Historian of Race Raymond Wolters’ “Road to Damascus”

Excerpted by Nicholas Stix

Raymond Wolters is the last living, honest historian of race in America. Therefore, I am seeking to read everything he’s ever written or spoken on the topic, and to re-post and discourse on as much as possible of his work.
 

Raymond Wolters: My Journey to Race Realism
August 10, 2015
Luke Ford

From 1944 until 1956, I attended Catholic schools in Los Angeles County. I mention this because the Catholic school curriculum of the 1940s and 1950s differed from the standard fare in public schools. Both school systems taught students to read, write, and cipher. But many public schools also adopted a social science curriculum that was intended to combat racial prejudice by showing that race was a historical and social construction, or myth, rather than a meaningful way to describe human diversity. Designed by Franz Boas and his disciples, this curriculum maintained that there was no scientific proof that race influenced the distribution of behavior, intelligence, or personality; that culture was more influential than race in determining the behavior of individuals; that “opportunities” were more important than “biology” in determining success. Boas acknowledged that his program, which was funded by the American Jewish Committee (AJC), was a form of propaganda. But so many schools adopted this curriculum between the late-1930s and the mid-1950s that Boas succeeded in revising the prevailing views about race. He showed, as Margaret Mead has noted, that it was “well within the power of educational leaders” to change “the climate of opinion in which young people are reared, a change which will inevitably have profound reverberations . . . “ Some public school parents and students continued to believe that racial differences were important, but these parents and students also learned what teachers expected them to say about human diversity; and to recognize that adhering to the Boasian gospel would help them avoid a career damaging faux pas.

Those of us who attended Catholic schools, on the other hand, were not taught to mimick Boas. The leaders of our Church (especially in Los Angeles) associated intercultural agitation with the propaganda of the Communist Party, and my teachers, while insisting that all individuals should be treated with respect, said little about racial matters and nothing about social construction. In grade school the nuns taught reading, writing, and arithmetic, drilled students on the Baltimore Catechism, and taught us something about the history of our Church. Then, in my high school, the curriculum was especially strong in math and foreign languages. All students were required to take at least two years of Latin (and two years of a modern language as well) and four years of math. In addition, there were four years of religion and English, three years of history, two years of science, and a year of civics. We learned the geometry of Euclid and were told about the theology of Thomas Aquinas. But we heard nary a word about Franz Boas and his disciples….

By the 1980s liberals were dominant in academia and in the national culture (although not in American politics at that time), and academic liberals had coalesced in support of the idea that racial justice required that students should be assigned by race to create racially balanced, white majority schools. The rationale for this was articulated most influentially by sociologist James S. Coleman. It held that the quality of a school depended largely on its youth culture and that middle-class schools were better. Since “white” was presumed to be synonymous with “middle class” and “black” the same as “lower class,” the purpose of integration was to create schools with enough middle-class white students to shape the prevailing attitudes and a substantial number of lower-class black children to benefit from being exposed to peers who recognized the importance of school work.

It took some courage – or maybe just contrariness – for me to challenge the liberal consensus. But I pointed out that careful studies of test scores did not support Professor Coleman’s theory; that, in fact, the evidence was so strong that Coleman eventually conceded that his theory was, in his own words, mistaken “wishful thinking.”…

[Read the whole thing here.]


More from Raymond Wolters

“Constitutional History, Social Science, and Brown v. Board of Education 1954–1964,” Part I: “The Historical and Social Science Evidence”;

Part II: “The Continuing Controversy”;

“Hear America’s Last Living, Honest Historian of Race: Raymond Wolters’ 2004 Lecture, ‘Fifty Years Since Brown v. Board of Education’”;

“New Book on Race Only Gets Two Topics Wrong”; and

“Was Charles Darwin a Genocidal, White Supremacist?!”