Black Underachievement in Context

Once again demonstrating why it's more than worth subscribing to, The Economist provides an insightful and unconventional take on the problem of black (meaning mostly Afro-Caribbean) underachievement that has been the subject of so much discussion in the British press of late.

WHITE people tend to be nervous of raising the subject of race and education, but are often voluble on the issue if a black person brings it up. So when Trevor Phillips, chairman of Britain's Commission for Racial Equality, said that there was a particular problem with black boys' performance at school, and that it might be a good idea to educate them apart from other pupils, there was a torrent of comment. Some of it commended his proposal, and some criticised it, but none of it questioned its premise. Everybody accepts that black boys are a problem.

On the face of it, it looks as though Mr Phillips is right. Only 27% of Afro-Caribbean boys get five A-C grades at GCSE, the exams taken by 16-year-olds, compared with 47% of boys as a whole and 44% of Afro-Caribbean girls. Since, in some subjects, candidates who score less than 50% get Cs, those who don't reach this threshold have picked up pretty little at school.

[...]

Among children as a whole, Afro-Caribbeans do indeed perform badly. But Afro-Caribbeans tend to be poor. So to get a better idea of whether race, rather than poverty, is the problem, one must control for economic status. The only way to do that, given the limits of British educational statistics, is to separate out the exam results of children who get free school meals: only the poor get free grub.

Poor children's results tell a rather different story (see article). Afro-Caribbeans still do remarkably badly, but whites are at the bottom of the pile. All ethnic minority groups do better than them. Even Bangladeshis, a pretty deprived lot, do twice as well as the natives in their exams; Indians and Chinese do better still. And absolute numbers of underperforming whites dwarf those of underperforming Afro-Caribbeans: last year, 131,393 of white boys failed to hit the government's benchmark, compared with 3,151 Afro-Caribbean boys.

These figures suggest that, at school at least, black people's problem is not so much race as poverty. And they undermine the idea of teaching black boys separately, for if poor whites are doing worse than poor blacks, there's not much argument for singling out blacks for special measures: whites need help just as badly.

This isn't, however, a message that anybody much wants to hear. Many white people find the idea that there's something fundamentally wrong with black people comforting: it confirms deeply held prejudices and reassures them that a whole complex of social problems—starting with underachievement in schools, but leading on to unemployment, drug addiction and crime—is nothing to do with them.

The race-relations industry also has an interest in explaining educational underachievement in terms of ethnicity. A whole raft of committees, commissions and task forces has been set up on the assumption that racial differences are a fundamental cause of social problems. If that's wrong, then all those worthies might as well pack up and go home.

What we see here is an over-eagerness to apply an American template to British realities, on the parts of both those who look down on blacks as well as those who make a living claiming to stand up for them. The mundane notion that black underperformance might be the mere result of poverty (and likewise, that the Chinese stand out because Chinese immigration to Britain has been dominated by well-off professionals leaving Hong Kong) just doesn't carry the thrill of superiority that conceiving of blacks as innately stupid does, while acknowleging that dire comprehensives lie at the root of the problem is no way for left-leaning "anti-racist" quangos to engage in empire-building. The status quo under which black social problems in Britain are understood as mere replications of the African-American experience seems to suit nearly everyone just fine - everyone, that is, except for the poor British children of all races who are so ill-served by the current educational setup.

Comments

[Jim]

"Everybody accepts that black boys are a problem."

This is part of the problem right here. It would be one thing if people thought that there was a problem with black boys, but that is not the wording says. Boys in general are "the problem" when it comes to determining their difficulties at school, especially if you are discussing the matter with a bunch of female teachers. Girls were not the problem back when the push was one to educate them, but now boys are the problem. Add the stereotypes around race and off you go. Inappropriate teaching methods may have more to do with the problem, and what is or isn't appropriate is more an individual matter than anything to do with sex or race. There is more effort in that area these days, thankfully.

Poverty does correlate with this, but the core problem is really alienation. Poverty will indeed do that to you, but then again, just being an alien or a minority of any kind can do it too. In the US poor whites as well as poor blacks have similar problems in school. I bet they test out the same on standard tests.

The point about the shape of the discourse is quite correct. There are vested interests in play.

Your point about the clumsiness of applying an American explantion to a British problem is also well taken. For that matter, it is clumsy and stupid to try always to jam an American explanation onto an American problem if the explanation comes out of the South and is applied to a situation on the West Coast, where the history of race is funadamentally different. The standard narrative doesn't apply even in the North, and it expalins why there is such a gap in communication on the subject between blacks and white "ethnics" there.

[David B]

Not one of the Economist's better pieces of analysis. If poverty is the root of the problem, how come poor Chinese and Indian kids do so much better than others?

In any case, the proportions of different ethnic groups receiving FSMs are so different (ranging from 9% to 62%, if you look at the DFES stats the Economist are selectively using) that they must also be tapping very different parts of the ability range.

As for the Economist's statement that "Blacks seem to do badly largely because they tend to live in bad neighbourhoods with bad schools", you don't have to be a BNP member to wonder about the direction of causation here.

As usual, I am not expressing a view about nature v. nurture, but I think just blaming 'poverty' is a cop-out.

[Abiola Lapite]

"If poverty is the root of the problem, how come poor Chinese and Indian kids do so much better than others?"

How poor were the Chinese and Indian immigrants who came to Britain really, how educated were they, and how well connected to global networks of similar business-savy individuals? The fact is that we know something about the demographics of both groups, and it's not acceptable to compare well-educated trader expellees from Uganda with West-Indians brought over to cook, clean and sweep, even on the assumption that their incomes are the same at time X (which you've done nothing to establish).

"In any case, the proportions of different ethnic groups receiving FSMs are so different (ranging from 9% to 62%, if you look at the DFES stats the Economist are selectively using) that they must also be tapping very different parts of the ability range."

Buried in your statement here is the presumption that there is some fixed thing called "ability", a presumption that is dubious in the extreme, given the very different educational experiences of the groups in question.

"As for the Economist's statement that "Blacks seem to do badly largely because they tend to live in bad neighbourhoods with bad schools", you don't have to be a BNP member to wonder about the direction of causation here."

We already know what direction causation lies in, as we know a lot about the composition of the migrant groups who came to Britain. What you're doing is bending over backwards to give the benefit of the doubt to a position that simply isn't tenable given what we know.

"As usual, I am not expressing a view about nature v. nurture, but I think just blaming 'poverty' is a cop-out."

No, refusing to accept that it's a mere matter of poverty is the real cop-out. If West-Indians had been subjected to the same levels of filtering that Ugandan Asians and Hong Kong emigres had been, you might have had some sort of argument, but they weren't, so all this talk of "ability" and "causality" is beside the point. Is it really astonishing that Jamaicans who were brought over en masse to do menial work and were unqualified for anything more have fared less well economically than well-educated Chinese who may have had to start over far lower on the totem-pole than they were at home? Without taking all of this into account, your argument slants the table heavily against Afro-Caribbeans from the outset.

[David B]

"How poor were the Chinese and Indian immigrants who came to Britain really?"

- Most Chinese immigrants in post-war Britain arrived as very poor economic migrants or refugees. They then worked in menial jobs in laundries, restaurants, hotels, etc. They did not usually speak English, and their initial economic position was on average worse than that of West Indians. You seem to be confusing them with recent wealthy 'emigres' from Hong Kong, who I would guess are seldom in receipt of FSMs!

"We already know what direction causation lies in"

- Really? So you know what makes a 'bad' school? Congratulations! Have you applied for a job at OFSTED?

"Buried in your statement here is the presumption that there is some fixed thing called "ability", a presumption that is dubious in the extreme"

- I'm not assuming that ability is 'fixed', just that there is some correlation (the strength of which may vary between different ethnic groups) between ability and poverty. This does not assume genetic causation - it could be entirely cultural/environmental. But I will be analysing these statistics further on GNXP, so I won't go into details here.

[Abiola Lapite]

"- Most Chinese immigrants in post-war Britain arrived as very poor economic migrants or refugees. They then worked in menial jobs in laundries, restaurants, hotels, etc. They did not usually speak English, and their initial economic position was on average worse than that of West Indians. You seem to be confusing them with recent wealthy 'emigres' from Hong Kong, who I would guess are seldom in receipt of FSMs!"

I'm not "confusing" anything: is it really a surprise to you that a political refugee with a degree from Beijing University should climb the economic ladder more rapidly than a Jamaican with an elementary school education? Do you suppose illiterate villagers become political refugees in great numbers, or that they can find the thousands of dollars to pay snakehead fees to get to Britain? In any case, you don't provide any evidence that the composition of Chinese immigration really is of the kind you claim it is, and I could just as easily claim the opposite without a shred of proof.

"- Really? So you know what makes a 'bad' school? Congratulations! Have you applied for a job at OFSTED?"

Cheap sarcasm does not an argument make. It *does* suggest, however, that you don't have a sensible response to offer to what I said. The fact of the matter is that we know that the Jamaican immigrants arrived to take jobs native Britons wouldn't deign to accept, and we know quite a good deal about the quality of education they'd have received, as Jamaica was then a British colony - all your sarcasm can't hide the fact that these people were poor and less educated than the natives BEFORE they got to Britain, so the fact that their children perform about the same as their British peers in their school districts argues against an educational problem specific to black youth.

[Nex]

Abiola - you will generally find that the Chinese will rise to the top wherever they go. Find me a society in which the Chinese diaspora is *not* more affluent than the majority populace within a generation.

As David B noted, the Chinese did not start out on top - far from it. The vast majority were in the catering business. Today, however, they are the most affluent minority. I would contend that the success of the Chinese is largely the product of Confucian virtues and mindset.

Anyhow I suggest you first enlighten yourself with the history of Chinese immigration to the UK. You can start with these links.

http://www.postcolonialweb.org/uk/mo/sakilli10.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4304845.stm

http://www.britishbornchinese.org.uk/pages/art6.html

[Abiola Lapite]

"Abiola - you will generally find that the Chinese will rise to the top wherever they go. Find me a society in which the Chinese diaspora is *not* more affluent than the majority populace within a generation."

Australia and the United States before the 1970s.

[Nex]

What I meant was in the absence of systemic legal discrimination by the majority populace.

[Jim]

"What I meant was in the absence of systemic legal discrimination by the majority populace."

You must be restriciting yourself to the UK, because the Chinese were subjected to ethnic cleansing all up and down the West Coast. (Come to think of it, Westerners were getting the same treatment in China.)

One key difference in comparing the Chinese and black experiences in the US at least is that the Chinese never gave much htought to what whites thought of them. They stayed as separate psychologically as possible. It didn't matter to them what whites thought. Whites were barbarians and ghosts.

It comes down to poverty and the adaptations to poverty. It takes a lack of common sense to invest your whole childhood in an activity such as education when no one in your family, or that you know, has ever benefited from it. People have to deform themsleves to accomodate to poverty. It takes a long time, generations of time, for that to wear off.

[David McQueen]

As a mentor of some fifteen or so years, I would mention that there are a number of factors involved in the UK black male (predominantly caribbean). They include amongst other things poverty, community, family and some times misunderstanding, including racism.

For those of us who have been actively involved in this debate for many years and rather than providing knee jerk reactions look at workable solutions to this, we have found that segregation is not the answer but rather a combination of addressing those items mentioned above and extra curricular activity, such as after school and weekend schools, and positive mentoring programmes.

The problems of male underachievement is universal and also is prevalent in the USA and Caribbean even though they have a higher degree of segregation than the UK, and there is no simple answer.

[Helen Li]

Do not be suprised that a generation or two down the line, Chinese youngsters will no longer have the same hunger and expectation to succeed at all cost. Right now, I know that Chinese parents in the United Kingdom are fanatical in pushing their children; spending all their money to send them to private schools; and their children just cannot afford to fail. But, as I say, this will cool off when the Chinese community understand academic performance is not the be all and end all. There are other ways to be happy and successful in their new country---watch out for the Wayne Rooney Wong of football in twenty years time. Hehe!