| |
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. |
| |
|
|
| |
|
| |