Lee Jasper is an utter cock

The poor man found himself out of the headlines for a while so he thought he would do something about it.

Lee Jasper has returned to the political limelight with a call for the creation of “all black” schools.

The former race adviser to Ken Livingstone resigned after allegations that he had channelled public money to groups to which he was linked personally.

Now Mr Jasper has advocated racebased schooling to tackle gang violence and raise education standards for black Caribbean students.

He said: “The fact is, it’s time the black community ran its own schools, devised a curriculum that suited the needs of our children, employed teachers that look like the young people they are teaching.

“Some of the greatest black leaders in the world – Dr Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, to name just two – attended all-black schools and universities.”

The ex-City Hall deputy claimed the schools would be a “beacon of excellence” for the black community and accused “liberals” of dismissing the idea while accepting faith-based education for Jewish, Muslim and Hindu children.

Mr Jasper said the schools would be open to all races but would be “focused in terms of their ethos, ethics and curriculum to the needs of our children”. He added: “I’m not arguing here for a BNP-style ‘apartheid education system’. I’m talking about the vision of establishing inclusive beacons of black academic excellence.”

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23552199-details/Lee+Jasper:+black-only+schools+will+beat+gangs/article.do

Leaving aside the question of whether Jasper is actually this much of a cock or he simply wants to get some media attention, this gets right to the heart of the practical political problem of multiculturalism, as well as the fuzzy (and dare I say it quite racist) thinking that underpins the whole mess. This man’s career is driven by a need for there to be distinct communities (“our children” with their “own needs” best served by “our community” and people who look like them) whose membership can be entirely subsumed within the over-arching ethnic/racial group, such that (as in the case) an account of what their children need from the educational system is exhausted by an account of their race/ethnicity. Without such a community there’s no one for a self-styled community leader like Jasper to, well, lead.

I say race/ethnicity because no matter which term is used in these discussions, it amounts to the same thing. His argument that there’s an inconsistency between accepting faith-based schools and rejecting all-black schools betrays such an easy conflation of the two. Cultural groups and racial groups meld into one ambiguous mass, to be fought over by Jasper and his ilk. I’m not for a second denying that there are problems faced by groups of people, as much as that you can meaningfully offer reductive explanations about the needs, problems and desires of such groups.

To suggest that, say, a difference in performance between white students & black students (and it’s very difficult to even articulate a statistical relationship without committing to some carving up of people into “white” and “black” with implications deeper than skin colour) can be resolved by matching black students with black teachers is not only manifestly ludicrous from an educational standpoint. It also implies that the difference in performance is an racial/ethnic problem, intrinsic to the group (see, for example, the outcry over absent black fathers) or a function of the group’s relationship with other such groups (see, for example, moral panics over black criminality and gang violence – or, as per this case, the mistreatment of black children by a white educational system). Not only does it entirely obscure all the other explanatory factors, social class being the obvious one, it subsumes a whole collection of heterogenous individuals under a unitary description then offers vague sociological hypotheses about the social options available to members of this group. Yet this group is defined in a way which (through the slippery slope of culture->ethnicity->race) is basically racial. Surely this is what we should be trying to avoid?