Jennifer Berkshire looks behind the Trump administration’s decision to withhold $6.8 billion in funding while further slashing education funding, and what she finds is ugly.
As I’ve been writing here, once you look beyond the chaos and the callousness, the same themes keep emerging, one of them being the roaring return of race science, or as its adherents like to call it, ‘human biodiversity,’ which sounds better but ultimately ends up in the same place: not all racial or population groups are equally intelligent. So what does this have to do with slashing spending on programs like migrant education, services for English Language Learners and basic education for adults? The answer comes to us via writer S.C. Cornell, who, in a recent piece for the New Yorker, summed up what’s so dangerous about the resurgence of the obsession with race science and IQ more neatly than I ever could:
“If the world really can be divided, biologically, into people destined for great things and people doomed to menial labor, there’s no reason not to abolish the Department of Education, as Trump has said he will, and to distribute the saving to the pet projects of the billionaires who got him elected. There’s nothing objectionable about the fact that the world’s fify richest people have the same total amount of wealth as the four billion poorest. Any effort to bridge the gap between these groups–universal pre-K, immigration, income tax, foreign aid–well that’s just DEI.”
Exactly. If you view inequality as not just inherent but desireable, then anything aimed at making the world less unequal is a waste or misguided ‘social engineering.’ That’s why the Trump folks are obsessed with keeping the ‘wrong’ people out of college, whether by using federal money as a cudgel to get elite institutions to admit students solely on the basis of ‘merit,’ or making higher education more costly for low-income students. And it’s why they don’t have a thing to say about legacy admissions, which give a leg up to those who already have a leg up. In other words, give those with the most more while taking from those with the least because they’re not going anywhere anyway. Anything that smacks of trying to make the world a more fair place, ‘well that’s just DEI.’