Column by George Sibley
Immigration – September 2006 – Colorado Central Magazine
ONE OF MY ALL-TIME FAVORITE Coloradans is former Governor Dick Lamm. There’s never a dull moment around the Guv; he makes us think about the things we need to be thinking about, usually by taking a strong and extreme stance himself — as when he suggested some years ago that, rather than trying to live forever in a useless dotage, aging Americans had an obligation to “move over” and make room for the succeeding generations. And he always gets all the howls of conventional knee-jerk outrage you would expect from the generally ahistorical and thoughtless masses of an immensely wealthy, arrogant and increasingly fragile imperial culture driving relentlessly toward its decline and fall but not wanting the closing party interrupted yet with reality.
But I don’t always agree with the Guv, and I think he is missing the boat somewhat in his current tubthumping about immigration into America. Most recently he has stirred the pot with observations about the cultural motivation and drive of “minority” groups in America. His hypothesis has been published in a pamphlet called Two Wands, One Nation, which he summarizes thus:
“Let me offer you, metaphorically, two magic wands that have sweeping powers to change society. With one wand you could wipe out all racism and discrimination from the hearts and minds of white America. The other wand you could wave across the ghettos and barrios of America and infuse the inhabitants with Japanese or Jewish values, respect for learning and ambition,” Lamm wrote.
“I suggest that the best wand for society and for those who live in the ghettos and barrios would be the second wand.”
He argues in the book that the society only gets to wave one wand or the other; it can’t wave both — a delimitation that I think compounds the gross oversimplification of the whole argument to the point of irrelevance. But rather than getting directly into that here, I’m more interested in looking at the reactions his hypothesis invoked when he stated it, apparently a little aggressively, in a recent forum at Vail.
First, it achieved the predictable outraged denials from spokespersons for the blacks in the ghettos and Hispanics in the barrios, who pointed out specific exemplars from the black and brown ethnicities who “disprove” Lamm’s hypothesis. Colorado’s Salazar family was trotted out as the obvious example of high achievers from the Hispanic culture. I suppose Condi Rice could be offered as a Colorado example from black America. This of course is the kind of flawed argumentation that is why this society never seems to get around to actually addressing issues: one side puts out a hasty generalization based on conventional wisdom, which the other side “negates” with its own hasty generalization based on too small a sample; both sides retreat into the virtue of their partial truths; and any hope of resolution dies in the resulting righteous din.
But the Guv’s publicized remarks at Vail elicited an actual thoughtful response from an unexpected quarter. Colorado’s current Governor Bill Owens, when asked about Lamm’s statements in an interview with Denver radio demagogue Mike Rosen, said he wished his own children would exhibit some of that “respect for learning and ambition” that Lamm attributes to the Oriental and Jewish cultures.
And Owens’ remark — for which he of course caught hell from the dominant-culture apologists — led Rocky Mountain News columnist Mike Litwin, a Jew, to observe that his kid could use a little of that cultural drive and ambition that Lamm attributes to the Jewish culture.
This seems to be leading — mercifully, maybe — away from the Lamm-Tancredo anti-immigration screed toward — well, toward something maybe more important. It reminded me of a study of college students recently released by the American Council on Education, which the New York Times used as the basis for an in-depth series on what they called “The New Gender Divide.”
PREDICTABLY, AND IN LINE with Gov. Lamm’s hypothesis, the study showed blacks and Hispanics to be under-represented, by population, in colleges and universities (although no mention is made in the Times article about whether Jews and Orientals are over-represented). But what the Times article focused on most was a growing “gender divide” in higher education. The ratio of men to women has dropped to the point where, overall, higher education is almost 60 percent female. (Western State College here in Gunnison reverses that, 60-40 male, probably because of the appeal of skiing and the outdoors in general.) And this ratio of women to men in the colleges increases for blacks and Hispanics — but also for low-income whites: more daughters than sons from poor families go to college.
The most interesting findings, however, had to do with achievement. The women are also cleaning men’s clocks in higher education — better grades, more honors, and a higher graduation rate, in fewer years. And this phenomenon correlates with neither ethnicity nor income; it encompasses the privileged sons and daughters of the middle and upper classes as well as the lower classes.
Anyone can pooh-pooh this study with the kind of false reasoning that argues that Ken Salazar disproves Lamm’s hypothesis about Hispanic attitudes toward “learning and ambition.” But anyone who has hung out around the ivied halls knows the general accuracy of the study; women students tend to take the opportunity more seriously, and way too many of the men students seem to be almost deliberately “dumbing down” — and based on my 19 years at Western in Gunnison, that goes more so if they come from middle and upper class backgrounds.
One male student interviewed for the Times article said, “I came here with the attitudes I’d had in high school, that the big thing, for guys, is to give the appearance of not doing much work, trying to excel at sports and shine socially…. For men, it’s just not cool to study.”
A woman student interviewed said, “The men don’t seem to hustle as much. I think it’s a male entitlement thing. They think they can sit back and relax and when they graduate, they’ll still get a good job. They seem to think that if they have a firm handshake and speak properly, they’ll be fine.”
And of course the statistics about jobs, salaries, et cetera, after graduation prove that to be exactly true. Young white men with middling to poor college records but a good handshake and a corporate character do just fine in the job market, and move up at least as fast as the hardworking women with the 3.95 GPAs.
So what’s one to make of all this — what message can one decode out of the cultural noise? I’ve got no pronouncements, but there are three questions I think we should look at in a more disciplined and maybe less emotional way.
FIRST, WHO IS “AMBITIOUS” TODAY? Lamm’s analysis seems muddied by the fact that he wants to shut down the uncontrolled immigration into the United States, but his hasty generalization here is about ghettos and barrios that are still largely made up of native-born Americans, especially the black ghettos. The most ambitious people in America today seem to me to be the illegal immigrants who will literally risk their lives to get into the country to work at jobs that most native-born Americans clearly do not want to do, and also the women who are still trying to break the glass ceiling, while the least ambitious are those long “ghettoized” by chronic poverty — or in the case of a lot of college males, coddled by chronic wealth.
Second, how much is ambition (divorced from learning or any other unrelated cultural values) driven by economic and/or cultural disenfranchisement? Or maybe the question should be — how much does a sense of economic and cultural entitlement render ambition unnecessary? The white middle and upper-middle class American youth (probably similar to Gov. Owens’ and Mike Litwin’s kids) I’ve been trying to inspire to learning over the past two decades suggest a growing negative correlation between entitlement and ambition.
And third, the question the Romans and Greeks confronted long before us: remembering that “the barbar” to the Greeks were everyone not of the Greek culture — which more saps the empire: the hot and hungry barbarians from without, or the cool well-fed barbarians within?
George Sibley writes from Gunnison, where he does other stuff, too.
