APRIL 2025 SULLYGRAM:  Schools don’t get much worse than Eastside HS, Paterson, NJ, 1982. But that was before black principal Joe Clark stepped in with a bullhorn and a baseball bat and drove street culture out of the halls – though he said the baseball bat was to teach students they could either strike out or hit a home run. Maybe you saw his story in the flick “Lean on Me,” starring Morgan Freeman.

Call it the first time someone looked at low minority test scores in education with common sense about addressing cultural decline rather than lowering learning standards, throwing money at curriculum reforms, and blaming legacy racism. Yet, there is plenty of history since emancipation to point out the crippling fallacy of low expectations. As social philosopher Thomas Sowell and other black thinkers have pointed out, crime rates and illegitimate births for minorities were lower in the 1920s than the 1980s. Where fostered, high expectations invariably produce success, such as seen among Harlem youth chess teams, which have won national championships. Unfortunately, expecting more from students has very little platform appeal to politicians and sucks at attracting money.

So, high expectations continue to be rejected as a way to motivate minority achievement, especially among the liberal elites and white activists who claim to care the most. A Yale University study in 2018 revealed that, as opposed to conservative whites, liberal whites dumb down their language when speaking to people of color. Some would call that implicit or closet racism, an underlying belief that minorities are inferior. At the very least, it represents condescension by white activists, a patronizing attitude that is my whole point here. If you are truly unbiased, you see people as they come, each an individual potential, rather than a projection of your hidden bigotry toward their racial identity.

That stigma of white empathy is not lost on blacks who see through its premise. Some may cynically exploit it, others quietly resent it, but it fools only the self-righteous empathizers themselves. And it doubtless undermines the self-esteem of young minorities dealing with anger and hopelessness. If you want to empower anyone, try high expectations (implicit and sincere respect). A cultural meritocracy is colorblind. Its building blocks – such as hard work, perseverance, and utilizing educational opportunities – are also colorblind.

Meritocracy shuns royalty, aristocracy and family background. We wrote those distinctions into our Constitution and struggled to get them right for a hundred years, culminating in a Civil War. It took another century and two world wars to codify the fine print, but we emerged mid-20^th C. more than ever a shining beacon among nations, a global destination for freedom and opportunity. We remain imperfect, but our marquee still advertises the ideals sought by those original common-folk Europeans fleeing social hierarchies where family standing dictated pecking orders of success and power. The colonials started with nothing and of necessity thrived on values where what you did was more important than who you were. Merchants, inventors, hard workers, risk-takers, willing labor, farmers, imaginative innovators of all types seized liberty and self-determination to rise, rise, rise. Welcome to the New World. Welcome to the meritocracy!

…until. Is there an until? Are we in it now? So open-minded that our brains have fallen out? Quotas based on nothing more than identity politics? And if you show your participation trophy for non-whiteness – particularly non-male whiteness – you are enshrined as a victim of said whiteness. For that matter, even “maleness” is negotiable. Choose sex and pronouns contrary to your biology and you get a special victim exemption. Otherwise, whiteness and maleness automatically brand you as privileged and bigoted. Repent and atone! Sigh…in the name of acceptance, we have embraced blanket intolerance.

Carving out group identities has nothing to do with intrinsic value in a human being. High expectations for what individuals do does. Have we lost our meritocracy to good intentions run amok? Who does lowering high standards truly help? Does the consumer from any identity group seek out less qualified services and businesses? Do you choose from an identity group you know were certified by lower academic admissions or standards for your child’s surgery, legal matters or financial investments? Do minorities who achieve under the higher bars get lumped in with the stigmatized lowered standards of their identity group? Inevitably, the answer coalesces to a certainty: everyone’s security and standard of living dwindles when the meritocracy diminishes. 

If you even suspect that sixty years of sliding Left down a slippery slope has taken us here, are you willing to turn it around? Is there a way back up for all who wish to recapture those distinguishing virtues that let us escape old-world heraldry? What does a meritocracy look like to a society that increasingly demonizes hard work, views life through entitlement lenses, and enslaves itself to chokepoints of partisan media?

The very notion of merit is threatening because it is inherently competitive (like nature). “Competitive” is a dirty, stressful word in the homogenized world of liberal socialism. It goes against compassion, empathy, instant gratification, and feel-good kindness as opposed to emotionally barren pathways that promote a greater good for the future. And meritocracy has its dark side. Greed and corruption are endemic to every economic system and must be aggressively prosecuted. But you don’t create security and a high standard of living by flooding society with insolvent needs. We have one political party that empowers itself by importing and promoting government dependency, while the other party promotes self-sufficiency through economic growth. One party vilifies the meritocracy, the other seeks to keep it from collapse. Choose your own label for that political divide: class envy, heartless greed, TDS, MDS, or the hue and cry of the underdog – they all have some basis.

Which brings us back to the fundamental belief, or lack of belief, in human potential. High expectations vs low expectations. Do we really believe that when 40% of minority public schools in Baltimore don’t have a single student meet minimum proficiency levels it has everything to do with broken education and nothing to do with the cultural attitudes students bring to school if and when they show up to class? Ask Joe Clark. Ask Thomas Sowell. America rose on the motivation of high expectations, not on excuses for failure. We endorsed equal opportunity, not equal outcomes. Merit.

I used to say “the better things get, the worse they get,” meaning that achievement can become its own worst enemy. The sharper the knife, the harder it is to keep the edge. In a meritocracy, eventually there come generation(s) who reap the rewards without honing or even understanding the virtues that built them. The tendency of all excellence is to turn into mediocrity, to run down, to become stagnant, mired in inertia, fallowness, entropy and eventual loss of incentive, motivation and individuality. Works wonderfully for full socialism – social insects – however. Live for the hive, for the ant colony. Live for the State, the government. Womb to tomb warranties and no competition. Programmed sameness for all! But Nature picks its species mandates and imperatives. Humans got the genes for cognitive advancement, including complex language. To be a thinking mortal, incentivized to reach for the stars, to do exponentially more than simply exist…isn’t that the point of being human? 

Thanks for reading. Photo below: every year I make a bet that there will be a snowstorm in April...this was April Fool’s Day!

Thomas "Sully" Sullivan