Racisme : le vrai problème

De braves gens qui n'habitent pas avec leurs frères de race dans le besoin.

Un article du Boston Globe fait depuis quelques jours beaucoup de bruit aux Etats-Unis. Son auteur, Richard Thompson Ford, est professeur de droit à la Stanford Law School et l'auteur d'un ouvrage très controversé,"The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse" dans lequel il démontre que la discrimination positive a des conséquences désastreuses pour ceux-là même qu'elle ambitionne de privilégier.

L'article a été rédigé dans le style habituel de ceux qui paraissent dans la presse américaine concernant la question noire et, pourtant, il sort des sentiers battus en avançant quelques idées sinon originales, peu connues du grand public.

L'auteur explique que l'ère des droits civiques arrive à son terme. Il est difficile d'argumenter que les Noirs souffrent de discriminations quand un mulâtre est président des Etats-Unis. En revanche, la ségrégation entre Noirs et autres races non seulement ne faiblit pas mais a tendance à s'aggraver, notamment par le fait que les Noirs des classes moyennes s'installent volontairement dans des beaux quartiers à majorité noire.

Il ne s'agit là que du résultat d'un instinct grégaire, mais il choque la bienpensance conventionnelle. En raison d'un racisme inconscient, la gauche américaine pense qu'un Noir qui gagne bien sa vie n'a qu'une idée en tête: aller vivre au milieu des blancs aux revenus comparables aux siens. Il s'agit du type d'idée fausse qui ne peut germer que dans l'esprit de gens qui n'ont jamais vécu aux côtés des minorités raciales qu'ils prétendent défendre.

Le constat tragique est qu'aujourd'hui, il s'est formé une population noire marginalisée au cœur des grandes villes qui n'a aucune chance d'intégrer la société américaine. Ce n'est pas le résultat d'une politique délibérée, les lois contre la discrimination ont été votées et sont appliquées. Ce n'est pas le résultat d'un manque de moyens, on n'a jamais autant dépensé pour l'éducation et la formation des Noirs. Ce n'est pas le résultat d'un manque de volonté, la loi « No child left behind » le prouve, mais d'un ensemble de facteurs dont les causes internes, propres à la communauté noire, sont probablement majoritaires.

La faillite des mouvements communautaires noirs, de leurs chefs autoproclamés, est patente. Ils refusent de s'attaquer aux causes internes des maux dont souffre leur communauté car cela ne rapporte aucune prébende. Il est bien plus rentable d'accuser les Blancs (et les Juifs, dans quelques cercles extrémistes) de tous les maux. De mettre sur le compte de l'esclavage toutes les insuffisances de leur communauté.

Mais le résultat est là. Des générations entières de jeunes noirs vivent dans une société en marge, caractérisée par un langage propre et un gestuelle qui non seulement les différencie de la majorité de leurs concitoyens mais qui les écarte de toute possibilité d'intégrer la société américaine (notons que c'est moins vrai pour les filles).

L'auteur remarque qu'une des raisons de l'incapacité des jeunes noirs à trouver du travail ne réside pas dans le racisme intrinsèque des patrons, comme veulent nous le faire croire les associations de professionnels de l'antiracisme, mais dans l'incapacité de ces jeunes garçons à jouer le jeu de la société industrielle et de services, à faire preuve des « compétences douces » indispensables, comme la capacité à créer du lien social dans l'entreprise, à générer l'empathie, ou tout simplement à avoir du charme.

Le résultat de cette catastrophe sociale est visible dans les rues. Les jeunes noirs ont plus de chances de générer un revenu par le crime que par le travail. Voilà pourquoi le taux de condamnation des Noirs est si élevé aux Etats-Unis, ce n'est nullement la preuve que la justice est raciste.

Cet article ne souligne pas, car c'est impossible à le faire sans se suicider professionnellement, que la communauté noire aux Etats-Unis est une société vulnérable. Le raisons de cette vulnérabilité sont complexes et méritent d'être détaillées ailleurs. Toutefois, une des conséquences de l'égalitarisme ambiant est qu'elle est privée des attentions particulières dont elle aurait besoin pour sortir de la crise dans laquelle elle se trouve.

Par exemple, les études démontrent que le QI moyen des enfants de la communauté noire est différent de celui des Blancs. Les études démontrent également que les garçons noirs n'obéissent pas aux mêmes règles de comportement social que les garçons blancs du même âge. Les mélanger aboutit au chaos. C'est comme si ont mêlait sur un terrain de sport des joueurs de rugby et des joueurs de football, toute partie est impossible.

Comme l'ont démontré des expériences encourageante, les jeunes Noirs réussissent mieux à l'école dans des classes qui leur sont réservées, sans enfants d'autres races et sans filles, sous la direction d'éducateurs noirs, dans un cadre de discipline très stricte. Seulement sous ces conditions, la spirale de l'échec, si répandue dans les écoles pour les garçons noirs, peut être arrêtée.

The end of civil rights

If we really want to fix inequality, it's time for a new approach
America's racial problems are persistent and vexing, and since the 1960s, the nation has used a powerful weapon to fix them: the ideas developed during the civil rights movement. Courts and government agencies enforce legal prohibitions against discrimination; private businesses and universities fashion their own diversity policies based on civil-rights principles. Even private individuals think about race relations in civil-rights terms: we aspire to the ideal of "colorblindness," and condemn the evils of discrimination and bias.

For a long time this way of thinking made perfect sense. In the past, the biggest impediment to racial justice was overt discrimination, inspired by a widespread belief that blacks were inferior to whites. And in fighting this kind of outright prejudice, civil rights have been an astonishing success. Race discrimination in restaurants, theaters, and hotels was quickly and thoroughly eliminated by the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. Discrimination in employment - while still a problem - has been dramatically reduced and is widely and roundly condemned. Public figures who make overtly bigoted statements typically suffer widespread contempt and often lose their jobs. As a result, each successive generation is less bigoted than the preceding one. Polls suggest that racial animus today is at an all-time low, and Barack Obama's election demonstrates that race is no longer the impediment it was in the recent past.

But in dealing with the worst racial problems we now face, the civil rights approach is no longer the right tool for the job. Today's most serious racial injustices aren't caused by bias and bigotry; instead they stem from racial segregation and the many disadvantages that follow from living in isolated, economically depressed, and crime-ridden neighborhoods. These problems are a legacy of past racism, but not, by and large, the result of ongoing discrimination. Civil rights litigation and activism have hardly made a dent in these formidable obstacles. It's tempting to believe that we just need more of the same - that we've only been too timid in enforcing civil rights laws or too conservative in interpreting them. But the real problem is inherent in the civil rights approach itself: faced with racial inequities that are not caused by discrimination, civil rights law is impotent and civil rights activism too often a distraction from the real work we need to do.

To say discrimination is not the cause of our worst racial problem is not to deny that racism is still a serious problem. Even today, too many people distrust or belittle others based on casual stereotypes; racial tensions continue to trouble social interactions in schools and workplaces, and the racial hatred and contempt that underlay the Jim Crow system is far from gone. Civil rights are an important response to these problems.

But, today, the biggest racial problem facing the country isn't discrimination, but rather the deep inequality that has created almost two different Americas, one black and poor and the other a more prosperous, multi-racial mainsteam. Many poor inner-city blacks have no contact with the mainstream of American society or with the conventional job market. Fathers who are unable to support their families walk away from them; young single mothers, overwhelmed with the challenges of parenthood, abandon education and any hope for upward mobility. In isolation, ghetto residents develop distinctive speech patterns and affectations that can be off-putting to potential employers, exacerbating the lack of economic opportunity. Deprived of legitimate job opportunities, many hustle in the quasi-legal gray market; others turn to full-fledged crime.

To fight this entrenched racial inequality, we need to move beyond civil rights to an approach that is both more circumspect and more ambitious. We should be more circumspect in blaming racism, and hidden racists, for problems with more subtle causes. But we must be more ambitious in directly confronting the decline of inner city neighborhoods and the isolation of the urban poor. And many of the reforms needed to improve the ghettos - job creation, more effective schools, better public infrastructure - would benefit poor and working class people of all races, striking a blow against class stratification as well as racial inequality.

If we confront and overcome these last vestiges of America's racist past, if we can break the cycle of poverty and dysfunctional behavior, we can not only turn the corner on America's shameful racist history; we can also turn millions of people who now drain resources in our jails and on public assistance rolls into productive citizens who will contribute to a vibrant economy and healthy civic culture.

For those who have inherited the benefits of the civil rights struggle, it's hard to imagine the deprivation, oppression, and humiliation that millions of African-Americans suffered just a few decades ago. Africans were forcibly brought to this country as slaves, legally defined as chattel and treated as less than human. It took a bloody civil war to secure emancipation, but the Jim Crow laws enacted soon thereafter codified the inferior social position of blacks. State-sponsored race discrimination was reinforced by private vigilantism: white mobs and organized racist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan terrorized blacks throughout the American South, and the nation's first race riots were sparked by racist whites in Northern cities such as Obama's adopted hometown of Chicago.

Using civil rights as a tool, generations of lawyers, activists, and intellectuals challenged and began to uproot these deeply entrenched laws and practices. Their struggle culminated in the comprehensive civil rights laws of the 1960s, which outlawed discrimination in employment, housing, and most businesses open to the general public. Today, both government agencies and individual victims can sue employers, landlords, and proprietors for discriminatory practices. Most importantly, the civil rights movement changed social attitudes: civil rights groups can fight many discriminatory practices without legal action, by inspiring public pressure for change.

But in the face of today's most severe racial inequities, the civil rights approach is nearly powerless. For example, many civil rights activists have begun to condemn the criminal justice system as "a new Jim Crow," a system overtly designed to privilege whites over blacks. As evidence, they point to racial disparities in the prison population, racial profiling, and harsher sentences for possession of crack than for powder cocaine. Last year's civil rights march on Jena, La., was inspired, in large part, by the idea that the criminal justice system is chronically biased: the "Jena Six" were stand-ins for the hundreds of thousands of young black men currently behind bars, on parole, or awaiting trial.

But the racial disparities in the criminal justice system, as stark and as troubling as they are, can't be blamed on the kind of deliberate bigotry that once fueled Jim Crow laws. Instead, they are largely the result of the lack of opportunities for lawful employment and the resulting prevalence of crime in many inner-city neighborhoods.

When civil rights activists complain that police detain innocents for "driving while black," for example, they evoke a bigoted cop who harasses blacks based on their race alone - a version of the problem that suits the civil-rights framework. This occasionally does happen, of course, and almost every public official readily and loudly condemns it. But the larger problem is that the demographics of crime in America mean that race-based profiling can be a rational and effective law enforcement tool - even though it threatens to unfairly burden innocent people who happen to fit the profile.

Similarly, the crack cocaine trade brought with it especially violent turf wars in poor, inner-city neighborhoods. When it did, black civic organizations in many cities called for more assertive law enforcement: an especially harsh penalty for crack cocaine possession was an understandable, if flawed, response. The result of these and other policies has been an explosion in the number of arrests and prosecutions of blacks - especially young black men. Calling the racial disparity in arrests and incarceration a "new Jim Crow" is certainly rhetorically dramatic, but it distracts attention from the real source of the problem: isolated and impoverished inner cities, where crime is a constant threat and a constant temptation for people who have little hope of finding honest work at a living wage.

Or consider employment. Is it because of corporate racism that many workforces are disproportionately white? Most jobs today are filled through interpersonal networking, and a large and growing share of jobs require not only objective technical skills but also "soft skills" such as charm, good demeanor, and that ineffable "can-do attitude." Poor people - many of them black - in isolated ghettos are cut off from the social networks that might lead to job opportunities, and they lack the role models and socialization that teach the attitudes appropriate for the work world. Bigots can use such criteria as an excuse to reject black applicants, to be sure. But employers who insist on interpersonal "soft skills," and thus wind up eliminating a disproportionate number of minority applicants from consideration, aren't necessarily racists.

In a sense, civil rights have become an attempt to address these deep-seated social problems on the cheap. The civil rights focus on bigotry is attractive, even when it's a poor fit, because it seems to offer a shortcut to consensus. Almost everyone - Democrat and Republican, Marxist radical and Burkean conservative - agrees that racism is both morally wrong and socially destructive. Prohibiting discrimination and condemning racism is much less costly and less controversial than confronting the fundamental inequities of our economy and our use of public resources.

Viable solutions to poverty, joblessness, failing schools, and crime will necessarily involve building a consensus in support of policies that are both bold and highly controversial. For example, to promote job creation in the inner city, Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson has called for a WPA policy for poor neighborhoods; others have suggested that loss of American jobs should be discouraged through trade, tax, and immigration policy. All of these ideas are controversial: fiscal conservatives balk at what they consider expensive "make work" programs; free trade advocates oppose restrictions on outsourcing; and liberals dislike constraints on immigration.

Fixing failing schools may require dramatic changes in school financing policies that tie funding to property taxes, as well as the expansion of alternatives to neighborhood-based schools, such as magnet school programs and charter schools, or the revision of seniority systems that perversely give the ablest teachers the least challenging assignments, leaving troubled inner city schools to the least experienced. There is fierce opposition to these ideas from local governments, school boards, and teachers unions.

To reduce crime in inner cities, and the incarceration of inner-city residents, we'll need to consider new approaches to law enforcement. Some insist that the war on drugs has become a quagmire and advocate decriminalization of some less dangerous drugs. Proponents of the famous "Boston Miracle" argue that we can break gang affiliations and patterns of criminal behavior by offering potential criminals a stark choice: help in finishing school and finding employment if they turn away from crime; tough criminal sentences if they don't. Both ideas will meet with resistance: conservatives oppose decriminalization of drugs, and liberals are suspicious of "tough love."

Fortunately, the time may be ripe for new and unsettling ideas and unconventional solutions to the problems of our inner cities. With the economy in crisis, even many conservatives see the need for aggressive investment in public infrastructure and for greater regulation of the economy. Liberals and conservatives in many cities have come together in favor of school choice in charter schools. States from Texas to Connecticut have reformed school finance, devoting more funds to underperforming schools in poor neighborhoods. Libertarian-leaning conservatives support decriminalization of drugs, while some "New Democrats" embrace law enforcement innovations like the Boston Miracle.

For American of all races, the civil rights movement embodies the best of American ideals. The Freedom Rides of the 1960s are as central to the American story as Paul Revere's midnight ride; the Montgomery Bus Boycott as emblematic of American virtues as the Boston Tea Party. After generations of legally sanctioned discrimination and exclusion, Americans began to make good on this nation's defining promise of equality regardless of ancestry or accident of birth.

Yet America's racist past retains its grip, trapping many blacks in circumstances that are little better than those of their ancestors. It is tempting to think that we must simply press for more sweeping and dramatic applications of civil rights, or argue more inventively and search more tenaciously for the hidden racism that will justify legal intervention. Martin Luther King Jr. himself understood that racial inequality was as much a problem of poverty as it was of white racism: near the end of his life he promoted a multi-racial Poor People's Campaign. This campaign never achieved the same attention as King's earlier civil rights efforts, and it disintegrated after his assassination, but it was just as vital to the ultimate goal of racial justice as his more familiar civil rights agenda. Now, we must not simply continue in the tradition of the civil rights movement: to complete its work and honor its spirit, we must move beyond it.

Richard Thompson Ford is a professor of law at Stanford Law School and author of "The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse" (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), now out in paperback.

La première pollution américaine

Il est peu de mythes aussi insupportables que celui de la virginité du continent américain avant l'arrivée des Européens.

A en croire les tenants de la feel good attitude, l'Amérique précolombienne aurait été une sorte paradis terreste, définitivement compromis par la conquête espagnole.

Ce n'est pas si simple.

L'étude par Colin Cooke d'anciens sédiments dans des lacs des hauts plateaux des Andes révèle que des pollutions au mercure ont existé bien avant le débarquement du premier conquistador.

The study of ancient lake sediment from high altitude lakes in the Andes has revealed for the first time that mercury pollution occurred long before the start of the Industrial Revolution.

University of Alberta Earth and Atmospheric Sciences PhD student Colin Cooke's results from two seasons of field work in Peru have now provided the first unambiguous records of pre-industrial mercury pollution from anywhere in the world and will be published in the May 18th Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

"The idea that mercury pollution was happening before the industrial revolution has long been hypothesised on the basis of historical records, but never proven," said Cooke whose research was funded by the National Geographic Society.

Cooke and his team recovered sediment cores from high elevation lakes located around Huancavelica, which is the New World's largest mercury deposit. By measuring the amount of mercury preserved in the cores back through time, they were able to reconstruct the history of mercury mining and pollution in the region.

"We found that mercury mining, smelting and emissions go back as far as 1400 BC," said Cooke. "More surprisingly, mining appears to have began before the rise of any complex or highly stratified society. This represents a departure from current thinking, which suggests mining only arose after these societies emerged," said Cooke.

Initially, mercury pollution was in the form of mine dust, largely resulting from the production of the red pigment vermillion. "Vermillion is buried with kings and nobles, and was a paint covering gold objects buried with Andean kings and nobles," said Cooke. However, following Inca control of the mine in 1450 AD, mercury vapour began to be emitted.

"This change is significant because it means that mercury pollution could be transported over much greater distances, and could have been converted into methylmercury, which is highly toxic," said Cooke.

"All of these results confirm long-standing questions about the existence and magnitude pre-industrial mercury pollution, and have implications for our understanding of how mining and metallurgy evolved in the Andes," said Cooke.

Cooke (cacooke@ualberta.ca) is an interdisciplinary scientist researching human impacts on the environment. His research combines paleolimnology (the study of ancient lake sediments) with the fields of archaeology, and geochemistry. The research team included Prentiss Balcom from the University of Connecticut (USA), Harald Biester from the University of Braunschweig (Germany), and Alexander Wolfe from the University of Alberta

Couilles molles

Je ne suis pas le seul (avec Criticus !) à m'étonner de la passivité des étudiants face aux nervis gauchistes qui interdisent à quelques uns l'entrée de certaines facultés à la grande masse des inscrits.

Je suis rejoint dans cette opinion par Françoise Thom, professeur d'Histoire contemporaine à la Sorbonne, après avoir été chargée de recherches à l'Institut de Polémologie.

Cette coupure de presse m'a été envoyée par un correspondant. Je crois qu'elle a été publiée par le Figaro mais je ne l'ai pas retrouvée sur le site internet du quotidien.

Tuer par le silence

Dans nos pays, où le poids du conformisme est terrifiant et où le politiquement correct fait la chasse aux dissidents dans les grands médias, il est difficile d'entendre des voix hétérodoxes.

La gauche intellectuelle, qui domine sans partage dans l'université et dans l'édition, écarte tout ce qui ne pense pas comme elle. En dehors de quelques libéraux radicaux, il est difficile de lire un ouvrage qui sorte des chemins battus. Rappelons, par exemple, qu'aucun des grands succès éditoriaux parus aux Etats-Unis concernant les questions raciales analysées par la génétique n'a été traduit en français.

De même, un de mes correspondants en Bretagne me révélait voici peu qu'un jeune historien français, qui vient de publier un remarquable ouvrage sur les rapports entre la monarchie espagnole et les élites créoles de Cuba, avait refusé la possibilité d'être invité au micro de la seconde radio la plus écoutée en Espagne car cela « fusillerait sa carrière universitaire ».

Il en est de même en France, en dépit des progrès enregistrés depuis vingt ans. La radio publique est un exemple extrême. Sur France Culture, un des rares intellectuels français réellement hétérodoxe, Alain de Benoist, est persona non grata. Sur France Inter, on célèbre l'arrivée à un poste de direction de Philippe Val, un des esprits les plus sectaires de la place de Paris. Durant ce temps, est au placard depuis de longues années le journaliste qui avait osé citer pendant la revue de presse un titre d'extrême gauche et un titre d'extrême droite.

Mitterrand d'extrême droite ? Pas si Minute le publie.

Cet apartheid humain et professionnel est de règle partout. Quand une information paraît dans un titre non convenable, elle est réputée ne pas exister. Ce fut la cas lorsque Minute avait révélé, des années avant tous les autres titres, l'existence d'une maîtresse de Mitterrand hébergée dans les palais de la République.

De même, en histoire, peut-on citer les documents ou les trouvailles faites par des infréquentables ?

Nous avons un exemple frappant avec David Irving. Cet historien est probablement un des hommes les plus misanthropes qui soient, également détesté par ses ennemis et par ceux qui le sont moins.

Il a réussi à se mettre à dos à la fois la communauté juive et ceux qui contestent l'holocauste. Ses opinions politiques, à contre-courant de la majorité, sont insupportables pour la majorité de ses compatriotes.

Et pourtant. C'est aussi un infatigable chercheur qui base son travail sur des documents d'archives. Méthode qui a aussi ses limites, mais ce n'est pas le débat ici.

Dans le cadre de ses recherches pour une biographie d'Heinrich Himmler, il achève la lecture de l'ensemble des messages secrets allemands interceptés par les services d'écoutes britanniques. Une source extraordinaire d'informations dans laquelle il a déniché un perle : un rapport du chef de la police de Dresde qui annonce un chiffre de morts et de disparus à la suite de l'attaque anglo-américaine sur la ville qui va dans le sens des chiffres anciennement publiés de 80 000 à 135000 morts et réfute celui plus récent de 25 000.


Voici le document en question.



Voici la traduction que propose David Irving :

Re: Missing Persons Situation in Dresden Air Raid Defence region.
The Lord Mayor of Dresden City has established (a) a Central Bureau for Missing Persons and nine Missing Persons registries; (b) eighty- to one-hundred thousand missing-person notifications are estimated to have been registered so far; (c) 9,720 missing-person notifications have been confirmed as fatalities; (d) to date, information on twenty thousand missing person cases has been given out; (e) accurate statistical data possibly only later.

Il est fort à parier que ce document, en dépit de sa nouveauté et de son importance, sera réputé non exister avant qu'il ne soit « redécouvert » par un historien dont on peut citer le nom en bibliographie.

Ne croyez pas que ce critère de la bibliographie soit excessif. Voici quelques années, un étudiant en lettres de la faculté de Rennes avait dû retirer les titres de Georges Dumézil de sa thèse consacrée à la littérature celtique car « Dumézil est un nazi ».

Secret défense mérite mieux qu'un jugement lapidaire

Voici quelques semaines, le traitement réservé par le journaliste de Libération Jean-Dominique Merchet à un jeune officier de Légion, accusé d'être responsable de la mort d'un de ses hommes au cours d'un exercice, m'avait scandalisé. Relayant sans discernement des informations en droite ligne du dossier d'instruction, il a construit un dossier à charge relayant auprès du grand public les accusation de l'institution militaire.

Je voudrais aujourd'hui un tant soit peu rectifier le tir. Je n'ai rien à changer de ce que j'ai écrit précédemment, mais ajouter que malgré tout, Merchet demeure un des journalistes les mieux informés de la chose militaire et un de ceux qui permettent au grand public de suivre l'actualité en uniforme.

Je relève aussi souvent sur son blog de nombreuses preuves de sa liberté d'esprit par rapport aux valeurs en vigueur dans le petit monde du journalisme de gauche, bobo et bien pensant, dans lequel il travaille.

Prenons, par exemple, le simple fait de présenter côte à côte deux ouvrages sur la piraterie en Somalie, celui de l'amiral Laurent Mérer et celui de Gérard de Villiers, le célébrissime auteur de la série de romans SAS, exécré par les tenants du politiquement correct.

Vous pouvez lire ce post ici.

Intelligence en images

Ce petit film aurait été produit par les autorités de la petite république de Macédoine pour promouvoir l'enseignement du fait religieux dans les écoles.

Tout a été pensé au millimètre et faire appel à Einstein, un saint laïc par excellence, tient du génie.

Une réussite absolue.

La société industrielle n'est pas généreuse

Une récente étude du New York Times sous la plume de Sam Dillon révèle au grand public ce que les chercheurs savent déjà depuis longtemps : tous les efforts du gouvernement américain pour réduire l'écart entre les résultats scolaires des Euro-Américains de ceux des Afro-Américains ont échoué. On peut aussi ajouter que l'écart entre les enfants d'origine nord-asiatique et ceux provenant du sud du Rio Grande reste toujours aussi élevé.

L'étude sur une longue période des résultats scolaires de ce que les chercheurs commencent à appeler « des groupes continentaux », à défaut d'utiliser un mot plus connu, mais chargé d'une connotation désagréable aux oreilles de la gauche universitaire et de la presse comme le New York Times, révèle des écarts stables.



C'est décourageant pour les enseignants aux Etats-Unis qui consacrent des sommes très importantes à l'enseignement des groupes sous la moyenne sans que cela ne produise des résultats.

A ce stade de la discussion, aucune explication n'est offerte par les médias et le gouvernement à cet écart persistant, sinon à une sous culture qui découragerait l'étude chez les groupes sous la moyenne.

Il est donc prévisible que toutes les mesures qui seront prises sont condamnées à l'échec car elles n'osent pas analyser les vrais facteurs à l'origine de ces écarts.

Or il suffit d'ouvrir les ouvrages récents écrits par les spécialistes des sciences de l'éducation ou de la génétique des populations pour découvrir quels sont ces facteurs.

Tant que le poids du politiquement correct ne libérera pas la parole des éducateurs, rien de sérieux ne pourra être fait pour améliorer l'éducation et les chances de succès de ces enfants. C'est comme un médecin tentant de lutter contre une maladie dont il n'ose pas évoquer la cause ni prescrire des médicaments qui révéleraient qu'il la connaît.

En Europe nous connaissons la même situation dans nombre de zones dites « difficiles ». Faute de statistiques autres que celles de la criminalité, il est difficile d'appréhender la magnitude des écarts.

Comme la société industrielle est sans pitié, elle conditionne largement le succès des individus à leur capacité à réussir dans le processus de sélection scolaire et social. Il est donc prévisible qu'une frange importante des nouvelles générations ne sera pas compétitive et restera en dehors. En conséquence, le seul moyen pour compenser cet incapacité à s'intégrer de ces nouvelles populations sont des mesures coercitives, comme par exemple la mal nommée « discrimination positive ».

Dernière chose. Ne cherchez pas à lire en français les ouvrages scientifiques américains qui traitent de ces questions. Aucun éditeur n'a pris le risque de les traduire.

No Child’ Law Is Not Closing a Racial Gap


The achievement gap between white and minority students has not narrowed in recent years, despite the focus of the No Child Left Behind law on improving the scores of blacks and Hispanics, according to results of a federal test considered to be the nation’s best measure of long-term trends in math and reading proficiency.


Although Black and Hispanic elementary, middle and high school students all scored much higher on the federal test than they did three decades ago, most of those gains were not made in recent years, but during the desegregation efforts of the 1970s and 1980s. That was well before the 2001 passage of the No Child law, the official description of which is “An Act to Close the Achievement Gap.”

“There’s not much indication that N.C.L.B. is causing the kind of change we were all hoping for,” said G. Gage Kingsbury, a testing expert who is a director at the Northwest Evaluation Association in Portland. “Trends after the law took effect mimic trends we were seeing before. But in terms of watershed change, that doesn’t seem to be happening.”

The results no doubt will stoke debate about how to rewrite the No Child law when the Obama administration brings it up for reauthorization later this year. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has said he would like to strengthen national academic standards, tighten requirements that high-quality teachers be distributed equally across schools in affluent and poor neighborhoods, and make other adjustments. “We still have a lot more work to do,” Mr. Duncan said of the latest scores. But the long-term assessment results could invigorate those who challenge the law’s accountability model itself.

Despite gains that both whites and minorities did make, the overall scores of the United States’ 17-year-old students, averaged across all groups, were the same as those of teenagers who took the test in the early 1970s. This was largely due to a shift in demographics; there are now far more lower-scoring minorities in relation to whites. In 1971, the proportion of white 17-year-olds who took the reading test was 87 percent, while minorities were 12 percent. Last year, whites had declined to 59 percent while minorities had increased to 40 percent.

The scores of 9- and 13-year-old students, however, were up modestly in reading, and were considerably higher in math, since 2004, the last time the test was administered. And they were quite a bit higher than those of students of the same age a generation back. Still, the progress of younger students tapered off as they got older.

Some experts said the results proved that the No Child law had failed to make serious headway in lifting academic achievement. “We’re lifting the basic skills of young kids,” said Bruce Fuller, an education professor at the University of California, Berkeley, “but this policy is not lifting 21st-century skills for the new economy.”

But Margaret Spellings, Mr. Duncan’s predecessor under President Bush, called the results a vindication of the No Child law.

“It’s not an accident that we’re seeing the most improvement where N.C.L.B. has focused most vigorously,” Ms. Spellings said. “The law focuses on math and reading in grades three through eight — it’s not about high schools. So these results are affirming of our accountability-type approach.”

Whether anyone knows how to extend the results achieved with younger students through the turbulent high school years remains an open question.

The math and reading test, known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, Long-Term Trends, was given to a nationally representative sample of 26,000 students last year. It was the 12th time since 1971 that the Department of Education administered a comparable test to students ages 9, 13 and 17. The scores, released on Tuesday in Washington, allow for comparisons of student achievement every few years back to the Vietnam and Watergate years.

The results point to the long-term crisis in many of the nation’s high schools, and could lead to proposals for more federal attention to them in the rewrite of the No Child law, which requires states to administer annual tests in grades three to eight, but only once in high school.

The 2008 score gap between black and white 17-year-olds, 29 points in reading and 26 points in math, could be envisioned as the rough equivalent of between two and three school years’ worth of learning, said Peggy Carr, an associate commissioner for assessment at the Department of Education.

Freeman A. Hrabowski III, the president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who has written about raising successful black children, said the persistence of the achievement gap should lead policymakers to seek new ways to increase low-performing students’ learning time.

“Where we see the gap narrowing, that’s because there’s been an emphasis on supplemental education, on after-school programs that encourage students to read more and do more math problems,” Dr. Hrabowski said. “Where there are programs that encourage that additional work, students of color do the work and their performance improves and the gap narrows.”

But he said that educators and parents pushing children to higher achievement often find themselves swimming against a tide of popular culture.

“Even middle-class students are unfortunately influenced by the culture that says it’s simply not cool for students to be smart,” he said. “And that is a factor here in these math and reading scores.”

Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, which represents more than 60 metropolitan school systems, said that much of the progress among the nation’s minority students has been the result of hard work by urban educators, not only since the No Child law took effect but for decades before.

“N.C.L.B. did not invent the concept of the achievement gap — much of the desegregation work in the ’70s and ’80s was in fact about giving poor, Hispanic and African-American kids access to better resources and curriculum,” Mr. Casserly said. “You do see from these results that in that period, the gains were steeper. It wasn’t being called an achievement gap, but that was what that was about.”