...I'm all for a bit less Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin, Galileo and Copernicus, if it means a bit more McCoy, Banneker and Carver. It's a question of balance. It's important.Who are they, you ask? What have they done to be bumped up ahead of those greats?
Well, I had to Google them. Carver was a botanist who got poor farmers to grow alternative crops, McCoy was a big cheese in the world of industrial lubrication (Woo!), and Banneker appears to be most famous for making a wooden clock...
Yes, really.
So, why should we elbow aside the greats of history? Only one reason:
It's a question of balance. It's important.There you go.The only thing that can possibly give kids ambition is to see other kids that look a bit like them.
I talk it over with Joe, a black school governor. Get the black scientists on the curriculum, he says. Black engineers, black investors, black surgeons. "If I see another school trying to boost black achievement by talking about black pop and sports stars, I am going to do someone a serious injury," he says. At a young age, the only limit most kids have is their ambition, says Joe, and yet we limit those ambitions. "What's the best they see to aim for? A West Indian takeaway. A barber shop, if they are lucky. Who plants the seed in their minds that they might be a metallurgist or a physicist; that people who looked a bit like them have already done it?"
Never mind are they any good, are they the right size, shape and colour...
There is black history month, I tell him. We are lucky to still have that. No sign of a Polish history month, a Chinese history fortnight or even a Pakistani history week. But it's stuck, he says. On Mary Seacole, and Martin Luther King.Oooh, that reminds me! Wasn't it MLK who said that he wanted to see a world where the only criteria that mattered was the colour of a man's skin?
No, wait, that's not right, is it?
"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."
Oh, Martin. You'd turn in your grave if you saw what passes for today's 'leaders'...
Update: As NickM over at 'Counting Cats...' shows, that's something the ladies want in on too.
11 comments:
Bit racist isn't old Hugh? Trying to shove white inventors into the background to promote inventors of a certain skin colour.
I use the same system on gender as I do on race, I reverse the positions and see how it looks from the other end, makes hypocrisy and agenda lead trumpetings very easy to spot. If there were an Afro-Caribbean Einstein out there, he'd be celebrated the world over, no matter the colour of his skin, as it is there isn't and they are left bigging up McCoy, Banneker and Carver.
I absolutely second your MLK comments. If I could communicate with MLK by ouija board he'd be delighted to hear the USA now has a mixed-race president until... To be honest I don't think I'd have the heart to tell the great man about the details of Obama such as the black-supremacist "church" he attended, the Marxism, Bill Ayers, the Chicago machine politics, the village idiot of a veep...
Tragic.
If I might blow my own vuvuzela here
(Oh how they laughed at A&E!) then I think I exposed the fatal flaw in positive discrimination here:
http://www.countingcats.com/?p=7227
And alas whilst it is also the fatal flaw of the "group grievance" industry it is the reason it keeps on truckin' because there is no end to the ways you can slice and dice humanity and come-up with some cockamamie cause.
An analogous thing happens in stuff like climate science. Google "red noise". Or economics. Recall Gordon Brown's "no borrowing except for investment over the economic cycle" golden rule. Fine I guess except utterly meaningless when he kept shifting the boundaries of the economic cycle to fit his own desires (or cock-ups).
Rankings of most influential Scientists ... past and present ... although not colour coded :)
http://www.adherents.com/people/100_scientists.html#Scientific100
Morgan Freeman said it well, regarding Black History Month:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3cGfrExozQ
But Julia, surely race doesn't exist except as a myth propagated as a brutal and deliberate tool of oppression and division of the poor in the ongoing class war fomented by the global econo-political hegemonic capitalist nexus.
Surely Brother Hugh cannot be suggesting that Comrades Newton, Darwin, Galilei and Koppernigk and less worthy than Comrades McCoy, Banneker and Carver, purely because of, ahem, skin pigmentation.
I mean, we're all the same colour under the skin, innit? (A sort of livid dark red brown as I recall.)
Or does all this only apply in the one direction?
Anyway I think Sylvester McCoy made an excellent Dr Who and his potato crisps are marvellous.
Do they support racial quotas for airline pilots or heart surgeons?
Nope. Only for functions whose value they can't understand or where lack of competence can't impact on them personally.
BTW, that toxic clown Lee Jasper actually used MLK and Nelson Mandela as supporting examples of the benefits of racially segregated education. A real WTF moment. I'm sure they would have approved. And wasn't he considered one of Britain's foremost advisers on matters concerning race?
Compared to the bullshit routinely turned out by the race grievance industry, Alice would have regarded Wonderland as an oasis of common sense.
Reminds me of a Radio Times feature some years ago on the Top 10 Women Inventors. Obviously important role model stuff. One of them was the inventor of Tippex...
I don't hold with racism myself, but it seems I'm in a minority, particularly when it comes to discrimination in favour of certain racial groups.
Racsim is just bloody stupid, frankly.
Trying to judge peoples worth accurately by what they say or think is hard enough, doing so by their skin color is impossible. It is just as stupid when employed as "positive" discrimination by idiots like Hugh as by the ones wearing sheets and pointy hats.
"Who are they"
You still haven't told me who these Newton, Gallileo and Darwin guys are.
"I use the same system on gender as I do on race, I reverse the positions and see how it looks from the other end, makes hypocrisy and agenda lead trumpetings very easy to spot."
Good point! It it would cause consternation in the race hustlers, it's a good indication of its worth.
"...because there is no end to the ways you can slice and dice humanity and come-up with some cockamamie cause."
Especially when there are grants and prestigious university posts going...
"Morgan Freeman said it well, regarding Black History Month..."
Yes, I'm waiting for the backlash for that. There'll be one. They don't like to see their pets thinking for themselves.
"Anyway I think Sylvester McCoy made an excellent Dr Who and his potato crisps are marvellous."
:D
"Do they support racial quotas for airline pilots or heart surgeons?"
I wouldn't be surprised to see someone, somwewhere arguing for that. Oh, not where they live, of course!
"...a Radio Times feature some years ago on the Top 10 Women Inventors. Obviously important role model stuff. One of them was the inventor of Tippex..."
She should get a National Day for that, at least! Maybe a Google scribble, Tippex'ed out?
"You still haven't told me who these Newton, Gallileo and Darwin guys are."
Just some boring old white (dead) guys... ;)
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