Alabama GOP Official Explains Racial Disparities In Schools: ‘Blacks Misbehave’

By Tanya Somanader

The U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division has been evaluating the Huntsville, AL school system’s racial integration, and earlier this month released a report that “wasn’t promising.” The DOJlisted “several outstanding desegregation issues that the school district must address,” including“that predominantly black schools have too few advanced courses” and “that black children at predominantly white schools are punished and suspended at alarming rates.”

But Hugh McInnish, a member of the Madison County Republican Executive Committee who also sits on the state Republican Executive Committee, set out to school the DOJ on the real reason racial disparities exist in Hunstville: “Life is unfair.” In a press conference at his gated community and a letter responding to the DOJ last week, McInnish offered a litany of bizarre “proof” that racial disparity isn’t “manmade,” claiming “blacks misbehave on average more frequently than whites do,” and that black students are unable to perform as well as white students. To McInnish, the only “manmade unfairness here” is that the DOJ wants to “correct a problem that is not of their making”:

McInnish went so far as to include in his letter a chart that purports to show the “black crime rate as (a) multiple of (the) white crime rate.”The chart indicates that black people commit more than six times the violent crime of white people overall; it has them committing about eight times as many murders as white people and more than 14 times as many robberies.[...]

McInnish also argued Tuesday that the gap between white and black students’ participation in advanced courses is not because black students are not afforded the chance, as alleged in the Justice Department letter.

Instead, he said, the gap exists because black students are not able to perform as well in advanced classes.

If the DOJ actually decides to peruse his letter, it will find that most of McInnish’s data is cribbed from the right-wing New Century Foundation (NCF), which, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, is a “self-styled think tank” that propagates “academic racism.” Dedicated “to the ideal of the United States as a white European nation,” NCF also publishes the American Renaissance — a magazine that “publishes frequent articles on the discredited field of eugenics” which is “selective breeding to improve human genetic stock.” Incidentally, the foundation’s “most important publication” isThe Color Of Crime (which, to NCF, is black.)

If McInnish ever stepped out of his gated community, he might actually discover that there is absolutely no evidence that African American students “act out more” but rather that “suspension and expulsion is evidence of a pervasive and systematic bias” that’s been present “for the past 25 years.” But McInnish spends more time posting editorials on the white supremacist site VDare, and publishing the news aggregaterSuppressed News which includes insightful comments like “Black on black racism is OK. White on black racism for the same reason is not. When are we going to wake up?”

McInnish won posts on the executive committees for both the county and state Republican parties in June but insists he “Was not speaking out as a representative of either group.” “Some of them will be aghast at what I’ve said,” he mused.

See McInnish’s full letter here.Hugh McInnish’s Letter to the U.S. Department of Justice