Date: Sun, 10 Aug 1997 23:29:15 +0100
From: Chris Burford <cburford-AT-gn.apc.org>
Subject: Re: M-TH: RACE - hot potato


Alistair Cooke, a liberal I think from New York who is probably better
known in England than the States for broadcasting for literally the last 50
years a weekly "Letter from America" to England - often whimsical, but
sometimes with an unusual angle and a long term perspective,
was commenting this morning on the emergence of specific criticisms of
affirmative action on the grounds that it has failed. 

I am not sure that is true by the way. Other cources of information suggest
I think that the proportion of black college entrants will fall drastically
with the loss of affirmative action.

He went on to comment on an aspect of the statistics that is even less
discussed, the superior success of Asian Americans in using the educational
opportunities in the States. This mirrors for example educational profiles
in London where children of Asian bacgrounds usually do better than British
born whites. 

I am not sure whether the subject has come up explicitly in these marxism
lists, but I do not think we should duck it. I think it fits better the
model of different cultures associated with national minorities than with a
reductionist genetic model. I would suggest that each subculture has its
areas of strength and areas of vulnerability. Cooke quoted one, he
suggested typical, Asian American student saying "we work hard to earn the
respect of our parents." 

There may be other factors.

A friend I made this summer, a mathematician of Jewish background from New
York was talking about his colleagues of Chinese background and how
competitive they were in this difficult area. When I risked a question that
might be seen as racist (of an inverted sort) he observed that there seemed
to be a high representation of people of Chinese or Jewish background among
leading mathematicians and physicists. He attributed this to the discipline
in childhood of learning the complex chinese system of writing on the one
hand, and the detailed Jewish Talmudic tradition on the other.

No doubt the reasons are heterogeneous but it seems to me that a marxist
and a materialist approach to differences in how different communities or
national minorities compete in the labour market, would take cultural
factors into account. These different attitudes are after all a material
reality, existing presumably in slightly different patterns of impulses in
the infinitely complex neural pulses in the students' heads. 

Any comments?

Chris Burford
London.






     --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---