ride compared to other minorities. What makes them different?

My answer would be that Asians, unlike Hispanics and Blacks, have largely escaped perpetual dependency upon government welfare that has destroyed the Black family and is well on its way toward destroying Hispanic family structure as well. In 1964, only 10 years after Brown, LBJ declared war on poverty. In 1988, Reagan noted that declaration and concluded that poverty had won. He went on to say that, “Federal welfare programs have created a massive social problem. With the best of intentions, government created a poverty trap that wreaks havoc on the very support system the poor need most to lift themselves out of poverty — the family. Dependency has become the one enduring heirloom, passed from one generation to the next, of too many fragmented families.”

There’s much more I could say, but I’ll conclude with these remarks. How many minorities have received the consistent message that they cannot succeed no matter what they do, that they must depend upon the government to do everything for them, that the deck is stacked against them and, in essence, why try? It’s time to ask, how many use minority status like a crutch to excuse their own lack of initiative, telling themselves and others that they would fail anyway because “the Man” is keeping them down? A free public education is available to them, but they chuck it away like it was nothing. Even one of LPS’s “advocates” recognizes that success or failure is ultimately up to the individual student, as evidenced by the end of the article where he admits that the “pot” will not boil unless the student shifts his priorities and expends the effort. This seems to me to be a case where we’ve led the horse to water (a long time ago) and, now, by Heaven, he’s going to DRINK, and we’re going to die (or go broke) trying to make it so.

Photo source: Miha Mazzini