In fact, as is well known by now, the problems of young blacks do not arise in our schools, nor are they remediable there. Actually, hiring more black male teachers is a good idea. But it has nothing to do with the provision of role models. They can help make a school a more orderly and decent place. But just as fathers play their part without a thought of being role models, so do black male teachers play an equivalent part.
Role models are largely a sociological fantasy.
Very few of us have gone through life gazing at role models we have known. And, unfortunately, there is as yet little evidence that black teachers have a significant, differential effect on the academic achievements of black students. It is in its most intense and extreme form, however, that multiculturalism is on its way to being a major educational, social and eventually political problem. In practice, this means an effort to persuade minority students to be contemptuous of and hostile to America and Western civilization as a whole, interpreted as an age-old system of oppression, colonialism and exploitation. Just as bad money drives out good, so the most intense versions of an ideology tend to color and shape the less intense.