NAACP exhorts voters to oust Bush
Find a Conversation
| Mon, 07-12-2004 - 4:06pm |
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.


Pages
Not always true. I graduated at the top of my class with 99.2 out of 100 possible points. When averaging grades to determine the valedictorian and salutatorian at our high school there was only 8/10 of a point separating myself and the third person in line. In Texas, the top two in every class automatically get scholarships to any state college. Unfortunately for the girl who was third, her family fell in the lower middle class income and she was white. She applied for just about every scholarship available. She had been an excellent student and very active in so many projects, but she was unable to get the help she needed to get into college and her parents couldn't foot the bill. An African American male in our class who was a B student at best also received a scholarship simply because of his race. So, contrary to popular belief, the cream doesn't always float to the top.
Edited 7/14/2004 2:05 pm ET ET by luvbug4me2
Part of the problem your talking about is cultural. Not black v. white, but poor, first time students, v. students from families who have gone. What in the world is a registrae. Student union? Is this like a voting block or something?
And the question isn't one of who can pay, it's who can even get accepted. AA doesn't guarentee that someone who gets accepted will be able to pay. Only that they have a chance to see if they can actually enter. Paying is another problem. Took me seven years to get a four year degree. But debt free at the end, and able to use the very limited (in my day) student loans to pay for post-graduate work.
And that's why we have it.
There is no doubt in my mind that sometimes underserving people will be given help and go on to waste the opportunities presented to them. Tell me why that different from a white middle class kid who drops out of college ????
Yes, without a doubt, I think affirmative action is preferential treatment. Any law that favors one person over another for any reason at all is preferential. That is my point exactly, we should never expect our children to learn all races are equal if we must create advantages for one race in order to "level the playing field".
My neighbor is a admissions clerk at a major university. He has told me repeatedly that in order to continue to receive state and federal grants, the university must meet at certain quota of minority and female students. This doesn't seem to me to be extra vigilence to avoid discrimination, this seems like reverse discrimination. Of course we should have rules and laws that prohibit discrimination against minorities and women, but must we discriminate against whites and males to solve the problem. Prove that we are all equal by creating the same opportunities for success for everyone. True, some black students will not have the parent support or financial status to make success easy, but believe or not there are some white children out there who have those same hurdles to overcome. Unfortunately, being uneducated and poor is not a monopoly of one race, it is a problem that plaques our entire society and we must work together to solve it.
And to answer your other statement, handing out a job or scholarship to a student simply because they are of a certain race or gender does not make them equal in my eyes. If they received this same job because they worked hard to achieve it, that would make them equal. If race or gender is a consideration at all and the goal is equality, then the process is flawed. If the goal is reverse discrimination in order to try and repay past wrongs (that we have absolutely no hope of repaying) and continue to create a racial divide in our society, then affirmative is right on the money.
"The economics of the situation and the mindset of poor people are the biggest problem in their situation. "
This appears to be a sweeping generalization so please enlighten me on what you
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.
This is probably one of the most troubling aspects of this debate for me.
I especially agree with this--"Parents have the first line of responsibility and accountability toward their children, not politicians and not schools. I firmly believe that schools/education would not be in the state they are today if some parents were doing their job at home and not expecting schools/teachers to raise their children."
But parents don't get much empowerment and there's so much societal change that it's bewildering to try to figure out how best to impart values and set priorities. My children are young adults and I am sooooo grateful that I am not raising young children or teenagers anymore. I think, I hope, that my two are growing into responsible, caring, and mature adults but only time will tell.
And what do you do when parents shirk their responsibilities, possibly out of ignorance but sometimes because it's too hard, too time consuming?
Gettingahandle
Ignorance is Nature's most abundant fuel for decision making.
Pages