NAACP exhorts voters to oust Bush

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Registered: 03-18-2000
NAACP exhorts voters to oust Bush
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Mon, 07-12-2004 - 4:06pm
Group condemns education, economic policies.

http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/07/12/naacp.convention.ap/index.html


NAACP chairman Julian Bond urged members of the nation's oldest civil rights organization to increase voter turnout to oust President Bush, and condemned the administration's policies on education, the economy and the war in Iraq.


"They preach racial neutrality and practice racial division," Bond said Sunday night in the 95th annual convention's keynote address. "They've tried to patch the leaky economy and every other domestic problem with duct tape and plastic sheets. They write a new constitution of Iraq and they ignore the Constitution here at home."


Volunteers with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People have been working on voter drives in black communities across the country, registering more than 100,000 so far in 11 key states, including Georgia, Florida, Tennessee and New Mexico, Bond said.


Bond, a leader in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the 1960s civil rights movement and a Georgia legislator for 20 years, became chairman of the NAACP in 1998.


Leaders of the Baltimore-based group are upset that President Bush has no plans to attend the convention. Bush spoke at the 2000 NAACP convention when he was a candidate but has declined invitations to speak in each year of his presidency, making him the first president since the 1930s to skip it, officials said.


Democratic challenger John Kerry has accepted an invitation to speak Thursday on the final day of the convention, the group said.


Bond said that 50 years after Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision on school desegregation, and 40 years after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, schools remain segregated based on income, and racism still exists in many forms.


Minority children still face inequality in school spending and are being disproportionately hurt by the accountability aims of Bush's No Child Left Behind Act, he said.


"On our present course, we are formalizing two school systems: one filled with middle-class children, most of them white, and the other filled with low-income minorities," Bond said.

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iVillage Member
Registered: 04-16-2003
Mon, 07-12-2004 - 4:46pm
<<"On our present course, we are formalizing two school systems: one filled with middle-class children, most of them white, and the other filled with low-income minorities," Bond said.>>

I had hoped we were beyond this! After the struggles with bussing the issues seemed to turn to affirmative action.

This was a topic on C-SPAN this am, and I was shocked at the racist language and anger of the call-ins. Considering what happened in Florida, I'm not surprised that Bush didn't want to attend the convention. Rowe must have figured he could write these votes off; figuring that the A-A don't vote as a block.

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-26-2003
Mon, 07-12-2004 - 10:44pm
I find this to be an endlessly tiring issue. Bush is being attacked because he wants to end affirmative action, a crutch that should offend and outrage minorities and women. How can we hope to prove ourselves as equals if we need an unfair advantage to make it where we want to be? I find myself making choices that I wouldn't ordinarily make based on race because of affirmative action. I would much rather have a white male doctor than a minority femal doctor, because at least I know he made it through school because of his abilities and not just because he met the required quota set forth for the school to meet. As a teacher, I find it very offensive that we are raising a generation of children who are using their race as an excuse when they choose not to put forth the effort involved to succeed. If we raise children to believe that they are less than equal to one race or the other, no matter what we do later in life, they will always hold that belief. Bill Cosby voiced this same opinion not so long ago and was laughed off. Why should minorities work to achieve things when they can sit back and whine how unfair things are and never choose to make life better for themselves?

As for the accountability issues, it is frightfully scary how low we have set our standards for schools. Is it the right choice to lower the standards and raise generation after generation of uneducated children, or should we raise the bar and try to better equip our schools and teachers to educate these children? Maybe if teaching wasn't one of the lowest paying professional careers, we could expect more out of our school system. However, that is the problem of parents who are too busy to deal with their own children and voters who are so worried about handouts and crutches that they don't force their politicians to focus on education and accountability.

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-26-2003
Mon, 07-12-2004 - 10:59pm
I'll buy into your argument when I see Yale take back the degree they gave to George Herbert Bush's son.

I've heard this and heard this. What crud! Give white American a two hundred year headstart, then criticize when the decendents of those who don't have a history of legacies to use to get into the best places try to level the playing field with AA.

Yes, parents are responsible for the behavior of their children. How about some slapping up beside the head of all those racist little snots white America is raising?

Oh, and to be an equal oppurtunity hater, Clarence Thomas is one of the dumbest Supreme Court justices ever appointed.

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-26-2003
Mon, 07-12-2004 - 11:11pm
Affirmative action isn't a perfect answer but it's not a perfect world either. I don't have all knowledge and wisdom to come up with a better solution--do you?

I don't gauge a doctor by either gender or race but rather by the level of competence and compassion the doctor and her/his staff show me.

It does seem that good teachers are undervalued and underpaid. But after raising two children through all grades, I've only encountered one truly superb teacher, and two or three good ones--even in public schools that were, by their own admission (my tongue firmly planted in cheek!), exemplary. So how do we change society to value good teachers and give them status equal to star athletes? By the way, I'm not convinced, given the debacle in Iraq, that we want to involve politicians in the change process!

Gettingahandle

Ignorance is Nature's most abundant fuel for decision making.

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-26-2003
Mon, 07-12-2004 - 11:22pm
Since I did teach George Bush in college, I would not know whether or not his degree was handed to him or not. However, I find it hard to be believe man as successful as George W. Bush did not earn his degree, but nonetheless it does not negate the fact that reverse racism is not the answer. While I do understand the argument of the past crimes of slavery, making generation after generation of minorities dependent on a system that keeps them subservient by lowering the standards and not treating them as equals doesn't appear to be working either. Children can not be expected to feel confidence in themselves and their culture if they are told they need extra help in order to be equal to another race. Nor does that make the children of another race not to feel resentment and even superiority to a race that cries racism everytime there is an issue for which they do not want to take the blame. We are telling children that we are all equal and should respect each other and then showing them that we are not by our actions.
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-26-2003
Mon, 07-12-2004 - 11:43pm
Too many people take a short term view of affirmative action when it is a long term strategy. In any individual case it might seem that a minority person is getting an unfair 'leg up', but for every person for which the outcome is a successful education and career, that person's children and grandchildren are more likely to be able to compete on equal terms, on a level playing field. And isn't that the point ??

I agree, it is not perfect but it's the best solution we have right now.

Octagonal
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-26-2003
Mon, 07-12-2004 - 11:48pm
You're right, we don't live in a perfect world, but when it becomes apparent that the choices we are making are not working, we should be intelligent enough to try another approach. Rather than fxing the problem, we are digging ourselves in a deeper hole and causing more and more resentment. Why not try a novel approach and reward people for success and effort rather than simply because the color of their skin? Create an educational system that will provide for all students to attend college provided that they put forth the effort and make the grades.

As for the quality of teachers in today's school(both public and private), I completely agree with you. As a parent of three young children, I chose to become a teacher mainly because of the low-quality teachers that my children were stuck with. How can we expect our intelligent and trully talented youth to attend 4-5 years of college to make slightly over what a high school graduate would expect to make after working at McDonald's for that same amount of time. We are losing our most talented young people to careers that will pay them for the time that they have investing in their education. I am not asking for $75K a year, but more than $24K would be nice. The only way we can hope to turn around the problems that are facing our school system is by attracting itelligent, highly motivated young people to the education field with a competitive salary.

I also agree that the politics in Washington are less than ideal for a drastic change to take place. It seems that both sides are so worried about winning the fight that they forget who they are fighting for. That is why it is the responsibility of parents and concerned citizens to voice their concerns and use their votes to change things. By sitting back and accepting the way things and choosing not to fix the problem, we are dooming ourselves and future generations.

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-26-2003
Tue, 07-13-2004 - 12:10am
Whose to say who should get the "leg up"? I am a white female, but I can honestly say that my ancestors had absolutely nothing to do with the slavery that everyone so easily blames for all the problems. My family immigrated here from Ireland over 150 years ago and worked to make it as immigrants in this country. We were never well off and for most of my life, I was considered low income. There has not been a single college graduate on either side of my family as far back as we can trace. As a matter of fact, both my parents were high school drop-outs. I was raised in a small rural school that was 60% minority and worked hard to make straight A's. There was no possible way that my family could pay for college for me, but fortunately, my grades landed me a scholarship and a pell grant. I maintained a 4.0 GPA throughout my college career and worked very hard to continue my education even after I chose to marry and start my family. There were several minority students that graduated with me and barely passed the minimum standards. They were also handed college scholarships (but only because of their race) which they used until they lost them because they were uninterested in college and would rather just hang out with friends. I also had white friends who had worked hard in school to keep good grades, but couldn't get scholarships because their parents were lower middle class and white.

Does anyone want to explain how this set-up will create an atmosphere where the two races learn to respect each other's "equality" when it is so obviously biased? Why not create a system where people can earn what they get on their merits and not on their skin color or gender. Granted things in the past were unfair for so many diffent minority groups, but does it solve the problem to make it unfair for another group who will just be able to make the same "poor me" argument further down the road? What a vicious cycle!

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-27-2003
Tue, 07-13-2004 - 5:39am

Do you have children who are ready for college?


Elaine

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-26-2003
Tue, 07-13-2004 - 9:31am
Apparently, I am missing the point to how Bush's college education has any effect on the argument on affirmative action. I dare say that Washington is full of the children of politicians on both sides of the fence who got a hand-up simply because of the social and political status of their parents. Does that change the fact that we are creating a cycle of racism in the name of stamping out past racism? Unfortunately we have created a society where money buys just about everything, but creating a system that gives someone something they did not earn simply because of their skin color or gender is not the solution to the problem? It is simply giving those and others that they would not otherwise be capable of earning it themselves. As I tell my children, two wrongs don't make a right. Making excuses by saying "but someone else did" doesn't make it right to be wrong.

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