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FREEDOMWAYS  FOURTH QUARTER 1966

by others but that it dismissed itself. It is dying because its analysis is tainted with subjectivity—and it cannot survive that fatal flaw.

Bill Strickland

NEW YORK'S BOYCOTTS—
AN ANTHROPOLOGIST'S VIEW

PICKETS AT THE GATE: The Challenge of Civil Rights in Urban Schools. By Estelle Fuchs. The Free Press, New York. (The Macmillan Company) 205 pages. $2.95.

MR. FIELDS MUST GO, HE IS ANTI-NEGRO read the picket signs outside the gates of a public elementary school in Brooklyn. In the first of two case studies, carefully developed and simply written, Estelle Fuchs takes her stand with the growing list of social scientists who dare to do battle against the hallowed formulas that "prove" the ineducability of the Negro child. Learned treatises on the biological inferiority of the Negro served during slavery time to content the white man's conscience. Today, biological inferiority is so discredited that social scientists have had to devise a monstrous mythology equating the Negro child's economic poverty with moral, social, cultural and intellectual impoverishment, if not depravity, to explain away the simple fact that Negro children are not being taught to read and write in the public schools of America.

School principal Fields wrote a letter to his new teachers, orienting them to their duties in his segregated school, repeating the established myths of the social scientists and the educators, to prepare his teachers and to exonerate them in advance for inevitable failure to teach the children.

The parents reacted with anger and with organization, to the amazement of the principal. Dr. Fuchs, with the untiring patience of the skilled anthropologist, explains why Mr. Fields, after fourteen years in this school, could not understand what he had done wrong and why the parents were determined to take matters into their own hands. Dr. Fuchs skillfully exposes the nature of this conflict between the middle-class white educator who cannot credit the worth of any human being who differs from his image of himself and the Negro parent who couldn't care less about that image, but who passionately yearns for a good education for his child.

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