Monday, March 15, 2010

Justice for Black - On - Asian Violence in Philadelphia schools?

http://american.com/archive/2010/march/are-some-races-more-equal-than-others

Abigail Thernstrom and Tim Fay: How will the Obama administration respond to a formal complaint in the wake of serious black-on-Asian violence at South Philadelphia High School?

The DOJ’s new education section chief, steeped in NAACP-LDF culture, may also avert her gaze from the Asian victims of black mobs in an overwhelmingly black school. The LDF, on its website, has an education agenda. It lists only three concerns. The first two are protecting racial preferences and fighting for increased racial integration in schools—i.e., racially balanced school populations through quotas, if necessary. The third is described as the “school to prison pipeline,” which an undated, but clearly recent report calls “one of the most urgent challenges in education today.”


Why is it that Asian-American students are only half as likely as whites to be suspended or expelled from school?The report describes “the punitive and overzealous tools and approaches of the modern criminal justice system [as having] seeped into our schools, serving to remove children from mainstream educational environments and funnel them onto a one-way path toward prison.” Black students, it notes, represent only 17 percent of public school enrollments nationwide, but account for 34 percent of suspensions. “Moreover, studies show that African-American students are far more likely than their white peers to be suspended, expelled, or arrested for the same kind of conduct at school.”

Evidently, it is beyond imagination that disparities in school discipline reflect disparities in the conduct that merits discipline. Why is it that Asian-American students are only half as likely as whites to be suspended or expelled from school? Does this reveal the powerful anti-white biases of our largely white teaching force today? And does it reveal anti-black hostility on the part of black administrators and teachers when they discipline disproportionately high numbers of black students?

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