What do African Americans want?

[verbal]

u know im at oklahoma state right now. it cracks me up what u just said about putting money into education instead of football. a guy just gave 168 million dollars to our football team. the biggest donation in big 12 history.  i have all uper division classes for this my last semester in college. all five of y classes r overcrowded and crampt. 3 of my 5 teachers r grad students. i am not learning anything. i wonder what 168 million would do for the quality of education at my school

[AH]

I wasn't even thinking about college level!  That is so true though.  They pay for our football players to stay overnight in the nicest hotel in town for home games and pay for ALL of their expenses (including books), and I went to a IAA school.  My profs were always top-notch and class size never suffered, but I barely got any money for school and my EFC was $150 at its peak.   

I can't imagine what it must be like for schools with good football teams (my roommate went to VATECH and they seem expecially crazy).

[2Lacoste]

Reparations -- what if they came in the form of school vouchers lol?

[AH]

That would be awesome!

Fresh Prince of Bel Air just did a PSA on something similar.  Weird, cause I've been watching the show forever and I totally don't remember this ep (it even has the guy from Mad About You and the Simpsons) in it.

[sck]

Oh the education thing....

The boyfriend is a teacher, and I've listened to him gripe all week about his classes. They keep adding students... and they're adding them over the number of desks he has. He's trying his best to get them redistributed, because, y'know, he likes his students to have desks.... When you have 30+ kids it's definitely not enough to have the short classes, too. He spends a lot of time calming them down, and dealing with the kids who just don't get it at all. (He has some students he thinks should be special ed, but... are not.) Of course, he's also a supporter of year-round schools, because he hates having to reteach at the beginning of a year, too.

He taught at an inner city ghetto school last year, as well. Terrible high school; he got assaulted pretty regularly, and he's a big guy. Granted, he also thinks that being the big pasty white guy in a predominantly African American school was the problem in a way; a lot of the kids grew up to not trust authority, especially when it comes from white guys like himself. But the biggest issue is not only the lack of resources, but the lack of parental involvement and interest.

Plus, he lost his job at that school due to its poor performance on standardized tests... the year before he was there. He was furious -- it wasn't his fault, but the solution was to fire 40% of the staff and bring in Teach for America kids and some other teachers rather than help out with what needed really doing.

This is his biggest peeve. He loves it when the parents are interested; it means he'll generally have a better time with the kids. The ones who aren't, he finds, tend to have more trouble unless they're unusually driven. This also has something of a socioeconomic edge. Many parents who are poorer just don't have the time to devote to their kids and their education. They're always working, can't take the time, and often just can't be bothered. I find education to be as much a social pressure thing as an economic, too, to be honest.

I went to the best public school in my district -- it was scarily good. It was also affluent and had a very powerful PTA. Plus, the principal the first three years I was there ran the place with a velvet covered iron fist. It just flat-out worked and she actively got students the books they wanted. I swear, we didn't use the same books everyone else did. So I guess I was lucky in that way. The one I would have gone to without my transfer was decent as well... I'd probably have had a higher gpa, though.

[redemption]

Look where the crime is, mostly black.  African Americans make up 13% of the population and what % of crime do you think that they commit?  Im not racist, I am well aware that there are degenerate white people too, I just want to live in an area where there are high class people.  These are just some thoughts.

Wow...if that ill-informed statement were an LSAT choice it'd be flagged for several "wrong-answer-type" attributes.  I'd say everyone has a fairly decent idea of where large populations of African-Americans can be found in this country.  So start by subtracting New York, Detroit, Chicago, Atlanta, New Orleans, Baltimore, and relatively small sections of some of the other southern states and already your concept of blameworthiness for crimes committed in this country seems just a tad skewed.  This is a large country, are we to believe that with regards to the rest of the country, Native Americans/Pacific Islanders/Asian Americans - being as they consitute such a large percentage of the total population - are engaged in crime sprees that would push the level of crimes committed by non-white to the proportions you're implying.  Some facts:

Data from the 1998 UCR indicate that differential
rates of arrest for crime are related
to race (see Snyder, 1999). Arrests of white
juveniles (under age 18) constituted 71 percent
of all juvenile arrests compared with
26 percent for black youth. American Indian
or Alaska Native and Asian or Pacific
Islanders account for 1 and 2 percent, respectively
(Federal Bureau of Investigation,
1999). Black youth were overrepresented,
given the fact that they make up 15 percent
of the juvenile population compared with
79 percent white and 5 percent other races.

Now this data pertains to juveniles...but for the sake of argument let's assume, that every AA juvenile moves on to being an adult offender, there still is a virtual mathematical impossibilty that crime is "mostly Black"  Quite the opposite it would seem.  I now turn your attention to the section where it mentions that realtive to their numbers the percentage of crime committed by AA is very high but surely we can all agree that this is due to several complex causation factors none of which anyone with even a rudimentary grasp of the social sciences...and I'm no expert...would ascribe to black people being classless.
[/quote]




These data don't help the argument that you are trying to make: they show that African-American kids are being arrested at twice the rate of their representation in the population.

A better and more accurate argument would be to suggest that African Americans are disproportionately the (direct) causes and victims of crime, and that there are, yes, structural/societal reasons for this. These reasons (or indirect "causal factors") need not be viewed as particularly complex:

1. African-Americans are disproportionately poor;

2. The African-American poor are culturally, geographically, socially and economically isolated from the remainder of society.

3. The African-American poor are cut off from the history of their pre-slavery traditions, and therefore without a strong cultural reference point that has the potential to dominate and replace the legacy of slavery and the formal institutionalised racism that came after.

4. Institutional and (nowadays mostly) unconscious racism creates an environment that - in the realm of public policy - by turns ignores the the above situation; stigmatizes this population; and devises policies and practices designed to *control* this population rather than to free it.

1 & 2 applies to all disadvantaged groups, including poor whites in Appalachia. If you check the crime stats on these poor & isolated populations you will find that they go a long way toward evening out disparities across 'groups', almost nullifying the effect of 'race';

3 & 4 are factors that are largely specific to African-Americans. Recent African immigrants to the United States, for example, do not face factor 3 and fare much better, despite the fact that they too are "black" and, when they arrive, mostly broke. And so on.

What - as Lenin would have said - is to be done? Target poverty for all groups. If we want to do it in a small-minded way, piecemeal and Clintonian, then government should remove pockets of poverty by better urban planning, by a change in the basis by which grade school education is financed, promoting small enterprise development in both the inner city and the backwoods, vocational education etc. And this for ALL groups in the situations described in 1 & 2 - whether they are "native americans", "mexicans", "whites" etc... 

Better, though, and simpler and likely more effective is to institute the idea suggested by Bruce Ackerman of Yale Law in "The Stakeholder Society" (I encourage everyone who hasn't to read it, it is highly persuasive): we should give every American who graduates from high school $80,000 in $20K installments over 4 years financed by a 2% annual tax on the wealth of the very wealthiest people in our country.

African-American civic organizations should address (3). No-one else can. The traditions of the "old-country", even if they could be identified (was it Hausa? Ibo? Bete?), are lost to African-Americans forever. Silliness like Kwanzaa isn't going to bring them back.  A specifically African-American cultural tradition needs to be fashioned out of the specifically African-American expeirnce that is one of hope for the future and optimism and of community with the rest of the population, not one that that is backward-looking, pessimistic and isolationist. The culture of bitches and ho's, of gangsta dress and the pimp walk, of "my-baby-daddy", of taking pride in underachievement (what Chris Rock, that great philosopher, would call the "n-word" culture) is here, there and everywhere, filling the gap between the need of youngstrs to affiliate with a culture that they can call their own and the lack of any positive strong tradition to affiliate with.

Instead, we have the call for reparations -  a ridiculous proposal by an intellectually and morally bankrupt civil rights movement, either blind to the tragedy around them or seeking to profit by it through empty rhetoric.

(4) is the weakest - and most overemphasized - factor. Nevertheless, it is real and counteracting it is the responsibility of all of us. We need, as a community of Americans, to watch the way in which all neighbourhoods are being policed; we need to care be vigilant in detecting unconscious racism in, say, the formulation of drug policy.

These kinds of efforts, though, pale in their effectiveness in addressing the root problem, when contrasted with efforts to seriously address 1, 2 & 3. And yet, they take up most of the oxygen in this debate. Sometimes I wonder why that is so, and sometimes I think I know why.

HTH

[Lionel A. Moore]

The last comment, which you made, says, "These are just thoughts." Well, I must beg your forgiveness, because I fail to see any thought put into anything in which you have stated. 

As an product of a single mother, who has raised three siblings on a teacher's salary of the 80's, I must first say that I believe, one is not a product of their envorinment, nor are those who grow up in an impoverished community degenerates, as you have said they are. I believe that a person's veiw on life and it's situations determines who he or she will become in life.

In answer to your question, I agree with other. We, as the government calls us, African Americans want nothing more than to be looked at through the eyes of one who is blind. 

As we know a person who is impaired visual must rely heavily on their other senses, but most importantly, on other people.  For one to think that their race is supreme, needing nothing from none other but their race shows ignorance, as well as, arrogance. Now, PLEASE don't mistake what I am saying. I am not saying that this is your view, what I am saying is that, other than the opportunites which has been attributed to various diverse people in  America, let alone the world, there is nothing that makes us any different as a group of people except for the amount of pigment and the color of our skin.

If I am wrong or my view of this matter is a bit twisted, then please, do not allow me to remain in my ignorance. Let me know and straighten me out, for I want to keep an open mind and see where you or anyone else is trying to come from. 

I like keeping an open mind.

[redemption]

The last comment, which you made, says, "These are just thoughts." Well, I must beg your forgiveness, because I fail to see any thought put into anything in which you have stated. 

As an product of a single mother, who has raised three siblings on a teacher's salary of the 80's, I must first say that I believe, one is not a product of their envorinment, nor are those who grow up in an impoverished community degenerates, as you have said they are. I believe that a person's veiw on life and it's situations determines who he or she will become in life.

In answer to your question, I agree with other. We, as the government calls us, African Americans want nothing more than to be looked at through the eyes of one who is blind. 

As we know a person who is impaired visual must rely heavily on their other senses, but most importantly, on other people.  For one to think that their race is supreme, needing nothing from none other but their race shows ignorance, as well as, arrogance. Now, PLEASE don't mistake what I am saying. I am not saying that this is your view, what I am saying is that, other than the opportunites which has been attributed to various diverse people in  America, let alone the world, there is nothing that makes us any different as a group of people except for the amount of pigment and the color of our skin.

If I am wrong or my view of this matter is a bit twisted, then please, do not allow me to remain in my ignorance. Let me know and straighten me out, for I want to keep an open mind and see where you or anyone else is trying to come from. 

I like keeping an open mind.

 

[chidochido]

I don't think it's that so much as it is net worth.  If you centralize education funding, home values would drop by $300,000 overnight in some wealthy suburbs. 

I'm open to this idea but I'm not sure I follow you...please explain!

[redemption]

I don't think it's that so much as it is net worth.  If you centralize education funding, home values would drop by $300,000 overnight in some wealthy suburbs. 

I'm open to this idea but I'm not sure I follow you...please explain!

Many people move to nice neighbourhoods because of the school district. That's why they pay premium prices for the homes. The price premium is the perceived value of the education that their kids will receive in the local public schools. Remove the system of local funding for local schools and you'll have to deal with a collapse in home prices in those neighbourhoods.

Not surprisingly, people who have paid that price premium do not want this to happen. They would vote out, scratch that - they would recall any politician who tried to do any such thing. Politicians know this. No-one, therefore, will propose such a reform measure. They will instead propose measures that don't work like "testing", and measures that can't work, like "raising teachers' salaries". To those not in the know, these sound like plausible policies; to those in the know they are a sort of inside joke. Nudge nudge, wink wink.