Previous

Home

alt="Next"

  

How we oppress ghetto children to become "dumb" - also in Europe!

Chapter 57

Please note: I leave this chauvinistic chapter as it is right now since it demonstrates how we in Europe were pointing fingers at American racism when I wrote my original book in 1984.
Since then we have repeated all of America's mistakes in our own oppression of Muslim immigrants.
Now when immigrant school children in Denmark are falling as much behind at the same grade levels as American black kids, I will soon re-write this chapter with more of my insights from Danish racism!

 

 

  

How damaging such a discrimination is for a child's self-concept was shown when a computer by mistake put all the so-called "slow" children into the "bright" lass and vice versa, with the result that a year later, when the mistake was discovered, they found that the slow pupils were behaving as though they were bright and the bright pupils were behaving as though they were stupid – the beginning of ghettoization.

  

  

Constantly I met teachers and even principals who referred to their ghetto pupils as "animals." With such an attitude they are directly creating animals, to the point where I saw even young children thinking of themselves as rats. The image the teacher has of a child becomes the image this child adopts and later tries to live up to.

  

  

This I felt clearly in my own school. I spoke a rural dialect, which sounded "dumb" and "non verbal" in the ears of teachers in the larger city, where they spoke "correct" Danish. As a result they unconsciously avoided me and little by little I became introverted with occasional sudden explosions of "dumb" behavior; I lost all desire for learning and consistently scored 30 to 50% lower than the other pupils.

  

  

Finally I was forced to drop out, which eventually made me into a streetwise vagabond. Had I in addition been black in a society which for a century had tried to keep such "unteachables" out of sight till they became untouchables, I could easily have ended up not only "streetwise," but also a "criminal," "addict," "prostitute," "welfare-recipient" or any of the roles disposable society finds it fitting to mold its undesirables into.

  

  

To avoid the accusation of being master-slave society's whip-hand, teachers (who in America - from daycare workers to university professors - have much less prestige than in Europe) constantly find new ways of putting the blame on their pupils. The liberals say that the ghetto child's "lack of motivation" and "impaired learning ability" is due to being "culturally deprived" by coming from homes with no more books than could be found in slave cabins.

  

  

Coming from a country with more bookstores than hamburger-joints and 15 times as many books in each home as in America, I would like to ask with the same logic: Could it be that the teachers themselves have been "culturally deprived" by coming from homes almost without books and with information mostly from racist one-sided TV without counter-balancing from other countries (such as we are used to in Danish TV with some Russian and East European programs alongside the American) ?

  

  

Just as black students in the end fall one or two years behind whites in America, American exchange students are consistently placed one or two grades behind their age in European high schools. In America I met teachers for whom Africa is still a dark continent and college professors who had never heard of Marx. Could it be that the teachers themselves have been caught in a closed system and thereby become such excellent oppressors?

  

  

If this smells a hit of national chauvinism then remember it is a benign chauvinism, hurting no one, unlike the chauvinism I found among American teachers whose infernalism "Our schools are not inferior. We get inferior students" or paternalism "Poor little things" hurt and crush the children.

  

  

If there is any doubt left it is worth remembering that highly motivated and politically and socially aware teachers in the schools of the Black Panthers and the Black Muslims did bring their ghetto kids up to the national standards. In Los Angeles I saw a beautiful case of racial solidarity when West Indian immigrant children formed an organization to aid and try to motivate native blacks not to drop out of high school and college - a historical repetition of the underground railroad where free blacks helped people out of slavery.

  

  

For if a few underclass blacks manage to come out of elementary school "alive" and with some self-esteem left, master-slave society has designed more obstacles to put them back in the closed system. Coming from a country where all higher education is free and of an even standard, without Harvards and Howards, it was a shock for me to see the total lack of democracy and equality of opportunity in American higher education, which clearly is de-signed to make some into an elite and dispose of others as trash. If so many Third World countries were not worse off, a U.N. human rights commission would long ago have indicted the American school system not only for apartheid, but even more for continuing slavery. (Remember, this was written in 1984. We are now repeating all these mistakes in Europe)

  

 

The USA therefore remains the most segregated society in the Western Hemisphere, with a psychology resembling South African apartheid more than a free society. For to try to integrate that which comes out of slavery is absurd ethnic alchemy.

  

 

A system which is based on the right of one to float on top of the other will continue to produce half-humans who repel each other like oil and water. The frantic efforts of the liberals to shake these two elements so much together that they split into smaller particles for a short time is a fruitless attempt to give uncontrolled capitalism a human face.

  

 

For when they do not really wish economic equalization of the enormous class differences in society anyhow, then they in fact make sure that these class differences are carried on among the pupils no matter how integrated the classroom.

  

 

The tragedy of American liberals is that their paternalistic throwing of guilt money at the poor from above is so engrained in their deepest-down social-Darwinist outlook that they are as frightened as the conservatives at the prospect of a genuine welfare state which respects the dignity of the individual instead of destroying it.

  

 

In their zealous distrust of the poor they are creating beggars instead of participants and thereby killing initiative in the underclass at the same rate as on chattel slavery's plantations.

  

 

With conservative infernalism killing what little initiative is left by the liberals it is obvious that a society with such a huge slave culture will start falling behind other industrial nations, much as the American South steadily fell behind the North until the Civil Rights movement.

  

 

Though American growth rates include the enormous cost of police, prisons, and courts, they have for years been below those of European welfare societies, leading one to believe that racism in more than one way hurts all Americans.

  

 

However, it is important to stress that racism has only killed the initiative to participate in the mainstream economy. For the prisoners of the closed system are in no way lazy and have developed incredible techniques for survival.

  

 

Yet how trapped people are by their culture is shown in this picture of a group of black teenagers. There are no whites among them.

  

 

The girl was adopted as a baby by black parents and has therefore been brought up to be black: to behave black, to think black, and to dress like blacks. She has hardly anything in common with whites and cannot even speak our language.

  

 

In white homes I saw black children brainwashed with the master culture and unable to communicate with people bound in slavery.

Black or white, Palestinian or Jew, European or Muslim immigrant, man or woman, gay or straight - in all patterns of oppression both parties suffer severe injury when our parents in early childhood recreate in us the patterns they themselves received from their parents. Though both parties are victimized by the oppression -- they are not equally powerless to end it. Both parties are robbed of both ability and desire later to behave in a human way towards the other side.

  

  

Previous

Home

alt="Next"

  

Home