TheBuzzCincy – 1230 WDBZ

Today, not only Republican but also key civil rights, labor, progressive and Democratic Party leaders are pressing the view that private, market-based solutions are the only way to redress inequality. There is near-unanimous agreement between the leaderships of both political parties that the gains of the civil rights movement should be placed on the backburner and that today’s captains of industry should be entrusted with the power to oversee and determine the character of black, Latina/o, other minority and poor students’ educational opportunities. The premise of this new paternalistic Jim Crow is that closing the achievement/opportunity gap between black and other minority students and more privileged white students can best be solved through market principles.

This theory is driving the campaign to dismantle public education, to force charter schools on black, Latina/o and poor communities despite massive popular opposition, and to turn inner-city public schools into separate, segregated, unregulated, stripped-down, regimented vocational schools, devoid of art, music, sports, AP and other vital academic offerings. It is also behind the concerted campaign of liberal faculty and administrators at many elite universities to get young minority students to emulate Booker T. Washington.

On these campuses, minority students are urged to seek and rely on the support of private benefactors/philanthropists to maintain desperately-needed targeted scholarship, recruitment and retention programs to compensate for the loss of programs ended by bans on affirmative action. Instead of standing up and becoming leaders of the new integrated civil rights movement, these young and talented students are urged to sell the new Jim Crow to their communities. They are being urged to promote the ideology of black and Latina/o inferiority and to encourage cynicism, growing atomization and despair.