The Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations Has a Body Count

There is a kind of racism so elegant, so immaculately dressed in the language of care, that the people practicing it genuinely believe they are helping. They lower the standards and call it equity. They eliminate the tests and call it access. They remove the requirements and call it inclusion. They look at a Black child and decide, with the compassion of a surgeon amputating the wrong limb, that this child cannot be expected to do what other children do — and so the child must be protected from the very expectation that would have produced the achievement they claim to want. This is not allyship. This is annihilation performed in a gentle voice. And it has a body count — not in corpses, but in futures destroyed, potential extinguished, generations consigned to mediocrity by the people who stood at the podium and swore they were on their side.

George W. Bush gave this phenomenon its name in a 2000 campaign speech: “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” But the concept did not begin with him, and its consequences extend far beyond any political slogan. What Bush named is the central operating principle of an entire institutional apparatus that claims to serve Black children while systematically ensuring they never develop the capacity to serve themselves. And the evidence is not theoretical. It is documented, specific, and devastating.

Oregon Says the Quiet Part Loud

In July 2021, Governor Kate Brown of Oregon signed Senate Bill 744, which suspended the requirement for Oregon high school students to demonstrate proficiency in reading, writing, and math in order to graduate. The suspension was initially framed as a pandemic-era accommodation. But the legislation’s own sponsors and advocacy supporters were explicit about the deeper rationale: the proficiency requirements disproportionately affected “students of color.” The solution, therefore, was not to improve the education of students of color. The solution was to eliminate the standard that revealed the failure.

Pause on this. The state of Oregon looked at its Black and brown students, observed that they were not meeting proficiency standards, and concluded that the appropriate response was to make proficiency optional. Not to fix the teaching. Not to address the resource disparities. Not to demand better from the system that was failing these children. But to lower the bar so that failure became invisible — so that a diploma could be handed to a child who could not read at grade level, and everyone could congratulate themselves on closing the gap.

What does this communicate to a Black student in Portland? It communicates, with the full authority of the state, that you are not expected to be able to read. That the adults responsible for your education have decided, on your behalf, that literacy is too much to ask of you. That you will be given the same piece of paper as everyone else, but the piece of paper will mean nothing, and the world on the other side of it will discover that you cannot do what the diploma says you can, and the state that handed you that diploma will have moved on to the next press conference about equity.

This is not compassion. This is the most sophisticated form of contempt available to a bureaucracy.

The Smithsonian Tells You Who You Are

In July 2020, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture published an infographic titled “Aspects and Assumptions of Whiteness and White Culture in the United States.” The graphic listed, as characteristics of “white culture,” the following attributes: hard work, self-reliance, the nuclear family, respect for authority, planning for the future, delayed gratification, rational linear thinking, the scientific method, and the idea that “hard work is the key to success.”

The infographic was later removed after public backlash, but its existence — its creation by the staff of a national museum dedicated to African American history — reveals something far more important than any individual document. It reveals the intellectual framework that now dominates institutional thinking about race in America: the belief that the habits that produce success are racially coded, and that asking Black people to adopt them is a form of cultural imperialism.

Read that list again. Hard work. Planning for the future. The scientific method. Rational thinking. The Smithsonian — an institution that exists because of Black achievement in the face of impossible obstacles — told Black America that these qualities belong to white people. That the habits of discipline and reason that every successful civilization in human history has relied upon are not universal human virtues but artifacts of whiteness. That to expect a Black child to think rationally, to plan ahead, to work hard, is to impose a foreign standard.

What did George Washington Carver do, if not apply the scientific method? What did Madam C.J. Walker do, if not embody hard work and delayed gratification? What did every Black family that survived sharecropping, survived Jim Crow, survived redlining — what did they do if not plan for the future, exercise self-reliance, and believe that hard work was the key to success?

The Smithsonian did not celebrate these qualities as the heritage of Black resilience. It assigned them to whiteness. And in doing so, it told every Black child who visited that website that the toolkit of success does not belong to them.

The Dismantling of Excellence

In 2021, the California Department of Education proposed a new mathematics framework that would, among other changes, eliminate accelerated math tracking — the pathway that allows advanced students to take algebra in eighth grade and reach calculus by twelfth grade. The stated rationale: racial disparities in enrollment in advanced math courses. Black and Hispanic students were underrepresented. The solution, once again, was not to prepare more Black and Hispanic students for advanced math. It was to eliminate advanced math for everyone.

In Fairfax County, Virginia — one of the wealthiest and highest-performing school districts in America — Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology eliminated its standardized admissions test in 2020, replacing it with a “holistic” admissions process explicitly designed to increase demographic diversity. The result was a decrease in Asian American enrollment and a modest increase in Black and Hispanic enrollment — but the underlying message was the same: the standard was the problem, not the preparation.

In New York City, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio proposed eliminating the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT), the single standardized exam that determines entry to the city’s elite public high schools, including Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech. The rationale: Black and Hispanic students were underrepresented. The test was called racist. The proposed solution: eliminate the test entirely.

The pattern is invariable. Black students are underperforming. Therefore the measure of performance must be destroyed. Not the conditions that produce the underperformance. Not the schools that fail to teach. Not the curricula that bore rather than challenge. The measure itself. Eliminate the test. Lower the standard. Remove the requirement. And then declare victory over the gap you have made invisible.

What the Science Actually Says

In 1968, psychologists Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson published the results of an experiment conducted at an elementary school in San Francisco. They told teachers that certain students had been identified by a special test as “intellectual bloomers” who were expected to show unusual academic gains during the year. The students had, in fact, been selected at random. There was nothing special about them. But at the end of the year, the randomly selected “bloomers” showed significantly greater gains in IQ scores and academic performance than their classmates.

The mechanism is now one of the most documented phenomena in educational psychology: teacher expectations directly shape student performance. When a teacher believes a student is capable of excellence, the teacher unconsciously provides more challenging material, more encouragement, more feedback, and more time. When a teacher believes a student is limited, the teacher provides less of all of these. The expectation becomes self-fulfilling. The belief creates the reality.

This is called the Rosenthal Effect, or the Pygmalion Effect, and its implications for the soft bigotry of low expectations are absolute. When an institution — a school, a state, a national museum — communicates to teachers that Black students cannot be expected to meet the same standards, it does not merely describe an existing gap. It engineers the gap’s continuation. The lowered expectation produces the lowered outcome, which then justifies further lowering of the expectation, in a cycle so vicious and so well-documented that the only question is whether the people perpetuating it are ignorant of the research or indifferent to it.

The Teachers Who Refused

The counter-evidence is not theoretical. It is specific, documented, and reproducible. It exists in schools where adults decided that Black and brown children would be held to the highest standards in America — and the children met them.

Jaime Escalante arrived at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles in 1974 to find a school so dysfunctional that it was about to lose its accreditation. The student body was almost entirely Latino, overwhelmingly from low-income families, and years behind in math preparation. Escalante decided that his students would pass the Advanced Placement Calculus exam — a test that most suburban honors students found challenging. By 1982, eighteen of his students passed. The Educational Testing Service was so skeptical that it accused the students of cheating and required fourteen of them to retake the exam. They passed again. By 1987, seventy-three Garfield students passed the AP Calculus exam, and the school produced more AP Calculus passes than all but four public schools in the country.

Marva Collins founded the Westside Preparatory School on the West Side of Chicago in 1975, using $5,000 from her pension fund. Her students were children who had been labeled unteachable by the Chicago public school system — children written off as learning-disabled, as behavioral problems, as unreachable. Collins taught them Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Emerson, and Euripides. Her six-year-olds read at third-grade level. Her nine-year-olds discussed Plato. When 60 Minutes profiled her in 1979, the nation was astonished. Collins was not. She knew what every great teacher has always known: children rise to the level of expectation.

KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) charter schools, founded in 1994, now serve over 120,000 students in 275 schools across the country. The student body is 95 percent Black and Hispanic, 88 percent eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. KIPP students attend school for extended hours, follow strict behavioral codes, and are held to explicit academic expectations. The results: 45 percent of KIPP alumni complete a four-year college degree within six years, compared to 11 percent for low-income students nationally.

The Common Thread

Every school, every program, every teacher that has closed the achievement gap shares a single characteristic. It is not funding — Marva Collins started with $5,000. It is not facilities — Escalante taught in a school that was nearly shuttered. It is not demographics — these successes occurred in the poorest, most underserved communities in America. The common thread is uncompromising expectation. The refusal to accept that poverty or race or zip code determines capacity. The insistence, backed by action, that every child in the room is capable of excellence.

And every institution that has widened the gap, or maintained it, or made it invisible by eliminating the measurements — shares the opposite characteristic. The belief, expressed through policy, that Black children are different. That they need different standards. That holding them to the same expectations as everyone else is itself a form of oppression. That the compassionate thing to do is to expect less.

This is the lie. And it is the most dangerous lie in American education, because it is told by people who believe they are telling the truth.

The Thernstrom Evidence

Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom spent years compiling the most comprehensive analysis of the racial achievement gap ever published. Their 2003 book No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning documented, with exhaustive data, two truths that the educational establishment refuses to hold simultaneously. First: the achievement gap is real, it is large, and it has devastating consequences. Second: it closes wherever expectations are high, culture is demanding, and excuses are not permitted.

The Thernstroms documented that the gap does not close with funding increases — some of the most generously funded school districts in America have the widest gaps. It does not close with smaller class sizes — the Tennessee STAR experiment showed modest effects that dissipated over time. It does not close with technology — laptop programs and digital initiatives have produced no consistent improvement. What closes the gap is what Escalante had, what Collins had, what KIPP has: a culture that refuses to lower the bar and adults who believe, with evidence, that every child can clear it.

The Hand That Lowers the Bar

I want to be precise about what I am saying, because precision matters when the stakes are children’s lives. I am not saying that the people who lower expectations for Black children are consciously racist. Most of them are not. Most of them believe, with genuine conviction, that they are being kind. That they are removing barriers. That they are creating space. That they are being sensitive to the unique challenges that Black children face in a society shaped by the legacy of slavery and segregation.

And I am saying that this kindness is killing us. That this sensitivity is producing catastrophe. That every eliminated standard, every suspended requirement, every test that is called racist because Black students score lower on it, every advanced course that is eliminated because Black students are underrepresented in it — every one of these acts of compassion communicates the same message to the child at the center of it all: you are not expected to succeed.

A child who is told, by the structure of her school, by the policy of her state, by the framework of her national museum, that hard work and rational thinking are white things, that proficiency is optional, that the test is the problem rather than the teaching — that child will perform exactly as expected. Not because she is incapable. But because the most powerful force in education is the expectation of the adults in the room, and the adults in her room have decided that she cannot.

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” — James Baldwin

What must be faced is this: the institutions that claim to protect Black children from the cruelty of high standards are protecting them from the only force that has ever produced excellence in any population, in any country, in any era of human history. The hand that lowers the bar looks like it is helping. It is not. It is pressing down on the head of every child beneath it and calling the pressure a gift.

Jaime Escalante is dead. Marva Collins is dead. Their students are alive, successful, and proof that the expectation was never too high — it was always exactly right. The question is whether we will honor their legacy by demanding the same for every Black child in America, or whether we will continue to accept the soft bigotry of people who believe, in their deepest hearts, that our children simply cannot do what other children do.

The bar is not the enemy. The people who lower it are. And until the Black community says so — out loud, without apology, in the face of every well-meaning progressive who insists that standards are oppressive — the soft bigotry will continue its quiet work, producing its quiet casualties, burying its victims under diplomas that promise everything and deliver nothing.