Op-ed: Breaking the Silence.
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| Sun, 08-01-2004 - 11:52am |
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/01/opinion/01gates.html?hp
"Go into any inner-city neighborhood," Barack Obama said in his keynote address to the Democratic National Convention, "and folks will tell you that government alone can't teach kids to learn. They know that parents have to parent, that children can't achieve unless we raise their expectations and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white." In a speech filled with rousing applause lines, it was a line that many black Democratic delegates found especially galvanizing. Not just because they agreed, but because it was a home truth they'd seldom heard a politician say out loud.
Why has it been so difficult for black leaders to say such things in public, without being pilloried for "blaming the victim"? Why the huge flap over Bill Cosby's insistence that black teenagers do their homework, stay in school, master standard English and stop having babies? Any black person who frequents a barbershop or beauty parlor in the inner city knows that Mr. Cosby was only echoing sentiments widely shared in the black community.
"If our people studied calculus like we studied basketball," my father, age 91, once remarked as we drove past a packed inner-city basketball court at midnight, "we'd be running M.I.T." When my brother and I were growing up in the 50's, our parents convinced us that the "blackest" thing that we could be was a doctor or a lawyer. We admired Hank Aaron and Willie Mays, but our real heroes were people like Thurgood Marshall, Dr. Benjamin Mays and Mary McLeod Bethune.
Yet in too many black neighborhoods today, academic achievement has actually come to be stigmatized. "We are just not the same people anymore," says the mayor of Memphis, Dr. Willie W. Herenton. "We are worse off than we were before Brown v. Board," says Dr. James Comer, a child psychiatrist at Yale. "And a large part of the reason for this is that we have abandoned our own black traditional core values, values that sustained us through slavery and Jim Crow segregation."
Making it, as Mr. Obama told me, "requires diligent effort and deferred gratification. Everybody sitting around their kitchen table knows that."
"Americans suffer from anti-intellectualism, starting in the White House," Mr. Obama went on. "Our people can least afford to be anti-intellectual." Too many of our children have come to believe that it's easier to become a black professional athlete than a doctor or lawyer. Reality check: according to the 2000 census, there were more than 31,000 black physicians and surgeons, 33,000 black lawyers and 5,000 black dentists. Guess how many black athletes are playing professional basketball, football and baseball combined. About 1,400. In fact, there are more board-certified black cardiologists than there are black professional basketball players. "We talk about leaving no child behind," says Dena Wallerson, a sociologist at Connecticut College. "The reality is that we are allowing our own children to be left behind." Nearly a third of black children are born into poverty. The question is: why?
Scholars such as my Harvard colleague William Julius Wilson say that the causes of black poverty are both structural and behavioral. Think of structural causes as "the devil made me do it," and behavioral causes as "the devil is in me." Structural causes are faceless systemic forces, like the disappearance of jobs. Behavioral causes are self-destructive life choices and personal habits. To break the conspiracy of silence, we have to address both of these factors.
"A lot of us," Mr. Obama argues, "hesitate to discuss these things in public because we think that if we do so it lets the larger society off the hook. We're stuck in an either/or mentality - that the problem is either societal or it's cultural."
It's important to talk about life chances - about the constricted set of opportunities that poverty brings. But to treat black people as if they're helpless rag dolls swept up and buffeted by vast social trends - as if they had no say in the shaping of their lives - is a supreme act of condescension. Only 50 percent of all black children graduate from high school; an estimated 64 percent of black teenage girls will become pregnant. (Black children raised by female "householders" are five times as likely to live in poverty as those raised by married couples.) Are white racists forcing black teenagers to drop out of school or to have babies?
Mr. Cosby got a lot of flak for complaining about children who couldn't speak standard English. Yet it isn't a derogation of the black vernacular - a marvelously rich and inventive tongue - to point out that there's a language of the marketplace, too, and learning to speak that language has generally been a precondition for economic success, whoever you are. When we let black youth become monolingual, we've limited their imaginative and economic possibilities.
These issues can be ticklish, no question, but they're badly served by silence or squeamishness. Mr. Obama showed how to get the balance right. We've got to create as many opportunities as we can for the worst-off - and "make sure that every child in America has a decent shot at life." But values matter, too. We can't talk about the choices people have without talking about the choices people make.


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I live 20 miles outside of NYC. I lost neighbors and friends on September 11th. I believe, quite plainly, that the war against terrorists -- and there are plenty of them in Iraq, as well as in Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, etc. -- is critical to our survival as a nation. Even the 9/11 panel found that there were indeed links between Iraq and Al Qaeda, and that it was Iraq that initiated those links. The potential for chem/bio/nukes were there as well; even Clinton declared that danger during his second term. As a mother of two small children, that's the issue that is of the utmost importance to me.
joy
One wonders if George will ever use the Bill defense of l'affaire Monica. He did it because he could. Nah, probably not. Bill was making an admission of wrong-doing. Somehow I can't see George doing it. He'd consider it a sign of weakness. Error can not be admitted in this administration.
Gettingahandle
Ignorance is Nature's most abundant fuel for decision making.
Of all your adjectives, the two I find strange are "fruitless" and "unjust." Iraq is free of Saddam, his sons and his terror squads. Schools are in session for boys and girls. Hospitals are being built, and businesses are opening. An interim government is slowly taking root. Perhaps it will fail. Perhaps not. Even if it does, the fact that it has begun portends the possibility that it will begin again, and again, until it gets itself right. Since the war began, Libya has surrendered its own cache of WMD, we have captured or killed a significant majority of Al Qaeda's leadership, and even Pakistan is cooperative to the world's efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Justice seems to be raining down like water.
I don't like wars...but I do believe that Fundamentalist Islam will seek systematically to destroy us if we are not enganged in preventing it.
PS - Clinton (for whom I voted twice) didn't sound like he was admitting wrongdoing to me. He said during his book tour that he viewed the impeachment as "a badge of honor," adding, "I don't see it as a great stain." Nice choice of words :-0
"Do you all hate Bush so much that you feel free to personally attack the man."
Unless Bush is actually replied to on this board it's not a personal attack.
I haven't read anything on this board, or others on iV, that one can't read in several newspapers/magazines.
That is not so much the white house's doing as it is a common viewpoint of average america. Some people think if one speaks in a manner that is above their linguistic comprehension that they're tying to be "fancy" and rubbing their "expensive education" in people's faces.
Not saying it's right, but many people DO think like that.
Not saying it's right, but many people DO think like that.<<<
And they are playing into that, so I stand by what I said in that the statement obama made is relevent. the white house has made an issue of kerry being elitist when in fact they fit the criteria just as much if not more so. Kerry is critisized as having an ivy league education (as if there is something wrong with that) and couldn't possible relate to the working classes, but fail to include that Bush did too.
Or it just may *seem* to people that Bush is more down to earth than Kerry. I mean, he is from Texas and Texans are famed for being friendly, "regular" people...even the rich ones.
All I know is that Bush is speaking to a packed house in Saginaw tonight (I live in MI) and Kerry scratched his stop in neighboring Frankenmuth...seems to be that there are plenty of people around here who at least want to hear what Bush has to say. And we've always been a primarily dem. state.
That is not so much the white house's doing as it is a common viewpoint of average america. Some people think if one speaks in a manner that is above their linguistic comprehension that they're tying to be "fancy" and rubbing their "expensive education" in people's faces.
Not saying it's right, but many people DO think like that.
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Pretty funny really, when you look at which Schools Bush and Kerry went to. Up until their under-graduate years, their lives were VERY similar.
What a bunch of marlarky. One can personally attack someone not posting on this board.
personal: adj. Done to or for or directed toward a particular person: a personal favor.
Ah, but it is all in the way one carries themselves. I think the reason why so many people liked Clinton, despite his shortcomings, was because he seemed falable, he seemed human.
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