Afrocentrism in the suburbs - problem with Prince George's County, Maryland's multicultural curriculum - The Schools: Four Reports

National Review, Sept 20, 1993 by John J. Miller

Washington-area residents fondly refer to outlying Prince George's County, Maryland, as "PG" County. The term has recently assumed an unexpected irony. With the near-adoption of a set of multicultural curricula, students might soon need Parental Guidance in order to unravel the strange education dispensed in the nation's 15th largest school district.

The county is famous for its large black middle-class. Writing in the New York Times Magazine, David J. Dent called it "the closest thing to utopia that black middle-class families could find in America." But like most of sub-urban America, the county has found itself vulnerable to bourgeois trendiness. The board of education, which oversees a two-thirds black student population, has hit upon a race-specific fad: Afrocentrism.

In 1987 the board voted, innocently enough, to restructure its schools' curricula and expand the coverage of "race, ethnicity, gender, socio-economics, religion, region, age, and citizen-ship," according to board member Suzanne M. Plogman. When a nine-foot-tall stack of 32 multicultural course manuals appeared before the board for approval at the start of the 1991-92 school year, some complained that the two-week review period did not allow enough time for their proper consideration. Despite warnings from several parents, the board hustled through a vote endorsing all but two of the manuals.

Problems with much of the approved curriculum soon emerged, and Superintendent Edward M. Felegy suspended five social-studies guides for further review. Good thing, too: Reading them, one discovers that slaves chopped sugar cane in the American Southwest; that Croatians (instead of Croatan Indians) served as the heretofore unknown levelers of the "Lost Colony" in Roanoke, North Carolina; that the English fought the British in the American Revolution; and, according to one illustration, that colonial mothers had access to electric ranges in their kitchens.

Yet these errors - some of which could be reasonably attributed to poor copy editing, though this raises its own troubling questions - only break the surface of a much deeper problem. The tenth-grade world-history manual, for instance, drenches itself in black nationalist historical revisionism. The guide starts by allowing the word "African" to slip in and out of its racial connotation enough times to ensure that ancient Egypt comes across as an exclusively black nation, a theory widely disputed by Egyptologists. The authors then cite the notorious Portland Baseline Essays, George James's Stolen Legacy, and other questionable reference points to reinforce their claims and state, predictably, that "Egypt was supreme in the leadership of civilization ... Egyptian culture survived and flourished under the name and control of the Greeks."

By relying so heavily on these Afrocentric authorities, the curriculum appears more intent on engaging in racial polemics than on teaching history. Approximately 5 per cent of the world history manual's 164 pages, for instance, is devoted to making the case for black African migrations to the pre-Columbian Americas, an idea dismissed by most archaeologists and Mesoamerican experts.

All of this aims chiefly at boosting the self-esteem of black students. The increasingly familiar argument runs something like this: The school performance of black students lags behind that of whites because the black students lack a proper sense of self-worth. They live in a society that does not value them, one that constantly reminds them of their diminished status. Educators must teach all students to value themselves in order for them to achieve high marks in school. As school-board member Brenda Hughes told the Bowie Blade-News, the county's Afrocentric curricula "will enhance [students'] self-esteem, motivate achievement, and help them to be law-abiding citizens."

Some supporters of self-esteem theory have wound up endorsing blatantly racist methods. Last year, the local Alliance of Black School Educators sponsored a conference (with the help of Coca-Cola, Giant Foods, and Safeway) entitled "Saving the African American Child through Academic and Cultural Excellence." In one session, Dr. Nsenga Warfield-Coppock spoke about female "Rites of Passage." The session's contents sprang from her Adolescent Rites of Passage, a book-length document made available to attendees. A chapter on biology explains that blacks "have a physiological superiority in the areas of physical coordination and spiritual access to energy and vibrations from the environment"; that "Accessing one's unconscious is easier for persons who have high levels of melanin"; and that "Melanin and the pineal, gland give African Americans special intellectual and physical talents."

Even if so many of the materials used to promote self-esteem were not objectionable, the problem would still remain that self-esteem theory is unsupported by empirical evidence. Although the Supreme Court essentially institutionalized the idea in its landmark desegregation cases, Brown in 1954 and Green in 1968, more recent scholarship has questioned it. James Coleman and others have shown that desegregation actually correlates with lower black self-esteem but slightly higher black scholastic achievement. As Smith College government professor Stanley Rothman notes in a review of self-esteem literature, "it does not seem so far-fetched to suggest that whatever it is that drives individuals to succeed is as likely to be bound up with feelings of guilt, and the fear of failure, as it is with those of self-love."