Jerome replies: I thank Richard Camilli and M. David Egan for their factual additions. The letter from G. Stanley Brown merits a more complete response.
The African American postdoc in my article who was ignored when he went for his job interview was far removed from the disruptive classrooms that preoccupy Brown; yet the postdoc’s skin color made him invisible to the interviewer. My main point, which Brown ignores, is that scientists need to follow Einstein’s example and, to paraphrase Hamlet, take up arms against a sea of social troubles, especially racism.
Now, to Brown’s point: Children who disrupt classes and children who see no hope for their futures are real and related problems. Both are clearly linked not to race but to economic status, which raises serious questions about economics. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, unemployment among African Americans is at least double the rate among whites; obviously, parents who cannot get jobs can rarely provide the stability at home needed to focus on study skills. Nonetheless, some people, like Brown, persist in seeing such problems as racial and perhaps inherent or genetic, a view that can lead only to race-based actions rather than to a real solution based on economic restructuring.
Despite Brown’s denial, a plethora of reports document that educational tracking in America—race- and class-based—is rampant. 1 Not only does it widen the former gap—now chasm—between the haves and have-nots, but the majority of students whose grades fall below the top one-tenth end up in the worst classrooms in the worst schools, with some of the worst teachers. It makes those students essentially passengers on an express train to Hell, which bypasses what Brown calls “the opportunity that tax money affords them” and ends abruptly at the junction of Despair and Anger in US cities that increasingly resemble the New Orleans we saw explode in 2005.
If the American media were surprised by that explosion, it could be because so little media attention was focused on the root problems. Perhaps a word from Einstein’s 1946 message to the Urban League would be useful—for Brown, other physics teachers, and not a few media moguls:
First, the taboo, the let’s-not-talk-about-it, must be broken. It must be pointed out time and again that the exclusion of a large part of the colored population from active civil rights by the common practices is a slap in the face of the Constitution of the nation.
I hope this discussion continues, in the pages of Physics Today and elsewhere.
