My coding got all screwed up in the middle of that last post.
No, if you aren’t black then I can’t put in the “black community”. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t share other groups. If you live in my geographic area, you are in my geographic community. If you are a Christian of a progressive persuasion, then we are in the same moral/spiritual community. If you a human, I consider you a fellow human, entitled to all the respect and kindness deserving of all humans.
And I don’t consider all of my “skinfolk to be kinfolk” (sensu Zora Neal Hurston) either.
Do not ever assume you know what I think or “consider” again.
Skin color does matter. Race does matter. To say it doesn’t matter is to say that racism and prejudice went extinct back in the 60s. It didn’t.
As long as racism exists in this country, it benefits stigmitized minorities groups to organize themselves. The power differential in this country necessitates this.
SoooooOoooooo much has been said. What hasn’t been?
There is no monolithic black community in America. Never really was then, either. The social limitations imposed by overt segregation haven’t been with us for the last generation. Institutional racism will fall next, counfronted with our best and brightest. What exists now is an African-American community that is its own worst enemy, possessing a pathological history of sociocioeconomic generational poverty that is responsible for most of our problems. America is increasingly tired of our violence, negligence, abuse, ill health, absentee fathers and young mothers, hip-hop excesses and unrealistic plans on a deep and personal level. Grandparenting is not parenting.
A female acquaintance of mine who’s raising her son alone told me angrily one day when I commented on her kid not having a father: “I’m not the Virgin Mary. I did not bring him in this world alone. He has TWO parents-- I’m just the responsible one.” That’s a paradigm people all over this country need to absorb.
Black people: quit trippin’ about homosexuality. Every one of us in here has a gay cousin-- or closer relation. Also: quit trippin’ about mixed marriages. Love is love.
I’m a product of several bedrock African-American institutions: a Southern family, the AME church and a historically black college. For however long it’s economically and politically viable to support them, that’s what me and mine will be doing, so talking about change without the church seems dumb. That said, in this secular world there need to be methods in place to groom leadership outside the pulpit. African-Americans do not hold our religious leadership accountable anymore than Catholics seem to (and I’m saying this as a lapsed Catholic schoolboy.)
You can successfully navigate a corporate ascension and still remain essentially true to your ethnic heritage, but recognize that compromises will have to be made. That’s just how big money America works.
Education was, is, will almost certainly be the best offense against generational poverty. Education begins at home. It’s an investment. You need books, educational toys, trips out f town, visti museums, get some art in the house. With 180 days the minimum standard out of 365 days each year, the public schools cannot and should not be your children’s primary day care, socializing institution nor facility for getting books and internet access. A real commitment to education would be nice, but barring that, home schooling is probably the next big cultural paradigm I’d personally like to see African-Americans embrace.
As a rapidly-to-become-former-kindergarten teacher, let me say THIS to all teh women raising kids alone: if your 6-year old son knows how to turn on the satellite TV, work a cell phone, call little girls “bitches” and “hoes” but doesn’t know how to go to the bathroom by himself and wipe his mannish little ass, something’s really wrong at home, MA.
This may turn into a rant if I keep going to #10 like I planned, so let me stop now. Come back later.
Please don’t take my post above to mean that there is no black community, nor that community spirit within that community isn’t important. I believe that it is, just as a sense of community in Roman Catholic parishes or Italian-Americans or veterans is also valuable, to name some communities I belong to.
However, I don’t think solutions here need to be communitarian in nature. There are millions of black middle class and upper class families in this country, and for the most part they share more characteristics with other middle class and affluent families than they do with poorer families of any race.
I believe programs and policies targeted to individuals rather than communities might work better, and would also lessen charges that any one group is being favored over another. Many past programs seem to be a buyout of ethnic elites rather than a general program of assistance for those less well off.
I have no problems with religion at all. I used to teach Sunday school when I lived in Washington DC. I’m not very religious, but I realize it’s an important part of people’s lives. On eof the reasons I taught Sunday school was to act as a role model for the kids there who rarely see young black men who aren’t doing something they shouldn’t. I understand it’s not a panacea, but I wanted to pick something that many people (including those on the panel) didn’t think of.
Homophobia is bad for a number of reasons. First, I think blacks should be far more sensitive to any group that is being prejudged. On general principle, we should not actively contribute to efforts to make the world more hostile towards homosexuals. Second, it has contributed to the spread of HIV and other STD in the black community. The rate of new HIV infections of black women is 20 times greater than that of white women. Many of those cases involve men who are on the “downlow” (men who are bisexuals, who hide their homosexuality from their female partners).
2) A female acquaintance of mine who’s raising her son alone told me angrily one day when I commented on her kid not having a father: “I’m not the Virgin Mary. I did not bring him in this world alone. He has TWO parents-- I’m just the responsible one.” That’s a paradigm people all over this country need to absorb.
At least she claims to be the responsible one. Did she make sure that she was married to the man who would father her children? Did she make sure that she had his consent in her childbearing project? If she wasn’t married to the father and she didn’t have his consent, she is much more irresponsible.
I see a large part of the problems you discuss as arising from women bearing children whom they are in no position to raise properly. Based on my own experience, few if any of the fathers wanted these children in the first place. Of course it’s idiotic for the men not to use condoms, but it’s even more foolish for the women to refuse birth control. It’s the “why, because I want to, that’s why” school of family planning.
IMHO, there is a Black community just as there are Asian, Greek, Jewish and other ethnic communities.
Like those other communities, the Black community must be able to integrate with other non-Black communities.
IMHO, one of the biggest problems facing the Black community is the absense of positive male role models. The media constantly bombards Black youth with the image of the anti-social alpha-male B-baller hip-hop gangsta’. It is not a realistic expectation to grow up to be a professional basketball player or rap artist. An “in your face” attitude does not get you very far in the business world.
*In middle school, I was accidently placed on the remedial track two years in a row–TWICE–even though my grades and test scores were way above average. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but I know that kind of stuff didn’t happen to the white kids who I went to school with. *
You’re much too kind. It wasn’t accidental at all. My siblings and I had a similar experience in our upper middle class suburban neighborhood schools. Our test scores ran from the top ten to the top one per cent. Teachers and guidance counselors would occasionaly put us in low track classes. Our parents would go in and fight with them about it, and they’d back down. It was an attempt on the part of the people running the schools to create a segregated school within an ostensibly integrated system. Similar results have been observed whenever integrated schools with so called ability tracking are studied. Invariably, black kids with high scores have been put in low track classes.
I’ll mention two factor not mentioned yet, although Monstro touched on on one of the factors somewhat.
Open air drug dealing. Every single study I’ve seen suggest that whites and black uses drug at the exact same rates. However most drug dealing occurs in predominatly black neighborhoods. A couple of factors are at work here. First dealer open up shop with either tacit approval or at least a “let’s not get involved” by the community at large. Whan all of a sudden there are too many dealers to stop the phenomenon, the community is then too scared to act.
The problems then increase proportionately. First you have the dealers themselves rotating in and out of the prison system. This in and of itself would not be a problem, if this only effected the dealers which it does not. Many of these men and increasingly women are parents. Often with two three or many more children, reentering society unable and illsuited to care for these children. Increasingly this is leading to multi generational households into which the burden of raising these children are falling on ill equiped grandparents.
Welfare.
Don’t get me wrong here, I’m totally supportive of a safety net. However our current welfare system allows too many men to escape the financial responsibilities of fatherhood. This too has other side effects. It may sound sexist but I truly believe that children need mothers and fathers to help raise them. That both sexes bring something to the table in matters of self esteem, personal responsibility and civic responsibilty all greatly lacking in poorer communitys black and white, where the primary care givers are women. Oddly this seems to produce mysigony rathr than an outcry against irresponsible men.
P.S. Please don’t take the above as an arguments againts gays raising children. I believe that any family especially extended family can raise well adapted children. I mantain that thi is not what we’re seeing in the black community.
When I was in college, I took a course in Race, Gender, and Science. It was probably the most liberal course offered in the entire school, and I found myself learning a lot while I was in it.
One day, we were discussing academic tracking and racism. There were maybe two other black kids–a guy and a girl–besides myself in the class. As the class discussed, it came out that all three of us black kids had had “accidental” placement in a remedial track at least once in our life. The girl’s parents were the ones who had rescued her (which is what happened to me). It was one of the guy’s teachers who had rescued him.
None of the white students relayed a story like that. In fact, I remember clearly that one of them, a young lady, kept trying to rationalize why the system works fine. Perhaps all three of us were the victims of an innocuous mistake, fine. Perhaps it had happened to the other students and they were too ashamed/scared/shy to say it. But where did she get off intimating that we were remedial. By saying the “system works”, she was saying we belonged where we had been placed. I know enough to know that just is NOT the case.
Sometimes I wonder what would have happened to me if I had not gotten pulled from the “bad” track. Would I been able to go to take AP classes in high school? Graduate from the college I attended? Maybe I wouldn’t be a crackhead or prostitute or high school drop-out, but no one can tell me I would have been the same.
No kidding. Every child at some point early in life has dreams of being a professional athlete, celebrity, or something else totally unrealistic. But as they head through the teenage years, they need to shift to an accurate assessment of what their abilities are and what jobs they will actually be qualified for. While the media has some influence on what children’s aims are, parents and teachers also play a role in shaping a child’s vision of their own future. In my experience, white-majority suburban schools typically have several guidance counselors on their staffs and they at least hold preliminary meetings with students as early as grade 8 or 9. I’ve never seen or heard of such a thing in an inner-city school district, however.
But in the end, parents will always play the biggest role in the process.
I’m wracking my brain trying to envision a program that would be geared to individuals rather than a specific community. I think I understand what you are saying, but when I try to “see” it, it falls apart.
Your last sentence-and-half states why I think the change has to come from within. I’m not advocating governmental programs and policies…although I’m not opposed to them. I just want change to come from within because I think the materials are already there for success. Asking for help wastes time and energy sometimes.
Accusations of favoritism come when the assistance comes from outside of the community.
I was thinking about this just a few minutes ago: It seems to me that at the heart of this topic (how to “fix” black people) is a strange dichotomy. On one hand, we have people who think black people should stop seeing themselves as a political group, disband, and stop thinking “community this, community that”. They discount the existence of African American culture, since–they argue–there is no “white” culture. They think black people are just whites with brown skin. And if they aren’t now, they should be. (I’m not saying you, Mr. Moto, fit all of these criteria, but I know there are others who do).
On the other side, you have people (who haven’t posted yet, but who I’m sure are lurking) who think black people need to fix themselves, that they need to fix their culture, that they need to stop looking for hand-outs from others, that all their ills are internal, and that they could learn a thing or two from “successful” minorities like Chinese Americans and Jewish Americans (this is a decemberist sentiment). These people often talk about black crime, black sexual irresponsibility, inferior black academic performance, and so-on and so-forth. They also refer to folks like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton as “black leaders”. They tell us we need to choose better black leaders.
Now help me figure out which argument is “right”? Are blacks a bunch of individuals who have similar pigmentation? Or are we a cohesive “hivemind” Borg-like collective? Should well-to-do blacks scatter to the hinterlands in Volvos and Gucci pumps, or should they settle into the ghetto and be a nobel credit to their race? Should we adopt an individualist approach, just worried about ourselves and our families? Or should we be more community-oriented, nursing a stranger’s crack baby with one hand while teaching algebra in inner-city schools with another? Will we be called a “sell out” or an “oreo” if we choose the individualistic stance? Will we be called a “racist” and a “separatist” if we choose the other? Which name will sting the most? Does it matter?
Oy vey. It’s enough to make you throw up your hands and say “fuck it”, man.
I define myself as how I am. I can only be me. Me is different from you, as it would be even if we had the same skin color. I would be me even in the absence of you.
If you’re into homogenizing people’s identities, how about starting with yourself: Define yourself the same way I and the rest of us do. I dare ya.
monstro, there certainly is a black American culture and community, and a rich one it is, too. But this cultural heritage isn’t all-consuming and doesn’t keep other societal influences out.
Take a white middle class family and a black middle class family. Comparing the two will reveal many cultural differences, from the church these folks attend on Sundays to the dinner they eat afterward. There will be a lot of similarities, though, where it counts - housing, income levels, educational attainment, careers.
Now, culture has a good way of looking after itself. Where people need help is in achieving societal stability, a good education, and good jobs. Here government has an important role to play, and if it makes a successful effort to do so, it won’t be just black Americans who should benefit. There are lots of white folks in places like West Virginia who need good jobs and better schools too.
An intractable problem with black culture would have, along with residual racism, completely prevented the emergence of the black middle class. This hasn’t happened, and many black Americans are doing well. I think it would be useful to look at the individuals who aren’t succeeding and trying to figure out why that is the case. Such an examination might show that families in trouble suffer many of the same pathologies, whether they be black or white.
You want actively discriminatory laws? Crack Cocaine Federal Sentencing. Anytime 2/3rds of cocaine users are Latino and white and more than 80% of those convicted of possession are black, resulting in much tougher sentencing on black defendents, that doesn’t spell “equal treatment under the law” and therefore actively racist.