How the Myth of Merit Makes It (and "Grit") Acceptable
Meritocracy and Supremecy in American Schools: Part 3
It's come to pass that scholars and sages across the lands have concluded the following: albeit enticing, the ideology of meritocracy is quicksand, a mirage.
All you need do, dear reader, is check your local listings to come to these inevitable conclusions:
SOME ARE NOT EQUAL
SOME DO NOT HAVE THE SAME OPPORTUNITIES AS OTHERS
SOME LIVE IN A WORLD OF FEAR, DESPAIR, AND ANGER
It seems that nationally, we’ve come to support the value that if one cannot thrive and succeed here in America, despite social mores serving as barriers, deeply cemented in by the dominant ethnic culture (including chattel racism, ageism, ableism, sexism, bigotry, superiority, etc.), they just don't have the merit it takes to be a(n) __________.
“The merit it takes.” You know--that thing successful and thriving people have. They figure they must have merit because look— they drive a Tesla, and live in a nice big house in a quiet, safe neighborhood, and travel the world and…all that good stuff!! They went to university, learned a trade, put their noses to the grindstone, and are now simply benefiting from the fruits of their own…merits.
We all get the same schooling, right? This is the land of opportunity, right?
No?
You see, some areas and schools and states provide inferior education for students (shocking, I know). Also, that “land of opportunity” bullsh*t isn’t some long-held American guarantee/value. It’s a line from a 1931 book written by some freelance writer (James Adams). And what's worse, the students in those inferior systems don't even know they're receiving dirt education.
…Well, I must not have enough merit. Otherwise, I'd understand Algebra or French. My living in sub-standard housing and in abject poverty---well, that's just my own fault cuz I got the same schooling that every OTHER American got. And we’re all equal, even though some of us have a few things that the rest of us might not. Nah. It’s because I haven’t earned my merit yet. Maybe if I work harder and longer?
The ONLY folks that benefit from the ideology of meritocracy are enslavers, controllers, and the dominant group of the era. For it to work, they have to gaslight those that it's intended to contain that even they agree with the ideology of meritorious achievement. The dominant culture has taken the grain of truth that lies in the concept of meritocracy--that if you persevere and are ambitious, one can, and likely will go further than most--and used it to justify meritocracy as a measure of a person’s worth and value!
We've been duped into thinkin' that ethnic minorities all have had the same opportunities as those considered members of the dominant culture. It’s just not so, folks. Just spend a few hours reading The Gangs of New York by Herbert Asbury.
So anytime I hear an educator talk about a student just not trying hard enough, my ears start tingling. I start humming the Deficit Thinking tune in my mind, which, by the way, sounds sort of like the theme from Knight Rider, if you're interested ;^0)
Privilege
I remember it like it was yesterday. At a previous post, I joined a parent/teacher conference (75% Latinx population school). The specialist (clearly of the dominant racial ethnicity) pointed out to the non-English-speaking parent that her child is reading 5+ years below grade level. But she quickly followed up with, "…compared to how the rest of the students at this school are doing, it's not that bad. They're all…er…almost all low."
The specialist thinks she was only trying to manage the parent's stress level because she didn't want the parent to "worry" as much about her daughter's performance.
See that? It's right there. The privilege. Did you catch it? No??!
Why would a specialist function as though saying …compared to how the rest of the students at this school are doing, it's not that bad… is an act of empathy and not bigotry? The parent should be VERY concerned! Why does the specialist think it's not as bad for this child to be so far behind but…not another child? Is this what POTUS G.W. Bush referred to as “the soft bigotry of low expectations” (while introducing the No Child Left Behind Act)?
Why yes. Yes, it is.
Perhaps, the focus shouldn't be on how low the child is performing but rather, why the child is reading at the 3rd grade level in the first place? What interventions were put in place to stop the bleeding at grade 3? Grade 4? None? The child was just tested for inclusion in the Special Education Program? And THAT was the intervention? How does a child get all the way to the 9th grade…with an elementary-level reading ability? No one saw it coming?
Why don't we ask those questions? Maybe, I reckon, most folks instinctually know they’re not gonna like what’s at the bottom of that barrel…
Barbeques and Baseball Games
IT'S OBVIOUS. Just take a look at this report by the National Center for Education Statistics…
Nearly 79% of America's teachers are White/non-Hispanic.
7% of America's teachers are Black/non-Hispanic.
9% of America's teachers are Hispanic (Latinx).
The "system" that everyone keeps talking about that's broken….is hatched and perpetuated by…the American schools!1 That's where the oppression is established and normalized. That's where the minority is taught the ways of the majority and reminded that if they don't comply with those ways, they're un-American and must be the traitorous enemy among the people. That’s where "American Values" ™ are inculcated. It’s when children learn what the world (according the the dominant racial ethnic group) is and what one should think of the others in it. That's when they learn America is better than AAAAAAALL the other countries (which means Americans are just better people than aaaaaaaall the other people, right?).
If four out of five teachers in America are of a single racial heritage, promoting "values" like hard work, stick-to-itiveness, sacrifice, punctuality, faith in authority (you know, how to be a modern slave) in the name of preparing students for "the real world"; teaching all children (not just their own) that they are the inheritors of the ancient and advanced Egyptian, Greek, and Judean cultures/civilizations2 and thus, purveyors of light and the one “true” god, do you think ANY of the teachers will substantively champion the cultures of the 25% of students that aren’t of Western European heritage?
Of course not! That would mean different curriculum, different materials, different educational standards, different languages, different customs, etc. And we have to mind those public dollars, right?
“American values” is just a tool/weapon/concept for gaslighting folks of the minority racial cultures and lower classes. Or, it’s to mobilize the hypnotized young men and women to run into some desert or jungle and get shot at or shoot "the others" dead. That the alienation minority groups sense, see, and feel isn’t real. It’s been used by rich, Americans to ensure that "people of color"3 who work for them, whole-heartedly believe that if they adopt the values Real Americans™ tell them to, one day, THEY’LL be rich (and white?) like the majority of Americans.
That's how sardonic things have gotten in the USA. The obvious and possibly everlasting characteristic of the American experiment may end up being one of genocidal imperialism and slave labor. As proud Americans, we exclaim with glee how we've become the only super power in the world and that our innovations, our stock, our ways are superior NOT because we murdered hundreds of thousands of the Navajo, the Yakama, the Oneida, the Apache, the Mohawk, the Luiseno, etc. and claimed their lands and then enslaved a million other Africans and had them build and farm stuff for us, but because…we were smarter, better, and had God on our side4.
Now, you may be asking, "What's wrong with a majority of school teachers being from the MAJORITY racial heritage? Isn't that how democracy is supposed to be? Majority rule?"
Yes. That is. Especially if you look at census data that holds 76% of Americans are of primarily Western European and West Asian racial heritage (White), 19% Latinx (Hispanic), 13% of primarily African/Nubian racial heritage (Black), and 6% Asian (Chinese, Mongolian, Vietnamese, etc.).
That's proportional, right? 76% of students are white. 79% of teachers are white.
But what are the other ethnic group student ethnicity to teacher ethnicity ratios? Like the Latinx community? Well, only 9% percent of the American teaching force is of Latinx racial heritage, whereas 19% of the total American student population is of Latinx descent. Now that I think of it, America’s students of primarily African racial heritage make up about 13% of the student population, but only 7% of our teachers are Black?
Huh. I guess it's proportional for White communities--just not Black or Latinx ones. Or is it a matter of a shortage of qualified teachers that are of those ethnicities? Not according to the U.S. Education Department. So how could it be that so MANY of America’s teaching force are, have always been, and continue to be of the dominant ethnic culture DESPITE the change in national demographics?5
While describing the American schools, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America (1835) “Les mêmes écoles ne reçoivent pas les enfants des Noirs et des Européens.” (The same schools do not receive the children of the Black and European6). He saw it at its start. And here we are. Nearly 200 years later. Same as it ever was…
Deficit Thinking About Race
Fast forward to 1969. Arthur Jensen (from Harvard, no less) publishes papers that argued that because national poverty programs didn't appreciably raise children's IQs, children of the poor must be genetically intellectually inferior. This was front-page news, folks. EVERY American bought it.
Comin’ in hot to 1994. Throughout much of the mid-nineties and on up probably into the early aughts, the American education establishment had adopted the following premise as real and true: science proves that African Americans inherit lower IQs than White Americans and that these IQ differences were virtually impossible to change.
Seriously. The Bell Curve, an awful, awful book quite bluntly pronounced that Black folk are poor and less educated because they don't have the intellectual capacity to climb out of their position in life. As such, there is simply no reason to intervene or to even TRY to provide them with compensatory education. In fact, the authors state that the monies being "diverted" to meet the needs of the most disadvantaged children of the minority ethnicities were being wasted and that instead, those funds should go to the various GATE programs.
32x forward to 2016. One Angela Lee Duckworth takes the education scene by storm with her pop-psych smash…
GRIT
I don't even want you to look into it because what this lady (unwittingly, I presume) has been spewing is totally irrelevant when it comes to educating the poor, the disabled, or the limited-English speaker.
The middle-class and wealthy kids aren't the issues, Donny! It's the students that are having the trouble, you know, the black and brown kids, the ones we thought our Title I program and our No Child Left to Behind plan would fix, Donny!!7
So yeah, Duckworth and her ilk hold the poor, disadvantaged students responsible for their environment--the prime cause for their lack of achievement in American schools. By the way, you've got to check out this maniac's "Grit Scale", just in case you want to compare yourself to other American adults. She's basically of the belief that multiple data points and statistics and evidence should be looked at in determining the optimal curriculum for children (which is good), and ONE of those data points, the grit score, is, well…the best indicator. But what does the grit psychometric expert that designed this crap leave OUT of her brilliant idea? The fact that nearly 14% of all Americans live below the poverty line and that 22% of the Latinx community as well as 18% of Black identifying people live beneath the poverty line8.
In case you don't know--THAT MATTERS. The solution she proposes falsely assumes that we all start from the same place and with the same things. It assumes that people persevere because they are good (or get good) at persevering. But that’s not determinable. They persist because they find things that are worth investing their efforts in. Self-interest. What’s more American than that?
But just ask around your local school teachers and administrators what they know or think about "grit" and just sit back and listen to them affirm, affirm, affirm. Do you know why? Because it blames the child (and by extension, the child's heritage) so their teaching, curriculum, schools, customs, traditions, etc. aren’t to blame. It’s the lack of…merit that’s the problem.
You want a theory that makes more sense and has more evidence that it works for all students? Try this one on for size:
SELF-DETERMINATION THEORY
Next time on…The Dottore Chronicles. Tell a friend!
…and media conglomerates as well as entertainment moguls.
Which couldn’t be further from the truth. Check out the work of Egyptologist Vanessa Davies for more…
For the record, not a fan of this term. I think it's just as dangerous as "White" or "Black"…
A late Medieval Age decree that Europeans and Americans have used for hundreds of years in justifying our imperialism. The Doctrine of Discovery was promulgated by European monarchies in order to legitimize the colonization of lands outside of Europe. Between the mid-fifteenth century and the mid-twentieth century, this idea allowed European entities to seize lands (i.e. butcher and slaughter) inhabited by indigenous peoples under the guise of "discovering new land". In 1494, the Treaty of Tordesillas declared that only non-Christian lands could be colonized under the Doctrine of Discovery. In 1792, U.S. Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson claimed that this European Doctrine of Discovery was international law which was applicable to the new US government as well. The Doctrine and its legacy continue to influence American imperialism and treatment of indigenous peoples. It was last cited by Jurist Notorious RGB in a 2014 decision. Yeah, you read that right. Ginsburg pretty much said “Too bad, Nation of Oneida. It’s our land so we can tax it and get to take it cuz God said so.”
And female. Tradition? Really? Ok. Maybe…
Meaning the Slavic and Spanish…
You have to picture me as John Goodman’s character in The Big Lebowski for this bit to work…
https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/103656/2021-poverty-projections_1.pdf