Melting Pot
America was built on the backs of migrants. Our essential “origin stories”: from Jamestown and Plymouth to Promontory Point and Pittsburgh (the transcontinental railroad and the coal and steel industry) are migrant tales. America’s history is replete with what migrants did to Make America Great. The desperate battles of the Civil War had Irish and German brigades, taking orders in their own language, on both sides. But, the largely untold story of that War, was the great sacrifices made by Free Black men. Nearly 180,000 served the Union Army, and near 40,000 paid the ultimate sacrifice. That’s over twenty percent killed.
Our public education system still teaches that America is a “vast stew” of immigrants. In the 1970’s, young students even watched cartoons about the “Great American Melting Pot”.
You simply melt right in,
It doesn’t matter what your skin.
It doesn’t matter where you’re from,
Or your religion, you jump right in
To the great American melting pot.
The great American melting pot.
Ooh, what a stew, red, white, and blue.
Of course, it wasn’t true then, and it certainly isn’t true today.
Insufficient Funds
I graduated from high school in 1974. It was eleven years after Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. The reality King described in that address is today over-shadowed by his description of “The Dream”. But in the speech, King referred to the sacred obligation of the Declaration of Independence’s “All Men are created equal”, and the Constitutional amendments ending slavery and granting citizenship and the vote. He called them all a “bad check”.
“…Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given its colored people a bad check, a check that has come back marked “insufficient funds.”
That was the “real” message, the “bad check”. It’s far more important than, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
King called for America to make the “check good”, before we judged everyone “equal” in character.
Segregation
And, it was only a decade before my graduation, that legal school segregation was the law in much of the Nation. Black kids weren’t allowed in white schools (or theaters, restaurants, public bathrooms or swimming pools). The demonstrations, marches and protests of the Civil Rights movement managed to alter the legal framework of segregation. But, when public schools were integrated and black and white students learned together; many white parents took their kids out.
That was both the beginning of “white-flight” to the suburbs, and to the growth of “private schools” where kids could get a segregated education. It was also the beginning of state governments seeking to direct more public monies to private schools, a problem still growing today. Here in Ohio we spend more than $13 billion on public education where 90% of kids go to school. Almost $1 billion of that amount, and growing, is directed to private schools, where the state has no say in what is taught or learned.
The Pool
I learned about all of this from personal experience. In the 1960’s, the best colleges in the nation took mostly white men. The “applicant pool” didn’t include many minorities or women. So the standards were not “the top students”, but the “top white, male students”, a much easier threshold to crack. By the early 1970’s things were beginning to change. Minorities and women were “jumping right in” to the pool, making it bigger and more difficult.
Most colleges recognized that there was an inherent bias in education against minorities and women (there still is). After all, a black student applying for college, wasn’t likely to have access to as good an education as a white student. It just the way it was, and frankly, still is.
So colleges began to broaden the way they chose students. It wasn’t about “weakening the standards”. It was about making the standards reflect what it took to be a minority or woman and achieve in a biased academic world. They had to overcome literal centuries of discrimination and lack of educational access. Their intelligence and effort to become competitive was, in and of itself, a mark of success.
More Qualified
I was a white, male, high school student with above average grades, good (to great) standardized test scores, and lots of activities. A black student with the same grades, scores and activities might be “equal” by the numbers, but likely had to overcome more to achieve it. Which was the better candidate for college?
I was actually a “case in point”. I was put on the waiting list for an elite college. A nearly identical black student in my school was admitted. In the 1960’s he wouldn’t have had a shot, and I would have gotten in. But I knew, then, and still believe, that the college was right in 1974. He was “more qualified”.
Alphabet Soup
That common sense, make the “bad check”, good; might seem reasonable. But today, fifty-one years later, teaching that in school is teaching “CRT” (critical race theory). The current MAGA extremists might have the teacher “ridden out on a rail”. (That’s an historic reference to being tarred and feathered, strapped to a railroad tie, and expelled from town).
The extremist majority on the US Supreme Court ordered any college that accepts Federal money (including scientific research grants and the like) must remove “affirmative action” from their admissions policy in 2023’s decision, Students for Fair Admission v Harvard (USSC). In fact, the whole process of broadening standards beyond “the numbers” in college admissions, and in hiring in this country, is now branded “DEI” (diversity, equity and inclusion).
Somehow, DEI is a “bad” thing. But what’s really happened is that white men are defending their status of privilege; one that’s been gradually eroded since I graduated high school. They are led by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Roberts, President Trump, his “Presidential friend” Musk, and the MAGA movement. They found political “energy” in trying to turn the clock back, before the 1970’s. MAGA wants the “pool” to be smaller. And they want to make sure Dr. King’s check remains marked “insufficient funds”.
It’s about power, politics, and “grievance”. It’s also about getting votes: in 2024 Trump get 60% of white male votes, the critical block in winning his narrow victory over Harris (Navigator). So in 2025, it is incumbent upon Trump to “pay them back”.
He’s doing it. Trump canceled the promissory note, the “check” written to Americans of color. He’s handing them another bad check. And he’s taking the balance of their account, and giving it to his supporters.
