We Need to take Accountability and Responsibility for the Condition of Black America
My point with this blog is to give ways that I think black people can improve their lives and conditions for themselves. I am not saying that I don't think that racism, prejudice, and discrimination don't have a deep and profound negative impact on the hearts, minds, and psyches of black people. I am saying that expecting the racist white people who perpetuate this after the laws have changed is sort of a waste of our time. It also does not address what we are doing to ourselves; what went wrong in black American culture that allowed a pervasive disdain for education, among other things, to spring up and persist. Until we do that and take responsibility for it nothing will change on our end.
I also don't think bringing up accountability and self-responsibility to impoverished blacks is wrong. I consider it to be spreading the knowledge, sharing what I know about education and how it has had an impact on my life. Often times among black people who are disadvantaged, it isn't because they are willing know-nothings or deliberately want their children to fail in school. Sometimes it is simply because they don't know what to do. Often the educated among us are so insistent on defending ebonics or insistent that black children who fail have just been labeled or whatever, we don't even bother talking to the actual people who need our help the most.
I've been extremely poor, I've lived 'in the hood', I've had my kids in 'hood' schools. I've talked to other black parents in these schools, and the things that the middle class take for granted and do for their children, poor and/or uneducated blacks often just don't know to do or how to do. Like reading to their kids every night when they are pre-schoolers or teaching them the alphabet. The children of educated people come to kindergarten knowing their colors, knowing basic shapes, knowing how to count, knowing the alphabet, sometimes even already knowing how to read. It's not that poor black people don't want their kids to know this stuff, it's that they think the school is going to teach them...no one ever told them about how to prepare a child for school so that they come with the very basics of education already in their minds.
Instead of preaching about what white folks did to cause this dynamic in our community, why aren't we preaching about how we can change it? Why aren't we spreading the word to our fellow black people who are at a disadvantage, because of economics or their own poor education, about how to prepare their children for education in the school system? How to support and help their children do well in school?
Is it perhaps because some of us truly believe that whites ultimately control our behavior? That they control what we do or don't do? That white people have to change before we can change?
What do you think?
I also don't think bringing up accountability and self-responsibility to impoverished blacks is wrong. I consider it to be spreading the knowledge, sharing what I know about education and how it has had an impact on my life. Often times among black people who are disadvantaged, it isn't because they are willing know-nothings or deliberately want their children to fail in school. Sometimes it is simply because they don't know what to do. Often the educated among us are so insistent on defending ebonics or insistent that black children who fail have just been labeled or whatever, we don't even bother talking to the actual people who need our help the most.
I've been extremely poor, I've lived 'in the hood', I've had my kids in 'hood' schools. I've talked to other black parents in these schools, and the things that the middle class take for granted and do for their children, poor and/or uneducated blacks often just don't know to do or how to do. Like reading to their kids every night when they are pre-schoolers or teaching them the alphabet. The children of educated people come to kindergarten knowing their colors, knowing basic shapes, knowing how to count, knowing the alphabet, sometimes even already knowing how to read. It's not that poor black people don't want their kids to know this stuff, it's that they think the school is going to teach them...no one ever told them about how to prepare a child for school so that they come with the very basics of education already in their minds.
Instead of preaching about what white folks did to cause this dynamic in our community, why aren't we preaching about how we can change it? Why aren't we spreading the word to our fellow black people who are at a disadvantage, because of economics or their own poor education, about how to prepare their children for education in the school system? How to support and help their children do well in school?
Is it perhaps because some of us truly believe that whites ultimately control our behavior? That they control what we do or don't do? That white people have to change before we can change?
What do you think?
Labels: accountablity, responsibility
posted by Trula at
1:30 PM
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