An Analysis of Lamm (2014)

Dear Friend, 

Thank you for sharing Gov. Lamm's speech with me. I have deleted your name from the original email with the link to the text of the speech because of your public position and the sensitivity of the subject matter. I would have never thought growing up in the United States that we would ever inherit from the Cold War a KGB, that is, an American style culture police. Sadly, we cannot talk about the subject matter without becoming personally or professionally defiled by racial centrists. 

You know how the scam works. The subject matter is only sensitive because as we are the ones commenting and since we are white, anything we say on the subject of race or immigration will be deemed representative of a racist or at least an insensitive person and we all know only a minority is sensitive. Isn't that the way it works? I have heard the comment, "If you have not lived the experience, you don't know what it feels like." That's like saying if you have never actually bore a child, you cannot love one. 

I am sure Gov. Lamm was aware that he might be labeled insensitive when he gave his speech. I doubt if he has any future political aspirations. The media will whitewash his words and his adversaries label him. 

I don't know about you, but I have been told, that because of my privileged white birth, by some act of nature or society, I am a racist. That I married a Puerto Rican does not exempt me from the categorization. That I count more African Americans as my friends than any other group does not exempt me. It only increases the heat of the branding iron since now I am a chauvinistic, racist white male. Of course, had we broached the subject under the veil of a Woman, or as an alias Gay, or as a Black Woman or Black Man, or Hispanic, or Immigrant, or even Disabled, we might be hailed as new and important voices and deservedly so like Thomas Sowell (Race and Culture, 1994) and Shelby Steele (White Guilt, 2006). 

I have never hid my maleness or my whiteness even amongst my Black and Hispanic friends. That I can count more friends who are Black (and many who are Hispanic if you count family) than White is a kind of irony. Perhaps there is no irony at all. Perhaps, there is a vast salient of Blacks and Hispanics on the verge of bursting whose voices the media declines to seek out and listen to. Or, perhaps the voices of the radicals have such a choke hold on the Blacks and Hispanics that they deflate the bulging salient every time an important new voice is raised. 

In my experience, the private conversations I have had with African Americans and Hispanics are quite different than what I often hear them publicly endorse. I get the feeling that they feel they need to tow the party line or else join the ranks of the defamed, defiled, and excommunicated. I do not know what it is like to be call an Uncle Tom but I do know what it is like to be called a N----- Lover. As for myself, my claim is that I represent no group except the human race until of course my complexion is noted and my opinion is relegated to the trash heap of history along with the other artifacts of western culture. 

As Lamm states, if he wanted to destroy America, he "would place all these subjects off-limits–make it taboo to talk about. I would find a word similar to “heretic” in the 16th century that stopped discussion and paralyzed thinking." I believe the word he refers to here is the word "racist." I will admit I am an apostate from the ranks of the Left who has returned to tell you all and I have to admit, had the voices of White males never been excluded from the dialogues on race, I might still graze with the same herd. Lamm once grazed with the Democrats. 

Perhaps, like myself, Lamm dreamed the dream of Black, Brown, and White children walking hand-in-hand down the street only to find that dream deferred and utterly changed. The Left today want those children to walk different sides of the street and admonish them if they don't (Spike Lee). Nonetheless, if Whites should move to the other side of their own initiative when they are approached by a group of Black youths, we hear the Left say, "You see, they still don't like us." It is the same argument militarists use. After ten years of war in Iraq and over a million civilians killed and displaced, the question still arises, "Why don't they like us?" 

There is a difference between fear and racism in spite of what the pulp, popular sociologists tell you. Fear of a race does not cause you to hate a race but it does cause you to avoid them. I am an avid hiker. I don't hate the bears in the forest but I know better than to venture off the trail. 

Another reason why I feel I should maintain your anonymity is because I would like to share my response with some friends and maybe even post it to my blog. You are no coward when it comes to standing up for your own opinion but I would not want readers to confuse your opinion with mine since you have not yet had the opportunity as I have to look back upon your career and ask yourself if you really mattered. Teachers do not look for accolades but on the other hand, they certainly do not expect to be branded what they have been fighting against. 

I am retired from public life now and no longer constrained and much less vulnerable to retaliation than you are. I have seen the best of my generation of teachers bewildered by the present civil rights movement. Most are waiting patiently for the pendulum to swing back to the days of inclusivity and sharing. Those who are bewildered simply slip back into classrooms and do their best against great obstacles to maintain high standards for all of their students. Those that speak out are cast out by some of the worst draconian means. 

It is that retaliation that I feared the most and is the reason why I fell into quietude the last ten years of teaching. The fear of retaliation that I held was the test of my commitment to my students and I failed. My failure and cowardice are the reasons now that I look back on my career and am ashamed that I chose my comfort and apportioned space rather than resistance. Nonetheless, the subject of which Gov. Lamm speaks is an important one and one that I have given much thought to over the last thirty years. 

I no longer fear the heretical. I feel I am far enough removed from the malaise to avoid the slings and arrows, that is, as long as no one is listening to me. If somebody should hear and take note, I will probably give a due apology, regret the truth, and pray that I be left alone. Gov. Lamm might have added 4a (see below), an excerpt from one of my 2012 blog postings. However, the Governor was not as privy as we were to the inside workings of public education. 

We, as educators, have been given a unique perspective to how the values that shaped a prosperous America are being eroded from the inside and the new worldview inculcated on the most vulnerable. Nowhere else is the cultural war more explicit and given carte blanche play than in the public education system. The anti-white, anti-west content it spews forebodes an ominous American future. For the zealots of this postmodern zeitgeist, the future is fertile ground to sow the seeds of dependency, victimization, and isolationism but for those who simply want to live to see a better future than they had for their children, the future is precarious and dangerous. It is a future where you will not be judged by the content of your character, nor by your ability or competency, or even by your religious views. I would be more optimistic if I were sure any religious view could survive this generation of youth. Those battles are easily fought. Future Americans will not even be judged by the Bolshevik standard of politicization. That battle wanes as economic opportunity expands and becomes inclusive. It is a future where simply the color of your skin will determine which line of refugees you join. 

Race, excised by science as an important human characteristic in the human construct, has been resurrected by the American Critical Race Theorists and elevated to the highest plateau next to Marx's class struggle as a determinate of privilege and status (Singleton, Courageous Conversations). Fanon and Che are turning over in their graves. Strange how Critical Race Theory works for only native born African-Americans and not African immigrants or Asians. The rhetoric of Critical Race Theorists seems to portray the African American as a new kind of chosen people, freed from Pharaoh's grip, whose struggle depends upon their victimization and not their strength as a people as they walk in the wilderness of deception. Africans, some having lived the experience of colonialism and most one or two generations removed, look condescendingly at American Blacks and say, "We come here because we too want to enjoy the fruits of a country where Blacks have accumulated more wealth than other group of Blacks in the world." 

For African Americans, Africans seem self-righteous. I think Africans like Asians just recognize a good thing when they see it. It takes courage to be an immigrant. It takes courage to reject the victim brand. Lamm and I share a commonality when discussing our subjects. Both Lamm and I are white males who dedicated their careers to the improvement of the plight of minorities; Lamm in a more generalized way than I did since he was a governor and was everybody's governor. I have to admit I was surprised when Bill Clinton went before the NAACP after being criticized by that organization and told them, "I am everybody's President." The same for Ronald Reagan when he went into Watts. After being shouted down he said, "I can't help you unless I can hear you." 

Oh what a tragedy it is that President Obama hasn't done more for the African American community. He could have done so much more. Being there is not good enough; you have to do. Maybe he should go back and reread Saul Alinsky (Rules for Radicals) or Hillary Clinton's dissertation, There Is Only the Fight . . . : An Analysis of the Alinsky Model. 

As for me, I was simply an ESL teacher hell-bent on raising up a literally voiceless people. Yes, I was idealistic and approached my job with a missionary's zeal. I fought for my students and took pride in the number of principal's offices I was kicked out of and in the number of letters of reprimand in my file. I would often quote from Dr. King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail when threatened by administrators: 

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial 'outside agitator' idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds. (Letter from a Birmingham Jail, 1963) 

I always worked from the inside never from the outside because I knew that no one would profit by destroying the educational entity for which I worked. I sought to bring into the struggle those who set obstacles in the way of my students gaining equal access and in the end I believe I did. Who could deny the progress the Kennett Square community has made since I taught there in the late 70's and early 80's? It took efforts on both sides. Kennett Square opened their arms and incorporated their Spanish speaking population into the community and like-wise the Spanish speaking community assimilated? It took the efforts of people with vision to bring this about for the greater prosperity of all. 

Lamm and I spent our careers working on the inside, Lamm in government and I in education. We came to know our constituents and were able to watch how their cause has evolved to where it now excludes us. As the cause evolved, I became more and more embarrassed by my career. Hopefully, Gov. Lamm does not feel the same about his public service. Where I am ashamed, he seems to be embarrassed. I spent a lifetime working to increase minority academic achievement only to see my work undermined by superfluous cultural edicts and governmental mandates that hobbled my students' efforts and reinforced the contagion that an education was a for whites only construct. No wound perpetrated by the KKK could have been more detrimental to the advancement of people of color than the one imposed upon them by the so-called liberal establishment, a liberal establishment that patronizes African American youth rather than encouraging with great expectations and demanding rigorous academic effort. It is a wound that is literally bleeding the life out of the African American community. 

I could go on and on about teacher-proofing class-rooms, student-centered instruction, the internet as the depository of wisdom, self-esteem sans achievement, inflated grades, proportional punishment, the instrumentalization of parents, FERPA, ethnocentrism, the cheating culture, IEP's, ADA, et. al. These wounds have no kinship with the original Civil Rights Movement but their benefactors claim its inheritance. Each wound has lowered American academic standards. Our only solution seems to be longer school days, longer school years, and more testing. Enough already! And we wonder why our nation is ranked 16th in the world in academic achievement. 

I look to Dr. King's words whose warning still resounds from his jail cell, "I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice" (Letter from a Birmingham Jail 1963). 

Lamm was the governor of Colorado where he learned the agenda of the Bilingual-Biculturalists. Bilingualism was once a call for a more literate and multilingual nation. I admit, I carried their flag once. However, one would be hard bent to find that idealistic message in their propaganda today. That Puerto Rico, for example, has doomed itself to perpetual limbo and economic dependency as a territory is due to the Puerto Rican Legislature declaring Spanish its official language. Thanks to that dictum, statehood and its privileges are a bygone dream. Congress would never admit into the union a sovereign entity so antagonistic to the American mainstream, so economically dependent, and so ungrateful. 

I hear no lamentations that the Puerto Rican Legislature was xenophobic. I do hear Puerto Ricans justify that Spanish language maintenance in Puerto Rico is tantamount to maintaining their culture. Yes, language is important but there is a trade-off. Have Italians lost their culture? The Irish? Greeks? Poles? Germans? Chinese? Koreans? Indians? As soon as someone initiates a bill for English as an official language, multiculturalists unfurl their banners proclaiming White hegemony or Anglo hegemony, take your pick, from their perspective they are one and the same. Why is what is good for Puerto Rican culture not so good for American culture? 

Here is an excerpt from an essay I wrote concerning African-American youth in America. It ties into he present discussion because I do not believe there will be a Black versus White or a Brown versus White conflict. The balkanization of America will begin with a conflict between the two under-classes, Black and Brown. As Lamm states, if he were to destroy America he “would make our fastest-growing demographic group the least educated. I would add a second underclass [Hispanic], unassimilated, undereducated, and antagonistic to our population. I would have this second underclass have a 50 percent dropout rate from school.” 

"We have lost a generation of young Blacks who feel a nonchalant yet violent and aggressive contempt and derision for anything associated with whiteness. I blame the public education system, a system I was part of for thirty-three years, for playing a huge part in this. For the past fifty years public education has promoted diversity at the cost of devaluing and even staining our Western European traditions and worldview as the cause of every instance of inhumanity to humanity. Black kids who do well in school are derided by their peers if they achieve because academic achievement is a White construct and antithetical to the ideology of the street so promulgated by the celebrity heroes of this generation. We have become so intent on compensating for our pasts. Has our nation's excess of love bewildered them till they died? We have centrified this generation of young African Americans so much that they have fossilized themselves by their own narcissistic inertia and their inflated racial pride has degenerated into a form of racial superiority whose modus operandi is cruelty and chicanery. This is the generation whose grandparents were the children of the Civil Rights Movement. Whose grandparents witnessed Malcolm X leave the United States a dogmatic racial centrist and return transformed spiritually and humanistically after praying alongside Muslim Whites at Mecca. It has taken three generations of African Americans spoon fed on racial propaganda to distort Malcolm's call for a Black renaissance culturally, economically, and spiritually in America; three 6 generations for Martin Luther King’s dream of an American Black race, fully enfranchised and fully participatory in the mainstream, to turn into a nightmare" (Richard Beck, 2012).

If I had the chance to rewrite the above excerpt I might take some of the blame off of public education and place it square on the shoulders of African American entertainers. Recently I read where Spike Lee was upset that White entrepreneurs were gentrifying Harlem. It seems that he only wants Black investors. Would somebody tell me the difference between African American gentrification and White gentrification? Do the races use a different color of money? Isn't gentrification the dominance by relocation of one class (not race) over another? They say that the greatest anti-smokers are the ones who have kicked the habit. I wonder if those who have escaped from poor communities are the most critical of the poor having once been poor themselves. I doubt if an unemployed Harlem resident would give a damn what color the person is who hires him or what color the hand is that signs his paycheck. There is no doubt that entertainers and politicians are too far removed from reality. 

I share Lamm's view in this respect, I believe that the balkanization of the United States is inevitable given our present course. However, the partitioning does not scare me. I am a patriot but I am not blind to the flux of nations. In today's global economy, nations thousands of miles from one another are just as dependent upon one another as neighbors are. What I do fear is the mechanism that ignites the partition. I do not believe as some African-American conservatives like Sowell and Walter Williams do that there may be a White backlash against Black violence and racism. White America has a defense mechanism to thwart Black violence and racism, detachment and disinterest. Whites will simply ignore African-Americans as has been the case of my hometown Coatesville, a demographically and politically Black dominated island in the middle of one of the most affluent counties in the United States. Whites have too much to lose and prefer to express their sympathies behind double-locked doors in sterile urbanizations with lots of open space where no children play. Again the use of the hiking metaphor is apropos. Whites are like hikers. They know the bears are in the forest but they use every precaution to avoid them. They hike in groups using bear bells and pepper spray and if attacked they roll over and play dead for they dare not carry a gun into the forest and harm the bear. That would be politically incorrect for after all, you took the risk (You were dumb enough.) to enter the bear's habitat. Tree huggers all --- we shall be do-gooders to the grave. 

No, my greatest fear is violence between the two underclasses, generationally impoverished, Blacks and Hispanics who know no other world except the few blocks that they terrorize. This is where the separatists will find their willing recruits. These two groups will be competing in an America, where for the first time ever, the pie will be smaller and the next generation guaranteed a lesser portion. In their subgroups, if violence and racial resentment is the primary means for conflict resolution, we can anticipate an America that is violently reconstructed. But, have no fear. I don't see this happening for a long time. The western wellspring of compassion and remorse that has nursed the American underclasses for the last fifty years may not gush forth with as much enthusiasm but the economic engine that feeds it still has a consistent flow. It is more likely we will see reparations before a bifurcation. 

We no longer are invited to sing in the same chorus We Shall Overcome. The days of unanimity are gone replaced by days of anonymity. We only can pray now that "They" overcome since our voices have been deemed out of tune and incongruent. Anyway, I don't know how long these groups would survive ideologically without their Anglo White whipping boy. Even as he melds into indistinction, they still will need him for many years to come to substantiate their propaganda. 

Thanks for sharing. 

Richard Beck