Our country is built on a rock. It is this: “All men are created equal.”
That is the ideal, the bottom line.
If the United States of America stands for anything, it stands for equality. We are equal at birth. That’s the truth — despite a past littered with the sins of slavery, segregation and the long denial of full citizenship to minorities and women.
In reality, people have social, physical and mental challenges, and huge economic disparity. Discrimination persists to this day. But rich or poor, black or white, we are born to equal opportunity. In this country, we stand up to the rest of the world to say it: All people are created equal.
When a publicly elected school official questions this very foundation upon which we stand, it is shocking. And it’s more than enough reason to say that any quibbling over Michael Kundu’s fitness to serve on the Marysville School Board can stop right now.
Kundu has every right to think what he thinks, and to say what he thinks. He has no business putting his stamp on public education.
He is at the center of a firestorm over e-mail he sent out in early June saying that “there is a definitive factor played by racial genetics in intellectual achievement.”
In e-mail sent to other school board members and Marysville School District administrators, Kundu cited a controversial study by J. Philippe Rushton, a University of Western Ontario psychology professor. Rushton wrote a book ranking the intelligence of East Asians, Anglo-Saxons and Africans. Kundu grew up in Canada and is of East Indian and German descent.
His e-mail included discussion of the district’s achievement gap on state exams, the trailing academic performance by students in some minority and other demographic groups. He stated that children of higher intellect are, arguably, “most likely to enter career tracks (science, technology, medical research, etc.) that will benefit humankind.”
Enough. Kundu should resign.
It’s certainly fair to examine concerns over poverty and other environmental factors while seeking solutions to poor school performance. Racism has no place in the discussion.
And that’s what it is, Mr. Kundu. Linking race and inborn intelligence is nothing but racism — by definition.
The Webster’s New World College Dictionary includes this as its first definition of racism: “a doctrine or teaching, without scientific support, that claims to find racial differences in character, intelligence, etc., that asserts the superiority of one race over another or others.” The definition goes on to include efforts to maintain supposed purity of races and practices of racial discrimination based on racist beliefs.
In the hot debate over Arizona’s immigration law, foes of the legislation hurl the word “racists” at its backers. Some may well fit that label, but a strict interpretation of U.S. law is not necessarily racism. Kundu, though, is absolutely buying into racism by giving any credence to a study linking race and intelligence.
Racism starts with belief. It has no place here, not in schools where students are taught our nation’s ideal and its bottom line: All are created equal.
Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460, muhlstein@heraldnet.com.
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