Posted on 09/21/2009 8:47:15 AM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
I hold that this bad news is a result of educational policies that I summarize as “Juneteenthlsm” — the encouragement of making one’s freedoms, one’s status and one’s wealth to be the due of others who owe it to you.
I grew up Catholic - ambition was encouraged, even demanded, but never looked down upon!
"Blacks" per say, aren't intellectually inadequate or lazy, but the rap/hip-hop culture and it's previous incarnations all discourage academic achievement.
"Education is a very high value in the African-American community and in the African community."
How anyone with even passing familiarity with the "African-American community" or, in particular, Africa could even suggest this is appalling.
Here is my theory on race. People are like cars, they come in many colors but essentally have the same potential. disparities in performance come from how the cars are treated. For example, lets say that 95% of the people own red cars never do any maintenence on them. The oil is full of sludge, the spark plugs are bad, and they fill the engine with cheap watered down gas. In a race against cars of other colors that are well maintained, the red cars will lose every time. People then start to think the red cars are junk, and start giving them head starts in races, but they still lose. Telling owners of the red cars that they need to take batter care of them makes them angry. They think the problem is not with their cars, but with the shape of the race track or with the judges.
Even in the first two generations of residency in the states, many Catholic-Americans embraced the humble concept of Church/Neighborhood/Work and not "rising above" the way that Jews and protestants did. It took assimilation into the larger American culture and out of the Catholic Ghetto/urban peasant mentality for upward mobility to take place.
As far as the Catholic world outside the US is concerned, places like Ireland did a cultural about face starting in the 1970s/80s, to say nothing of France earlier under the Orleanists (mid 19th century) and Italy (outside of the south, where the urban peasant attitude continues in places like Naples and Palermo, encouraged by the welfare state) under De Gasperi's reforms of the 1950s.
Cultures (and religions of course) are NOT static, which is why even places like Brazil are seeing a scrapping of the old "ambition as Pride" mentality in both the populace AND the Church (thank you Josemaria Escriva and Opus Dei!). Nevertheless, to deny that such an attitude existed among the Irish, Polish, Italians, Portuguese, and French Canadians, both at home and in the diaspora, would be ahistorical.
--- Clemenza, Descendant of the ambitious ones. :)
Generally, one should expect to catch flak when one is on-target.
parents worried that Ogbu's work would further reinforce the stereotype that blacks are THEY WERE intellectually inadequate and lazy. .....there, fixed it.
School district officials, meanwhile, were concerned that it would look as if they were blaming black parents and students for their own academic failures.
Well, who else would be responsible? When I completely screw up something, I don't blame the guy down the street.
If this group ever decides to stop finger-pointing and address the real issue - that is, children and their parents are ultimately responsible for their educations - they might get somewhere. Otherwise, it'll be the same old same old with a victim mentality.
This Professor John Ogbu is absolutely right, no matter how hard the professional malcontents try to undermine him.
So even black academics buy into the notion that excelling in academics and speaking proper english are "acting white".
If thats your assumption you've lost the game before it began.
I have a nephew who was half-latin, and had fallen in with the little gang-bangers at school in an effort to be authentically latin. He dressed the dress and talked the dialect. Then I invited him to South America when I was working there, and he saw a real latin society, with successful happy people, moral people, all kinds of people, and he was never the same again. He never again tried to emulate the little gangbangers, and he's grown into a bright, moral, successful college student at this point.
There is such a thing as poverty culture. A lot of people have moved through it, up and out. But when you begin to associate poverty culture as being somehow "authentic" and anything else as somehow a betrayal of your authentic self, you are truely and royally trapped.
Exactly.
That is real similar to the dynamics of Envy in the small tribal situations.
ping for later reading
The "acting white" cultural norm is in part a defense. Which is more hummiliating: to work your ass off in a suburban school to get C's, or to claim trying to succeed is "acting white", cop an attitude and get D's.
Of course we can't talk about this. "That's racist!".
Suffice it to say that the concept of 'victimhood', victimhood' resonated in my mind. AND the lack of parental involvement in their children's education. Bill Cosby has stated the conclusions, set forth in this article, many times in the last few years (though he is going 'wobbly' now).
The quote by the mother, states it succinctly
"We come from this point of view of slavery and victimhood and every problem is due to racist white people," she says. "That victim mentality is perpetrated by parents and they're doing their kids a disservice. ... My primary objective is not to hold someone accountable but to close the achievement gap." "
Thank you so much for posting this! I went to a Prep School in Shaker Heights in the ‘60s. The community has changed drastically since then.
“Whites, he found, say it is a racially harmonious and tolerant place. African Americans, meanwhile, describe the community as racially troubled and filled with tension between blacks and whites.”
That short quote shows exactly where the “tension” lies.
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