I would like to offer my sincerest, most heartfelt apologies to those I offended by my post Sunday. It was certainly not my intent to make people angry, and I was totally unprepared for the outpouring of hate and vitriol my diary generated. Three or four commenters seemed to understand the point I was trying to make, but the overwhelming majority wasted no time telling me how vehemently they disapproved of what I had said. I deleted the diary within 15 minutes of posting.
I had been confident about the content, having spent a lot of time researching, in addition to drawing on my own personal experience, so I was totally caught of guard by the nastiness of the comments. It took the wind out of my sails, to say the least. So I spent some time in reflection, then set about trying to figure out how I had managed to create such animosity when all I was trying to do was provoke some thought.
I did some poking around and eerily, I found that what I had tried, but obviously failed miserably to say, was being talked about by several prominent and certainly more respected sources, among them Jonetta Rose Barras in theWashington Post: (highlighting is mine)
"African Americans have just entered the no-excuses zone.
As president, he's [Obama’s] unlikely to embrace the confrontational identity politics that have defined black activism for so long. He won't tolerate an African American brand of racism or a culture of violence. Nor is he likely to be patient with the long-standing narrative of victimhood that has defined black America to itself and to the mainstream for more than a century.
Obama is already constructing a new black political and cultural narrative -- gathering together the best of the past, including the coalition politics that characterized the early civil rights movement and an image of strong black males that doesn't involve bling-bling or hip-hop misogyny. He has decried the low-hanging pants fashion so popular with young black men, blasted rapper Ludacris for offensive song lyrics and called on fathers to take responsibility for their families.
Are African Americans ready to accept all this and respond positively? Are they ready for a truly post-racial America?
The answer isn't clear. Just a few days after Obama's stunning win, black America is already divided over what his election means, arguing about what it should expect from a "black president" -- and about whether his first obligation is to black America or to all America.
But some African Americans don't get it. Despite measurable advances over the past 30 years, they still perceive themselves as beleaguered, as the once and present victims of discrimination, struggling to keep pace with their white counterparts.
If African Americans want to be taken seriously, they have to get with the program. Obama's election isn't just about a black president. It's about a new America. The days of confrontational identity politics have come to an end. The era of coalition politics and collaboration has arrived."
And this from the Seattle Post Intelligencer:
"Some black leaders say Obama's political success means it's time to shift away from the dialogue of victimhood.
Racism is no longer the primary obstacle to black progress. With the election of a black man whose middle name is Hussein, the rhetoric of white racism is off the table," declared the Rev. Eugene Rivers, a Boston-based minister with a national agenda and a history of taking controversial stands. "Black people don't want to hear it. White people don't want to hear it. ... The old school is over."
Kevin Peterson, a Boston community activist who runs the Ella J. Baker House in Dorchester, also calls for a new brand of black leadership. "Obama's success this political cycle represents a new style," Peterson said. "The notion that black people need to employ racially polarizing stances is now extinct. There are more effective ways to get things done for our communities than being accusatory."
The following is from an article in The American Scholarby Charles Johnson, an English professor at the University of Washington:
"My point is not that black Americans don’t have social and cultural problems in 2008. We have several nagging problems, among them poor schools and far too many black men in prison and too few in college. But these are problems based more on the inequities of class, and they appear in other groups as well. It simply is no longer the case that the essence of black American life is racial victimization and disenfranchisement, a curse and a condemnation, a destiny based on color in which the meaning of one’s life is thinghood, created even before one is born. ...
Yet, despite being an antique, the old black American narrative of pervasive victimization persists"
And lastly from the 11/8/2007 Christian Science Monitor, this snip from an article by Bill Cosby and Alvin F. Poussaint
"We know there are forces that make the ability to escape poverty seem bleak: overburdened single-parent homes, a high dropout rate, joblessness, gangs, drugs, crime, incarceration, deaths at an early age from guns fired by angry black men. We know that systemic racism and governmental neglect still exist.
Yet we in the black community must look at ourselves and understand our own responsibility. We sometimes inflict ourselves with a victim mentality, feel hopeless, and do self-destructive things that make our lives even worse. Many people who are trying to make it find themselves struggling against fellow African Americans so lost in self-destructive behaviors that they bring down other people as well as themselves.
Although few acknowledge it, the doctrine of white supremacy has sunk deeply into the minds of too many Americans, black people included. It has slithered its way into the psyches of poor black youth with low self-esteem, who equate academic success with "acting white." If success is "white," then are they saying that to "act black" is to fail?
It is time to think positively and act positively. A people armed with the will to want to get better, armed with the will to win, and armed with knowledge of the past and present, can move forward and take action, succeed, and reclaim their dignity."
And now from me:
If you haven’t spent any time in an urban middle or high school in the past few years, you should do so. What you see will break your heart, as it does mine on a regular basis. There are far too many Black students, particularly boys, doing everything they can to ensure they fail, because as Barack Obama himself has said,,
Parents have to teach that children can't achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white.
Turn in assignments? Forget about it. They are blasé about their grades because the middle schoolers are all positive they’ll get an athletic scholarship to collage and be picked up by a national sports franchise, and the high schoolers are all certain they could make big bucks "on the street" if they have to. "I’m just not feelin’ it," is the excuse they offer for ignoring the work placed on their desk.
Their deportment is abysmal. They are not simply disrespectful of the efforts being made by the instructor to teach the class, they are argumentative and confrontational. Per a report from the U.S. Department of Education:
While black males accounted for 8.7 percent of U.S. school enrollment in 2002, they accounted for 23.8 percent of those who had received out-of-school suspension.
That’s the highest form of punishment, and comes only after several other lesser punishments such as lunch detentions, in-school suspensions, and after-school detentions. In my school, many male Black students inhabit the classroom like so many peacocks, taking every opportunity to display their "bling" and their toughness, and making sexually explicit gestures to call attention to their virility. In the hallways, it’s all about strutting, rubbing, hugging, and using as much profanity as they can get away with.
And the girls lap it up. Although Black females are usually better students, many don’t hesitate to get "in the teacher’s face" if they dislike something, or feel they are being asked to work too hard. After I accidentally touched one young Black student on the arm, she announced to the entire class that she was going to get me fired for "hitting" her. Many girls dress as provocatively as they can, wearing zip front hoodies to cover up low cut tops, and quickly raising the zipper to meet the dress code when the teacher is looking. It’s sad.
The glorification of the gangster life style is so entrenched in these kids, (and even in White kids) that the word "pimp," which I had always understood to be a term for a criminal that profits from the exploitation of women, has become part of their everyday vocabulary – as in "pimp my ride, my room, my bike.) Even some teachers use it.
Did you know that a smaller percentage of Black students graduate from high school today than did 20 years ago? Although it’s hard to get accurate figures, because until now states have used different formulas for calculating graduation rates (some adding GEDS, omitting special education students, etc.), according to James J. Heckman and Paul A. LaFontaine: (again, highlights mine)
"After adjusting for multiple sources of bias and differences in sample construction, we establish that:
About 65% of blacks and Hispanics leave secondary schooling with a diploma. An additional 5% eventually receive a regular diploma through a variety of job training and adult education programs.
The official statistics show that white and minority high school completion rates have converged since the early 1970s. However, the official estimates exclude those who are in prison. We show that when we count GED recipients as dropouts (incarcerated or not), there is little convergence in high school graduation rates between whites and minorities over the past 35 years. A significant portion of the racial convergence reported in the official statistics is due to black males obtaining GED credentials in prison."
The failure of many young African Americans to take their studies seriously is learned from their parents, who learned it from theirs, and starts much earlier than high school.
In my work as a reading and math tutor, I remember particularly one 15-year-old Black girl who was repeating 7th grade because her scores on the standard achievement test had not been high enough to allow her to move on to 8th. She was reading at a third grade level. I knew there was no way I could bring her up to a 6th grade level (the minimum required for 8th graders) before June. She had no worries, however, and was counting the days until she turned 16 and could legally drop out. She was 3rd generation welfare, being raised by her grandmother, since her 30 year old mother (do the math) had died of AIDS the year before. The grandmother, who had gotten pregnant with the mother at age 14, also had AIDS, and when she passed, the young girl would be sent to North Carolina to live with relatives she’d never met. But before that happened, she told me she wanted to "get a baby" so she would have something of her own to love. This poor child never had a chance.
According to this article:
For Grade 8 Reading, the national percentage of White, non-Hispanic male students scoring at or above the Basic level was 78% in 2007. The percentage of Black, non-Hispanic male students scoring at or above the Basic level in Grade 8 was 46%.
For Grade 8 Mathematics, the national percentage of White, non-Hispanic male students scoring at or above the Basic level was 82% in 2007. The percentage of Black, non-Hispanic male students scoring at or above the Basic level in Grade 8 was 46%.
Granted, many of these kids have it unimaginably tough at home. Some are late or absent because no one wakes them up. They can’t even set an alarm, because with no working adults in the home, there’s no need of one. Teachers can’t call to wake them (as I’ve offered to do) because there’s no phone. It becomes an impossible situation when there is no adult willing to make sure the child is awakened, dressed, and fed, and transported in the morning. This is exactly what Obama, Bill Cosby, and others meant when they said more adults needed to take responsibility.
Black teens having sex and having children is another issue. A recent survey by the CDCrevealed over 16% of Black students have had sexual intercourse by age 13, while more than two-thirds were sexually active by 12th grade, and only 22% had ever had an HIV test.
Per the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy,, the teen pregnancy rate for African American girls decreased almost 46% between 1991 and 2006, but is still too high at 63.7 per 1000. Keep in mind these figures are national averages and vary hugely from city to city, school to school. Black males are largely out of the picture when it comes to fatherhood. In 2006, the latest year figures are available for, 97% of black women who gave birth were unmarried.
Per the last census, 62 percent of Black children in America live in single-parent families, and a Black child living with a single mother is nearly three times more likely to live in poverty than a Black child living with two parents.
Violence is also a huge problem. The CDC report cited earlier notes more than 17% of Black students had carried a weapon in the 30 days prior to the survey, and almost 10% had been threatened by a weapon in the past year. A report from the FBI in 2004, updated in 2006 showed that although Blacks are just 13% of the population 36.9 of the persons arrested for violent crime were Black. If you are a Black male born in 2001, you have just under a 1 in 3 chance of being incarcerated during your liftime, according to the US Department of Justice. As reported on CNN, the rate of murder committed by Black male teenagers rose 52% in the four years prior to 2006. Homicide is the leading cause of death among African-American males aged 15 to 34, and Blacks have a six times greater chance than whites of being murdered.
These are some of the cold hard facts that keep me awake at night. Trying to help these kids is like trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon. I’ve more than one parent-teacher conference where both the mother and the father (yes, these were "lucky" kids in a two-parent household) broke down in tears because their 12 or 13-year-old was out of control and doing as he or she pleased, and they didn’t know what to do about it. In another example of adults as non-care-givers, our administrator called the father of a 14-year-old African American boy and told him we had seen signs that led us to believe his son was in a gang. The father angrily spat back, "He’d damn well better be in a gang. That’s the only way he’s going to survive around here." How do we save these kids when the "adults" responsible don’t know how to be parents?
Even when the parents do their best, it backfires on them. As a Gurdian ad Litem, I had a case where a 12-year-old boy was slapped by his mother when she caught him with older boys who were breaking into cars. He promptly called Child Protective Services, who removed him and his twin sister from the home on suspicion of child abuse. While the mother spent nine months going through parenting and anger management classes in order to regain custody, the children were placed with their father. He had just been paroled after serving time for the attempted murder of their mother eleven years earlier. (He had shot her five times when the twins were just six months old.) The twins went from having their own bedrooms in a clean apartment in a fairly nice neighborhood to sharing a 2-bedroom, 1-bath rent-subsidized unit in the worst of the city’s projects, where a man they barely knew lived with his girlfriend, her 20-year old son, his wife, and an infant. But within four months, the father was back in prison after violating parole by using drugs, and the kids were placed in foster care. All of this because they had a mother who cared about them, and was trying to keep her son from becoming another victim of violence and crime.
The things listed above are not exclusive to young Black people. They affect Hispanics and Asians and Whites as well - but study after study shows that they are more prevalent in our Black students. Therefore, it is this group that is at the most risk.
In my diary yesterday, I certainly did not mean to indict all African Americans, or to infer that all Blacks might oppose the changes Barack Obama wants to make or the methods he espouses. But it is a fact that there are some who will not be easily convinced, and some who will simply refuse. The question remains – how can we help Obama help the ones who most need it, and are we willing to put some real skin in the game?
I’m done now. Pile on the hate if you must.