"diversity"タグの名言
Asians are still a small minority—14.5 million (including about one million identified as part Asian) or 4.7 percent of the population—but their impact is vastly disproportionate to their numbers. Forty-four percent of Asian-American adults have a college degree or higher, as opposed to 24 percent of the general population. Asian men have median earnings 10 percent higher than non Asian men, and that of Asian women is 15 percent higher than non-Asian women. Forty-five percent of Asians are employed in professional or management jobs as opposed to 34 percent for the country as a whole, and the figure is no less than 60 percent for Asian Indians. The Information Technology Association of America estimates that in the high-tech workforce Asians are represented at three times their proportion of the population. Asians are more likely than the American average to own homes rather than be renters. These successes are especially remarkable because no fewer than 69 percent of Asians are foreign-born, and immigrant groups have traditionally taken several generations to reach their full economic potential. Asians are vastly overrepresented at the best American universities. Although less than 5 percent of the population they account for the following percentages of the students at these universities: Harvard: 17 percent, Yale: 13 percent, Princeton: 12 percent, Columbia: 14 percent, Stanford: 25 percent. In California, the state with the largest number of Asians, they made up 14 percent of the 2005 high school graduating class but 42 percent of the freshmen on the campuses of the University of California system. At Berkeley, the most selective of all the campuses, the 2005 freshman class was an astonishing 48 percent Asian. Asians are also the least likely of any racial or ethnic group to commit crimes. In every category, whether violent crime, white-collar crime, alcohol, or sex offenses, they are arrested at about one-quarter to one-third the rate of whites, who are the next most law-abiding group. It would be a mistake, however, to paint all Asians with the same brush, as different nationalities can have distinctive profiles. For example, 40 percent of the manicurists in the United States are of Vietnamese origin and half the motel rooms in the country are owned by Asian Indians. Chinese (24 percent of all Asians) and Indians (16 percent), are extremely successful, as are Japanese and Koreans. Filipinos (18 percent) are somewhat less so, while the Hmong face considerable difficulties. Hmong earn 30 percent less than the national average, and 60 percent drop out of high school. In the Seattle public schools, 80 percent of Japanese-American students passed Washington state’s standardized math test for 10th-graders—the highest pass rate for any ethnic group. The group with the lowest pass rate—14 percent—was another “Asian/Pacific Islanders” category: Samoans. On the whole, Asians have a well-deserved reputation for high achievement.
In all racial groups, students from wealthy households tend to score better than those who are poor, but income does not explain group differences. A study by McKinsey and Company found that white fourth graders living in poverty scored higher—by the equivalent of about half-a-year’s instruction—than black fourth graders who were not poor. These differences increase in high school. On the 2009 math and verbal SAT tests, whites from families with incomes of less than $20,000 not only had an average combined score that was 117 points (out of 1600) higher than the average for all blacks, they even outscored by 12 points blacks who came from families with incomes of $160,000 to $200,000. Educators and legislators have not ignored the problem. The race gap in achievement is such a preoccupation that in 2007, 4,000 educators and experts attended an “Achievement Gap Summit” in Sacramento. They took part in no fewer than 125 panels on ways to help blacks and Hispanics do as well as whites and Asians. Overwhelming majorities in Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act in 2002 to improve student performance and bridge achievement gaps. The government budgeted $24.4 billion for the program for fiscal year 2007, and its requirements for “Adequate Yearly Progress” have forced change on many schools. This is only the latest effort in more than 25 years of federal involvement. The result? In 2009, Chester E. Finn, Jr., a former education official in the Reagan administration, put it this way: “This is a nearly unrelenting tale of woe and disappointment. If there’s any good news here, I can’t find it.
Many theories have been advanced to explain racial gaps in performance, of which these are the most common: black and Hispanic schools do not get enough money, their classes are too big, students are segregated from whites, minorities do not have enough teachers of their own race. Each of these explanations has been thoroughly investigated. Urban schools, where non-whites are concentrated, often get more money than suburban white schools, so blacks and Hispanics are not short-changed in budget or class size. Teacher race has no detectable effect on learning (Asians, for example, outperform whites regardless of who teaches them), nor do whites in the classroom raise or lower the scores of students of other races. Money is not the problem. From the early 1970s to the 2006-2007 school year per-pupil spending more than doubled in real terms. The Cato Institute calculates that when capital costs are included, the Los Angeles School District spends more than $25,000 per student per year, and the District of Columbia spends more than $28,000. Neither district gets good results. Demographic change can become a vicious cycle: As more minorities and immigrants enter a school system average achievement falls. More money and effort is devoted to these groups, squeezing gifted programs, music and art, and advanced placement courses. The better-performing students leave, and standards fall further.
As whites cease to be the mainstream, their interests become less important. In 2008, the College Board, the New York-based non profit that administers Advanced Placement (AP) tests, announced it was dropping AP courses and exams in Italian, Latin literature, and French literature. Blacks and Hispanics are not interested in those subjects, and they were the groups the College Board wanted to reach. In Berkeley, California, the governance council for the school district came up with a novel plan for bridging the racial achievement gap: eliminate all science labs, fire the five teachers who run them, and spend the money on “underperforming” students. The council explained that science labs were used mainly by white students, so they were a natural target for cuts. Many schools have slashed enriched programs for gifted students because so few blacks and Hispanics qualify for them. Evanston Township High School in Illinois prides itself on diversity and academic excellence but, like so many others, is dismayed that the two do not always go together. In 2010 it eliminated its elite freshman honors courses in English because hardly any blacks or Hispanics met the admission criteria. The honors biology course was scheduled for elimination the next year.
[M]any whites flee from diversity, but a few welcome it. Joe and Jessica Sweeney of Peoria, Illinois, had been sending their children to private school but decided the multi-racial experience of public school would be valuable. After the switch, their eight-year-old son and nine-year-old daughter were taunted with racial slurs, and became withdrawn. One day, a black student threatened to kill the girl with a box cutter. The same day, the boy showed his parents a large bruise he got when he was knocked down and called “stupid white boy.” The school reacted with indifference. The Sweeneys sent their children back to private school.” Fourteen-year-old James Tokarski was one of a handful of whites attending Bailly Middle School in Gary, Indiana, in 2006. Black students called him “whitey” and “white trash” and repeatedly beat him up. They knocked him unconscious twice. The school offered James a “lunch buddy,” to be with him whenever he was not in class, but his parents took him out of Bailly. The mother of another white student said it was typical for whites to be called “whitey” or “white boy,” and to get passes to eat lunch in the library rather than face hostile blacks in the lunch room. On Cleveland’s West Side, ever since court-ordered busing began in the 1970s, blacks and Hispanics have celebrated May Day by attacking whites. In 2003, Elsie Morales, a Puerto Rican mother of two, told reporters that when she took part in May Day violence as a student in the 1970s she justified it as payback for white oppression. Her daughter Jasmine said it was still common to attack whites: “It’s like if you don’t jump this person with us, you’re a wimp and we’ll get you next.” In the late 1990s, whites were 41 percent of students in Seattle public schools, blacks were 23, and the rest were Hispanic and Asian. In 1995 and 1999, schools conducted confidential surveys about racial harassment. In both years, a considerably larger percentage of white than black students complained of racial taunts or violence. Only an “alternative” newspaper reported the findings, and school representatives refused to discuss them.
Clearly, our immigration policies should be reexamined. A convincing case can be made on environmental grounds alone that a nation of 300,000,000 needs no more people, especially since it would enjoy natural growth if the borders were closed tomorrow. How can we possibly claim to be fighting environmental degradation or hope for energy independence when we import a million or more people every year? How can we claim to be fighting poverty, crime, school failure, or disease when we import people who are more likely than natives to be poor, criminals, school failures, and to suffer from strange diseases? Immigration is even harder to justify when many newcomers speak no English, maintain foreign loyalties, or practice disconcerting religions. It is profoundly unwise to add yet more disparate elements to a population already divided by diversity. [D]emographers and economists are making dire projections based on the lower likelihood of blacks and Hispanics to become productive workers. These people go on to insist that the solution is to improve education for blacks and Hispanics, but the United States has already made enormous efforts to that end. There is no reason to think some kind of breakthrough is imminent. Clearly, the solution to the problems posed by an increasing Hispanic population is to stop Hispanic immigration. However, [...], our policy-makers are too afraid of accusations of racism to draw such an obvious conclusion. Americans must open their eyes to the fact that a changing population could change everything in America. The United States could come to resemble the developing world rather than Europe—in some places it already does. One recent book on immigration to Europe sounded a similar alarm when the author asked: “Can you have the same Europe with different people?” His answer was a forthright “no.” It should be clear from the changes that have already taken place in the United States that we cannot have the same America with different people, either. Different populations build different societies. The principles of European and European-derived societies—freedom of speech, the rule of law, respect for women, representative government, low levels of corruption—do not easily take root elsewhere. They were born out of centuries of struggle, false starts, and setbacks, and cannot be taken for granted. A poorer, more desperate America, one riven with racial rivalries, one increasingly populated by people who come from non-Western traditions could turn its back on those principles. Many people assert that all people can understand and assimilate Western thinking—and yet cultures are very different. Can you, the reader, imagine emigrating to Cambodia or Saudi Arabia or Tanzania and assimilating perfectly? Probably not; yet everyone in the world is thought to be a potential American. Even if there is only a small chance that non-Western immigrants will establish alien and unsettling practices, why take this risk? Immigration to the United States, like immigration to any nation, is a favor granted by citizens to foreigners. It is not a right. Immigration advocates often point to the objections Anglo-Americans made to turn-of-the-century immigrants from Italy, Ireland, Hungary, and other “non-Nordic” countries. They point out that these immigrants assimilated, and insist that Mexicans and Haitians will do the same. Those advocates overlook the fundamental importance of race. They forget that the United States already had two ill assimilated racial groups long before the arrival of European ethnics—blacks and American Indians—and that those groups are still uncomfortably distinct elements in American society. Different European groups assimilated across ethnic lines after a few generations because they were of the same race. There are many societal fault lines in “diverse” societies—language, religion, ethnicity—but the fault line of race is deepest.
