The tragedy of the fraught relationship between America?s Black conservatives and Black liberals

I was flipping channels one afternoon when something caught my eye on C-SPAN. On the screen was a Black gentleman speaking in front of what appeared to be an all-White audience. The gathering looked quite formal, and hearing just a few of the gentleman’s words made me stop to watch the coverage. After another minute or so, I hurriedly grabbed a VCR tape and began recording his speech.

This happened in late 1992. I had been in America less than a year, and was about two months into my first job as a K-12 public school teacher. I was teaching in an inner-city school district, and had by then come face-to-face with all the disciplinary problems that plague many urban schools. Because I knew quite little about American society in those initial days, I could not fathom some of the things I was witnessing in my classrooms. Inside the school building, I wandered around in a daze most of the time.

The classrooms were so chaotic that there wasn’t much teaching I could do. It was also clear to me that most of the students came to school completely unprepared to learn. That widespread disinterest, and the disruptive behaviors, would have been unthinkable in the schools I attended as a young boy in Ghana. There, teachers wielded so much authority that no student would ever dare disobey any classroom rule or fail to do their homework, as was prevalent in the school I was now working in.

That disorienting experience I was having as a teacher was what drew me to the gentleman’s speech on C-SPAN that afternoon. He was talking about the values of discipline, hard work, respect for authority, and several other positive character traits that he had learned from his grandfather. He attributed his success to his grandfather’s guidance.

Those were exactly the things that I thought my students needed to learn about, and I couldn’t wait to play the tape in class for them. What I didn’t know was that those great words of wisdom were spoken by the “wrong” person. The gentleman happened to be U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. I had heard a few stories about his appointment to the Court a year earlier. But I had no idea how contentious his confirmation hearings had been, and the subsequent total breakdown of his relationship with a large segment of the Black community.

The principal of the school I taught in was a wonderful African-American woman. I got along with her extremely well. In fact, I had called her into my classroom too many times to help restore order because hers seemed to be the only voice that the students at the school listened to.

I met her in one of the hallways shortly after arriving at school the day after I made the recording. In my excitement to tell her about my brilliant idea, I made the mistake of divulging too much of the details of what I was about to share with the students, including the fact that they were the words of Justice Thomas. I was astonished by how quickly her facial expression and body language changed when she heard his name. Without uttering a word, she walked off briskly as if she was in a hurry to go somewhere. Although she didn’t tell me not to play the tape for the students, it was quite clear to me that she wasn’t happy with it so I shelved the plan.

Later that day, I quietly told one of my colleagues about the tape, and the principal’s reaction to it. That was when I first learned that Justice Thomas’s name had become taboo in much of the Black community. Cancel culture was not part of the American lexicon then, but I instantly became aware of the problem that we are all too familiar with nowadays: the deep animosity between individuals and groups that often leads to complete shutdown of dialogue and breakup of social relationships.

In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell wrote about Chris Langan, a brainy gentleman whose prodigious intellectual prowess was never discovered because he grew up in a completely broken home where the ingredients that nurture such talent were missing. Langan’s mother, who was estranged from her family, had four sons, each with a different father. The fourth husband, who raised the boys, was a violent man and was rarely at home. Langan’s own brothers marveled at his brilliance. After graduating from high school, he was awarded two full scholarships, one to Reed College in Oregon and the other to the University of Chicago. He opted to attend Reed.

After a year at Reed, Langan lost his scholarship. His mother was supposed to fill out a parents’ financial statement to get his scholarship renewed but she failed to do so. Langan was forced to return home to Bozeman, Montana, where he worked in construction for nearly two years before enrolling at Montana State University. Within a semester, he dropped out of college again. The car that he used for his thirteen-mile commute to class broke down and he didn’t have the money to fix it. A neighbor offered to give him rides to class, but could only do so later in the day due to his farmwork schedule. Unfortunately for Langan, both his adviser and the dean declined his request to be moved from his early morning classes to later sessions. That was the end of his college education.

Langan took a variety of factory and other odd jobs in the ensuing years before settling into a role as a bouncer in a bar on Long Island. Throughout that time, he read widely in philosophy, mathematics, and physics while working on an extensive dissertation titled the Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU). Langan’s childhood dream was to become an academic. But with less than two years of college education and no credentials, he knew that there was no chance the scholarly work he was doing would ever be published in an academic journal. When Gladwell interviewed him for the book, Langan had resigned himself to spending the rest of his life doing basic jobs to make ends meet.

Gladwell juxtaposed Langan’s story with that of Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who led America’s effort to develop the nuclear bomb during World War II. Gladwell likens Langan’s mind to that of Oppenheimer. He goes on to describe how Oppenheimer’s extremely well-to-do family used its resources to properly nurture the young prodigy’s talent, and the series of other lucky breaks Oppenheimer had throughout his life. Most importantly, Gladwell mentions that along the way, Oppenheimer acquired “practical intelligence,” a crucial self-confidence skill that is cultivated in children who grow up in environments that promote mentorship. As a young adult, Oppenheimer possessed oodles of that skill, and he frequently employed it to get his way in a variety of settings. Because Langan had none of it, he couldn’t even manage to talk his way out of rather simple situations.

The environment that Langan grew up in quite closely mirrors those that my students came from. Since I left teaching, I have forever been haunted by the fact that there are perhaps many bright gems in our poorly performing urban schools who, like Langan, are not being discovered. Apart from their bleak family circumstances, the overwhelmingly Black children who populate those schools similarly lack the practical intelligence that they need to navigate the complex world we live in today. As Gladwell points out, that skill is not innate. It has to be taught. And that is why the lack of frank conversation about what ails the inner-city public education system is such a great tragedy.

As I understand it, the standoff between Black liberals and Black conservatives is mainly due to differences of opinion about who and what are to blame for the dire socio-economic conditions in many parts of America’s Black communities. The conservatives argue that enough progress has been made on the race issue, and that American society as it exists today provides reasonable amounts of opportunity for every child, regardless of ethnicity, to fulfill their potential. To the conservatives, it is mostly about personal responsibility and the willingness to work hard. The liberals vehemently disagree. They contend that racism is still prevalent, and that there are a variety of other systemic barriers that make it all but impossible for Black children born into poverty to succeed.

This debate is one that I have followed closely for the past three decades. As is the case with most complex issues, I think there is some truth to both arguments. But my view, drawing on lessons from how my own life unfolded, is that oftentimes, taking charge of one’s destiny and working with whatever resources one has, however meager they are, is the best way to achieve any level of success in this world. The systemic problems that the liberals point to deserve focus and concerted effort to address. However, those shouldn’t distract us from the other equally important task of teaching the Black community’s disadvantaged youth the values that Justice Thomas was talking about that afternoon.

We need to impress upon America’s urban Black children that the many disadvantages they face in their lives are not always all because of their race. The fixation on the race factor breeds paralyzing inertia. Chris Langan is White, but he was dealt a hand that was as bad as the ones my Black students had been granted. Misfortune is like a swollen, raging river. It sweeps away anyone and anything lying in its way, without regard to the color of a person’s skin. Those of us who were born into life’s flood zones need to be pragmatic. We have to constantly keep our eyes and ears open and find a few safe spots here and there to stand so we don’t end up being engulfed by the waters when they come rushing in. And whenever we are still standing after a deluge-inducing storm passes, we should consider that a win and be thankful.

To White and other non-Black Americans, the dire state of the urban K-12 public education system has become a radioactive topic that they don’t want to touch. The responsibility thus falls on the Black community itself to confront the issue head-on. The rupture in the relationship between Black conservatives and Black liberals needs to be repaired quickly to allow free-flowing conversations about the state of our inner-city schools.

Our at-risk youth are being kept in the dark, and thereby being seriously harmed, by the information vacuum that has been created by this absence of robust dialogue. There is a massive amount of accumulated practical intelligence within the ranks of the many highly successful Blacks in this country, on both the right and the left, that disadvantaged Black children would greatly benefit from if it is freely and broadly shared.

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