Monday 18 August 2008

"Institutional Racism"

The solicitor acting for the Metropolitan Police in racial discrimination cases has been caught with this catch-all term. It coined by Stokely Carmichael a ranting anti-Semitic demagogue who was rightly banned from entering this country.

Carmichael strongly opposed the closest possible economic, social, cultural and political co-operation, both within the United States and throughout the world, between the people of West African slave descent (primarily concentrated in the United States and in the Commonwealth countries of the Caribbean) and the people of English, Scots, Welsh and Irish descent (primarily concentrated in the United States, the United Kingdom, the Irish Republic, Canada, Australia and New Zealand), on the basis of their shared economic, social, cultural and political Christian heritage, including their shared English language and their shared blood ties.

But, if we must use it, then it seems clear to me to whom it actually applies. It actually applies to those who maintain that there is something inherent in that common tradition's pedagogical principles which renders Afro-Caribbean boys, in particular, effectively unteachable in accordance therewith, and accordingly something inherent in Afro-Caribbean boys to the same unhappy effect.

Can someone please explain to me, in that case, why schools in the Caribbean are famously disciplined and orderly places, delivering excellent education to pupils of both sexes who are routinely poorer than almost anyone in Britain? Indeed, those schools are often so good that British parents of Afro-Caribbean extraction send their children to them in order to avoid what has been done to the British institutions on which they were originally modelled.

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