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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Probably much in the same way I found it ironic that there is much talk about personal attacks against Kerry or his wife, but calling Bush "stupid" seems to be acceptable. The word stupid, IMO should be stricken from the English language, and every one who uses it to describe something on a regular basis should invest in a thesaurus. "Stupid" is a word that, IMO, is used when not much forethought is given to what is being criticized. (i.e. think of little kids when they say "that's just stupid", and usually don't have a better response.)
Got that right...
"In a time when the US has a growing illiterate populace, to demean an education is dangerous."
This makes the fact that those in poor neighborhoods who belittle their peers trying to get an education even more of a crime.
"See Johnny, George never learned to speak English and look he's president."
People need to consider something about Bush. When he speaks off the cuff he is speaking honestly. Now it may not be perfect English but so what. Half the people on this board don't use proper grammar, spelling, or sentence structure. Now does that mean their stupid? Maybe but more likely they are just typing away about a thought the way they speak. Why fault them for it? Did you get their point, if so they achieved their goal.
Frankly I'd rather have a president that doesn't know what a dangling participle is but speaks from the heart when he does.
It seems that "taking the war to them" isn't keeping them at home. Particularly, when 130,000 armed personnel are over there fighting; and they only need to threaten and we quake. I agree, the plan isn't successful. IMO, currently both Iraq and Afghanistan are teetering on total chaos. When will Americans see that the decision to invade Iraq was a folly that put us at great risk. The next attack on the US will be greated with joyous exuberance around the world, rather than the overwhelming concern we received after 9/11.
They are just as bad. I'm not picking on Dems/Libs. I mean it across the board. I've caught myself doing it about Clinton in the past...it is still wrong and unnecessary
:)
I agree. Truth be told, some of the most talented writers I've read have admitted to having problems with the structure of the English language. And I have known some brilliant people who weren't exactly eloquent either. 90% of the people in this country engage in proper misuse of our language every day, and I wouldn't pin a label on them either.
Stupid is a ligitimate word that doesn't mean uneducated, uncooth or misinformed. It is a word that describes GWB. Think of the 7 min in the classroom--that was a stupor and he was stuplified. Anyone who invades another country without a plan of what to do when the fighting is over is slow to apprehend the nature of war, three months of not plan is dull and obtuse. Besides, "stupid" rolls wonderfully off the tongue.
"Stupid: In a stupor or stuplified; slow to apprehend, dull or obtuse; showing a lack of sense or intelligence" American Heritage.
Gettingahandle
Ignorance is Nature's most abundant fuel for decision making.
I was going to rip into this and shred your statement showing how baseless and ignorant it is but why bother someone already has...
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From two different angles, Americans have new glimpses of that historic moment. One comes from rabble-rousing Michael Moore, whose Bush-eviscerating film "Fahrenheit 9/11" premieres next week, and includes an uninterrupted seven-minute segment showing Bush's reaction after hearing the news of the attack. He doesn't move.
Instead he continues to sit in the classroom, listening to children read aloud. Moore lets the tape roll as the minutes pass painfully by.
And now from a second angle: The staff of the 9/11 Commission this week released a report that summarizes Bush's closed-door testimony about his thoughts as he sat there.
"The President told us his instinct was to project calm, not to have the country see an excited reaction at a moment of crisis . . . The President felt he should project strength and calm until he could better understand what was happening."
This moment will surely be used by the president's political opponents, and with equal fervor defended by his supporters. However it is interpreted, it points out a basic truth about any president: He's both an executive and a symbolic figure. He's the spiritual leader of the nation as well as the head of state. He's monarch and prime minister.
...
Presidents of an earlier era did not have to contend with so many cameras and microphones and the endless appetite for material to put on 24-hour cable news channels. Greenstein said that there are anecdotal reports that, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, FDR held his head in his hands and despaired of the future of his presidency. But that is not the image Americans retain of Roosevelt's reaction.
Instead we think of his powerful address to Congress the next day -- his "date which will live in infamy" speech.
Nor do we have tape of John F. Kennedy learning that the Soviets had placed missiles in Cuba. Sally Bedell Smith, author of a new book on the Kennedy White House, says that his national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, didn't even pass the portentous news to Kennedy for about 12 hours. Kennedy had returned from an exhausting campaign trip. Bundy decided that "a quiet evening and a night of sleep were the best preparation" for the critical days ahead. As the crisis unfolded, Kennedy slept.
Americans did not see Lyndon Johnson's immediate reaction to the assassination of JFK. But Johnson, who had been in the same motorcade, made a quick image-conscious decision: Although he automatically became president upon Kennedy's death, he arranged to be sworn in on Air Force One with Jackie Kennedy at his side. The photograph of that moment became iconic, not so much because of the somber Johnson as for the shocked widow with blood on her dress.
"He wanted this as a symbol of his authority," Dallek said. "Jackie is at his side and she's giving legitimacy to his presidency."
Bush was conscious on Sept. 11 of the need, for symbolic reasons, to return to Washington, but was persuaded by the Secret Service, Cheney and other aides that the situation was too risky. Some critics, Dallek among them, say Bush should have overruled his aides. The commission report states that all participants agree that Bush argued forcefully for returning."
Here's the full article with attacks and defense of Bush's actions:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A53548-2004Jun18?language=printer
Gettingahandle
Ignorance is Nature's most abundant fuel for decision making.
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