… in that small group of distinguished black Americans who tell the truth as they see it about self-destructive black behavior even though doing so earns them accusations of “blaming the victim” and in effect being “race traitors.” See this excellent column by Williams. (HatTip to reader Brian Ladd.)
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I am only partially in agreement with Williams and Cosby. They are right that there are severe cultural problems in the black ghetto. However, certain institutions of our society — most notably education and law enforcement — are supposed to mitigate these problems and give children a chance of a decent outcome in spite of them. Instead, our society has tended to abandon Black neighborhoods and schools to the gangs, and to make little effort at serious education in these neighborhoods. I blame the leadership (and voters) responsible for this more than I blame the poor parents in question.
LTEC writes:
>>>” Instead, our society has tended to abandon Black neighborhoods and schools to the gangs, and to make little effort at serious education in these neighborhoods. I blame the leadership (and voters) responsible for this more than I blame the poor parents in question.”
I find solid truth in your words, LTEC. All sorts of book-shilling attention-mongers adopt this “blame the victim” mentality when it comes to the poor, especially those in the minority community. Listen to what Juan Williams’ “solutions” are for “black poverty.”
Juan Williams writes:
>>>”child of a middle-class professional has heard 500,000 words of encouragement and 80,000 words of discouragement. Among children in welfare families, the numbers were turned on their heads with 75,000 words of encouragement and 200,000 words of discouragement. Middle-class parents, the researchers found, also spoke to their children about the value of education. They regularly discuss with children family rules, current events and how to negotiate difficult situations and people.
These are middle-class values that benefit people, black or white.
To encourage the black poor to adopt these values is not evidence of self-hate but offering good news about how people can help themselves and their children to succeed. It is good news to know that if you stay in school and at least graduate from high school, then stay in the job market and don’t have a child until you are in your 20s and married, you have little chance of being poor.”
http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/stories/2006/12/26/1226edwilliams.html
It’s polyanna stuff. Of course a middle class parent in the suburbs can give a child more “encouraging words”…the suburbs are usually a much more “ENCOURAGING” environment.
This is why I find the arguments of the MCRI so contemptable, because societal abandonment of the inner city and racial segregation is no more visible and apparent than in the state of Michigan today. Of course the parents of kids in Southgate can use the “encouraging words” that the kids living on 8 Mile in Detroit will seldom hear.
Juan Williams is just another professional black media figure trying to sell books, IMHO. He knows his target audience…the people who would actually READ his books don’t live anywhere near the people he attacks.
Typical.
–Cobra
Cobra,
Juan Williams writes:
>>>”child of a middle-class professional has heard 500,000 words of encouragement and 80,000 words of discouragement. Among children in welfare families, the numbers were turned on their heads with 75,000 words of encouragement and 200,000 words of discouragement.
Funny, I didn’t take from this either what you did or what Juan Williams did. What I saw was “580,000 words” total of encouragement/discouragement vs. “275,000 words” of same. More than twice as many words for the children of middle-class professionals vs. children on welfare. I have no idea how the study in question arrived at the numbers, or what fraction of total speech to a child in each case counted as either encouragement or discouragement, but that difference is huge. It seems to me incomprehensible to ignore that as a factor.
Given everything else that he’s written here, I find it hard to believe that Cobra really agrees with me about very much at all. Does he really agree with me about the following?:
1) Our criminal justice system should follow the gang members, catch them committing crimes, and take them off the streets and put them in prison. Note that in the short term, this will cause many more Black people to be sent to prison.
2) We should remove from the (normal) schools anyone who is greatly disrupting other people’s education. This will help a large number of people but it will also hurt a small number of other people. In the short term, more Black students will be expelled.
3) Schools should foster in students a sense of individual responsibility (rather than an attitude of collective victimization), a “future time orientation”, and a command of standard English. (With all due respect to the Seattle school board.)
4) The most important subjects to be taught and learned early on are reading, writing, and arithmetic. All the nonsensical crap that the education establishment has been pushing for decades (e.g. de-stressing phonics, having students invent their own ways of doing arithmetic) should be dropped; this stuff has been especially harmful to students from bad backgrounds. The goal should be stuff that works, as measured by grades on uniform exams. Let’s drop the pretense that different races or cultures “learn in different ways”. It may (or may not) be very slightly true, but it is almost exclusively used as an excuse to avoid actually teaching.
5) Students who do sufficiently poorly should not go on to the next grade (or level), but should instead redo material. In the short term, this will reduce Black graduation rates.
In the long term (one generation), these actions will greatly reduce the number of Black people sent to prison and will probably increase Black graduation rates. And many more of those that do graduate will be able to get into Ann Arbor honestly.
If Cobra does not agree with these points then what would he do instead?
And MCRI is contemptible? MCRI does not address the problems of the ghetto any more than our current driving tests address the problem of blindness. But my guess is that MCRI supporters are much more likely to support my 5 points than are MCRI opponents.
LTEC writes:
>>>”And MCRI is contemptible? MCRI does not address the problems of the ghetto any more than our current driving tests address the problem of blindness.”
Oh, but I disagree. IMHO, I bet the MCRI folks in Southgate had minorities living in Detroit SPECIFICALLY in mind as they gathered in the shadows to devise their insidious scheme. Can’t prove it, of course, but it IS “my humble opinion.”
But let’s address your points.
1. Gangs. First of all, it’s not illegal to join a a “gang.” One man’s gang is another man’s club, fraternity or lacross team.
Now, if you commit a CRIME, then I believe you should face the consequences, whether you belong to a gang, club, fraternity or lacross team, so I’m being consistant. Making a special PROFILING assignment singling out black gang members exclusively is NOT a solution IMHO, to this issue.
2. Expelling problem kids. I don’t believe in throwing away school children. Nobody chooses which parents they’re born to, nor the situation or environment they find themselves in. I do agree with one facet of your statement, that children who don’t have behavioral problems should be separated from those who do, so that learning potential can be maximized, but expelling and giving up on problem kids will only increase the criminal population. I guess you seem to have a “solution” for this already in Point #1, huh?
Now, are there some kids who are beyond help and are on a B-line to the state pen? I’m sure there are, but
I think what must be weighed is the cost of reform schools and intervention programs against the anywhere from $20,000 to $60,000 a year to house a prison inmate.
3. I don’t know if instilling values is a job you want educators to do. I would leave that to parents and religeous leaders.
4. We may be able to find some common ground here. I agree that reading, writing and arithmetic should be stressed. Of course, there are challenges with those from bad backgrounds. I was fortunate enough to grow up in a home where I had a wall full of encyclopedias, and Childcraft study guides to read and explore at my leisure. Had my folks not moved from the inner city, I wouldn’t have had access to that, at least not conveniently.
5. I don’t have a problem with remedial learning, or keeping kids back, as long as the focus is on TRUE learning and comprehension, and not the standardized test hustle.
LTEC writes:
>>>”In the long term (one generation), these actions will greatly reduce the number of Black people sent to prison and will probably increase Black graduation rates. And many more of those that do graduate will be able to get into Ann Arbor honestly.”
The problem with your plan is that the blacks you wish to expell, imprison or otherwise remove from the picture don’t “vanish,” and those who aren’t expelled or imprisoned still face a racist, unequal society, where there are plenty of arguments to be made about the “honest” admission of many white student at Ann Arbor.
However, I don’t dismiss all of your points. Your approach may be a tad more abrupt and aggressive than mine would be, but it seems you have the best interests of good kids in mind in your statements.
I can’t say that for many of the AAA types who post here.
–Cobra
And Cobra illustrates the exact problem that Williams describes: he points fingers everywhere except where the problem is. When whites try to explain, he dismisses them as racist. When blacks say the same thing, he dismisses them as tools of whites. He never stops to consider that if he listened to them, he might learn something.
Whining about racism has never helped anybody. The poor are not victims, except of their own bad choices. Racism is not an excuse for those choices.
call me naive, but i’ve always thought that it’s incredibly easy to “make it” in america if you go to school, stay out of prison, and avoid having kids until you’re economically stable and mature. (two points: obviously my conception of “making it” is a rather modest one; and there are other things, in addition to the ones i mentioned above, that a person would have to do in order to “make it” in america: for example, staying away from illegal drugs.) all of this is pretty obvious. i’ve never understood why it’s considered “racist” to convey these rather obvious points to poor blacks. it’s like telling someone that if they pay attention to all traffic signs and laws, then in all likelihood they won’t get into a car accident.
also, i noticed the same thing michelle thompson did (i.e., “‘580,000 words’ total of encouragement/discouragement vs. ‘275,000 words’ of same”). i’m sure the study attempted to identify the reasons for the disparity, some of which should be obvious.
Cobra —
First of all I should have added a 6th point:
6) We should spend significantly more per student educating people from bad backgrounds than people from good backgrounds.
Second, regarding your assertion that MCRI supporters “gathered in the shadows …”: no further comment.
Regarding my other 5 points:
1) Gangs are criminal organizations (no further comment about your Lacrosse reference); I don’t know if it is illegal to join a gang as it is to join the mafia. I made it clear in my point that we should use gang membership as a starting point for investigating people, but it is actual criminal activity that we get them for. I am against targeting Black gang members over non-black ones. But such targeting would do a great deal to help the Black community, much as having the police ignore Black gangs as “an internal problem” does a great deal to hurt the Black community. (A similar statement could be made about Chinese gangs and Chinese communities, etc.)
2) I tried to make it clear that we expel extreme cases from “normal” schools. I didn’t say where we put them. It would be some kind of school, and we would save a few of them, but many of them would indeed be lost and yes, wind up in prison. What is Cobra’s solution: “separating them from others”, sometimes into reform schools. Perhaps we can agree here: we won’t expel anyone, we’ll merely separate them.
3) I share Cobra’s dislike of using the school system to “instill values”, and I hesitated before making this point. Firstly, a command of standard English is a skill, not a value. As far as the other two things: they should not be preached to students, but rather they are values students must acquire in order to do the work that schools require.
5) I don’t see how we can measure TRUE learning other than by using standardized tests. The only alternative I can see to the risk of “standardized test hustle” — which is non-optimal but which isn’t all that bad — is the bull of the educational theorists who would have us believe that lots of “authentic” learning is taking place, even though it can’t actually be measured, and even though it appears to everyone else that the kids aren’t learning anything.
LTEC,
You see we can have a consensus on many of these points, and I absolutely agree with you on #6. I’m still hesitant on the “gang” scenario, because it comes dangerously close to the right to assemble part of the Constitution. Who defines what constitutes a “gang?” I wouldn’t leave that loose definition open for the judgement of just anybody, or you’d find “gangs” in every Burger King lot on Friday night.
I don’t like the Ku Klux Klan or the Council of Conservative Citizens and the INITIATIVES they support, but they do have a right to assemble lawfully and peacefully.
David writes:
>>>”Whining about racism has never helped anybody. The poor are not victims, except of their own bad choices. Racism is not an excuse for those choices.”
Again, CHILDREN do NOT pick their parents. You had ABSOLUTELY NO choice in the matter when you were born into the Nieporent family.
If you were born in a South Central LA barrio, a South Bronx housing project or a trailer park south of Wheeling, WV, it wouldn’t have been your decision.
In fact…
>>>”In 2005, 17 percent of children lived in families with incomes below the poverty line – a percentage that had not changed since 2003.”
http://www.childtrendsdatabank.org/indicators/4Poverty.cfm – 29k –
That figure transcends race, David.
David writes:
>>>”When whites try to explain, he dismisses them as racist. When blacks say the same thing, he dismisses them as tools of whites. He never stops to consider that if he listened to them, he might learn something.”
What needs to be “explained” David? You must have NEVER been to a Black Church on Sunday morning, because you’d agree with me that this is nothing new. What we have with Juan Williams, the most visible (albeit rare) minority contributor on Fox News, is the attempt to repackage an old message for white consumption and profit.
I don’t totally despise Juan Williams, however. He does seem to add a tepid opposition to the neo-con tea party that is Fox News Sunday. Perhaps he suffers from some form of media “Stockholm Syndrome” where he has adopted at least some popular white conservative positions to gain acceptance or credibility there.
Chauncey writes:
>>>”call me naive, but i’ve always thought that it’s incredibly easy to “make it” in america if you go to school, stay out of prison, and avoid having kids until you’re economically stable and mature.”
Statistics usually have a way of clarifying many issues.
According to Columbia University’s National Center for Children in Poverty, there are:
13,773,539 Low Income Children with parents who are Married.
10,926,959 Low Income Children with a parent or parents with a College education or higher.
15,555,849 Low Income Children with a parent or parents who work full time.
9,642,313 Urban Low Income Children
9,624,029 Suburban Low Income Children
5,052,018 Rural Low Income Children
823,221 Asian L.I.C
6,531,529 Black L.I.C
11,094,359 White L.I.C
8,843,389 Latino L.I.C
305,659 American Indian L.I.C
http://www.nccp.org/
As you can see, just by the demographics of child poverty alone, there is no simple, sound bite answer to this NATIONAL issue.
Juan Williams is, IMHO targetting inner city blacks as a marketing scheme for the white conservative audience most familiar with him.
–Cobra
Indeed it does; that’s part of my point. But here’s a puzzler for you: what percent of that 17% of children do you think live in intact families?