Trevor Phillips and Education

What Trev had to say about segregation wasn't really so important, though it's entertaining to see the Guardian supporting 'separate development'. Isn't there an Afrikaans word that means the same thing ?

As I blogged a while back, there are five main strands of opinion on the reasons for the dreadful academic performance of black boys in the UK.

They are :

Racist teachers

Institutional Racism

Black Street Culture

Black Pupils need Black Teachers (the Apartheid Approach)

Don't Ask Me, Mate

The first two boil down to 'it's Whitey's fault', and are still the main approach of white liberals - for reasons which will become clear.

The third is favoured by people like the great Tony Sewell, John McWhorter, and Joseph Harker of the Guardian. Any white person expressing such ideas is obviously a buttoned up racist, ill at ease with the realities of multicultural Britain and its vibrant black youth culture.

The fourth is seemingly now the view of Trevor Phillips, the Guardian and the BNP.

Trevor has moved from the 'Dunno, mate' school, of which he was still a member in July 2004, at the conference on 'London Schools and the Black Child'.

We could offer more support to schools with large numbers of African and Afro-Caribbean pupils," he says. "But why should we discriminate against Indian pupils who may be just as economically disadvantaged, but somehow have overcome that disadvantage, or white boys, increasingly among the lowest achievers and often among the poorest?"

Why indeed ?

But a closer reading of Trev's words moves him nearer to the Tony Sewell camp.

"Mr Phillips also called for tougher action on black fathers who do not take parenting responsibilities seriously"

"In order to tackle the lack of sufficient black male role models, he also suggested that the Government pay incentives to encourage more black men to join the teaching profession"

We're slowly moving somewhere. Trevor Phillips is right about the shortage of black male role models. He hasn't quite grasped that the missing role model is called a father.

As Joseph Harker said "At the top of the list must surely be the breakdown of the black family: 50% of Caribbean mothers under 35 have never been married - five times the white figure - and the number is increasing."

I remember a couple of years back a friend of Stephen Lawrence's describing how Stephen was different - in that both his mother and his father would turn up to parents evening.

It's difficult for a white liberal, who believes that the family is mum, the kids, and whoever she's currently shacked up with, to look at the community with the highest number of fatherless children, the highest level of criminal behaviour, and the lowest level of educational attainment, and put two and two together. It would mean a re-evaluation of some of their most cherished beliefs about the oppressive nature of the traditional, patriarchal family. Certainly for boys there is only one thing worse than being in a traditional family, and that's not being in one.

Nah - raises too many questions. Let's just stick to white racism, shall we ?

The other day I quoted Robert Whelan on the underclass :

We have created the classic conditions for the emergence of a warrior class: separation of economic activity from family maintenance; children reared apart from fathers; wealth subject to predation; and male status determined by combat and sexual conquest.

This is not only the view of a detatched commentator - it's how some black people see themselves (and of course it's not confined to the black community - there are just fewer guns in Shildon or the Rhondda). And let's face it, it's cooler to be a latter-day Beowulf than a burger-flipper. In the short term.

This is the story of a warrior and now you know It
True warriors go ahead make some noise
It aint healthy to be makin n****s paranoid
Hit your corner wit my weapon I dont need my boys
Im doin 120 in the fast lane
Kick back just relax let me do my thing
Dont give a f***k about you suckas gotta maintain
Money power and respect in this rap game

I can give you n****s somethin you can talk about
I can turn your smile upside down
You aint no G u a f****n clown
I can take your girl and t-t-turn her out
dont hold it in let it all out
I can give you f*****s something
to be mad about
invite her in send her back out
With my DNA all in her mouth

Popular romantic lyrics seem to have changed a bit. I'd love to hear Nate Dogg's version of the Victorian smash 'Come into The Garden Maud'.

The baby-father is only one aspect of the prevailing black culture, defined as the villain by McWhorter, Sewell and Harker. But the liberals sure don't help.

In McWhorter's words "it’s time for well-intentioned whites to stop pardoning as “understandable” the worst of human nature whenever black people exhibit it. The person one pities is a person one may like but does not truly respect"