National Review, on the same side of the argument since 1955.

National Review, on the same side of the argument since 1955.

A new report from the Department of Education shows that even from preschool, black students in America tend to receive disproportionately severe disciplinary actions . To most people this was taken as signal that something might be severely amiss in our classrooms; to the National Review, it is evidence that black children are inherently predisposed to disruptive behavior and crime.

I wish I was making that up, but that's the argument presented by NRO writer Heather Mac Donald, because it wouldn't be the National Review if they didn't have a steady supply of authors climbing Mt. Racist to plant their flags. You simply can't argue your way out of this one, National Review. It's a column explicitly declaring that black children simply have "weak impulse control" compared to whites, so suspending them or disciplining them more severely than white students is simply "common sense."



Actually, what [NAACP educational director] Ms. Smith-Evans should be trying to fathom is the black crime rate, which explains the school-suspension rate. Black males between the ages of 14 and 17 commit homicide at ten times the rate of white and Hispanic males of the same age combined. Given such high crime rates, what do the civil-rights advocates and the Obama administration think is going on in the classroom — docile obedience and strict self-discipline? In fact, the same weak impulse control that leads to such high crime rates among young black males inevitably means more disruptive behavior in school.

Also on Friday, the New York media reported that a 14-year-old boy riding a bus in Brooklyn the previous night had opened fire on the bus and fatally shot an innocent 39-year-old passenger in the head. Did anyone doubt the race of the killer, even though the media did not disclose it?

We're talking about kids as young as four years old, remember. Four-year-old black children, according to the writer, suffer from worse "impulse control" than more docile four-year-old white children. And it doesn't get better:This seems to be sort of a litmus test, this one. Dear Abby: How do I tell if I am a huuuuuge racist? If you see on the news that a bad thing happened, and you immediately thought "Oh, a black person was clearly responsible for that," yep, you're definitely a racist. How the hell in this day and age do you get away with writing that you did not doubt a certain criminal was black when you first heard the news? How many good, solid white people blasting their way through schools and movie theaters and convenience store parking lots need to be on the news before you start wondering if maybe good, solid white people have a problem with "impulse control" as well?

More below the fold.

