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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Did gyre and gimble in the wabe.
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mame raths outgrabe.
'Beware the Jabberwock, my son,
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch.
Beware the jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious bandersnatch.'
He took his vorpal sword in hand;
Long time the manxome foe he sought.
Then rested he by the tum-tum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.
And as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!
One! two! and through and through
The vorpal blade went snickersnack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.
'And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjious day! Calooh! Calay!'
He chortled in his joy.
'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe.
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
Thanks to Lewis Carroll, we know that it isn't necessarily the media to blame if words come out sounding incomprehensible!
Gettingahandle
Ignorance is Nature's most abundant fuel for decision making.
But in Clinton's defense, there were no deaths directly linked to the Monica episode.
--
Someone on my website used to have a sig that said: Bill Clinton lied and one woman's dress was lost, George W Bush lied and thousands of lives have been lost.
Especially considering the vast amount of conversation on the News boards dedicated to declaring how resprehensible personal attacks on THK and Kerry himself are...yet there is no outcry when someone says "Bush is stupid."
That too, in an unfounded statement. One may *think* Bush is stupid, but how does one really *know* he is such? Besides, what is "stupid" exactly? Nothing but an ignorant term that really defines nothing but a misunderstanding. No one is "stupid" but people are uneducated, uncooth, misinformed, etc.
Cute, but I think you missed my point...or maybe not and it's just an angle I'm missing.
Perhaps I misread your post and you had some other point?
Gettingahandle
Ignorance is Nature's most abundant fuel for decision making.
Yes, and GWB speaks their lingo, and uses this to hide his lineage, fancy schools and education. I'm not sure what's behind his image--it glows so brightly I have trouble finding the truth.
Stupid is as stupid does. When you say stupid things, some people think you're stupid. But their is a deaper value here. In a time when the US has a growing illerate populace, to demean an education is dangerous. See Johnny, George never learned to speak English and look he's president. Duh
Though I may not have gotten my point across clearly (sometimes I have a bad habit of forgetting that people cannot read my mind and know what's going on in there...dh *hates* that), I was more thinking out loud (if you will) about image and how much information we really get about a president. Meaning, if there is something that is not meant for the public to know, they won't know.
I watched a movie the other night called Spartan, and this got my mind churning on governmental cover ups and the like, and it occured to me that in my life time we may never actual know the true nature of the JFK assisination, and if something like that can be hidden, then surely the more unsavory aspects of a person's character can be swept under the rug if need be.
I truely think I need to stop brooding so much.
Let me repost this snippet of another post because I think it is something you should mull over in your brain as it is a truth:
Besides, what is "stupid" exactly? Nothing but an ignorant term that really defines nothing but a misunderstanding. No one is "stupid" but people are uneducated, uncooth, misinformed, etc.
"In a time when the US has a growing illerate populace, to demean an education is dangerous. "
Illiteracy stems from parents not taking an interest in being sure they're children are taught the love of books....geez, it's not even hard to instill in kids, sponges that they are. My 4 year old is reading and that's just from her interest in her nightly bed time story.
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