Race to the bottom

PUTTING oneself in another person’s shoes is one very good way of understanding their perspective. Yet it is something we rarely do.

I was brought up on that wisdom, but I was well into my 40s when I put it into practice in a very practical way. My partner was six foot three and I was five foot four. One day I stood on a step in our house and saw the dwelling as he saw it. It was clear that he experienced the space quite differently from me.

Getting down to a child’s height is also recommended if you want to make friends with them faster.

The rate at which we are moving away from the established world order, the one people of my post-war generation grew up in, is quite alarming. It is increasingly less liberal, less empathetic, and the everyday manifestation of that is the way we treat one another as human beings and what rights we imagine we are each due.

It is a paradox that as we have more information we have come to know less, but are more confident and strident in our ignorance. Nowhere is that truer than in the matter of “race,” which I reject except as a social construct. Biologists, geneticists and anthropologists know that race does not exist, yet it continues to be one of the most powerful drivers of illiberalism.

The heady electoral US goings on, crystallising in the Democratic convention last week, overshadowed the sinister and growing return of race as a major issue in the Republican camp, and we saw it too in Britain earlier this month, overlaid there with religious hatred.

Race science is also making a comeback. Just when we thought The Bell Curve was well and truly buried, the right is again linking race and IQ. They cannot prove the scientists wrong, so they talk about the inferiority of “the people and the spirit,” while cancelling the scientific proof. A recent article in the Atlantic magazine by Ali Breland made for worrying reading.

Apparently, the ugly, scurrilous ideas that gained currency during Trump’s presidency and were forced underground during the Biden presidency are now circulating more freely. For example, the Tucker Carson Show, currently broadcast from a barn in Maine and free of corporate scrutiny, is giving wide exposure to the unsavoury, irrational rhetoric. Elon Musk engages on X with a user who promotes a genetic link between black people and crime rather than historic socio-economic factors.

Although race science has not yet been adopted by Trump’s MAGA followers, the labelling of Kamala Harris as a DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) candidate contests her experience, education, innate and intellectual ability to lead the Democrats and the country. Her success is down only to her race and gender, they claim.

At the last count, in the US there were 99 historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in 19 states; 50 were public institutions and 49 were private non-profit institutions. Kamala Harris attended the highly-reputed Howard University. These are institutions, dating back to 1837, and all established before 1964, with the principal mission of educating African-Americans, although 24 per cent of the student body now comprises other ethnicities. In academic year 2021–22, about 48,800 degrees were conferred by HBCUs: 11 per cent were associate degrees, 67 per cent were bachelor’s degrees, 16 per cent were master’s degrees, six per cent were doctorates, and 74 per cent of the total were conferred on black students.

Of course, there are also all the African-Americans graduating from non-HBCU institutions. They total millions of educated Americans with low IQs!

But the facts do not matter to the extreme right determined to turn the clock back. And, as Michelle Obama said, African-Americans do not get a chance to cheat in order to succeed. Ninety per cent of all undergraduate students at HBCUs received some type of financial aid in 2019-20. Specifically, 83 per cent received grants, 65 per cent had student loans, four per cent received work-study awards, two per cent received federal veterans education benefits, and 18 per cent had parents who took out federal Direct PLUS Loans. Black graduates start their professional lives, like so many other students, with a huge debt, but with fewer job opportunities.

It is very difficult to make people change their minds about others. My deceased mother’s carers laughed at me when I related who was the poorest person I knew – only state pension, no job, no property. How could that be, when everyone knows there are no poor white people? They rejected it vehemently. But it was not in their experience to see white people as poor.

Interestingly, when I was a child it was common. In TT, nobody has seen a white garbage collector or fireman or, possibly, teacher in the state school system in recent years, so how can I fault their deduction? Those are not “white” jobs, to borrow an idea from Donald Trump.

Fortunately, we do not live in a racially hateful society where religion is also a hot potato to be radically politicised, despite the best efforts of the deceased Yasin Abu Bakr. Let’s try to keep it that way.