Segregation: The fallacy that is psuedospeciation.

It appears that the Commission for Racial Equality has raised an issue with segregation...



Obviously the question posed is if segregation is the answer to teaching these boys.

If applied a literal logic, segregation can maintain an equality between all parties segregated. In reality, that might not happen and the first problem is telling these kids that they are different.

I think this solution has a major misconception: psuedospeciation (thank you Margaret Atwood for the term!). This is the idea that has given us the ability to specify "black people," and give the term an identity so as we may call "black people," "them." Psuedospeciation then, is how we've classified people into sub-groups seperate from humanity as a whole based solely on their skin colour. So instead of just 'people' we have this idea that there are 'black people,' and 'white people,' within that first group... and to be frank it took the work of many revolutionaries just to include 'black people' in 'people.'

In reality however, there is no special genetic distinction between a "black person" or a "white person" or a "yellow person" to warrant sub-categories of humans. Every person despite skin colour or cultural differences has the same potential for development as every other human being.

The misconception in the context of this segregation solution is deeper than simply how we classify ourselves. That classification has taken on influence on how we define culture -- raising the same distinctions as race. Thus "black people" seperate from "people" also have an identified seperate "black culture."

Now outside of this reasoning and in the real world, people of various ethnicities do indeed have distinctive cultural characteristics. However, in this reasoning the parallel effects of pseudospeciation is what has in all probability led some people to believe that the cultural differences (ie: the "black culture" is to blame in this situation.

It is in my reasoning that this is not indeed, the case -- it is simply a problem wired in ourselves. Our ability to make the distinction of "black people" and "white people" and so on. It's this problem that is affecting the culture of humanity and creating this seperation. If we didn't we didn't create the idea of "black people," these boys wouldn't be treated differently...

and that is the great tradgedy here. That they're sitting in a classroom while people the world over are discussing wether they are different or not.

So the problem still remains that these boys aren't reaching their full potential... and as far as my reasoning goes it is because humanity has decided that they are different.

So my questions for discussion are: how do we deal with this idea of pseudospeciation? and what cultural elements are propelling it?

I think that it's a really, really tough call and that at some point there are advantages to being educated among ones cultural peers and disadvantages in being limited to that.

My father was educated on a reservation, which, by virtue of being reservations, they are segregated from other cultures. Also, because his father had been forced into education off of the reservation (by law at the time), my grandfather was even more embedded in the Blackfoot culture than others.

The advantage to this was that he got the opportunity not only to learn the culture, but to live it un-impeded. Also, the actual act of teaching took into consideration the culture, drawing on analogies and concepts that were familiar to Native Americans. It is difficult to learn a subject like mathematical problem solving when the description of the word problems makes no sense to the person trying to solve them.

For example, asking a student if Mary's car has 3/4 tank of gas and Timmy's car has 1/2 tank of gas and Norman is out of gas, how much gas should Mary and Timmy give Norman so that they are equal.

A student who walked most places or used a community truck might be more inclined to be focused on why Norman didn't ride the horse to begin with than with the actual concept of using math to solve the problem.

Text books everywhere have a cultural bias, it is unavoidable.

The disadvantage my father had was that he was completely unprepared for life outside of the reservation or on how to interact with other cultures, specifically, white American culture.

My father attributed is inability to grasp how things worked off of the reservation for many hardships in his life. Because of this, he refused to allow any of his children to live on the reservation (though I stayed with my grandmother some summers). During those summers, I was like a fish out of water. It was much deeper than just having lighter hair and green eyes; it was because I had been kept from living within the culture. I was as unprepared for reservation life as my father was for life off of the reservation.

I doubt that I would have thrived intellectually in a reservation school, even if they had been provided with adequate teaching tools. (Which is the other down fall to segregation in education.) Often, the environment of the classroom, the teaching tools and the quality of the teachers is determined by the wealth of the community supporting the school. Segregation of poorer factions of society are inclined to produce less successful schools because they so lack in resources.

So that probably dosen't really answer your question, but I think that maybe it might depend on the community. If the school they go to is well funded with good resources, then maybe the might be advantages, though perhaps only for those in the lower grades.

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black people and white people be diffrent yo. yeah lame comedy but it's true i think. there are differences physically but not any important ones. the difference comes from how and where you're raised and the culture you're raised in. sorry but i believe there are different cultures and they effect you. whether there's White Culture and Black Culture i dunno. forget specific groups. it's just my experience that no matter who you are the way you're raised effects you psychologically and has alot to do with how you see the world and how you approach it. like Rose's "on the reservation/off the reservation" thing.

it's all nice to say there aren't any differences between people at all but fact is there are. it's not some big racist deal tho unless you make it one in your own mind (not saying you are Icon). just saying Nurture does make a big difference even if Nature doesn't (aside from just the fact that everybody is unique, sickle cell, lactose intolerance, eye color etc).

so summary......... people aren't all that different physically or mentally but they are very different psychologically cause of where and how they're raised. everybody has more or less the same potential but that doesn't mean everybody can reach it.

ya know what forget that last part. i'ma stick it out and go against the political correctness and say not everybody has the same potential. i'll never be able to run my lazy ass like Michael Johnson no matter how much i train and i'm not going to be breaking any weight lifting records either.

new summary........ people really are different thru all of humanity. talking about everybody as a group there aren't any important physical differences but individuals are all different physically mentally psychologically (some of that depending on how and where you're raised) and with different potentials but that's true no matter what "race" you look at.

you can always find people who fit the stereotypes and people who break it. fact is there's alot of tiny little wrinkled up asian folks working the rice fields in the world and making good photos for National Geographic. there's also alot of asians getting engineering degrees or going to medical school or were when i was in college. and last olympics there was an asian sprinter in the finals hauling ass with all the others. how's that for busting stereotypes? for "black people" unfortunately Africa is like example A for stereotypes but what about George Washington Carver, Langston Hughes and Colin Powell? there's potential getting met.

thing is people start thinking stereotypes are the real view so they get all OMG when somebody doesn't fit the stereotype. but there's somebody in the world who really does fit any stereotype. but for every stereotype there's a million people who don't fit it. it's just the one image people latch on to and after awhile people start thinking it means something.

yeah yeah not much of a summary........ anyways....... i'm not sure what the point of the article was. ok reading it again....... "

well calling people "black people" or "asians" or "white people" or "hispanic" is probly what's propelling it. thing is those are legitamate descriptions that keep us from having to say "see that.........person over there. next to the other person but behind that one person?" problem comes when you start thinking it's anything but a convenient way to describe somebody.

that's probably true. it's just as true if you take out the word "black" or even take out the whole "for black boys" part. if these black boys really are doing worse in school then there's a real problem. but it doesn't say something about "black people" it says something about those boys and how they're being raised and where they're living. and that guy wanting to segregate them says something about him being the UK equivelant of a deep south cracker. there's my one generlization for this post.

disclaimer: i keep reading what i wrote and it's not exactly what i'm trying to say but it's close as i can get. there's probably going to be people saying i'm a reverse racist or something but fact is i'm saying the politically correct sensitivity types saying there's no difference between anybody anywhere (but diversity is still somehow good) are just as stupid as inbred KKK fucks screaming on Jerry Springer. the truth is in the middle.

The only segregation that should be going on in the classroom is seperating males and females. Children (specially older ones) learn better without distactions.

Devlin
I think i totally agree with that.

After reading Rose's and Zuzi's posts, and after some talk with other people in my life on the subject there are a few more things I've considered.

Culturally there will always be different and I agree that a homogenized culture isn't really possible at all. From birth onward we define ourselves uniquely from everyone else -- but we can never escape the fact that indeed we are human.

So to clarify what I mean (lets hope I get this right): it's not the culture itself that I am scrutinizing -- it's the segregation on belief that it is the fault of "black culture" that these young black males are "refusing to reach their full potential" (to paraphrase).

From my line of reasoning it's the pseudospeciation that has given birth to a seperatism in humans where we can call black people as a group "them." In a parallel context to culture, it is saying the black culture is exclusive from humanity which further propels the idea that people are a seperate "sub species" of human based solely on skin colour.

Could it not be possible that this pseudospeciation is the cause of so much misconceptions of race?

I suppose it will never be possible to completely erase the linguistic identifiers that allow us to recognize that this person is latino, or this person is asian... and hell, they may have positive uses. However, it seems to me that the idea to segregate these young boys and teach them differently is only propelling this negative side of such distinctions.

Black, latino, white, asian, etc... they will always have their seperate cultures and we as individuals will always develop our own unique facets of each. On the larger scale of humanity as a species -- such distinctions are self-effacing and even destructive.

I don't think there is a cultural stigma that requires these boys to be taught seperately from the other children. The problem is not "black culture" at all IMO -- it's racial distinction as identity. It's the fact that I as a white person can generalize and point to black people and call them, "them." It's the reason why race is a distinction we make that influences who we'll interact with and how we interact with them... it's a human thing and I've an inkling that it's been beaten into us through centuries of ignorance and bigotry.

For example, when I was a kid -- I had asian friends and black friends and jewish ones and friends from all walks of life. I obviously could tell that they were a different coloured skin.. but I wasn't yet able to classify them based on those features. I wasn't able to compartmentalize them and say, "those are my jewish friends and those are my indian friends... etc" Later though, I somehow learned the identity of these races and suddenly it was different. People in high-school we a little more uncomfortable about the whole thing. I could tell that people I talked to were aware of what I looked like before my conscious presence and that affected what they would say to me and how they would talk.

It's strange, and even now in adulthood living in this great multi-cultural city of Toronto, I don't see it as often and feel more comfortable about it all. Being around people who do however make a psuedospeciation distinction makes me uncomfortable. It feels tense and I feel pressured into making those distinctions.. which is stressing because I can't.

In the end I guess what all of this has meant that if I was black, white, hispanic, chinese, indian, native american, aboriginal, or what have you... if you remove the cultural experiences and I grew up as a person equal without colour as a dinstinctive factor of my social existence -- I could become anything. I could learn anything.

Which is why I say every human being has the potential to become or learn anything... and I think it's the race-identity and psuedospeciation that divides us is a limiting factor in our existence. It's not that 'black culture' is what is making it hard for these young boys to learn -- black culture has the potential to be anything and is constantly changing -- it's that black culture is a seperate classifiable identity that doesn't apply to anyone else of a different skin colour. Therefore the interaction of black culture with the rest of human culture is what is causing rifts.

So why can't these boys be taught in the same classroom as all the other ones?

Is it possible that 20 years down the road we'll end up with "Lord Timothy's School for lower-class only-child white males living with a single mother"?

I dunno.. I guess I just want to know why we think we're so different.