Letters

Racial Tracking, Fixing Details, Speaking Out

The September 2005 issue of PHYSICS TODAY (page 54) carried Fred Jerome's Opinion piece, "Einstein and Racism in America." Jerome relates the experience of a young African American PhD recipient who was ignored while waiting for a job interview, and expresses disappointment with assumptions made about minority applicants for academic jobs in physics. Later, the writer refers to "racial tracking in the public school system."

That last phrase struck me forcefully, because I have never seen such tracking in Fairfax County, Virginia. Students are not assigned to a school or class because of their color; the "tracking" is geographical, and the high schools south of the Beltway have the worst problems.

If 30% of the students in a given county are black, and 70% of discipline problems are among black students, what is going on? If racial equality truly exists, then 30% of the students should give rise to 30% of the discipline problems. Likewise, if 30% of an area's population is black, then I would expect 30% of that area's physics PhDs to be black. I did not understand why that is not the case until I saw the behavior of too many black students in the public schools. That behavior leads them away from academic strength, and when members of one ethnic group fall out of the academic pipeline in their teens, the effect shows up at the advanced levels.

One gauge for measuring the disciplinary problems is to interview public-high-school teachers—particularly substitute teachers, who have tried to follow lesson plans in many different schools and are tempting targets for students yearning to be disruptive. Ask substitutes what kind of student, in their experience, is most likely to be loud, to engage in social interaction instead of following the lesson plan, to show the greatest disregard for the rules, and to do the least work.

For the past five years, I have been a substitute teacher in all the high schools of Fairfax County. I have observed student behavior before I open my mouth and after I have read the lesson plan to the class, and I have observed who turns in papers as directed. I know the trends with respect to minorities, and how those trends relate to geographical location in the county. Certainly trends have exceptions. But the trends cannot be ignored if a teacher's or a district's planning depends on them.

Science prompts the question "Why?" To answer, start with what you see and work backward. I suspect the answer is found in the student's home. A student who is a high achiever is interested in working. If she is interested in working, she learned that at home. If so, she has caregivers who emphasize it and consistently supervise progress. The opposite situation is the young people you see out on the street at night looking for trouble, because their parents are afraid of them.

Certainly I want all people to have their track record evaluated with a color blind. And I would like to have experiences in the classroom that have no correlation with skin color. But I see trends too often to forget them, and political correctness is useful only for winning elections or grants. I meditate on what will happen later to young people who have so much disrespect for the opportunity that tax money affords them. And I don't think expectations at the top will change until environments at the bottom change for the better, in many, many homes. Self discipline and concentration are foundations of scholarship.

In his Opinion piece, Fred Jerome states that black soldiers "fought only in segregated units under white officers." Blacks also fought in unofficially integrated units. In the spring of 1945, when combat casualties depleted all-black infantry fifth platoons in Europe, the black GIs fought as squads within white platoons and eventually as individuals. Thus blacks did _1fight side-by-side with their fellow white GIs in Europe. They shared the dangers and discomforts of combat, living and eating together. Many of the black volunteers, selected from labor service units in France, took reductions in rank to have the privilege of serving their country in combat.^1–3 The experiment worked.

References

1. 1. U. Lee, The Employment of Negro Troops, US Army Center of Military History, Washington, DC (1966), p. 688.
2. 2. A. L. Gropman, The Air Force Integrates, 1945–1964, Office of Air Force History, Washington, DC (1978), p. 50.
3. 3. M. J. MacGregor, Integration of the Armed Forces 1940–1965, US Army Center of Military History, Washington, DC (1985), p. 448.

Fred Jerome's opinion piece is excellent—sobering and well written. However, I submit one point of clarification. In the article Lincoln University is described as "the oldest black college in the Western world." Founded in 1854 as the Ashmun Institute, the college was renamed Lincoln University in 1866, in honor of Abraham Lincoln. However, Cheyney University, also mentioned by Jerome, is the oldest historically black university in the US, founded in 1837 for "the descendants of the African Race," according to its original charter.

Cheyney was founded, in part, as a response to the August 1829 race riots of Cincinnati, wherein violations of black codes were used as a pretext for a mob attack on the city's African American population. The codes, which had become state law in 1804, barred blacks and mulattos from living in Ohio without a legally recognized certificate of freedom, barred them from attending public schools, and required a bond for good behavior. The riots resulted in more than 1000 members of the city's African American population being driven from their homes.

Jerome replies: I thank Richard Camilli and M. David Egan for their factual additions. The letter from G. Stanley Brown merits a more complete response.

The African American postdoc in my article who was ignored when he went for his job interview was far removed from the disruptive classrooms that preoccupy Brown; yet the postdoc's skin color made him invisible to the interviewer. My main point, which Brown ignores, is that scientists need to follow Einstein's example and, to paraphrase Hamlet, take up arms against a sea of social troubles, especially racism.

Now, to Brown's point: Children who disrupt classes and children who see no hope for their futures are real and related problems. Both are clearly linked not to race but to economic status, which raises serious questions about economics. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, unemployment among African Americans is at least double the rate among whites; obviously, parents who cannot get jobs can rarely provide the stability at home needed to focus on study skills. Nonetheless, some people, like Brown, persist in seeing such problems as racial and perhaps inherent or genetic, a view that can lead only to race-based actions rather than to a real solution based on economic restructuring.

Despite Brown's denial, a plethora of reports document that educational tracking in America—race- and class-based—is rampant.¹ Not only does it widen the former gap—now chasm—between the haves and have-nots, but the majority of students whose grades fall below the top one-tenth end up in the worst classrooms in the worst schools, with some of the worst teachers. It makes those students essentially passengers on an express train to Hell, which bypasses what Brown calls "the opportunity that tax money affords them" and ends abruptly at the junction of Despair and Anger in US cities that increasingly resemble the New Orleans we saw explode in 2005.

If the American media were surprised by that explosion, it could be because so little media attention was focused on the root problems. Perhaps a word from Einstein's 1946 message to the Urban League would be useful—for Brown, other physics teachers, and not a few media moguls:

First, the taboo, the let's-not-talk-about-it, must be broken. It must be pointed out time and again that the exclusion of a large part of the colored population from active civil rights by the common practices is a slap in the face of the Constitution of the nation.

I hope this discussion continues, in the pages of PHYSICS TODAY and elsewhere.

Reference

1. 1. See, for example, [LINK]; J. Hill, [LINK].

 

Request product info