Black Men: The Crisis Continues

Black men in crisis. Ho hum.

Solutions to black men in crisis - now that could be dynamite!

Okay- enough already about the sorry state of the american black man.  Common sense ought to tell all of us that it’s too late to save 99.99% of the men this article addresses.

SAVE THE CHILDREN. SAVE THE BLACK BABIES- BOYS and girls. Okay?  Read to a child, mentor a child, sponsor financial literacy - entrepreneurial camps, teach them about responsibility, morals and the love of God and fellow (wo)man.  Because if you take a good hard look at the men in the inner city so many of them have given up and just don’t give a damn anymore. 

By all means, let us continue to encourage, support and edify our black brothers who are still in the struggle.  For those who have given up the cause, just pray for them.  AND LET’S MOVE ON.

Fuck God, and fuck you.  Both of you.

You can hardly solve a problem if you do not know what the problem is.

President Johnson promoted the “Great Society”, and a major part of the program was Welfare.  But Welfare had the effect of making babies valuable, and men worthless.  Babies got money payments, but the presence of a man in the home reduced those payments.  Welfare cost $6.6 trillion dollars before it was eliminated, and the only impractical effect of welfare was to destroy the black family.

President Clinton was nearly as mindless as Jimmeh Carter, but even Clinton saw that Welfare was not working and did something about it, thirty years after Daniel Patrick Moynihan described the problem. 

But the problem now is the great number of unattached black males.  How do you build family values in an environment which regularly assaults family values: abortion, gay rights, illegitimacy, etc.  Chiseron says to “move on”.  OK, how?  Chiseron as some good ideas, but we need a massive, non-bureaucratic, effort.  Aye, that’s the rub.

Actually, the practical effect of welfare was to mitigate the poverty endured by the indigent whose services were no longer required by the businessmen who once employed them.  Millions were fed, housed, clothed and educated by a government which recognized its responsibility “to promote the general welfare”.  No one claimed to be “saving souls” or “building family values” or whatever other fatuous euphemism politicians employ to flog the faithful.  It was understood that people were free to form their own “values” and save their own “souls”, without the benevolent interference of the god squad.

MM -

Oh, gosh, I have to apologize.  I did not realize that your “millions” of people who were formerly on Welfare are now starving, homeless, and naked, and now are ignorant, whereas during Welfare they were all “fed, housed, clothed and educated”, by the “government” ( the taxpayer, in reality).  So, why don’t we just put everyone on Welfare, and solve all our problems?

Or, you could pull your head out of your leftist ass, and realize that before Welfare, they worked to support themselves, and after Welfare, they again worked to support themselves - even as you and I. 

Back some years ago, I read that it cost $30,000 to create a job; I am sure the cost has not gone down in the last dozen years or so.  But how many jobs could be created by $6.6 trillion, which is approximately the same as the national debt?  Money which is taxed away to support socialist bureaucratic schemes is not available for job creation.  This is the dilemma Old Europe finds itself in; the bloated Eurobureaucracy consumes billions in resources while millions are out of work.

The USA economy limped along from the start of Johnson’s Great Society until Reagan lowered taxes and established economic reforms, after which the economy went into the greatest sustained advance in history.  Unfortunately, Clinton had no economic program or knowledge, and he raised taxes and allowed the economy to overheat (the Bubba Bubble).  The dotcom crash came in Clinton’s last year, when the NASDAQ fell from over 5000 to under 2000, which lead directly to the recession in 2001.  Fortunately, my man Bush was on the job, restored the tax cuts, and the economy again took off, but on a sustainable level, unlike Clinton’s debacle. 

The American economy is an amazing, resilient thing, and only gets into trouble when Dimocrats raise taxes and try to help the victims they define and create.

MM -

It was understood that people were free to form their own “values” and save their own “souls”, without the benevolent interference of the god squad.

So, if “people were free to form their own ‘values’”, why does the leftist ACLU and the leftist media universally assault traditional values?  Religion and family life have played a strong positive role in our culture (and most cultures), including black culture.  But black culture and the USA economy were badly treated under the socialist Great Society, at great cost to everyone.  Now you are out to destroy traditional culture and substitute the tender mercies of the socialist bureaucracy. 

You have taken three contradictory and opposing viewpoints:

1) People are free to choose their own values.

2) Leftists attack traditional values.

3) Leftists substitute destructive socialist bureaucratic values for traditional values.

The “god squad” values have proven infinitely better than the horrors of socialist corruption, inefficiency, repression, and death.

You hope to profit from the loss of order and the creation of chaos, but the chaos you are aiming for has already been achieved - in the Old Soviet Union and now, in a somewhat different form, in Old Europe.  But hope springs eternal, and you think that you can do better this time.  Based on what, pray tell?  Old, dead Marx?

The problem defined as Black Men In Crisis that scorp so vehemently defined in the racist terms of the conservative movement is another attempt to blame the victime for deficiencie in the society they created and live off. Young black men are the canaries in the coalmine of a industrial capitalist society.

Young black men are simply the most vulnerable but eventually a society predicated on greed will eventually devour all its children. Trained by the schools to accept a life of isolation, vunerability and quiet desparation they no longer can find protection in a sense of community and collective strength. The schools train all children to accept lives of anomynity and quiet desparation. Hered like cattle from one grade to another and graded like some quality control program gone amuck they no longer yearn for happiness and a sense of fullfilment - all of this has been reduced to consumerism and a purchased identity. Scorn is eating our children now but his insatiable greed will eventually drive him to devour his own. WHen A society rejoices in the destruction of significant portions of its society - for any reason even their deficits - then it needs to look at itself. That may too much to ask of Scorn. He may no longer be able to see himself beyond the bitterness and hate that he thrives on.

Baraka -

Are you one person, or two?  Your first paragraph is a mindless collection of cliches, thoroughly off-putting.  But your second paragraph is well thought out and evocative. 

In fact, your second paragraph is main-stream conservative. 

The NEA and the education hierarchy are among the main components of the Dimocrat’s constituency politics, and these are the people who look to their own interests, to the exclusion of the interests of the children that need education.  Thus we have Dims in Florida and Michigan limiting the avalilability of school vouchers, knowing that school vouchers deliver quality education at low cost; but then how would the NEA meet its funding and political goals if children went somewhere else for an education?

President Bush picked up several points among black voters in the 2004 election by appealing to shared values; many functional black families have strong moral, religious, and family values.  The Dims did not appreciate that and immediately redoubled their attacks on Bush in order to keep blacks on board the Dimocratic train to nowhere.

I have absolutely no problem with feel-good policies and politics, as long as they are rooted in rational, factual fundamentals.  But Johnson’s Great Society was rooted in socialist nonsense, and blacks were the particular victims of the Dims’ stupidity, as described so well in this article. 

The recent plight of black Americans has been adversely affected by socialist policies.  If you need a vision of just how bad socialist policies can become, look to the Soviet Union with its corruption, inefficiency, destruction, and death.  That is what is being described in this article, but Muwakkil somehow thinks that more socialism will solve the problems socialism has created.  But in every single example we have, more socialism creates worse problems.  I defy you to show me an exception to this general rule.

“The scholars cite many reasons for this deterioration. Primary among them are bad schools, absent parents, racism, structural changes in the economy and a subculture that glorifies gangsterism.”

The above quote from the New York Times article provides some clues as to what has contributed to the plight of black men in America.

However, the average reader in America will not make much sense out of those examples because 1.The welfare of black people has always been anathema to white Americans and 2. As a result of (1), these examples will only lead to an intraracial deficiency analysis that points to the inadequacy and moral degenerancy of black people.

in my opinion, racism is the main reason. The other three are subcategories of racism. For example, why are there bad schools? Bad schools are born out of bad neighborhoods. Bad neighborhoods exist because of their relationship to “good” or shall we say wealthy neighborhoods (racial housing segregration and racial districting in America is well documented). Bad neighorboods are also characterized by a lack of resources (food, shelter, clothing, healthcare, poverty, underemployment, unemployment - in short, all the things that constitute the quality of life. All of these manifestations are reflected in the racialized neighborhoods that make up America and that restructure access to resources and structural relations of power.

Absent Parents. The family structure within the black community has always been in a constant state of struggle in terms of the ability to remain supportive and nurturing as a collective group in the context of racial hostility and social violence. The average white person simply is not sensitive enough to understand the impact of this which has lasted for centuries. The amazing thing is that the black community has been able to establish wonderful networks of caring IN SPITE OF racism. Yet, the current assault on black men has brought us face to face with a serious crisis.

Structural changes in the economy refer once again to the restructuring of society to accommodate significant changes in the global capitalist era, such as out sourcing labor, and more recently, moving suburbanites back into metropolitan areas, formerly perceived by white folks as a menacing place filled with black criminals, pushing out poor working class families who live within or around the perrimeter of these areas. This once again stems from racism, not so much because white people are sitting around planning these things but out of a persisting social pattern that has duplicated itself for generations and generations to sustain white domination and class privilege.

Gangsterism of course is the outcome of living in a neighborhood where the systemcatic pattern of poverty and marginalization has led to alternative economies and the base masculine behavior of gangsterism that functions as an destructive overcompensation of the racist and impoverished conditions that black men continue to face.

These are all outcomes of American-style racism: a society of power and privilege that is centered around white supremacy, even when whites themselves are faced with problems of their own. American society always finds a way to punish black people by implementing racist legal and institutional policies that disproportionately affect black men.

Scorp is willing to identify my comments on the canaries in the coalmine as a mindless collection of clichés and then goes on to drag our his own favorite mindless and unsubstantiated clichés in rebuttal. There is not one clear critically constructed thought in his following diatribe. Just more conservative rambling and posturing.

Obviously the product of a mediocre public school education.  His conservative capitalist notion of an equitable society is undercut by a system that has as it governing virtue _ Greed. The desire to make as much money as possible at any cost to anyone but one’s self drips from his commentary. He will eat his children for a price, seasoned or not.

Any one of any political persuasion that holds Geo. Bush up as a model for ethical of effective behavior of any stripe should be dismissed out of hand, like his father before him and the Nazi loving grandfather before him. Never mind the racist and empty-headed movie star R. Reagan.

These personalities are in their own way vile and tI should not be distracted by mediocre political rambling of little substance that distract my energy away from the issues which plaque our country.

The industrial society has reached its zenith and is now on its way down.  One does not need to look to the Russian society to find the cause of human suffering. Capitalism in this country has provide enough examples of greed and corruption.

White men came to this country and stole the natural resources of the indigenous people in ways that creatively out strips anything socialism could ever create or execute. Even now in the 21st century the institutional racism and the greed of the white oligarchy that prey upon the labor of its citizens is beyond comparison. We have a government, republican and democratic that is owned by the corporate oligarchy. The advance of some with the marginalization of everyone else is a hustle like the lottery where one or two win while millions learn to be good losers

“Those areas where people are motivated the most by greed are the areas that we’re the most satisfied with: supermarkets, computers, FedEx.” By contrast, areas “where people say we’re motivated by ‘caring’”—public education, public housing etc.—“are the areas of disaster in our country. . . .

Does anything get done based on “human love and kindness”? Well, a nonprofit group called City Harvest collects donations of restaurants’ surplus food for the poor. But where does that food come from? Greedy people like Virgil Rosanke produce it, and greedy restaurateurs buy it. Kindness can only give away the goods self-love provides.

mmmm......capitalism

Thank You Baraka and Epistrophy

How can anyone stand next to the Strom Thurmund/Tren Lott ‘s of the world and say “ I’m not a racist !!! “

Let’s consider the sense of entitlement which continues to permeate our society. Todays wealthy believe they deserve their gains because of their own acumen and the poor just don’t have “ it “.

Baraka has a good point. Scorp is definetely seasoning his children before sending them out to colonize. Always conservatively and using the brand “ Salt of the Earth “

To properly answer this question we have to look at the structure of our society.

Throwing welfare dollars at a societal structure designed by Moloch, the evil child-eating deity, might not in the end work out. 

What has Moloch been up to lately? 
Please research prison construction vs. school construction (California in the 90’s as the biggest example, though Massachusetts is currently trying this out).

California’s prison system was privatized (read: companies can make $ off of the incarcerated) and prison construction rose 700% in a years when violent crime was decreasing.

This will make for dry reading, in order to spice things up start looking at the referendums that were going before Californian voters at the same time.  They were trying to find ways to give jail time for spray painting graffiti.  They were trying to label small groups of kids hanging out together gangs.  I wonder if the prison lobby in California had something to do with these referendums?

Next up, take a look at the public school disparities that exist, try Birmingham, Michigan vs Detroit, Michigan (Moloch was born in a little house right off Woodward).  But why pick on Detroit?  We could also use some rural Michigan towns where school years have been shortened due to a lack of funds.

Moloch does not want an additional Bill of Rights concerning Education.

The public schools were created to transform an agrarian population into an industrial workforce.  You can’t operate a steel mill without draftsmen, engineers, metallurgists and chemists.  Unfortunately, the teachers invested with the responsibility of educating their students actually assumed their responsiblities and taught their students to appreciate less practical subjects, such as Art, Music, English Lit, Economics, Sociology and Political Science, which compelled many of their proteges to assume a correspondingly critical perspective with respect to the more traditional American institutions of racism, sexism, class stratification and imperialism, which in turn transformed an ignorant, labor-intensive agricultural workforce into an educated, capital-intensive industrial workforce, one which became increasingly more aware of the actual value of its own labor and united among themselves to demand their fair share of the profits to be derived from it.  Faced with the unappealing prospect of providing a commensurate compensation for the people who actually performed the work, commensurate to the compensation given to those who simply supervised the labor of those who did, our industrial titans decided instead to transfer their enterprise to more pastoral environs, first to the suburbs, then to the exurbs, then out of the state, and finally out of the country.  Those who could afford to follow the industrial migration were easilly incorporated into its system, while those who could not were allowed to remain mired in their own misery, one which was created by misers who immiserate the miserable with half-assed theories of market economics and religious salvation, when in fact their primary objective is to maintain the comfort, power and privilege to which they believe they remain eternally entitled.

Epistrophy -

“The scholars cite many reasons for this deterioration. Primary among them are bad schools, absent parents, racism, structural changes in the economy and a subculture that glorifies gangsterism.”

The above quote from the New York Times article provides some clues as to what has contributed to the plight of black men in America.

Your interpretation of the NYT article is imaginative, dynamic, fanciful nonsense.

In the first place, if you rely on the NYT for information, you are screwed. 

Bad Schools

You seem to be genuinely concerned about the status of education for blacks.  You must be aware that public education is not doing to well for anybody.  In the 1970s, the Teachers Unions (NEA, AFT) organized as overtly partisan political forces.  These Unions donate to leftist political causes (not always related to education) and to the Dimocratic Party and Dimocratic politicians.  For years, 10% or more of the delegates to the quadrennial Dimocratic Presidential Conventions have been Union teachers or educational administrators.  I can’t find any related figures for the Republicans, but I expect that the number of NEA delegate at a Republican Convention are near zero. 

Our colleges, particularly in the soft subjects (social sciences, critical studies, education, English, journalism) typically have faculties that vote 90% Dimocratic.

So, the people who educate our teachers and the teachers who educate our children both have a strong bias toward leftists Dimocrat positions.  This has been going on for thirty years.  You do not like the results.  Who the hell do you think has created this situation?

Absent Parents

President Johnson’s Great Society paid women and children to make male parents scarce.  It wasted $6.6 trillion dollars and utterly wrecked millions of black families.  What do you want me to do about it, I didn’t vote for the son-of-a-bitch.

Racism

Now we have a real problem, not one manufactured by the Dimocrats.  Two of the seminal actions to eliminate racism were Lincoln’s War Between the States and Eisenhower’s calling out the troops to protect black students in Little Rock.  Lincoln and Eisenhower were Republicans.  The “Solid South” could have just as well have been called the “Solid Racist Dimocratic South”.  The Civil Rights Act 1964 was first drafted by Senator Dirksen.  Dirksen was a Republican.  The final vote for the Civil Rights Act 1964 (from Wikipedia):

Democratic Party: 153-91 (63%-37%)
Republican Party: 136-35 (80%-20%)

Kindly note that a much higher percentage of Republicans than Dimocrats voted for the Act.  The Solid Racist Dimocratic South voted against it.

Structural Changes in the Economy

I cannot tell from the info available just what this refers to, but I expect it includes Free Trade.  NAFTA was passed during the Clinton Administration, and has had a very positive effect on our economy and the economies of the countries with which we share free trade.  But, yes, it has had an effect on the work force.  Since the leftist Dimocratic educators were not doing their jobs, it had a greater effect on those at the bottom of the economic ladder who did not have access to the education to take advantage of the changes in the economy.  Who the hell do you think has created this situation?

Continued .....

A Subculture that Glorifies Gangsterism

Glorifying gangsterism is not a Republican vice.  But it is a fact that sports and entertainment are prominent in our culture, and a few thousand black people hit it big.  Unfortunately, a few million people think that they might hit it big, and they neglect their studies to concentrate on their ball handling, rap, and batting averages.  At any given time there are exactly 1440 NFL player slots, and a couple of million young men who think they can pull down one of those slots.  There is zero payoff for the vast majority of those who spend their time practicing ball or so-called music.  Most of them simply don’t make it. 

At the same time, there is a very high demand for educated and skilled young people for good paying jobs, if they want to try a more conventional line of work. 

You may pretend that everything is racial, but it is not.  Defining the problem wrongly restricts your ability to deal with the problem.

MM -

Faced with the unappealing prospect of providing a commensurate compensation for the people who actually performed the work, commensurate to the compensation given to those who simply supervised the labor of those who did, our industrial titans decided instead to transfer their enterprise to more pastoral environs, first to the suburbs, then to the exurbs, then out of the state, and finally out of the country.  Those who could afford to follow the industrial migration were easilly incorporated into its system, while those who could not were allowed to remain mired in their own misery, one which was created by misers who immiserate the miserable with half-assed theories of market economics and religious salvation, when in fact their primary objective is to maintain the comfort, power and privilege to which they believe they remain eternally entitled.

You may fancy yourself as an alliterist, but don’t give up your day job just yet.

You do realize that what you have written is utter nonsense, don’t you?  Please say yes.  We have to live with a certain amount of stupidity, but ignorance can be corrected.

The metrics of the American economy go up and down.  When Dimocrats implement their policies (Great Society, Bubba Bubble), the metrics go down.  Dimocratic policies are broadly characterized by rising tax rates and, in consequence, declining investment.  Republican policies are characterized by declining tax rates and rising investment, and the metrics go up.  Investment creates wealth, jobs, tax receipts.  Taxes destroy wealth, jobs, tax receipts. 

For all our perceived problems, the American economy is in near optimal shape, with high employment, high growth, and low inflation.  The other two large, growing economies are China and India, which have both recently rejected socialist economic policies in favor of free markets, and the results have been spectacular.  Other large economies (Old Europe, Brazil, Argentina) are still bagged down in high tax and big bureaucracy swamps, and are going nowhere. 

In fact, the role of public schools changes over time.  At the time of the American Revolution, Jefferson foresaw America as an agrarian society, and he thought that farmers, after working all day in the fields, would come home at night and study the classics in the original Greek and Latin. 

The only untoward educational development recently has been the hijacking of the Academy by socialists and Marxists.  But fashions in scholarship are trailing indicators, so academic socialists are now a dying breed, and will soon be gone, with minimal damage to the Republic.

scorp:
and you call my response nonsense? I’m not sure if you were responding to my comments are just venting.

You are all over the map with your comments but the subject of black men seemed to escape you.

The quote you start out with is actually taken from the above article by Muwakkil. I would continue this correspondence further, but nothing could possibly come from it.

Good Grief, Gomer.  I didn’t mean to confuse you.

Actually, I did, but I can see that your ideological armor renders you impervious to reasonable discourse.  You’re obviously the product of a parochial education.  In your Manichean universe, the Democrats are evil and the Republicans epitomize an apotheosis of civic virtue.  In such a universe it’s easy to demonize the soft sciences and deify the more phallic, mathematical and physical academic disciplines.  You might be surprised (and dismayed) to discover that economics and market finance are included among the former, flaccid category.  In fact, it’s become increasingly apparent that the hard sciences have lately lost much of their, um, rigid rigor, what with quantum mechanics and Godel’s inconsistency theorems, and all that…

Sorry about the alliteration.

Nevertheless, I’m encouraged to observe that we agree on a variety of topics, namely, that “fashions in scholarship are trailing indicators”, by which I assume you mean that the general quality of education has declined.  Of course, you blame the socialists and the Marxists for this unfortunate event, whereas I can only once more reiterate what I had previously stated: that we live in a postindustrial universe where the industry is increasingly outsourced away from traditional urban or national centers, in pursuit of cheap labor, by the people who own the industries and regard the subsequent social dislocation they create as inconsequential to their own personal interests.  The quality of education is coupled to the quantiy of industrial development.  As industrial development declines, so does the quality of education, at least for the people whose skills and services are no longer required.  You don’t have to be a supply-side, free-market, evangelical economist to understand this.

In fact, your inability to understand it proves the point.

Scorp and other Repubs. want to point the racist finger at Dems ?!?!
Answer the Trent Lott Question !!!!

Scorp:

Your response is in the main interesting and well put but like so many racists essential bent to conform to an immoral point of view. Democrat or Republican is of little matter. I could characterize the differences but find that dichotomy of little value. Your references condemn you. To align you point of view with republican or free market values reveals the villain behind your intelligence.

There is a false notion that political pundits like to hang their hat on, namely, to embrace industrial capitalism is to be in favor of individualism and the strength of the individual effort in the form of a zero sum paradigm – that the winner takes all. The antithesis of this is the communal paradigm in which we are all in this together and the rules of the game is to make every one a winner – non zero sum strategies. In the first, the community can be used to the benefit of the individual and in the second the individual must be sacrificed for the good of the community. 

In fact one cannot exist without the other and the more enlightened view would be to see that the community is essential to the success of the individual and without recognition of the individual there can be no community.

Scorp on the other hand is like Geo Bush born on third bas he declares that he must have hit a triple. It is that unbridled presumptuousness that characterizes so many white people, one of privilege and presumptuousness. Hitler was smart too but not wise or caring. For all his brilliance he was a bigot and a racist, and his madness eventually revealed itself.

The schools are not working and they quietly conduct a social engineering effort to conditioning our children into believing that the isolation, anguish and vulnerability of industrial life were natural and acceptable. Working for money without any sense of personal gain or satisfaction, the unbending obedience to authority and a willingness to forgo any sense of identity and purpose was exactly what was called for in an industrial society.

I’ll have none of it and none of the tirade and racism that Scorp wears as a hair shirt. Forced to exchange ideas with a black person who sees him for what he is and pities him. So bright but so empty. His political history is probably right but white men in the form of a lynch mob don’t have a political party and they will always bend their political reality to fit their greed and presumptuousness.

The country is in terrible shape run by narrow self-serving white men in suits who would send our children to Iraq for their own corporate interests. Moving more and more of the national wealth from the workers to the oligarchy.
Brother can you spare a dime?

It is not your intelligence but the immoral rant in favor of your own self-interests. There is neither a kind word nor a sense of concern for the commonwealth in his rant, only the sly ranting of another white supremacist.

Its quite obvious that racism still exists, and that the ramifications of it are still present.  Yet, I still question whether in 2006, it is racism is the main force keeping black men down, black people in general.  This has been a given truth to me for many years, but when I look at my fellow peers, at school, at home, on the streets, I cant help but to see other elements leading to some of thier demise.  In addition, I cant help but see how these other elements are disregarded because the “self evident truth” is that blacks are being held back by a racist government and white people. 

The “racism explains the demise of the black male” is not a self evident truth that is never questioned to me anymore.  I think it hurts when we fail to look at ourselves, and take responsibility for some of the things we have done.  It hurts when the self destructive patterns are discussed, yet blamed on racis {ie., single parent black families exist because the system is set up to demise black men, not, some black men have failed to be responsible for their children}.  That means we as black people have no responsibility in our decisions and actions.  This means that black people in are helpless victims who are so inferiror we cant even help ourselves.

And this notion is false.  About a month ago I went to the Berkeley Conference of African Americans at UCB.  I had never seen so many successful blacks unified in a gathering like that before.  There were doctors, teachers, public service people, lawyers and bussinessmen.  And no-these people are not tokens as many say they are.  Members of my family that have risen from adversity are not token success stories.  The decisions, actions and hard work of these people have beared the fruit of thier success. 

We still have some work to do in the area of equality, yet year after year I find it hard to believe that racism is what is holding us back-because it hasnt held me, my peers [including males], family, mentors, and the many successful/unsuccessful black folk i know back.  Furthermore, the “self evident truth” has become harder and harder to believe because I see self destructing patterns that have hurt our plight in many significant ways.  These are the same self destructing patterns which are blamed on racism.  And finally, its become harder for me to believe because were are not inferior, we are a strong people and equal.  And with that equality, we are just as responsible for our decisions and actions as every other human being.

As for solutions, I dont completely know.  I have found that mentoring, makes a small but significant differnece .  When i tutor young black elementry students, and I tell them i go to UCB, they start to think “if she can, then i can” and I have had the likewise experience with my mentors.  We should push for school reform yet at the same time we should have more of a value of our education as we have [yall know what im talking bout, “at least get c’s so you can go to the 6th grade, or “education is for white folk” attitude].  non profits and or faith based programs that not only aid those in need, but lead to a path of self sufficiency seem like a good idea also.

To: Berkeleygurl

I owe many people on this exchange an apology. I felt that Scorp, by his comments and the derogatory quality of his rhetoric was holding on to racist views and I labeled them as such. I beleive the larger society is searching for some sense of fairness and equity all though not very successfully. The lack of success is due in large part to the institutional racism in the government and the actions of the congress and other institutions that maintain and reflect an attraction to racist views and opinions. Institutional racism in our schools and commercial institutions are obvious and widespread. There is also the classicism of an industrial society that removes the opportunity of equity from those already hampered by institutional bias.

The tone and generosity of your posting made realize how much can be gained from a temperate and kind approach to discussion and dialogue – including my own clarity of thought and insightfulness. Thank you!

I still hold a lot of anger and hate for no one in particular, but stored like some genetic defect acquired from 70 years of American citizenship. I try to not let it take over my live and harden my heart but I am not always successful just as scorp gives into a villainous spew of half facts and distortions. He/she might be equally trapped in his anger like I have been on many occasions so I will try to be more understanding in the future.

I need to look more carefully at my assumptions and perhaps others will do the same as a reasonable and critical precursor to dialogue.

Keep the conversation going.

If racism hasn’t held you back I suppose you can gurantee your wage will be the same as your white counterparts ...

Do they have affirmative action at Berkley?

It’s easy to say “ I made it why can’t you ?”

You can be as responsible as you want , but if you don’t have a Math textbook you are not going to pass Math. If you have no bootstraps you can’t pull them up…

Please reread Majormajor and Epistrophy above and try to understand…

The handfull of our sucessful fellow African-Americans you encountered are as diverse as the Gangstaz on the block and neither got there by themselves.

6% of all African-Americans in the inner city schools in Chicago go to college...These high schools are overrun with the street, lack simple tools to be able to regurgitate trivia for the state tests (no child left .......), no books , no labs equipt. overcrowded classrooms, no PE for non athletes, no music supplies, no art supplies, etc.......
The sad truth is when I visit these children really do want to learn - not condecended to, not lied to, and not bamboozeled by this system.

Fredrick Douglass pointed out the adverse affects of psycological Slavery.

once a month the slaveowner would throw a little party for their slaves --
let’em run free a little bit—then on Monday you’d be pickin cotton again.

People who have power will remain in power by any means nessessary
(see GWB)
How many African-americans are in the Senate??

Enjoy your party berkeleygurl

Mr. Muwakkil:

I can relate to your frustration and understand why you come back to the issue of Black men in America.  What I can’t appreciate is your referencing articles published in the NY Times.  My concern is why nobody ever ask Black men why we’re in the situation we’re in, and specifically why nobody ever ask those Black men these studies portray why they are in the situation they’re in.  To a man you’d probably find that somewhere along the line they made a decision or were affected by a decision that another Black man made that steered their life down a path toward their current state.  Also to a man, if they could pinpoint that one decision we’d all discover that the decision was in effect a rejection of the subserviant role prescribed to Africans by Europeans over the last 500 or so years.  Black men who throw their lives away by making decisions that lead to their ruin are actually committing social suicide.  This suicide is an act of total and absolute rejection of white subjegation represented by white culture and values.  Black American history is a history of resistance.  Many more Africans died and/or committed suicide during the middle passage than made it to these shores.  Black men in America are jumping ship, many would much rather be dead (or among the living dead) than live under European domination.

I wonder - why help/focus on poor black people? Why not just help/focus on poor people. . .?

Even then, the problems are very difficult to even begin to address. How do you help children abandoned/neglected by their parents? How does government - or other agencies such as churches, etc - help individuals who reject their help? Or are unaware that help exists? Can institutions solve the problems of individuals? Can the macroscopic fix the microscopic?

Either way, it seems better to concentrate on the actual problem - poverty. Regardless of whether the impoverished are black, white, red, yellow or even green.

Baraka -

You have referred to me as racist.  Regardless of how poorly I express myself, racist I am not. 

We are totally agreed that the black community, and black men in particular, have a major problem.  The problem is of long duration.  The problem was made catastrophically worse by paying black women and children to have black men abandon and neglect their families, which is what the Great Society Welfare program did. 

President Johnson’s Welfare program established the game rules whereby responsibility was taken from men and dependence was inflicted on women.  The Democratic Party has played the game to perfection, assisted by a few prominent black leaders.  The great mass of blacks were made dependent victims, and nothing was expected of them.  You and I are complaining about the same result. 

Natalie and Berkeleygurl are the only two people on this site who have made practical statements on solving this problem.  But my field is management dynamics, and I assure you that glorifying and subsidizing dependence is destructive to the hierarchy’s chosen victims, that is, the Democratic Party’s chosen black victims.  It is personally, socially, and culturally destructive, just as you have identified in your complaints.  Subsidizing the victim does not cure the problem, it only assures that the problem continues. 

We must find a way to restore power and independence to the black community and to black men.  That is our only hope.

As long as blacks keep dropping out of high school and then those dropouts have kids ... there is no hope.

Actually I think it’s too late already.

And the only one’s to blame are the blacks themselves.

No one forced them to drop out, no one forced them to have kids when they don’t even have a high school diploma.

First of all let me address the idiocy of Tina1.

It is common to blame the victim and her screed does nothing more than that. The schools are failing everyone and are in fact an effort at social engineering that prepares the workers of this country for a life of isolation, humiliation and impotence. The school fail everyone and deny our children their humanity and convinces them that the industrial life of degradation and subservience is inevitable and appropriate. It trains us to accepts unhappiness as the natural fallout from industrial life. You get out of high school unable to ask a reasonable question or initiate an open discussion that results in greater understanding or a higher level of consciousness.

Schools produce automatons who thrive on a single viscera – greed. Blame everyone and take what you can for yourself. This is a system that reflects the worst ambitions and those who understand it drop out as an alternative to the ignominious life of an industrial worker.

To drop out of school may seem the worse possible option but when you think that this nation has fallen into the craven hands of a C student from Yale the system is revealed for what it is.

Now Scorp:
I totally agree with your analysis and the conclusion of the results of the Johnson war on poverty but that the white bigots in the South who ran the Senate and the House of Representatives crafted that legislation. That’s the only way they would allow a war on poverty and Johnson bought it. They became the Republican majority that now runs the country.

They destroyed the Black family and Monihan, then a professor at Harvard, declared it as such.

The oligarchs in the Republican Party have looted the wealth of the nation, which is its labor and traded it for money that could be stashed away in banks and bonds. Those oligarchs own this country and use it to have the public resource take the risk through an elaborate shill game of corporate welfare while they treat the product as private money that they deserve and eventually acquire.

Finally, The industrial organization, a machine, is trying to disguise itself as a community that everyone can belong to and find succor and support. Nothing could be further from the truth. Organizations run as systemic devices that depend on complexity for vitality are essentially flawed. The people trapped in them are beginning to rebel and search for more intimate and satisfying relationships with one another – they are seeking organic communities that have a potential for a collective consciousness.

Remember the industrialist promised more product with less labor and capitalism said we could become from the drudgery of labor in a rational world of productivity – more for less, and the cult of efficiency. Bullshit we work even harder but now our labor has been converted into currency which is controlled by the oligarchs and the more we produce the less our efforts are worth and eventually they own us. The wealth moves into the hand of the oligarchs who’s only motive is GREED. Now young black men are dropping out but soon everyone will be dropping out as they recognize the emptiness of the educational system. Where is Socrates when we nee him?

WE are unhappy and dissatisfied, working too hard for less and less while the CEO of Exxon/Mobile walks with 400 million (or was it billion?) in retirement. Young Black men must know that the only game in town is not designed for them on some intuitive level and decide to opt out for the immediate but shortsighted benefit of the street. (Lord of the Flies societies) The epidemic of depression in western society might simply be the symptom of a dying and desperate planet erupting from our submerged and battered psyches.

Why is it that the dropout rate is so high in black areas?

Why is that the most sucessful schools have the highest parent involvement?

Why is that even in an all black high school some of those black students excell and go on to college?

My cousin is a teacher and she wanted to teach in a low income school, so she did.  She taught 3rd grade in a school in the poorest area ... and guess what happened.  She disciplinted a black girl that was out of line and the girl went home and told her mom.  Instead of her mom telling the little girl that she shouldn’t act like that ... the mom came down to the school complaining about my cousin (teacher). 

It gets better.  The mom found a picture of her daughter’s teacher in a flyer and made many copies and posted them on telephone poles around the school insulting the teacher, my cousin.  So my cousin left and taught at another school, an all white school.

Now what did that the little 3rd grade girl learn?  She learned that there was no penalty for her behavior, in fact, she was rewarded by her mom for her bad behavior by getting rid of her teacher.  And you wonder why 60% of our jail and prison population is black ... 60% of all inmates are black but blacks make up only about 15% of our population.

Can you figure it out now?

tina1 - i also know teachers who have had similar experiences (in both black and white schools), But there is more. What about the child sitting next to the troublemaker, whose life is disrupted (both by the troublemakers themselves and even worse, their being abandoned by competent teachers)? The good kids pay the same price as the “bad” ones. (Here there is an obvious solution however - the principle should back up the teachers. But that is a rarity, at least where i live.)

Furthermore, parents who have little financial resources tend to be: 1) not that bright; 2) scrambling to make ends meet (long hours on the job); and 3) way too overstressed emotionally and physically. Even under the best of circumstances, it is tough to raise children, but under poor circumstances a lot is simply left to “luck” (which obviously is mostly bad).

Of course, none of this is a “black” problem. It is a problem of how to deal with the underclass. Any viable solution has to take into account that there always will be a bottom 25% of people with respect to motivation, intelligence, morals, etc. Many (perhaps most) of these people could make useful contributions to society, if the circumstances were favorable. It is no benefit to anyone to dump massive amounts of people in prison (wasted lives and wasted tax dollars).

One person can make a difference. Here there are programs for people to read to kids in the disadvantaged schools. One can mentor a child that needs help. We are what we do. All of us have the capacity to make the world a better place, one child at a time. . .

Dear Tina1
Was your relative the teacher who was ill-prepared for class and upset that a little black girl disrupted her decorum? Or was she the wonderful teacher who had just had enough of the noise and lack of discipline for one day or was the mother just fed up with the stench of middle class values and privilege that alienates her from the educational system?

It could have been any number of things none of which disputes your version of what happened but to form policy on the basis of your bias against black children and their parents is exactly what we do. For all you know it might have been the curriculum or your relative’s lack of confidence or pedagogical preparation. It might have been the unsuitability of that child for that class or that parent for what has been her particular load to bear in life and none of it your relatives fault or capacity to solve but your assessment from the anecdotal tale you wove for us reeks of the same vile prejudices that drive our country and taints our school systems.

But lets form a policy out of your story. First lets put the mother in jail for slander and take her children and make them wards of the state. Now lets punish the little girl for not having an adequate mother or family life and financial resources to be born into the middle class. Throw her out of school because she doesn’t deserve to be there. Lets look around and find all those undeserving black children and their no good parents and put them away so that your middle class family and do gooder motives can be adequately rewarded. I am ashamed that the mother and child didn’t recognize the missionary work your family is doing for them and act accordingly – you know something like taking a maids job in your home for minimal wages. Oh. You don’t need a maid? Well we must find something interesting for them to do so that they don’t get into trouble learning how to use a Xerox machine that could be used to defame your relative’s good name.

Dear Tina1 May God have mercy on your soul, with the milk of human kindness by the quart in every vein.

Ah, the Wolf,

I can see you have your heart in the right place. You have been carefully taught to be a bigot, black or white, male or female. Reducing people to percentages of moral certitude.”…25% are morally unfit” Are these among the top 2% of the population who have the money and the power to send the children of the underclass to Iraq to die for oil? Are they the 1% who own 99% of the wealth of the nation and want more? Who are the morally important class of people you refer to in your posting?

Are they Christian Jihadist who would outlaw any religion but their own and would impose their morals and way of life on the rest of us? Perhaps they are the really smart members of our society that made the bombs that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilian in Japan? Perhaps they are the brilliant government officials in smart suits drifting around the president while poor people in New Orleans were drowning?

I know those smart people who are empty of any values whatsoever but greed and white (middle class) privilege. I know you guys are struggling for salvation through the paternalism of Christian missionaries, helping the poor and downtrodden to achieve the reward you deserve.

The schools don’t need missionaries we need better schools for the poor and the adequately trained and motivated teachers that can support learning, even at the risk of middle class indifference. The need an adequate share of the resources they produce in this country. The country is in terrible shape economically, energy-wise, resources, quality of life and political leadership and the class responsible for this situation is that class that you believe are the best and the brightest. The poor and ill informed and abused are not responsible for the thousands being killed in Iraq or the children without health care or the housing that is not even fit for chickens. It is the rich who ignore Darfor.

Don’t get me started Wolf. Your unctuous air of superiority places a bright light on your motives. Let me suggest that you do things that come with the motive of living a life Christ would be proud of. Offer those impaired by a ruthless economic system your love and support, your affection and good will. Talk with them and listen to their story with an open heart and mercy and compassion. If just one poor person knows they are not being ignored you will have been successful, but stay out of the schools, you’re too good for them.

Baraka - you are so very confused. And so hostile! Where to even begin. . . ?

If you really want to know about someone, you should ask questions (hint - i am not a Christian, for instance)! But maybe you aren’t interested in actual people, only with the weird stereotypes you make up in your head? I had a difficult time not laughing as i read your version of who *i* am. :)

Better yet, rather than vent here (or even in addition to) you might actually attempt to put your energy into helping others. Have you made efforts to teach children to read? Visited schools that need help (despite your assertion that “The schools don’t need missionaries” they do like and benefit greatly from volunteers, either white or black!). Hey, i do and surely you are even better than me - so prove it.

Anyway we do agree on one thing - i definitely do not want to “get you started”, *unless* it somehow involves actually helping someone in need.

Whoever wrote this was really on to something:
“The tone and generosity of your posting made realize how much can be gained from a temperate and kind approach to discussion and dialogue – including my own clarity of thought and insightfulness. Thank you!”
What happened?

Dear Wolf,
Its true I don’t know who you are and if I missed characterized you in some way that the characterization was put I apologize. Its a bad habit to make assumptions based in the sort of oblique comments you made. It was like a red flag that triggered all the wrong buttons - no excuse.

The notion that there is an underclass sort of stuck in my craw. I don’t feel good about those sorts of asumptions. Your assumptino that I need to help others has the same ring of bias so careful.

Assigning people to demographic niches has a facist quality to it, particularly when they result in the characterizations you presented.

Thank you for your comments and admonitions.
Baraka

It would be a mistake to accuse people like scorp, wolf and tina1 of racism.  They resent the misrepresentation and they would be right to resent it.  These folks are equal opportunity sado-masochists, a skill which is highly regarded among the military elite, especially the Marine Scorp, where shitting on your subordinates and kissing your superior officer’s’ butt is the institutional norm.  Most of us return to civilian status and manage to resolve the experience.  But the ass-kissing, ass-kicking power-tripping bullshit usually requires a much longer period of resolution.  Often there is no resolution.

Ora pro nobis.

Dear Tina1
“Was your relative the teacher who was ill-prepared for class and upset that a little black girl disrupted her decorum?”

“But lets form a policy out of your story. First lets put the mother in jail for slander and take her children and make them wards of the state. Now lets punish the little girl for not having an adequate mother or family life and financial resources to be born into the middle class.”

Posted by Baraka on May 2, 2006
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Baraka,
You reply is exactly why our schools are screwed up.  You blame it on the teacher, not the student. 

I graduated HS in 83’, which puts me in 1st grade in 70’.  In Canton, Ohio back then the teachers use to paddle students and not that many kids got out of control.  But thanks to liberals, teachers are not allowed to paddle students anymore and kids can say and do all kinds of things now ... and not get punished.

If kids from broken homes don’t get disciplined at home and now they don’t get disciplined at school, NO WONDER OUR PRISONS ARE GROWING. 

You liberals just don’t get it !!!

I’ve had almost every kind of kid in my classroom, migrants and hometowners, super-rich and super-broke, all skin colors and a raft of language/culture orientations. In identifying what separated those who managed to be successful in high school from those who could not, I observe a few main factors:

1) Articulated expectations and follow-through by parents. Sometimes this is unfortunately focused on punishments or threats by some parents, but when the child is given respectful encouragement as well as meaningful incentives for performance (e.g. privileges that depend strictly upon the child carrying out his duties at school), the positive results are vivid, much more so than when the kid is just avoiding punishment.

2) An appetite for “something better” in the child himself. This is rather more than what people typically understand when they refer to “ambition”, although it is often called by that word. It’s more of an belief in the possibility of one’s own excellence as an expression of self-respect, and a wish to actually reach it. This doesn’t mean you’ll get the valedictorian; it may mean, for example, that a kid who doesn’t do so hot in Government class might still demonstrate their wish to be/come excellent at, say, art or music or writing. (if your school still has art or music programs, or teaches kids how to write… hope so!)

3) Akin to 2) above, a reliable mindset that the kid himself is his own best ally, an internal locus of control. Giving that responsibility or power to someone else just doesn’t wash, and it is sad when a kid has been taught to think that way. It also holds him down.

Those are the main ones. There are a tiny percentage of kids with natural genius in some particular area, or the very rare uberkids for whom success at everything seems effortless. I’m not really focusing on them.

Further, sometimes kids have to find a path toward excellence in spite of the teacher, because as we all experienced and as has always been so, some teachers really are just marking time and are worse than useless as childrens’ guides. Burnout cases or incompetents. Sad to say, but we all have had to endure their classes, have we not? But why allow that factor to hold us back?

The racial profile, in my experience, is only significant to the extent that it correlates with the other helpful factors, which is to say, not reliably. There’s no doubt in my mind, having done this gig since the mid-1980s, that when the child feels accountable, knows he is supported and respected, and is encouraged to think of himself as having great potential for a bright future, AND knows that it his own role to identify and reach his own meaningful goals, not only is scholastic success likely but so is the chance that he will have a more fulfilling, dignified, dare I say prosperous life.

...more…

When kids are encouraged to accept or glorify mediocrity as a gesture of loyalty to the group, or when their misbehavior is tolerated or even (mind-bogglingly) reinforced by parental neglect or misdirected hostility toward the authority facet of the school, or when they are given the message that they really aren’t worth much or that their own efforts are less significant than factors outside themselves, it’s no surprise if that kid gives his attention to mindless fun and self-indulgent wanderings, or becomes prone to blaming others for his misfortunes and to looking to others to prop him up. Again, the racial tip is incidental, not reliably correlated in my experience.

In a pinch, I’d give my nod to 2) and 3), the kid’s own determination to grow and fulfill some potential in himself that he believes is real. This can compensate even for lame-ass parenting and the stupid insults, social barriers and underestimations that some groups, such as “black” males, have had to endure for so very long. But other people’s bullshit doesn’t have to take the form of a prison, or an anchor. My best pride is in those kids I’ve known who had all those strikes against them, including being marginalized and held down by the ugly events of history, but who stubbornly refused to internalize them.

How the power of this belief in one’s own value and the decisions that stem from it can be missed or brushed off is beyond me.

tina

No wonder our prisons are growing ?!?!?

This aspect is so encompasing (and already covered in these comments )
that it is obvious you don’t want to REALLY understand....

However let’s address the last comment from Kuya

The “ Power of this belief in ones own value “ is not something you are born with ...
IT IS NOT IN YOUR GENES
the support that you recieve is :
The amount of attention your Parents,Teachers, Extended Family,Mentors,Professors & others can give you
/
(Divided By - for those of us who had a Math book )

your circumstance ( Priveage,Wealth, Inheratance, whatever )

Kyua said “ When kids are encouraged to accept or glorify mediocrity as a gesture of loyalty to the group .......”

It’s not just kids -

“People love mediocrity “ Miles Davis

Tina1
I don’t have a reasonable response to your comment that would make any difference to you or anyone reading this posting. I don’t want to call you some terrible name or demean you for your lack of intelligence or concern for anyone but you self and your mythical cousin. That person can’t be real and actually teach in a school. I just don’t beleive we have gotten that far out of synch with humanity. I beleive that your cousin is just a mechanism you use to spew hatred on the world through a proxy because you don’t have the courage to hate on your own.

I wish you peace from the life of hatred that must consume you daily. To blame poor children for the problems in our schools is a new low in human response. You need prayer and moral assistance not a rational response.
Baraka

Thank you Kuya
Your comments are interesting, informative and considerate, I can’t thank you enough for bringing such careful humanity to this extended conversation. I agree with your comments and observations and will resist the temptation to elaborate on something already well said. Within this context I can’t ignore the notion that how schools work is as much social engineering as it is cognitive support. Children, as we all, are designed by birth to learn. When they fail it is more a function of educational failure or the misfit of inappropriate design or practice. Every child can learn and wants to learn, its a natural imperative of human beings and beyond procration it is the strongest urge. That schools fail or apply their vigor to brainwashing is a function of the industrial needs of the society. How to obey authority, don’t ask questions and embrace a life of isolation and lonliness that supports impotence and subservience are the qualities that are needed in the industrial workplace and promoted .

With all that there is much to be admired in the schools that provide an open door to those that are cursed with being born in a poor family.

Again, thank you Kuya for your sobering and encouraging comments.

the gangsta culture problem is real. I have taught bright young black men who simply disregard the option of positive values because black masculinity for a subclass has become what rap says it is.

Another problem which affects all youth of modest means:  lack of after school and summer activities.  Kids simply don’t know what options are out there.  Poor black kids, regardless of the curriculum don’t know what multicultural is; indeed they have no idea of any “white” culture, American or European.  To them, all Asians are the same.  Where’s anything on the map?  Forget it.  US history, black, white, Jewish, Southern, immigrant, forget it.  We need fun after school and summmer programs that are culturally and ethnically integrated that provide a real multlcultural experience.  Teaching only Black History Month, Richard Wright, and MLK are not multicultural.

Baraka -

I totally agree with your analysis and the conclusion of the results of the Johnson war on poverty but that the white bigots in the South who ran the Senate and the House of Representatives crafted that legislation. That’s the only way they would allow a war on poverty and Johnson bought it. They became the Republican majority that now runs the country.

I appreciate the fact you agree with my analysis and conclusions.  Unfortunately, you analysis of the voting at the time is a little shaky.

The figures below are from the Wikipedia article on Civil Rights Act 1964 preliminary voting totals:

Northern Democratic Senators 46
Northern Republican Senators 31

Southern Democratic Senators 22
Southern Republican Senators 1

Northern Democratic Representatives 154
Northern Republican Representatives 162

Southern Democratic Representatives 94
Southern Republican Representatives 10

The total Congress creatures after the 1964 Presidential elections:

Total Democratic Senators 68
Total Republican Senators 32

Total Democratic Representatives 295
Total Republican representatives 140

As you can see, the Democrats had a very strong majority in the House and Senate, as well as having a Democratic President, Johnson.  And as I have previously pointed out, a higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats voted for the Civil Rights Act, but somewhat fewer Republicans voted for other legislation in the Great Society, such as Welfare. 

So, how do you justify these statements:

..... white bigots in the South who ran the Senate and the House of Representatives crafted that (Welfare) legislation .....

You are asking me to believe that “white bigots in the South (almost all Democrats)” crafted and passed Welfare laws that eventually gave $6.6 trillion to poor, mostly black, citizens.  Can you explain why they would do such a thing?  And since all these white Democrat bigots in the south were a distinct minority, and the majority of Democrats voted for Welfare, how did the racist minority impose their will on the majority? 

For the record, both Civil Rights and Welfare legislation grew out of Kennedy’s New Frontier, and were enacted as a part of Johnson’s Great Society programs; both were firmly opposed by your Democratic “white bigots in the South”.

They (white bigots in the South) became the Republican majority that now runs the country.

So, how did the racist Southern minority Democrats suddenly become the majority Republicans in the whole country?  Remember that a bigger percentage of Republicans voted for the Voting Rights Act 1964 than did Democrats.  Please explain your thinking on this one. 

The Democratic Party, through its constituent Teachers Unions, NEA and AFT, have had a hammer-lock on education practices for thirty years, and the results have been dreadful, as you acknowledge.  Just today it was reported that the Florida Supreme Court over-ruled education vouchers for students in failing schools, on the grounds that the State Constitution required “equal” education: lousy, but equal.  So, failing students could not go to superior schools, but were required to attend failing schools. 

Baraka, you really might think about joining your Republican friends and demanding quality education, rather than failing equal education.

Scoop:

I am impressed with the data retrieval and the associated analysis.

The Democrats that Johnson held sway over came from the traditional Democratic party that ran the south since reconstruction and then became republicans in rebellion to the civil rights movement as a way to break the northern Democratic influence. They felt Yankee democrats who had the money and power of the northeast legislative block were using them. Most of the new Republicans were from agricultural districts with little or no national influence or money. But they learned to sell their legislative responsibilities to the oligarchs and by doing so found untold wealth - the whores.

I need to look carefully at your last posting, which is filled with useful information (if correct) to respond with the clarity you deserve. No matter what the issues that most concerned me are not resolvable along party lines with either white Republicans or white Democrats as heroes or villains. To quote Rudyard Kipling: Rosy O’Grady and the Cornels Lady are sisters under the skirt. I don’t know how I could see value in an overtly racist Ronald Reagan or a spineless John Kerry for that matter. As far as supporting the republicans a party that would put up for office that immoral and vacuous president that now sits in Washington can not mean either me or the country any good. he is an embarrassment and a fraud - like Kerry a C student from Yale.

The Republican Party belongs, lock stock and barrel to corporate America whose only credo is greed, not that the Democrats are any better. I am a populist who is trying to recover my country from the special interest oligarchs. 

I want you to know that I appreciate the effort you made to look carefully at my assertion and even search for the relevant information. I don’t agree with your conclusions and I believe that any moral notion predicated on political parties is just nonsensical. Thank you for your effort and intellectual honesty. Remember being smart does not insure wisdom or ethical behavior.

Baraka -

The data on the Civil Rights Act 1964 vote is from the Wikipedia entry of the same name.  Wikipedia listed a total of 102 Senators for the voting, and I corrected that to agree with the totals after the 1964 election.  The data on the composition of the Congress after the 1964 elections is also from Wikipedia, and can be found by accessing Senate Election 1964 and House Election 1964.

The Democrats that Johnson held sway over came from the traditional Democratic party that ran the south since reconstruction and then became republicans in rebellion to the civil rights movement as a way to break the northern Democratic influence.

Since a Republican (Dirksen, IL) drafted the original Civil Rights legislation, and a greater percentage of Republicans voted for Civil Rights than Democrats, does it make sense that a bunch of bigoted rednecks suddenly became Republicans “in rebellion to the civil rights movement as a way to break the northern Democratic influence”? 

I.  Don’t.  Think.  So.  There is something else going on here.  First, segregation was morally untenable in the perceptions of our evolving culture.  Besides the Democrat-Republican divide, there was a sharp racial divide between the Old South and the rest of the nation, and this divide also split across Party lines.  But the American people are remarkably observant of laws (at least compared to the rest of the world), and the 1964 laws granted civil and economic rights; most people got on board, and racial relations are much more relaxed now than they were back then. 

Is there anything else that Johnson and the Democrats did that affected voters’ attitiudes and opinions to change the electoral picture?  Well, yes, as a matter of fact. 

The Welfare portion of the Great Society cost $6.6 trillion dollars and utterly destroyed many Black families.  That is NOT a good cost-benefit ratio. 

Kennedy/Johnson/McNamara started a war they had no intention of winning and had no idea how to fight, and pissed away 58,000 American lives (not to mention a couple of million Vietnamese), and accomplished absolutely nothing; the South Vietnamese were turned over to the communist North by the majority Democratic Congress that refused to support freedom and democracy after the withdrawal of American forces.  And there are still Democrats who are proud of having destroyed freedom and democracy in Vietnam; you can hear them yammering daily about Iraq, where we have made remarkable progress in one of the totalitarian cess-pools of the world.

If Ronald Reagan was “overtly racist”, you must surely be able to point out something overtly racist that he said or did.  Now, President Johnson WAS overtly racist; he specifically targeted poor Blacks to be beneficiaries/victims in the War on Poverty.  Johnson thought he was being benign, even supportive, but this was one of the most socially and culturally destructive episodes in American history.  If the Civil War released Blacks from slavery, the War on Poverty bound Blacks in dependency and hopelessness.  You have already made that criticizm in slightly different, and more eloquent, words.

Continued ....

The Republican Party belongs, lock stock and barrel to corporate America whose only credo is greed, not that the Democrats are any better.

So, who IS better?  Populists generally degenerate into socialists, who always degenerate into inefficiency and corruption on a massive scale.  And if corporate America owns the USA, how come there are record and increasing numbers of home owners, including Black home owners?

If you study this long enough, you will find that socialists/populists destroy wealth, and free market capitalists under a rule of law create wealth.  The wealth may not not be distributed equitably, much less equally, under capitalism, but wealth does increase in a free market environment, and everybody benefits; people who get a better education and work harder and smarter generally benefit more. 

But under socialism wealth is destroyed; the Soviet Union collapsed from corruption and inefficiency, and Old Europe is in a fifteen-year funk of socialist bureaucracy and stagnation.  If the Democrats succeed in winning the Presidency and the Congress, as they did in Johnson’s time, you will see higher taxes, economic stagnation, limited freedom and democracy, and weird and unaccountalble and costly social and cultural experiments.  I only say this based on past experience and current Democratic policy statements, such as they are.

The Republican Party belongs, lock stock and barrel to corporate America whose only credo is greed, not that the Democrats are any better.

Scorp
We have wandered far and wide and now we are both making unsupported comments about our favorite view of past events. I don’t have the time or energy to continue this debate nor the interest to do the research.

There are flaws in both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party and the motives of white people are suspect based on their behavior. To say that I should admire or embrace white republicans over white democrats because of their political beliefs is ridiculous. And I know that the harm done to black families was not a purely democratic invention. Republican efforts to reduce health care for children and support corporate interests in a profit driven health system is not defensible at any level but I’m sure you will leap to the challenge.

The challenge is in forming out of our past a strategy that serves the human spirit and provides for a life of happiness and security. The current level of consciousness is not capable of doing that. If you have a sense of how that will happen I might be interested but not in this exercise which I’ve lost an appetite for.

Wealth is an abstraction that can have profound effects on the quality of life and to suggest that when there is more “wealth” everyone benefits equally is not supportable. That means that when the oligarchy get rich they get rich permanently as a function of birth and lineage not as a function of personal merit, i.e. Geo W. Bush. I don’t trust you or your motives, which I believe are mean-spirited and greedy. You are obviously smart in the knowledge and intellectual resource sense of things but Morally corrupt. I want to always remember that Hitler was smart and he had a lot of very smart people surrounding him but he was also a brute that could murder millions on a whim and his smart friends participated in the holocaust.

The oligarch does not on its own create wealth. In an industrial society the worker plays an equal and equitable role in production and the creation of wealth but capitalists out of greed hold that wealth disproportionately for themselves – greed! They are incapable of seeing things holistically or acting out of the common good.

In the particular I have cared for and loved many white people – friends, lovers and associates but in the aggregate I find you lacking morally.  As a crowd you are not to be trusted. I wish it was not so. I wish that there was affection in your tone and a sense of connection but you are stuck in the matrix of political “truthiness.” I don’t trust you but I am eager to extend my trust when you express an interest in our common welfare.

scorp,

One strain of historiography I think you are missing in your endeavor to paint the Democratic Party as the exclusive villian for all the ills of the recent past is that Johnson’s War on Poverty as it was originally envisioned was decimated by Nixon’s only partial administration of it.  All those demeaning and disempowering welfare programs, such as food stamps, Sec. 8 housing and so on, that you allude to were fully extended by Nixon because they served as subsidies to his Republican base.  Those that sought to help lift the poor, such as job training, community action centers, Head Start, etc. were eliminated or evicerated.  AFDC, which actually dates back to Roosevelt, had those characteristics that tend to break up families, precisely because of threats of Republican filibusters on the grounds of ‘only the deserving poor’, ‘aid for widows and orphans, not for men capable of work’ and the like. 

It is true that Establishment Liberal Democratic politicians were eager to make these concessions against the arguments of Progressives and Populists who have never held a majority even in the Democratic Party, much less the government as a whole.  What victories they have had, have come from the unassailable moral superiority of their arguments as well as the momentum of mass movements, never from the barrel of establishment political power.  It might be telling that the errors of Lenin and the consequent brutality of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot may have happened because they held unapposed state power.  The success of socialist governments in Sweden and post-Franco Spain cannot be easily dismissed with the hand-waving and gross generalizations you employ.  Modern Western European mixed economies may not have the growth rates you seem to think are necessary for human satisfaction, but they are generally more stable and relatively more egalitarian than the US.  Also defined by a more developed ethical sensibility.

In education, you want to put all blame for the decline at the feet of the teacher’s unions, without understanding that curricular and funding decisions lie with local boards and state governments who have been increasingly Conservative since the 70’s.  It is movements like the Tax-Payers Revolt, that began here in California with Prop. 13, that have reduced educational funding, and ‘3Rs’ and ‘back to basics’ education that have led to the disappearance of music, art, theatre and other culturally enriching and individually empowering programs.  It is mis-guided ideas like Reagan’s ‘elimination of waste fraud and abuse’ as a means of reducing government expenditures, that have actually served to make government more expensive by adding layers of inefficient bureaucracy, driving education costs into administration and out of the classroom.

You seem very eager to reduce all politics to the false either/or of capitalism vs. socialism, but reality is much more complex.  Indeed, the unprecedented material success of modern US society owes much to the synthesis of socialist and capitalist ideals in the neo-liberal program of pragmatic realism that characterized much of the progressive advances of the 20th Century.  It is certainly true that neo-liberalism has out-grown much of its utility, and, in its current expression in international trade, has proven counter-productive and terribly destructive of civil society in the third world countries where it has been put into practice.  It seems to me, that the current Conservative agenda is seeking to dismantle that success and return to the laissez faire horrors of the 19th Century.  This appears to be not in the interests of capitalism, at least as it was originally spelled out by Adam Smith, but much more to the benefit of the increasingly dominant forces of chrematistic and merchantilist international institutional investment banking and global corporatism .

This seems to me to be an interesting expression of Karl Marx’s admonitions about the reactionary false consciousness of the petit bourgeousie and their willingness to be manipulated by the traditional oligarchy against the imaginary threat represented by democratic social regulation of production and capital property, culminating in monopolism.

I would think that a new synthesis is called for.  It should, with what we know today, be generated more easily by a spirit of mutual consideration and principled debate than unyielding ideological opposition.

What do you think?

Oy vey.

You do understand, don’t you, that you attempt to encourage the impossible?

Which reminds me of a joke (possibly your own) I read on this site several months ago:

Rene Descartes walks into a bistro in Paris and stands at the counter, contemplating the clockwork precision of the universe.  The proprietor asks him if he wants a beer, and Descartes replies, “I think not.”

And promptly disappears.

These days, the dominant political wisdom can best be described as cogito non, ergo sum conservitus.

MM,

It may very well be impossible, particularly for ideologically frozen minds like tiny one’s.  I think only highly unlikely, though.  With enough patience and by planting enough seeds, even the smallest likelihood will come to eventual fruition.

Encouragement is always encouraging, however, even if only for the practise.  I’ve been getting back to Bohm’s ideas of dialogue and consensus building lately, of which Baraka’s posts are refreshingly fulsome.  It’s more fun and more challenging and more imaginative than merely butting heads.

I don’t share your optimism for converting the fascists and the conservatives.  Conversion is a religious experience.  More accurately, it’s a psychological process which requires a catastrophic event to shake loose the ideological foundations which support it, and the eventual end result is usually the reconstruction of another, equally misleading ideological framework, like liberalism, or socialism.  People need to believe in something.  Otherwise, we would continue to destroy one another indefinitely.

Oh, wait.  We’re doing that already, aren’t we?

I imagine that people like tina or scorp were once liberals, but their faith in liberalism was destroyed by some catastrophic event, such as the drug overdose of a son or daughter, or survival from the Vietnam war.

By that definition, all of us are former liberals, searching for someone to blame for events which none of us could control.

Loony Booty -

As always, I think you are educated beyond your intelligence.  You know many big words, and can use them correctly in more-or-less coherent English sentences, but you cannot think your way out of wet tissue paper, much less out of your confining leftist ideology.  You are like a medium-sized fish confined in a very small metal tank, and you can’t see what is going on six inches beyond your tank wall, much less get out of your self-imposed environment and participate in the world. 

All those demeaning and disempowering welfare programs, such as food stamps, Sec. 8 housing and so on, that you allude to were fully extended by Nixon because they served as subsidies to his Republican base.

Ver-ry in-ter-es-ting, as the little German used to say.  I was not aware that Nixon’s “Republican base” was recipient of food stamps and Section 8 Housing, or that Nixon wanted to demean and disempower his supporters.  Perhaps you are eligible for a Section 8; you ought to look into it. 

Now, I know what you meant to say, but I fail to see how food and housing is necessarily more profitable than, say, education and child care.  So if you could give us a reference for your weird assertion, I would be ever so grateful. 

Those that sought to help lift the poor, such as job training, community action centers, Head Start, etc. were eliminated or evicerated.

Well, they were not eliminated, because they all are still active.  And I can find no reference to any such programs being eviscerated by Nixon, but I’ll take your word for it.  After all, the dreaded Donald Rumsfeld was head of OEO during part of the Nixon Administration. 

All of which is irrelevant, and trivializes the important things being discussed.

President Johnson initiated the Great Society Programs, some of which had historical antecedents in the New Deal.  Right or wrong?

Did President Nixon contribute in any way to the origin of the Great Society programs? 

Welfare, as a part of the Great Society programs, cost $6.6 trillion over a thirty-year period.  Right or wrong?

Did President Nixon add to or delete from the cost of Welfare?  How much?  How was this done? 

The major impractical effect of Welfare was to destroy poor, mostly Black, families by insisting that poor, mostly Black, males make themselves scarce around their partners and children.  Right or wrong?

D.P. Moynihan, a non-ideologue Democrat, warned in 1965 that we should preserve the Black family, but Moynihan was criticized at the time and ignored for the next thirty years.  Right or wrong?

President Clinton, dumb as a turnip about most things, recognized that :

1) Welfare was costing a great deal of money;

2) The net effect of Welfare was unrelentingly, catastrophically, negative. 

Right or wrong?

President Clinton, with the assistance of Democrats and Republicans in Congress, therefore eliminated Welfare “as we know it”.  Right or wrong?

Did President Nixon contribute in any way to the demise of the Great Society programs? 

If you have any germane or mitigating comments, they are welcome.  Out of respect to your other readers, you might try to avoid your usual idiotic obfuscation of what are, after all, important matters.

Continued ...

The success of socialist governments in Sweden and post-Franco Spain cannot be easily dismissed with the hand-waving and gross generalizations you employ.

If you insist.  In 1970, Sweden was number five on the OECD Prosperity Index (Per Cap GDP).  In 2003, Sweden had fallen to number fourteen on the Index, and Spain was number twenty.  So, if things are going so well, why are they getting worse? 

And do you know who is hot?  Ireland and Estonia.  Both of them consciously decided to eliminate socialist bureaucracy and free up their economies, and they are off like rockets.  As are China and India, who also dropped the socialist anchors that had restricted their economies.

I am all in favor of music, art, and theater in our schools.  I am not in favor of constantly escalating costs and constantly declining performance among our students.  This is the same disaster we saw thirty years ago with Welfare, when we pissed away Black family values. 

We cannot piss away a couple of generations of students while you leftists discover that you had it wrong millions of wasted lives and trillions of wasted dollars later.  I can just see President Patrick Kennedy in 2026 standing up and saying that education costs too much, and that the net effect of education was unrelentingly, catastrophically, negative, and that he will change education “as we know it”.

I would think that a new synthesis is called for.

That would be as in thesis-antithesis-synthesis, I’m sure.  But don’t you realize that disastrous Marxist thought led directly to disastrous Marxist economics?  No, I don’t suppose that you do.  You will always be stuck in your safe little ideological tank, blind, ignorant, and self-satisfied.  Enjoy.

Wow!  Quick response.

Classic case of overcompensation.

MM,

“I am neither a pessimist nor an optimist, weighing the evidence more or less as it comes. Thus I do not see the glass as half full or half empty, but rather twice the required size.”

My aim isn’t for conversion, so much as conversation.  To some degree, conflict and competing ideas are necessary to focus, clarify and distill one’s own thinking.  After all, if everything was just peachy-keen all the time, life would be just too tedious to bear.  There would be no art, no humor, no human progress if there were no obstacles to be overcome.  For this I am genuinely grateful for scorpy wolfgang and J. Cline, even tiny one, noisome, screechy and mono-maniacal as she may be. 

They must recognise, if only sub-consciously, that they wouldn’t be here, trying to shout down those imaginary constructions of liberals and socialists and so on, which they have been so skillfully conditioned to oppose, if there wasn’t some unshakable shadow of doubt and dissatisfaction in their own minds for the externally engendered absolutist belief in insuperable rational self-interest they espouse.  Other-wise they could blissfully lose themselves in the unmitigated chorus of the like-minded at FreeRepublic, FrontPage, The Corner, Michelle Malkin or some other right wing blog dedicated to the unreflective ecstatic triumphalism of the half-witted. 

You are correct that the dissolution of false belief generally occurs in the sudden realization brought about by contrary and traumatic experience.  However, the likelihood that the individual will relapse into some other reformulation of false belief when such a momentary threatening situation passes is reduced by preparing the ground through steady and regular effort to lessen, loosen and relax that characteristic of our self-nature that feels it must cling to something or it will surely die.  On the surface, it is somewhat paradoxical that we can only accomplish this for ourselves by genuinely and selflessly encouraging others to do so.

This isn’t to say that you or I need always and in every case renounce the liberating pleasures of rank sarcasm.