The Factors Responsible for Low Educational Achievement Among African-Caribbean Youths

By Cajetan Iwunze

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• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Oct 20, 2009
• ISBN: 9781467887243

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The Factors responsible for Low

Educational Achievement Among

African-Caribbean Youths

Cajetan Iwunze

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© 2009 Cajetan Iwunze. All rights reserved.

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First published by AuthorHouse 10/13/2009

ISBN: 978-1-4490-2710-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4678-8724-3 (e)

Contents

Abstract

Chapter One Economic Lynching

Chapter Two Political Repression

Chapter Three Unemployment

Chapter Four Educational System

Chapter Five Family structures of African-Caribbean people in Britain

Chapter Six The work Moral Code and the new poor

Chapter Seven Political Culture

Overview

Bibliography

Abstract  

Year after year, at the end of every annual period of study many black children will leave school without any qualifications. Different professionals put it down to one factor or another based on their own perspectives. Restricting it to one particular thing is a narrow way of identifying the problem.There is no one factor responsible for low academic achievement among young African-Caribbean people. In other words, there is no universal definition for this intellectual calamity among these young people. Some historians’ believe the problem is associated to their history which forms the grid by which African-Caribbean are seen as service users, good for nothing who cannot become service providers. Some Social Scientists put it down to family composition and low income. Some perceive it or see the problem of these young men as Unemployment and lack of access to the labour market while to some, the problem occurs and persists due to lack of education, discrimination and political culture. All these factors identified, form the nucleus of low educational achievement levels among young people of African-Caribbean origin. The reason why so many African-Caribbean people are service users and not service providers is due to long time suppression beyond human imagination. They have the notion that the state uses repression as a means of social control because black colour is seen as highly infectious and is viewed as a disease British society does not want to catch. For that reason whenever a black person is seen walking on the street the some people in the society seem to become offended, the only way out of it becomes repression and exclusion from partaking in the freedom African-Caribbeans helped to fight and won. Institutional racism becomes embedded into the British way of life and educational system, as an instrument to achieve a permanent exclusion of African-Caribbean people from the economy. Because of economic exclusion and systematic oppression directed against African-Caribbean people, they find it difficult to give their children decent education and because they do not have adequate education themselves, they are not able to provide for their off springs with the necessities of life and consequently, the lives of these young children turn out to be a life of misery. In this Book, chapter one will look at the impact of Economic Lynching on African-Caribbean people. Chapter two will demonstrate how Repression contributed to low educational achievement among black youths. In Chapter three we shall illustrate how Unemployment helped to aid low educational achievement among African-Caribbean youths. Chapter four will show how educational system has contributed to low educational attainment. Chapter Five will explain how political culture has contributed to the problem by atomizing the black families into modern individualism. Chapter six will look at the new set of unwritten rules (moral code) concerning the acceptable standard of behavior from African-Caribbean people and how it has impoverished the black communities. Chapter seven will be the conclusion chapter focusing more on the consequences of British Political culture and it contribution to the low educational achievement among the African-Caribbean children.

Chapter One

Economic Lynching 

Introduction

One of the factors responsible for low educational achievement among African-Caribbean youths is economic lynching. Having said that, the phrase economic lynching, sounds ambiguous without further explanation. For it to make sense to a lay person without any background of Political Economy, the term must be clarified further. The question now is what is lynching? Lynching here has two dimensions, (1) killing someone without the use of physical force such as through starvation, (2) killing someone with force by using an instrument. The former could be achieved through discrimination and the later through suppression, which we shall expand further in Chapter Two. In a simple definition, economic lynching is discrimination on the basis of skin colour, denying a certain group of people the right to earn a living because of their skin colour. Economic Lynching could be defined as treating someone differently when seeking employment because he or she is ascribed to a particular racial category. This could, in another sense, be defined as employing hostility which is biologically determined due to differences in physical appearance. Economic lynching is when someone is denied promotion to certain jobs or positions on the basis of his or her skin colour; Let us assume, for example, that Mr. A, is a brilliant lawyer and one of the most senior judges in the land. He is in line for promotion to the top job, Chief Justice of that Country, because the current Chief Justice is about to retire in 6months time. According to the rule of the game, Mr. A. is a natural successor to that position but Mr. A. happens to be African-Caribbean. When that 6months are up, Mr. B is appointed the Chief Justice instead of Mr. A the reason being that Mr. B. is White and due to the differences in physical appearance they think it is more appropriate for Mr. B. to become the next chief justice. Here the natural rule has been broken, Mr. A. has been denied this top job because he is ascribed to a particular racial category; this is economic lynching. Again, let us assume there is an economic down-turn and a lot of people are now claiming unemployment benefit and contributing nothing to the society. As the economy begins to improve and businesses start to create jobs, people are employed to fill the vacancies. Let us assume that the total vacancies created by these businesses so far are 300 jobs; however, out of these 300, only White people are employed. The African-Caribbean people who applied for the jobs were not taken on thereby forcing them to remain jobless even when they want to work; this is economic lynching. From this definition the picture of what Economic Lynching means has emerged. In a very simple term "it is a kind of behaviour in which a person is treated differently because he is attributed to a specific social group¹.

Justification of Economic Lynching

The question we have to ask then is "why is it that some people economically lynch others? To begin with, it is convenient to consider the reasons people advanced for behaving as they did. They may not always have been fully aware of what caused them to practise economic lynching, but in many cases they gave reasons which can serve as starting points. According to Barton, there are three kinds of response on the part of people he interviewed. He discovered that there is a wholesale rejection of African-Caribbean people with no attempt of justification². This he called emotional antipathy which means strong hostility or opposition towards African-Caribbeans because some people in the society believe they are annoying and disgusting. These feelings degenerate to agitation against the community. However, emotional antipathy appears to be the least common motive for Economic lynching on the part of the people he questioned, although it may be more common than his surveys suggested because people influenced by this attitude may have concealed it during that research. Many white people, in defence of their actions, argued that they could not behave as they wished to other people (such as Eastern Europeans, Indians and Pakistanis) but would not accept African-Caribbean people in such capacities. Some maintained that economic lynching was justified because African-Caribbean people are uneducated. As a result of this they are higher risk than Whites and Asians, and more prone to accidents than the rest of British society³.

Recently, John Snow made a programme about Immigration which was broadcast on channel 4 on the 26th September 2007 at 8pm. The shocking news was that among these immigrants from outside the EU, and when you categorize them according to countries Nigerians came on top, as the most educated when compared with other new members of EU. Yet Nigerians are the least likely to be employed which disproved the negative thinking that African-Caribbeans are uneducated and this is the cause of their economic lynching. Nonetheless, some went further to justify their actions by arguing that most African-Caribbean drivers are higher risk than Spanish motorists, although both had been driving in Britain for eight years. On that note, Barton imposed the question, "had there been any evidence that the African-Caribbean’s are worse drivers (e.g. that they had been involved in more accidents?) Barton’s research showed that, not to be the case. If there is evidence to prove that African-Caribbean people are worse drivers than their White counterparts, their analogy would not have been regarded as Economic Lynching. In this case however it is Economic Lynching because there is no official data to prove that African-Caribbean people are worse drivers than the White people, but rather what statistics has shown was that youths under 25’s are more likely to have accidents than the older people. There is no place in the official figures that shows that African-Caribbean people have more accidents than their White counterparts. We are now beginning to see how economic lynching occurs when a person is treated differently when seeking employment or other social amenities such as housing services because he is ascribed to a particular racial category⁴.

Judging from Barton’s research, economic lynching is wide-spread in every part of British institutions including employment and housing as mentioned above. For example, in the early sixties, some white people do not want to work alongside African-Caribbean people, that does not mean that in the 21st Century something has changed but instead, the statistics are going down rather than up in other words some people do not want to work alongside African-Caribbean people and that is why there is a lot of hostility against them in British inner-cities⁵. So, when some politicians talk about crime, what they are saying is that they want African-Caribbean people removed from the street and the one of way to stop them working alongside British people is by imprisoning them⁶ . Even though a proportion of British people claim they would accept non-white persons as workmates the percentage that would accept a Pakistani or an Indian as a workmate is higher than the proportion who would accept an African-Caribbean person as a workmate. The proportion of White people who would accept Asians as neighbours were again higher than those that would accept an African-Caribbean person, which suggests that the social relationships based on working close together with Asians is more acceptable than that of African-Caribbean people, which may be due to the reason that they have a lighter colour.

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However, that is changing because of the Eastern Europeans coming into UK. The position of the Asians and their acceptability has been reassessed. As a result they are fighting back to maintain their economic position in the social hierarchy. They do not want the Eastern Europeans take away the privilege they have enjoyed for so long and they are prepared to do anything to secure it.

In housing, African-Caribbean people were not given places because of restrictions imposed on them. What that implies is that the justifications advanced by practitioners in housing goes far beyond what is rationally defensible. Many ethnic minority people (in the case of Africans, nearly three- quarters) have never applied for a flat to the council. Because the councils are inclined to regard African people as falling short of English standards of decorum and hygiene, but the recently arrived immigrant of whom this might be true are the ones least likely to be seeking houses from these councils. But Barton’s critics argued that African-Caribbean peoples’ inability to apply for housing to the council is cultural because they are ‘closed up’ communities who do not want other people to know what they are doing. Besides, it is only within their community that they learn the secret of home ownership even when they are not qualified to have them. In order to prove their point that there is no such thing as Economic Lynching, they impose the question "why is that ¾ of the housing in London, Birmingham, Bradford and Blackburn are owned by the Indians? Despite the criticism, it does seems stereotype ideas about unwelcome characteristics are extended to all ethnic minority people whatever their history, occupation, income and personality⁷. Some of the councils who practice economic lynching are determined to exclude African-Caribbean people from the economy by using colour as the sole criterion for evaluating their applications. Africans came out worse because they were economically lynched both in personal applications by their names, it is obvious where they come from. For a European or Asian it was the other way round⁸. The emotional significance of a strange skin colour could have be a major factor in explaining why the African-Caribbean people experienced twice as much economic lynching in housing as than a European and more when seeking low level employment. The main reasons advanced for economic lynching of the Indians could be cultural; whereas for African-Caribbean’s, they were physical. Some critics argue that ethnic minority people in Britain cry out, economic lynching whenever they fail to get what they seek, whatever their qualifications⁹. This leads some writers to believe that accusations of economic lynching are unfounded: by stating that most British Businesses are run by Asians who also control most of the shops in Britain. They imposed the question, if there is Economic Lynching how come Whites are relegated to the background when it comes to allocation of business premises¹⁰? They may have got a point, but that does not wholly prove that Economic Lynching does not exist. For example, I went to apply for accommodation with the Haringey Council because my daughter decided to come and live with me after I have separated with her mother. They council told me to bring prove of parental responsibility, my passport, prove of address in the last five year, my pay slips, my bank statement, my daughter birth certificate, letter from her school showing attendance etc. I gave them all the information they requested for. One of the managers rang me on my phone on the 5th of October 2007, saying that the parental responsibility which I have handed in was not good enough that what they required from me was full custody order from the court. I went out and spoke to legal practitioners concerning the full custody order. They asked me why? I told them that I was living with my daughter in one room in a shared accommodation with other 6 other adults. They asked me where my ex-partner was and I told them Coventry. And you were staying in London with your daughter? And I said yes. Was she in school? Yes, I replied. If you were living with your daughter and she was already in school what was the full custody order for? I then realise that the demand was a means to eliminate me because I am African-Caribbean. What the council was doing, was indirectly, urging me to declare a legal battle that would destroy my daughter including myself. It was then that I realise how the government policies may socially engineer the destruction of African-Caribbean people. This exclusionary measure is economic Lynching. Because they believe that I have come to take away their flats which are meant for Europeans.

This shows that economic lynching still exists. On that note, Daniel went on to investigate this economic lynching which some authors believe is unfounded. His findings pointed towards Barton’s conclusion and hypothesized that there is, in reality, more economic lynching than would have been expected from calculations based upon the experience reported by the African-Caribbean people who were interviewed. He went on to suggest that sometimes economic lynching could exist even where the African-Caribbean person does not suspect it¹¹.

From a political standpoint, his two other findings evoked concern. Firstly, he pointed out that better educated African-Caribbean people experienced more economic lynching than when they were uneducated. He went further to elaborate on that by suggesting, that "as African-Caribbeans and their children acquired better qualifications and higher expectations they may experience not greater acceptance but more rebuffs¹²". He went on to argue, that awareness of economic lynching reinforced the tendency on the part of minorities to withdraw into their own communities and make integration progressively more difficult.

As a result of that, Daniel concluded that economic lynching was a problem in our society that needed to be tackled and for the British people to ascertain the level of this problem we needed to ask ourselves how serious is this level of economic lynching in our society today? Many might not believe it is very great if they compare it with the difficulties African-Caribbean immigrants often meet in Britain. If they rephrase it and put it this way what significance has economic lynching been in this 21st century? they may find the answer less comforting. If they ask what difference the prejudice of British people would make to their personal lives if their skin turned brown, they may like to reflect on the case of a Welshman, an ex – commando and former Services boxing champion, who used to live in a Dorset town. He suffered from a kidney disease which meant that he had to seek lighter work. The disease also darkened his skin so that he was mistaken for a black man. As a result he had experienced economic lynching¹³. Sometimes, he had been stopped on the street by strangers, who said something like: You bloody wog, why do not you go back to the palm trees?, On another occasion when he applied for work as a sales representative in an insurance company the employer refused to interview him because he looked like a black man and was told that he looked like a monkey and could not get a job¹⁴. This treatment given to a British citizen would give one an insight into why economic lynching of African-Caribbean people is rampart.

Eventually, when Mr Welshman’s incident was reported in the Observer. Mr Welshman was told that he was no longer to lose his home even though he could no longer keep up his mortgage repayments due to economic lynching he had experienced for looking black. As a result of this his local council bought his house and rented it back to him at a rate he could afford. His local lions club then bought him a refrigerator, and paid for a course of driving lessons to help him get a job as a driver. He was allowed to fall behind with his rents and electricity bills¹⁵. People only became aware of this economic lynching when it was reported by the media and probably, no-one would have believed its existence until they saw it in a newspaper.

Let us not forget that the media carried the news because the victim was White. If not it would have gone unnoticed, unspoken and when such cases are unspoken we assume it does not exist¹⁶.

Three Outlooks and the Explanation of Economic Lynching.

There are three outlooks and explanation for economic lynching and Daniel’s Report provides a snapshot of the incidence of economic lynching in this 21st century. How would this evidence be interpreted? Some people would regard the evidence of emotional resistance to intimacy with African-Caribbean people as readily comprehensible and perhaps beneficent¹⁷. While the tendency of employers to stereotype African-Caribbean people as indecorous and unhygienic, irrespective of their social background, may seem illogical from a psychological standpoint, while to some it is by no means accidental. The tendency is present because it has a function. It furthers biological evolution by keeping genetically different groups separate. Perhaps, it furthers social evolution by helping nations maintain a sense of identity¹⁸. Those who adopt this standpoint might regret individual cases of injustice and victimization but argue that they are best avoided by keeping nations homogeneous. Their critics insist that there is no evidence to support the notion that humans inherit such hostile dispositions and as such have many things to learn. Because members of the same family often have different dispositions and individuals change their behaviours¹⁹. Social changes such as competition for employment, explain variations more convincingly. As recent research has demonstrated, for example, that when people become blind they are likely to abandon the colour prejudices that they may earlier have expressed²⁰. The hypothesis of biologically determined hostility could be employed to argue that, the greater the difference in physical appearance, the more resistance there will be to contact, and the more intimate the relationship, the greater the resistance. The disposition to hostility is the independent variable; social and economic factors are dependent variables influencing its expression²¹.

However, there are several independent causes of hostility. From watching the behaviour of given individuals over a series of actions it is possible to infer that they are motivated by particular attitudes. It is also possible to find out whether individuals hold attitudes (or dispositions to behaviour) by asking them questions, but it is not certain that their attitudes will necessarily be translated into behaviour. There is also evidence that if people are induced to behave in a certain way, they will start to express attitudes which make sense of their behaviour. There is a two way relationship here.

Daniel used university female students who often deprecate racial discrimination and seek to demonstrate to African-Caribbean men that not all White people are intolerant. So at a university dance in the late 1950s when there were more students from the colonies, a girl might show that she was not unwilling to dance with an African-Caribbean partner. Other African-Caribbean students might notice this and concluded that here was one girl who was not biased. Some of them, who had asked English girls to dance with them and had been turned down, might have found the experience a little humiliating; they would therefore be more inclined to seek from a girl they defined as open-minded. So, the girl initially wished to show only goodwill might find she was receiving a whole series of invitations to dance from African-Caribbean students. She might well find it more difficult to say no to African-Caribbean men than to White boys. If the White students saw her dancing with one African-Caribbean student after another they might inferred that she did so from choice, and refrained from asking her to dance with them. The African-Caribbean students might interpret her behaviour as showing a desire for greater intimacy than she actually wished²². A whole series of predictable consequences which were no part of the girl’s original intention might come from her initial willingness to dance with an African-Caribbean man. Therefore Economic Lynching may be caused by the psychological disposition, usually labelled prejudice which makes people discriminate and exclude, it also may be caused by social factors²³. Therefore he concluded that Social behaviour is patterned and it cannot be understood simply in terms of people’s states of mind²⁴. So, one’s attitude might not necessarily explain his or her behaviour.

In other words, one might argue that the leading process cannot be fully understood on the psychological social levels, and that there is an underlying biological programme for it²⁵. According to some scholars, the tension and the intention to exclude African-Caribbean people could have been the tensions of a monopoly capitalist society, the tensions of a racist society. It could be true in the case of Stephen Lawrence which will be elaborated more in chapter 7. However, the views of African-Caribbean Academicians are that racial attitudes are learnt, but not just any attitudes²⁶. Some people or groups have the power to influence the expression of opinion. Consciously or unconsciously, they see to it that the television, radio, newspapers, universities and schools propagate ideas about the nature of society congenial to the rulers. Attitudes about strangers are boosted if they suit the interests of the ruling class²⁷. Sociologists who accept this approach object to the implication that British behaviour can adequately be analysed by using concepts like economic lynching which in one sense take for granted the prevailing social order instead of assessing present troubles against the standard of the more harmonious social order that could be established by adopting correct policies. It is therefore important to uncover the mechanisms of exploitation rooted in the relationship between British government and African-Caribbean people, for it is within this relationship that the so called ‘race problem’ had risen.

If we put events into a historical sequence, it could show how national policies have been tailored to suit the interests of the ruling class. In the old days of the Empire, the policy of extending British citizenship to overseas subjects of the Crown was a cheap way of keeping the colonials quiet, with an appealing echo of Roman grandeur. Few of Her Majesty’s African-Caribbean subjects came to Britain then and fewer stayed. In the early 1950s immigration from the African-Caribbean countries was not discouraged because there were vacant jobs for unskilled workers. It suited the employers to recruit undemanding African-carribbean labour rather than reorganize backward industries. After the 1958 disturbances and rise in South East Asia, mainly India, immigration in the 70s, the press raised the alarm and right-wing politicians began to manufacture a racial issue²⁸. The mass of the working class was deluded into believing that the threat to their living standards from the ‘unhygienic’ Asian competitors was greater than the threat from the employers. The ideology of racial difference was used to make White workers feel they were no longer at the bottom of the status hierarchy and that therefore they had an interest in maintaining that hierarchy. An alien wedge was driven into the potential political unity of the working class. For that same reason, hostility towards African-Caribbean people will continue so long as the ruling class is able to utilize it for their political ends²⁹.

Many social scientists have accepted the propositions such as ‘people learn the attitudes disseminated by power elites’ and agree that it is legitimate and worth re-examination. They can be put to the test, and, if upheld, incorporated into existing theories of social structure. But the proposition is not falsifiable. Its adherents assume that a ruling class always acts in accordance with its long-run interests and represent the social order as operating in a more systematic and coherent fashion than is usually the case. John Rex’s writings on race relations attempt to synthesize elements of these assumption. It seems to suggest that ‘an individual’s position in the housing market is a more important