Precious and The Blind Side point to what Steve Sailer cynically calls the next liberal fad:
This weekend saw the national rollout of two crowd-pleaser movies about impoverished 350-pound black teens: Precious and The Blind Side. (What an amazing country we have, where a pair of poor children can tip the scales at 700 pounds!)Together, the two films reflect an emerging, if seldom fully articulated, consensus among all right-thinking people in this Bush-Obama era about what to do with underclass black children.
Precious is the story of an illiterate 16-year-old girl who was made pregnant and HIV-positive by her rapist father, but her real problem is her abusive welfare mother with whom she shares a Section 8 apartment. Still, with the help of tireless teachers and social workers, she moves into a halfway house and begins to turn her life around.
The Blind Side is an adaptation of Michael Lewis’s 2006 nonfiction bestseller about Michael Oher. A homeless 16-year-old with a drug addict mother and a father who was thrown off a bridge, Oher was adopted by a rich white family. He’s now a rookie starting offensive tackle for the Baltimore Ravens of the NFL, with a five-year $13,795,000 contract.
The Blind Side’s writer-director John Lee Hancock told Michael Granberry of the Dallas News:
“He loves what he calls its nature vs. nurture story line. “It’s like a test case for nurture, and nurture wins in a big way. You’ve got a kid who’s cast on the junk heap of life, socially and from an educational standpoint. And it’s amazing what a roof, a bed, meals and an emphasis on schools can do, when everybody had written him off.” [The Texan behind 'The Blind Side', November 15, 2009]The Blind Side is the rare movie in which white Southern Republican born-again Christians are portrayed favorably. One liberal commenter on IMDB.com raged, “I feel insulted (in the same way I felt insulted when McCain chose Palin for his running-mate) …”
Of course, this positive Hollywood treatment of a white Republican family comes only in the context of their writing a humongous black youth into their wills.
These two films help us understand the common denominator of the demands increasingly heard in the media for mandatory preschool, longer school days, shorter summer vacations, and universal post-high school education. They flow from the inevitable logic of the following syllogism:
- Since 45 years of Great Society programs subsidizing black families have failed to close the black-white gap in school achievement;
- And since only evil people suspect that nature as well as nurture plays a role in the black-white gap;
- Therefore, poor black children are victims of their family environments, and thus should be, as much as possible, kept away from their families and raised by whites or middle-class blacks.
The New York Times Magazine has devoted countless articles in this decade to this general theme, such as The Inner-City Prep School Experience by Maggie Jones [September 25, 2009], about a public boarding school in Southeast Washington. The story is largely devoted to worrying that the school’s annual per student expenditure of $35,000 of the taxpayers’ money isn’t enough to keep the kids locked up in an enriching environment 24×7. When they go home on Fridays, they are re-exposed to black slum culture. Presumably, their test scores decline over the weekend.