Pete Souza, White House
In 2012, Obama signed an executive order to improve educational outcomes for black students. Betsy DeVos has since rescinded a guidance intended to address disciplinary bias against black students, citing a racist article by a fringe academic.
The Trump Administration is executing an anti-black agenda via its education policy. The decision to rescind the Obama era school discipline guidance policy isn’t anti-black on its face. Where Betsy DeVos and the Trump Administration expose their anti-blackness is in how they’ve defended their decision.
A major reason cited for the policy change was a study in which researchers argued that disparities in disciplining of black and white students are due to “prior problem behavior” of youth brought to the classroom. In layman’s terms, black children are disciplined more than white children because black children exhibit behavioral issues that start earlier in life, rather than because of institutional racism. “These findings highlight the importance of early problem behaviors and suggest that the use of suspensions by teachers and administrators may not have been as racially biased as some scholars have argued,” states the study authors.
This explanation is racist pseudoscience, and not new.
When asked by Congresswoman Katherine Clark during Congressional budget hearings whether or not she believes that black children are more of a discipline problem, DeVos responded, “No child should be treated or disciplined differently based on their skin color, race or their national origin.” Yet, John Paul Wright, the lead author of the study claims credit for rekindling interest in “the role biology plays in criminal behavior.” He has argued that Michael Brown was justifiably shot and killed by Darren Wilson, and has called Black Lives Matter a radical left-wing group.
There’s a large body of research showing how institutional racism, implicit bias, and the lack of teachers of color all account for higher exclusionary discipline outcomes for black students.
There’s a large body of research, unaccounted for by Wright, showing how institutional racism, implicit bias, and the lack of teachers of color all account for higher exclusionary discipline outcomes for black students. And while Wright acknowledges that black children aren’t categorically more of a discipline problem, he asserts that black people have the highest comparative rates of problem behavior due to being socially and economically disadvantaged.
I call bullshit.
Consider this: It is a proven fact that black people and white people use drugs at the same rate, yet black people are arrested more and it’s not because black people exhibit more criminalized behavior because they are poor. No, poor black people are frequent targets of the police where they are exploited for profit and harassed for kicks as proven in various Department of Justice reports conducted on the police departments in Ferguson, Baltimore, Milwaukee and San Francisco.
Wright’s anti-black research fits the Trump Administration education agenda. It also feeds the ego of Donald Trump by eliminating another Obama Administration initiative.
Racial pseudoscience—the misuse of science to “prove” inherent white superiority—has long provided rationale for whites desiring to discard and ignore the injustices of racism found in America’s institutions. There was drapetomania to explain why enslaved black people ran away, for example, and the use of eugenics as cover for black genocide.
DeVos’s boilerplate response to Congresswoman Clark reeks of selective colorblindness, in which whites detect color clearly when they wish to distinguish themselves from blacks or remove them from view, but blackness disappears when it comes to the need for social and economic policies designed to right the wrongs done to black people by racial discrimination.
This rhetoric blames students of color and their families for a lack of academic success, and focuses on shifting black behavior as the solution rather than suggesting shifts to structures or policies that systematically fail students of color.
After the hearing, Congresswoman Clark called for DeVos to resign as Secretary of Education. But that call will go unheeded. Her use of racist pseudoscience to rationalize rescinding the Obama era discipline guidance is apropos of her membership in a racist administration. DeVos’s move is also preemptive.
It also falls in line with Trump Administration policy on immigration—suppress, oppress, and remove in the name of protecting white rule both now and in the future. It makes sense when you consider that whites are now outnumbered by students of color in public schools; by 2020, children of color will outnumber white children.
Blaming individuals in communities of color for educational inequality excuses institutional responsibility. DeVos engages with pseudoscience to pretend to study race while evading concrete analysis of racism. Taken another way, racist pseudoscience makes racists employable, allows racists to enact public policy and over all makes racists sleep easier at night. Racists are members of the Trump base and the President blows dog whistles daily.
Congresswoman Clark’s plea for Betsy DeVos’s resignation was correct, but is basically a symbolic gesture that will go unheeded. For the Trump Administration, anti-blackness guides public policy.