Fred Reed hits another one out of the park

I'm sure many readers are familiar with the iconoclastic, biting columns of Fred Reed.  He's just penned one on the demagogues he calls 'Race Hucksters'.

I read, with the joy that I usually reserve for recurrent migraines, that Precedent Obama will establish an Office of African-American Education, thus furthering the racial Balkanization of the country, providing makework jobs for useless bureaucrats and, predictably, accomplishing nothing.

. . .

Racial discrimination pervades American society, apparently ineradicably, rising over window sills, clogging storm drains—and all of it in favor of blacks. Try:

Head Start, the federal Department of Education, NCLB, forced integration, forced busing, free after-school programs, Youth Scholars, welfare, grants given to universities, medical schools, and law schools for developing minority outreach programs, affirmative action in school admissions, government contracts, government and private-sector jobs, unidirectional hate-crime laws, and so on. And on. And on.

. . .

No nation has ever made such desperate, soul-wrenching efforts to convince a large minority to for God’s sake do your homework. And this is what it comes to. I say to black parents: Your kids do not do poorly in school because of discrimination, but because they don’t know the answers. We evil whites can give you schools and books. We can’t read them for you. And we can’t make your children read them. That’s your job.

... The schools in DC are entirely under the control of blacks, and the per capita expenditure is very high. Yet the schools are almost the worst in the country ... Might it—just conceivably, you understand: I don’t want to fall into wild speculation—have something to do with the quality of teachers hired by the black government, the degree of orderliness required of the black students, and the degree of insistence by their parents that they do their homework?

. . .

And I know that anyone who really wanted to improve education for blacks could look to the Catholic schools of Washington, which do, or did when I last looked, a far better job than a dimwitted, vote-for-me Office of African-American Education. How did the artful mackerel-snappers do it? By demanding courtesy, expelling trouble-makers, insisting on done homework, and assuming that students were capable of it. Duh.

There's more at the link.  Gloriously politically incorrect, but depressingly accurate . . .

Peter