A cry in the black education wilderness

The great disappointment of my ongoing crusade to foment a revolution in black education has been the lack of a response, and even hostility, from black leaders in this community. Naturally, I expected everyone to drop what they were doing and hop onto my education movement bandwagon.

To be sure, black readers in general have responded positively and in droves to the call for a black education movement along the lines of our historic civil rights movement. They have said they agree that this movement must demand rigorous academic standards and a high level of parental responsibility and community involvement to ensure black children's success.

In a comment typical of many I've received, a reader wrote, "We as black people must begin to create a culture of valuing education ... if we are to ever pull our children out of the river of underachievement in which they find themselves. I believe that this can be done, but it will require a new and different determination on the part of the black community, and every black parent in particular, before it will be achieved."

Another reader wrote, "I am just frustrated at our community's complacency towards education and the willingness of so many parents to allow their children to waste their young years on activities that do not help them become competitive in academia. ... I'm making the effort to convert as many [people] as I can. I think I successfully turned my husband around. He was wiling to buy his children-to-be their first car but would not fund their college education. Now THAT had to change."

Of course, many people are doing interesting and important work to promote high standards in black education.

Helen M. Berger runs Houston Preparatory Academy's U-Prep model in which academically promising students from poor northeast neighborhoods are provided four weeks of intensive instruction in reading, writing and math. Afterward, a select few students who meet the high admission and academic standards of some of Houston's best private schools enter those schools with scholarships and the social and academic support of U-Prep to ensure their success.

Sylvia Brooks, president & CEO of the Houston Area Urban League, after reading my columns calling for new black leadership to head a black education movement, called to point out all the work the local Urban League is doing in that field. In fact, the promotion of equal access to education is one of the main goals of the Urban League's advocacy mission, and I applaud that.

Kevin Hoffman, the president of the Houston school board, posed a couple of questions when I complained to him about black leadership on education. "Do you go off and have a public tantrum, or do you work inside the system in which you were elected?," he asked. "Do you want to represent as an insider getting things done or as an outsider making a fuss on the front page?"

Without patting himself on the back too hard, Hoffman noted the significant number of new schools that will be built in black neighborhoods and of old ones that will be renovated under the district's new bond issue. Point well-taken.

My thinking has been that a natural place for the new black education movement to grow could be black churches. I have imagined church leaders organizing tutoring sessions for young members, recognizing and rewarding good grades and bringing in experts to teach test-taking skills and to help parents support their children's educational endeavors.

So, not long ago, I spoke with Rev. Michael Williams, pastor of Joy Tabernacle church. In writing a column afterward, I focused on those issues which he and I held in common, such as parents' major role in early education.

Williams chastised me later for not playing up his other points, such as that "serious and significant inequities" in funding and facilities exist in white and black communities, and that "American institutional life is designed to support white supremacy and public education is no different."

I had chosen to ignore some of his more outrageous statements, such as that "college is overrated for black people" and that many good jobs exist for people without college degrees.

Even if that were true, why would Williams, who also happens to be a trustee of the Houston Community College board, preach that to young people?

People who believe, as Williams apparently does, that black people are powerless to achieve excellence in their lives because they are oppressed victims ought to take a note from all the people who are out there working hard to show black children how bright the future can be. That's real leadership.

Georgsson, an editorial writer, is a member of the Chronicle Editorial Board andrea.georgsson@chron.com

The one article title explains much. "The GOP is Courting the Black Vote".

Hmmmm. Might this be behind the attempts by the MSM to foment racial hatred?

Might this be behind the MSM leaving people with the impression that all of NOLA's black population are criminals, lazy ne'er-do-wells who would not lift a finger on their own behalf, except to rob and loot.

That image, perpetrated by the MSM, might cause a further rift by hurting fundraising efforts, and thus confirming in the minds of the already 'disenfranchised' the perception of a racial rift.

Any hampering of relief or fundraising efforts is a two-fer, giving more cause to bash President Bush (relief failure), and to foment hatred against the "haves", for not digging deep.

The images of looters, rapists, and angry people do little to open would-be sympathetic wallets.

After all, much, if not all of the media are about the creation and maintenance of images, appearances which do not have to coincide with reality, and best do not, in the diabolical promotion of such an agenda.

Then the Dems swoop in with allegations that they are the only real friends of the black community, and the beat goes on....and on. THe welfare state (and mentality) remains intact, and untarnished 'victimhood' ensures a multitude of subjects in perpetuity.

Unfortunately, any white who would dare to say this would be shouted down, damned as a racist by the MSM.

Thus, the answer has to come from within the black community, a community which used to demand more of their children than many white parents did, just to overcome the images which had been perpetrated upon them.

Once again the Dems and the MSM do the black community a great disservice in the raw and unadulterated pursuit of power.

Hi Smokin' Joe. You said (great post): ....Then the Dems swoop in with allegations that they are the only real friends of the black community, and the beat goes on....and on. THe welfare state (and mentality) remains intact, and untarnished 'victimhood' ensures a multitude of subjects in perpetuity.

Unfortunately, any white who would dare to say this would be shouted down, damned as a racist by the MSM. ....***

From a black American: [What] White do-gooders did for black America***.....Few thinking people regret the flower children’s opposition to the Vietnam war, sexism and racial discrimination. But these advances also spelt the demise of old standards of responsibility. Taught that criminality and violence must be judged in proportion to the extent to which poverty and discrimination have coloured one’s existence, the enlightened white person saw black violence as “understandable”.

This meant a largely theatrical black separatist ideology, drastically short on constructive aims, had a public sanction that it had never had before. Hating whitey for its own sake now had an ear among the influential and quickly became the word on the street.

There was a new sense that the disadvantages of being black gave one a pass on civility — or even achievement: this was when black teens started teasing black nerds for “acting white”.

Behaviour that most of a black community would have condemned as counterproductive started to seem normal. Through the late 1960s blacks burnt down their own neighbourhoods as gestures of being “fed up”. But blacks had been “fed up” for centuries: why were these the first riots initiated by blacks rather than white thugs — when the economy was flush and employment opportunities were opening up as never before? Because the culture had changed, in ways that hindered too many blacks from taking advantage of the civil rights revolution. Meanwhile, the most grievous result of the new consensus was black American history’s most under-reported event, the expansion of welfare. Until now, welfare had been a pittance intended for widows, unavailable as long as the father of one’s children was able-bodied and accounted for, and granted for as little time as possible.

In 1966, however, a group of white academics in New York developed a plan to bring as many people onto the welfare rolls as possible. Across the country, poor blacks especially were taught to apply for living on the dole even when they had been working for a living, and by 1970 there were 169% more people on welfare nationwide than in 1960. This was the first time that whites or blacks had taught black people not to work as a form of civil rights. Politicians and bureaucrats jumped on the new opportunity for political patronage and votes, and welfare quickly became a programme that essentially paid young women to have children. .............***

Don’t substitute racism for incompetence (emergency task for blacks is to get out of poverty)***….“The charges of racism-inspired foot-dragging isn’t just nonsense. It’s pernicious nonsense.”

This is how the New York Daily News called it regarding charges, from the usual circle of black leaders, that the rescue efforts in New Orleans were slow because the victims were black. The Daily News is right. Except it’s even worse than the paper appreciates.

What we are witnessing is a well-honed black political public-relations operation geared to obfuscation, stoking hatred and fear, and nurturing helplessness and dependence among black citizens. Such efforts keep black politicians powerful, diversity businesses prosperous and blacks poor.

The fact that the handling of the disaster caused by Hurricane Katrina was a massive botch job at all levels of government is beyond the doubt of any sober observer.

Such operations demand precise cooperation and coordination among local, state and federal authorities. It appears evident that the performance at and between each of these levels of government was abysmal.

However, government incompetence isn’t news. And, unfortunately, it’s also not news when black politicians call it racism when the unfortunate victims of this incompetence, because they are poor and unprepared, are largely black.

It is inconceivable that there could have been some all-knowing racist guiding hand orchestrating the chaos and disorganization that characterized what occurred. Furthermore, how, when black politicians themselves played a prominent role in what happened, can we be talking about racism?

The first line of authority in emergency management, all agree, is local. It appears that Ray Nagin, New Orleans black mayor, was grossly negligent. Existing and detailed written evacuation plans for New Orleans were ignored while the mayor made sporadic decision after decision as if there were no such plans. A fleet of school and transit buses that could have evacuated 12,000 citizens per run was not used and left on low ground and flooded. …………………………***

What is so ‘un-black’ about being intelligent?***............My people, my people. Some of you disturb me. There’s something terribly wrong when black students — even one — at Parkview or any other Gwinnett campus criticize, ridicule and question the “blackness” of someone like Mandisa simply because she wants to excel.

It’s even sadder in this case because Parkview High is no ghetto school. Its student population doesn’t hail from lower-income apartment complexes and subdivisions. At Parkview, the parents and students consider their school the crème de la crème of public schools, the clientele upper-crust perhaps and at the very least middle-class.

So I blame parents. You black parents.

It’s your fault if your children think academic achievement is uncool, anti-black and pro-white. It’s your fault if your offspring are so enthralled with the so-called thug life that they devalue education, hard work and dedication.

And you’re especially to blame if your child’s sense of black culture means that you have to think and act a certain way, and that to do otherwise means you’re acting like whitey.

It’s your fault. And you’re crippling your kids.

Mandisa wants to pursue acting or a career in the fashion industry. She plans to attend college in New York, her birthplace. I’m sure she’ll be fine.

It’s the kids who ridicule her that I worry about. When they succumb to this crippling ignorance, we all lose. We’ll have fewer doctors, teachers, artists and more. Fewer people to be proud of.***

A man of influence - wants to rescue Aboriginal affairs from white romantics***..........................Mundine believes the land-rights and welfare policies of the past 30 years have failed to provide most Aborigines with better lives. In his view, some of the Aboriginal leaders still defending those policies "are living in the past, living off the old victories, trapped in the 1970s land-rights rhetoric". The solution? "I want to make Aboriginal communities safe and economically viable. They're the two issues I want to drive forward. We've spent 30 years trying to get economic development into Aboriginal communities through government agencies and community organisations and it just doesn't work. We need to get the private sector in there and encourage Aboriginal people to build their own businesses."

He has great faith in private industry and private ownership. "The discipline of paying off a mortgage affects your whole life. You have to be healthy so you can get an education; you have to be educated so you can get a job; and you have to keep that job. It changes everything." As for government: "It has been an enslaver of Aboriginal people for 200 years. It's time we got them out of the way so we can move on independently." .........***

Idle black men, tragically, aren't just a stereotype *** The black men I know best are all hard-working, accomplished professionals. They include my brother, a physician, and my buddies — lawyers, college professors, political consultants, journalists. I live in an insular world of middle-class affluence, rarely stumbling into the troubled universe of marginalized underachievers.

Until recently. After a contractor walked off the job, I was assigned the task of helping my mother find laborers to help complete her new house in my hometown, Monroeville, Ala., a small place with a declining textiles industry. The assignment led me into an alternative universe of black men without jobs or prospects or enthusiasm for hard labor.

My younger sister, an architect, appointed her Mexican-born father-in-law, an experienced carpenter (and American citizen), the new general contractor. I was to find men willing to help him paint, lift, scrape, fill, dig. The pay was hardly exorbitant — $6 an hour. But it seemed reasonable for unskilled labor. So I looked among unemployed high school classmates, members of my mother's church and men standing on nearby street corners.

The experience brought me face to face with every unappealing behavior that I'd heard attributed to idle black men but dismissed as stereotype. One man worked a couple of days and never came back. One young man worked 30 minutes before he deserted. Others promised to come to work but never did. ……….***

Latest liberal assault on school reform involves playing race card Last week we reported how charter schools are less racially diverse than traditional public schools.

This return to the dark days of our segregated past supposedly should be of concern to us even if it is not to the thousands of black parents who willingly enroll their children in the charter schools.

That would make the children victims of racism perpetrated by their parents, an interesting new twist on an old outrage.

Charter schools are publicly funded but privately run. They compete for students with public schools. Teachers' unions hate them because they take jobs from unionized teachers.

There are legitimate concerns. The schools lack the same oversight as public schools and, on average, do not perform better than public schools.

But last year the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, upped the ante by injecting racism into the debate.

It released a national study calling charters a "civil rights failure" because they "stratify students by race, class, and possibly language."

The folks at UCLA argue that concentrating low-income minority kids leads to their failure. And so we need to dilute them with kids from the middle and upper class. This has led to calls for some form of mandatory diversification at charter schools.

The problem is that the lack of diversity is voluntary. The schools don't pick students. They must take them on a first-come, first-served basis. If there are more kids than slots, then a lottery is held.

..the reason some charters are almost completely black is that black parents are happy with that arrangement.

This leaves the civil-rights activists arguing that the parents don't know what is best for their own children. Can you say "liberal elitists"?

The notion that black kids have to be diluted with white kids also smacks of racism. [end excerpt]

Don't Know Much About History (Republicans and Black Americans - a better story than you've heard)………”These historical facts are hiding in plain sight. But we live in an age of historical illiteracy. And these are not things members of the main(left)-stream media would like to talk about even if they knew them, which they don't.

Nowadays black voters, usually in percentages north of 90 percent, are wholly-owned subsidiaries of the Democratic Party. Things have been trending in this direction since the New Deal, which provided jobs for many unemployed blacks. The last Republican presidential candidate to receive more than 20 percent of the black vote was Tricky Dick in 1960.

Since then black voter devotion to the Democratic Party has been, excuse the expression, slavish. It's a real head-scratcher to me on the academic and personal level why this endures now that so many blacks have entered the great American middle class and higher. I've known, worked with, played ball with, and buried my nose in the happy-hour froth with so many blacks who are personally conservative, but who almost invariably cast their votes for candidates who do not share their values.

In contrast to the gift of freedom and earned dignity, Democrats and liberals have bequeathed black Americans a stifling welfare system that's gone more than a fair long way toward dismantling the black family, as the melancholy statistics on out of wedlock births and one-parent families testify to. The Democrats also invented and cling to the policy of affirmative action, which is not a cure for discrimination but a socially corrosive form of it. There's hardly a more effective way of keeping Americans at war with each other than the racial spoils system of affirmative action, wherein the good things are divided up along racial lines.”……

Jan 20, 2010 article by Greg Lewis (a black conservative) The Obama Administration's Rampant Racism ......................"The racist bias of the current administration cuts both ways. The fact that our president accepted Reid's apology as if he (Obama) were the only one damaged by Reid's remarks speaks to two things: the president's own narcissism and the fact that he agrees with the underlying racist premise that speaking with a "Negro dialect" is negative. Obama was sending a subliminal message to tens of millions of African-Americans that they weren't damaged by the implication that they're inferior and not politically marketable as national leaders because they speak differently from white massas like Harry Reid. Reid's comments were insulting to every "Negro" in America, and Reid should have apologized to all of the country's African-Americans, not just to the president.

Obama's spineless and insensitive acceptance of Reid's apology was tendered without so much as a beer summit of the kind he convened to repair the damage (to himself) caused by his racially tinged remarks ("the police acted stupidly") about Cambridge, MA police sergeant James Crowley in the Henry Louis Gates incident. Obama never did apologize to Crowley, though he invited him to beer.

The president was one of the leaders of the lynch mob that eventually succeeded in getting talk show host Don Imus fired from his post for the sin of calling the Rutgers University women's basketball team "nappy-headed ho's." Then-candidate Obama declared that "[Imus] didn't just cross the line, he fed into some of the worst stereotypes that my two young daughters are having to deal with today in America." Thank God Harry Reid wasn't guilty of that.

By appointing a racist as his Attorney General, Obama effectively cemented history's judgment of his administration's racialist policies. Eric Holder, who called Americans "cowards" because they were unwilling to engage in a public debate about "race," has proven himself to be both a coward and a racist. When it's politically convenient for him to support blacks, he'll subvert the law to do so, as he did in dismissing the prosecution of members of the New Black Panther Party for voter intimidation on election day 2008 in Philadelphia. The Justice Department had won the case by default when the defendants failed to respond to the charges, yet Holder dismissed the charges against all but one of the miscreants. The one against whom the charges remained was told not that voter intimidation was illegal, but that he had to wait until after 2012 before brandishing a nightstick at an election site again.

Holder is the Obama administration's "Bull" Connor. Where Connor called out firemen and policemen to prevent blacks from demonstrating in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, Holder tacitly condoned behavior equivalent to that of Connor's brownshirts by dropping prosecution of members of the New Black Panther Party when they brandished weapons and shouted insults at white voters, intimidating them in a way similar to that of Connor's thugs 45 years earlier. The difference is not in the degree of the offenses committed, but in the fact that in this case, when committed against whites, the offense doesn't lead to punishment."......................

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