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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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.
Really?
Frankly I'd rather have a president that doesn't know what a dangling participle is but speaks from the heart when he does.
If he's speaking from the heart...then I think we should all go into hiding!
No person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that office who shall not have attained to the age of thirty-five years, and been fourteen years a resident within the United States.
That's from the US Constitution. Now if you know something I don't let me know. Otherwise the rest of your qualifications are just personal theory and completely subjective which have meaning to you and you alone. Therefore your statement about him being unqualified is completely wrong.
But I am guessing that majority of the people won't vote for a homeless crack pot to be a president. So in the same way, Presidency do have some requirements depending on the job the President does, and if it is obvious that he doesnot have the basic qualifications, one would not vote for him or her and consider the person not qualified to be a president.
would you elect a moron just because he satisfies the requirements to be a president as in constitution? I think most will ans No.
Same way if there are obvious deficiency in a candidate as far as the job responsibities are concerned one would not vote for that person on the basis of incomptence.
" An Engineer can send in his resume for sales job" doesnot mean the interviewer has to hire him. In that regard I am not saying that Bush cannot stand in election because he cannot talk, but the interviewers that is US should think about aprroving him twice based on obvious flaws. Since you didn't discredit my flaws in him, at least you agree that he does have incompentences in that respect.
Not hardly. I'm just tired of arguing about these petty attacks on his intelligence. It is getting really tired and boring. "He's stupid", "No he's not", "He only got Cs", "Yea but it was at Yale", "He can't speak with eloquence", "Maybe but he isn't lying".
Don't you get tired of attacking his intelligence? I'm tired of defending it.
You'll never believe that he is intelligent, and I won't believe he is incompetent.
One definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and hoping for a new outcome. Why not mutually agree to stop this insanity.
You can keep calling him a moron, incompetent or whatever but don't assume that because I don't respond that it means I accept your biased and flawed viewpoint.
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