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i am confused.
i am not persuaded that this direction in analysis says anything that is useful.
i do not have a particular problem with the study and its methods, but i am not sure that its design is terribly informative or explanatory.
maybe this is a function of my affection for the kinds of analysis i have been indulging concerning contemporary american conservatism since the late 1980s. this is the possibility that has me confused, truth be known.
from the outset i have been more interested in the structure of conservative discourse and have been thinking alot about how it functions, what it does and why it appeals to folk.
the discursive framework is pretty tight, and thinking about it strips alot of the interest out of reading most conservative responses to issues simply because you can pretty much derive them before anyone says anything.
those which are initially a surprise can be generally explained by looking at adjustments made by the media apparatus.
i dont think the appeal of conservative discourse is a function of people being stupid. i think it is something else--maybe a response to globalizing capitalism in a way--shifting to the frames of the nation and of the will is a way to enable folk to imagine that the categories that enable them to locate themselves socially still function, even though they are being eroded by the reorganization of capitalism.
maybe to some extent you could map one way of thinking about this onto the other, and conclude that folk who are in the most exposed class position are the most likely to avail themselves of a discourse that enables them to deny what is obviously the case--that the organization of the economic model they rely on to eat (say) is changing and that they are or will soon become the second great canary in the mineshaft insofar as consequences are concerned.
this would line up contemporary american conservatism with a long tradition of radical nationalist ideologies that speak to the sense of being-exposed of the petit bourgeois in part by enabling them to cope via denial, by retreating into a fantasy of a pure nation that has somehow or another been betrayed or is under some Threat from a curiously amorphous Enemy.
if this study speaks to anything for me at least, it is an index of the extent to which one of the features of contemporary america that really freaks me out (and i use this term with some rigor): that the system of social reproduction has not been able to catch up to changes in the labor market at all, and that it continues to produce and reproduce an outmoded labor pool. this would be a direct reflection of the rigid class structure of american public education--a subject about which the right has nothing coherent to say, really--all they have ever proposed is a system that would privatize class stratification in order to erase the problem as political. the same dysfunction would continue--in fact they would become worse--but the question itself would be shifted away from politics. if i am right, however, and the system of social reproduction is radically out of phase with contemporary reality and cannot be adjusted with any speed to a shifting reality, i would say that the we are maybe in one of the more benign periods of the gradual implosion of the united states.
this last bit actually connects to the methodology of the study in that sat/act scores are more a measure of class position than intelligence.
whence the underlying suspicion about the study: does it naturalize class disparities? does it conflate the effects of a radically stratified educational system with "natural abilities"?
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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