> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://goodoil.news/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Listen to Black Ways of Knowing – Until They Know Too Much - URL: https://goodoil.news/listen-to-black-ways-of-knowing-until-they-know-too-much/ - Published: 2026-08-31T01:00:27.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-31T01:00:27.000Z - Description: Black scholars get cancelled if they don’t fall in line. - Author: Lushington Brady - Tags: USA Politics, Racism, Education In *Planet of the Apes* (1968), Dr Zaius (**Maurice Evans**) warns Taylor (**Charlton Heston)** not to dig too deeply into the secrets of the Forbidden Zone: “You may not like what you find.” What Taylor found was a half-buried but starkly undeniable truth. Taylor would have remained in safe ignorance if he’d learned the operative lesson from today’s woke left: bury the truth all the way down, pretend it never existed. To be doubly sure, shoot any messengers who notice, ‘Hey, what’s that thing poking out of the sand, there?’ Even if the messenger is one of the left’s cherished victim groups. *Especially* if they are. Despite the wokies’ non-stop injunctions to ‘listen to Black ways of knowing’, when black people know something they shouldn’t, the academic lynching parties are ever-ready with the procedural ropes and torches. **John Uzo Ogbu** found that out the hard way. A Nigerian-American anthropologist at UC Berkeley, he spent decades asking the question every education faculty would rather embroider onto a tote bag than answer: why do black children from affluent homes, sitting in excellent schools, still lag behind poorer white and Asian classmates? The facts he was circling are not obscure. Children of Asians who never finished high school routinely outscore the children of black parents with degrees. Kids from the poorest white families regularly match or beat kids from the richest black ones on the same tests. Shaker Heights, an upscale Cleveland suburb with tree-lined streets, a model district and a black professional class that had moved there precisely for the schools, was supposed to be the counter-example. It wasn’t. Black students averaged a 1.9 GPA; white students, 3.45. Black parents invited Ogbu in. Doctors, lawyers, judges, brokers. Ogbu spent nine months in the district, sat in 110 classrooms from kindergarten to year 12, interviewed parents, pupils and staff, and then committed the unforgivable sin of reporting what he saw. The black parents claimed to want an explanation – what they really wanted was someone else to blame. > [“The black parents](https://eastbayexpress.com/rich-black-flunking-1/?ref=goodoil.news) feel it is their role to move to Shaker Heights, pay the higher taxes so their kids could graduate from Shaker, and that’s where their role stops,” Ogbu says during an interview at his home in the Oakland hills. “They believe the school system should take care of the rest. They didn’t supervise their children that much. They didn’t make sure their children did their homework. That’s not how other ethnic groups think.” The particularly damning part is that their kids know what they have to do: work hard. They just didn’t bother actually doing it. > “In spite of the fact that the students knew and asserted that one had to work hard to succeed in Shaker schools, black students did not generally work hard,” he wrote. “In fact, most appeared to be characterized by low-effort syndrome. The amount of time and effort they invested in academic pursuit was neither adequate nor impressive.” Almost all admitted they put television, jobs, sport and the telephone ahead of the books. Peer culture treated good grades, standard English and advanced courses as ‘acting white’ – a betrayal of identity. Parents mistrusted the schools as a white institution and then, with magnificent consistency, left the same institution to raise the children. They skipped homework checks and school events. That, Ogbu concluded, was not an accident of poverty. It was a norm. > “But you have to ask why. Week after week the kids don’t turn in their homework. What do you expect teachers to do?” He was careful, almost painfully so. He did not reach for genes. He did not deny that prejudice exists. He simply said discrimination and funding could not carry the gap in a rich, integrated, well-staffed suburb. Laziness and scapegoating whitey does. > “Blacks say Standard English is being imposed on them,” he says. “That’s not what the Chinese say, or the Ibo from Nigeria. You come from the outside and you know you have to learn standard English, or you won’t do well in school. And you don’t say whites are imposing on you. The Indians and blacks say, ‘Whites took away our language and forced us to learn their language. They caused the problem.’” The ropes came out almost instantly. A Shaker parent went on television and called him an “academic **Clarence Thomas**”. The *New York Times* could not find a single complimentary quote before the book was even out. With an almost-magnificent failure of self-reflection, Urban League educational fellow **Ronald Ross** thundered, “I find it useless to argue with people like Ogbu”. I think we can all see for ourselves whom it’s useless to argue with. Ross ‘just knows’ that it has to be racism, and won’t countenance any other possibility. Shaker Heights was integrated, well funded and stacked with qualified staff. Ignore all that: the victim narrative is all that matters. Not all are so determinedly immune to uncomfortable facts. A few black parents, speaking softly, said Ogbu had only written down what they already knew. **Nancy Jones** was tired of the slave-and-victim liturgy. Close the gap, she said, instead of holding someone accountable in the abstract. Publicly, that sort of talk is a career-limiter. **Shelby Steele** and **John McWhorter**, who have worn the same ‘sellout’ medal, recognised the ritual at once. To mention black responsibility is to become the problem. **Roland G Fryer** took his own shovel to another Forbidden Zone and received the upgraded package: not just the smears, but a police car outside the house. Fryer is the rare black professor at a top university who arrived on the work rather than the melanin. In 2016 he published what he later called the most surprising result of his career: the body-cams don’t lie. American police do not shoot black suspects more often than white ones once you once you control for suspect behaviour during the encounter: lethal force tracks behaviour. A colleague took him aside and told him not to publish it if he liked having a career. He published anyway. Death threats arrived. For a month police sat outside his home. He bought nappies for the baby with an armed guard in the supermarket aisle. Then, with the timing of a pantomime villain, Harvard discovered that the atmosphere at his EdLabs included “unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature”, chiefly verbal, including jokes. Two years’ unpaid suspension, lab shut and restrictions piled on. He apologised for the jokes and denied harassment. The process was the punishment. At Harvard, unearthing inconvenient truths is all it takes for them to want you gone. Ogbu died in 2003, still insisting he was looking below the surface and that his critics did not like what was there. Fryer lived long enough to grocery-shop under a gun. Neither man ran to genetic explanations in the work that got them branded heretics. They did not have to. Culture, effort, parenting and the stories a community tells its children about whether the books are ‘for us’: that was sufficient blasphemy. As long as the humanities faculties remain a priesthood, the only permitted black way of knowing is the one that keeps Dr Zaius in office. Leave the statue in the ground. The apes prefer it that way. --- 💡 ****If you enjoyed this article please share it using the share buttons at the top or bottom of the article.**