Ann Althouse has a good catch on a Slate/Washington Post article that desperately tries to explain away North Dakota having a very low teen pregnancy rate despite having only one Planned parenthood office and little sex education. It's pretty funny to see the wacky and unlikely "evidence" cited but the real sting is in the tail. The article quotes a learned professor who obviously didn't think things through before opening her mouth:
That said, there is another way to think about it. Suppose that, rather than focusing on unspoken negative assumptions about non-white cultures at work here, we focused instead on the unspoken positive assumptions about the white, middle class culture of a place like North Dakota.
Notice the that Professor Carbone identifies the very things that help North Dakota teens succeed (empasis added):
The liberal culture doesn't just fail to recognize the things that work, it often actively seeks to undermine them. And the biggest victims of these liberal efforts to undermine family, virtue and literacy are black, Hispanic and aboriginal Americans. That's not a coincidence.
As I've said before, I'm descended from famine-fleeing Irish Catholics. The branch of the family I descend from achieved amazing socio-economic success by emulating the morals and culture of white middle-class protestants they ended up living next to when they arrived in the Northeast. Professors and journalists spend a lot of time slagging the white, middle class in places like North Dakota but the truth is that if you want to succeed in life, you couldn't do better in your search for role models.
“North Dakota is just off-the-charts, demographically,” says June Carbone, a law professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and co-author of Red Families vs. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture. The state may prove that white, middle-class teens will probably do OK in the absence of comprehensive sex ed and well-funded reproductive health centers, as “they’ll learn from their families, their peers, their doctors, and the internet.”It's the unspoken corollary assumptions that go with that thought that come off as, well, racist is a good word here.
That said, there is another way to think about it. Suppose that, rather than focusing on unspoken negative assumptions about non-white cultures at work here, we focused instead on the unspoken positive assumptions about the white, middle class culture of a place like North Dakota.
Notice the that Professor Carbone identifies the very things that help North Dakota teens succeed (empasis added):
... white, middle-class teens will probably do OK in the absence of comprehensive sex ed and well-funded reproductive health centers, as “they’ll learn from their families, their peers, their doctors, and the internet.”In other words, it helps to have a strong family and to obey your parents, it helps live in a culture where virtues such as prudence predominate and it helps to be literate. The good professor is also implicitly admitting not only that these things work but that they are more effective than "comprehensive sex ed and well-funded reproductive health centers".
The liberal culture doesn't just fail to recognize the things that work, it often actively seeks to undermine them. And the biggest victims of these liberal efforts to undermine family, virtue and literacy are black, Hispanic and aboriginal Americans. That's not a coincidence.
As I've said before, I'm descended from famine-fleeing Irish Catholics. The branch of the family I descend from achieved amazing socio-economic success by emulating the morals and culture of white middle-class protestants they ended up living next to when they arrived in the Northeast. Professors and journalists spend a lot of time slagging the white, middle class in places like North Dakota but the truth is that if you want to succeed in life, you couldn't do better in your search for role models.
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