Deficit Thinking About Race and Language

Meritocracy and Supremacy in American Public Schools: Part Four

In the mid-19th Century, as Americans were expanding west, most of them considered nonwhite folk to innately contain moral and intellectual deficiencies. As such, nonwhite folk weren't granted citizenship and couldn't pass their wealth and property to their heirs. But new groups were being added to the racial hierarchy of the nation. Southwestern Mexicans were considered "half-civilized," but the natives of the land were still “savages”, as far as the Americans of primarily British/French/German racial heritage were concerned. As more Asians emigrated, they were integrated into the hierarchy, but as pagans with a ridiculous language (again, as far as folks of the coastal European nations were concerned).

Right around that time, this dude publishes a magnum opus entitled On the Origins of Species that basically says all people are, in fact, human. The text engendered a revolution in the human experience but it also brought about Social Darwinists—intellectuals that agreed with the premise of Darwin's hypothesis but insisted that the Western European ethnicity was a more cognitively superior one than the others. So, even though in 1868, compulsory ignorance laws used to segregate Americans of primarily European racial heritage from all others were struck down by the Supreme Court, SCOTUS allowed the states to choose whether or not to fund or not fund schooling for nonwhite kids.

So, most schools in America…didn't fund schooling for nonwhite kids.

I want to be precise. In America, from the 1860s up to the 1920s, much of public education policy was guided by the misapplication of Darwin's propositions in both racial AND cultural ways. Children of the native nations and students presenting as having primarily African racial heritage were thought to hate obedience and were mentally incapable of restraining themselves.

“These southern and eastern Europeans are of a very different type from the north Europeans who preceded them. Illiterate, docile, lacking in self-reliance, and initiative, and not possessing the Anglo-Teutonic conceptions of law, order, and government, their coming has served to dilute tremendously our national stock, and to corrupt our civic life.

Our task is to assimilate and amalgamate these people as a part of our American race and to implant in their children, as far as can be done, the Anglo-Saxon conception of righteousness, law and order.”

-Ellwood Cubberly, 1909 American educator and pioneer in the field of school administration; Dean at Stanford Graduate School of Education (for cryin’ out loud…)

Enter Lewis Terman, professor at Stanford University. He pilfers this Frenchman's ideas (Alfred Binet) and creates…The Science of Intelligence. He uses Binet's work to make the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales—the most popular test in the USA for many decades (still used today, even). Terman purported that his I.Q. Tests measured innate abilities.

Innate abilities.

Here are some samples of the items in Terman's day…

#4 Most exports go from a)Boston b)San Francisco c)New Orleans d)New York

#9 Larceny is a term used in a)medicine, b)theology, c)law, 4)pedagogy

#16 A character in David Copperfield is a)Sinbad b)Uriah Heep, c)Rebecca, d)Hamlet

I'm not entirely sure just how "innate abilities" are extracted from these questions. And I'm wondering how many American children of the Choctaw, Irish, Chinese, Polish, or Mexican descent who swelled the streets of the country in those days read David Copperfield? I'm thinkin'…not many. But the children of the middle-class land and property owners (nearly all of whom were of primarily Anglo-Saxon descent) may’ve come across terms like ‘larceny’ or learned a bit of geography due to their father’s business and therefore, fared much better on those I.Q. tests. So, Terman was able to use the findings of the I.Q. Tests to prove, “scientifically”, his heredity determines intelligence view was accurate.

This cartoon from the magazine "Puck" in 1899 shows Uncle Sam lecturing four children labelled the Philippines, Hawaii, Porto Rico and Cuba in front of children holding books labelled with various U.S. states. In the background are caricatures of an Indigenous American boy holding a book upside down, a Chinese American boy standing at the door and a Black American boy cleaning a window. The caption reads: "School Begins. Uncle Sam (to his new class in Civilization). 'Now, children, you've got to learn these lessons whether you want to or not! But just take a look at the class ahead of you, and remember that, in a little while, you will feel as glad to be here as they are!'" The blackboard reads: "The consent of the governed is a good thing in theory, but very rare in fact." 

The Bell Curve

I mentioned this text in one of the previous posts, but it needs to be fleshed out a bit more for you, dear reader. The theories of race and intelligence Lewis Terman, Francis Galton, and Theodore Simon (all of whom contributed to the spawning Psychometrics) were kept alive and healthy by authors Richard J. Hernstein and Charles Murray. The Bell Curve’s effect on American pubic schooling is still rippling through our schools, 25 years later!

The prime point of the book (again, this is in 1994, y'all) is that from a "scientific standpoint," African Americans inherit lower I.Q. than white Americans and that these I.Q. differences are virtually impossible to change. Therefore, they claimed that programs put in place to close achievement or opportunity gaps (e.g., Head Start, Title I compensatory education, Affirmative Action laws¹) are useless. In fact, Hernstein and Murray say that such programs damage the very folks they're supposed to uphold and that these programs allow for the less intelligent to take on leadership positions which can ultimately hurt society.

The BALLS on these guys! And you should see the charts. The graphs!! It’s so easy to make illegitimate nonsense LOOK like truth…

Middlebury College students turn their backs to Charles Murray, who they called a white nationalist, during his lecture. Photograph: Lisa Rathke/AP 2017

But they were just running a play from a much older playbook. Arthur Jensen, a Harvard psychologist, wrote in 1969 that because national poverty programs didn't appreciably raise kids' I.Q.s, children of the poor must be genetically intellectually inferior! In 1974, one of the world's most significant and most impactful scientists, who nobody knows, William Shockley, who co-invented the transistor and received a Nobel Prize in Physics (1956), said…

My research leads me inescapably to the opinion that the major cause of the American Negro’s intellectual and social deficits is hereditary and racially genetic in origin and, thus, not remediable to a major degree by practical improvements in the environment.

These "scientific" publications made front-page headlines and gave eager readers permission to speak aloud their previously private convictions about race and the poor. But these theories of race and intelligence are not neutral and objective scientific discoveries. They're a reflection of the beliefs and values of the times and of the Western and American cultures in which they developed.

Is English the most successful and dominant world language in history?

That’s what most peoples of the Western Civilization believe. In fact, part of my doctoral research was on this topic. From a sheer numbers perspective, no. In fact, English is now (2019) the THIRD most spoken language on the planet (wherein it was the first, just a decade ago). Mandarin Chinese is spoken by TWICE as many people than English is. And you know which language comes in second?

So why do most Americans think it's English? Perhaps because we conflate cultural and material supremacy with the language we use. That's why we have such a history with the Language Wars in America. It's not about the languages—it's about who holds the most dominant social and economic position in the social strata.

Conclusion

Things haven't gotten much better in public education. Our nation is still full of contradiction and outrage about our history, our traditions. For me, the way to salvation isn't about buzz terms like "student-centered" or "familial framework." It's not about caring more. No. Most educators got into this work because they care. Enough tugging at heartstrings.

What drives me to stay in it is the interest to keep our democratic tradition alive. I speak out against the deficit thinking that constrains the diverse young people I teach. I want to promote awareness of pernicious deficit thinking to move beyond the conventional explanations that blame students, their families, and their cultures for low achievement. I want to be vigilantly aware of my own privileges, so I may make real for my student what has been possible for me—being academically successful and retaining my heritage, my language, and my identity. I strive to increase my knowledge and implement a curriculum and pedagogical approach that's been shown to be effective…specifically for BIPOC students. I challenge structural policies that undermine the academic success of those students.

This is the work of every modern educator wrestling with the history and traditions of American public schooling. Because the education system isn’t broken. It’s working exactly as it’s supposed to be working.

1. The policy now called affirmative action came as early as the Reconstruction Era (1863–1877) in which a former slave population lacked the skills and resources for independent living. In 1865, General William Tecumseh Sherman proposed to divide the land and goods from Georgia and grant it to black families, which became the "Forty acres and a mule" policy. The proposal was never widely adopted due to strong political opposition, and Sherman's orders were soon revoked by President Andrew Johnson. Nearly a century later (1950s–1960s), the discussion of policies to assist classes of individuals reemerged during the Civil Rights Movement. Civil rights guarantees that came through the interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment affirmed the civil rights of people of color.