Technoethicist

The story To Be Black at Stuyvesant High from the NYTimes this week did not sit well with me. This story focuses on the sad real­ity of some spe­cific indi­vid­u­als, which is inter­est­ing and impor­tant in its own way, but it means the story doesn’t get at the root of what’s actu­ally hap­pen­ing here. Black stu­dents aren’t set up suc­ceed for these kinds of merit tests. Their ele­men­tary schools and mid­dle schools don’t have the same resources to pre­pare stu­dents for these tests. But this fact is painted over by the gen­eral belief in the Amer­i­can Dream– that every­one can suc­ceed if they just work hard.

One com­menter says: “Racism does not hold back blacks in gen­eral. It is their lack of suc­cess that does. One should not nec­es­sar­ily hold back the other. Keep focus­ing on edu­ca­tion, and you will even­tu­ally suc­ceed and over­come all doubts. This much is clear from the lessons we’ve learned from other minori­ties who have risen the lad­der of eco­nomic suc­cess in Amer­ica.” This is not an uncom­mon belief. This is dis­turb­ing. Has our coun­try really already for­got­ten that we insti­tu­tion­ally iden­ti­fied black men and women as NOT peo­ple, as par­tial peo­ple, and finally as separate-but-equal people?