Fourteen-year-old Kahton Anderson illustrates what’s wrong with the racism meme.
Last week I invoked the case of a 14-year-old Brooklyn boy arrested for shooting another teenager, in making the claim that behavioral differences, not racism, drive the disparity between black and white student suspensions. The Obama administration had released its latest school-discipline data on March 21, showing that black students are suspended at three times the rate of white students. The civil-rights industry predictably greeted this information as yet more proof that schools are biased against black students. The day before the federal data were published, eighth-grader Kahton Anderson had opened fire on a Brooklyn bus when several members of a rival “crew” (a localized mini-gang) got on; an innocent 39-year-old father was fatally shot in the head.
Anderson was relevant to the school-discipline debate as an emblem of the pathological urban culture that is manifested both in the black crime rate and in classroom misbehavior. “The chance,” I wrote last week, that Anderson was “a model pupil, quietly paying attention in class and not disturbing his fellow students and teacher, was close to zero.” That statement proved prescient. A fuller picture of Anderson’s school behavior is now in. It is exactly what one would expect.
According to the New York Times, Anderson
was frequently in trouble. Sometimes it was for violating the school’s uniform code or disrespectful chatter in class. . . . Sometimes it was worse: He had a sealed arrest from 2011, and often, high-school-age members of a crew students knew as “R&B” or “RB’z” — the initials stand for “Rich Boys” — loitered outside the school, waiting to fight him.
About three weeks after he got into a fight near school last year, he was transferred to Elijah Stroud Middle School in Crown Heights. .
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