The Importance of Teaching Black History

According to the census bureau, 57.5% of African-Americans were born after 1970. That means they were not alive for the 1963 March on Washington, passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act or the 1968 Fair Housing Act. And, of course, they missed all of the Civil Rights struggles of the 50’s and 60’s and will know nothing about the many struggles that led to their own opportunity to make choices unless we teach them.

They Simply Change The Rules!

Do you know how the Texas Republicans created five new Republican seats in the House of Representatives? They simply changed the rules. Instead of waiting for the normal ten years to redistrict, they redistricted in an off year while they were in control of the Texas legislature. When Texas Democrats hid in a neighboring state to prevent the vote to change districts, Republican Congressman Tom Delay sent a spy plane from Homeland Security searching for them. Democrats finally gave in and the Republican majority voted to redistrict. They then crammed Black and Latino voters into already heavily Democratic districts thereby creating all-white surrounding districts. The result was that five White conservative Republicans went to Congress who otherwise would have stayed home.

Maybe Kobie Bryant Has Learned His Lesson

Whatever made Kobie Bryant think he was more important to the Lakers than both Phil Jackson and Shaquile O’Neal should be gone by now. He has become the poster boy for what is wrong in the sport of basketball today. Too many selfish players with inflated egos and too much money are sending bad messages to our kids instead of being the role models that they could and should be. Now, he has just recovered from a broken foot to rejoin a broken team, whose owners deserve their fate for making one man believe he was so important.

It’s A Big Dunn Deal!

In honor of his mom, who was a police officer killed in the line of duty when he was just 18 years old, Atlanta running back Warrick Dunn created a “Home for The Holidays” program for single moms. So far Dunn, this year’s winner of the Walter Payton Award, has helped 52 single mothers in three states become first time homeowners by making the down payment on fully furnished homes. Inspired by Dunn, several other NFL players are about to set up similar programs. Kobie Bryant, are you listening?

Bill Cosby Be Careful!

All you need to do is watch and listen to Fox news to understand why Bill Cosby needed to be careful about how he addressed the problems affecting Black community youths. They are now using him to justify racist commentary and, because of him, they believe they can comment with impunity. By allowing White people to believe that he carried some special message that the rest of us were too ignorant to know about, he freed them up to promote all of the old stereotypes whenever they want to. By allowing the suggestion by the mainstream media that he was the first and only Black person to address these matters, he has allowed White folks, such as those at Fox news, to promote the impression that before Cosby, Black folks ignored their problems when, in fact, there are so many who have always labored in the vineyards to address the problems and to solve them. At a local level, he has allowed White folks to promote the notion that they can help us better than we can help ourselves and made it easy for them to exclude us from the very programs he inspired them to create. Both the mainstream media and Fox news are breaking their necks to let us know that Cosby didn’t rape anyone and they soft-pedaled the fact that he will have to defend his behavior in a civil lawsuit while all but ignoring the fact that we can pinpoint at least two instances in which he has “stepped outside of his marriage vows” and, arguably, forfeited (at least diluted) any rights to any moral message to our kids that he might have owned. In order to continue to use him they are protecting and sanitizing his reputation and even he should be able to see that.

I Love South African Affirmative Action!

Some folks are upset that the Black South African government has required businesses to turn over substantial portions of ownership to Black citizens, who were oppressed and exploited for years by the White minority under apartheid. But you’ve got to give the government credit. Its policies are unequivocal. Put 25% of most businesses in Black hands by 2010 or lose them to nationalization.

You Can’t Have It Both Ways!

Amy Wax, Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania, has come up with the “novel” idea that “sometimes the wrongdoer may… lack the power to make the victim whole.” Wall Street Journal, January 3, 2005. While agreeing that Black folks have been victimized, her major premise is that we are in position to heal ourselves and nobody else is. She compares it to a person who is hit by a car and must learn to walk again. No matter how hard the errant driver may try, only the injured party can go through the process of rehabilitating himself. Her suggestion, of course, is that Black Americans must deal less with the question of who caused our harm and more with the question of who can heal it. The only problem that I see with her theory is that much of the financial resources required to do the healing has been directed out of the Black community into the White community, which justifies this bizarre distribution by their belief that they can help us better than we can help ourselves. C’mon now, y’all can’t have it both ways!

The Bad News!

Although many White Americans consider themselves unbiased, in a test of their biases some 90% implicitly link Blacks with negative traits (evil, failure, etc.). If you have the nerve to take the test you can find it at

https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/

The Good News!

If White people are given the opportunity, they can modify or override their biased emotional responses to Black people with the rational regions of their brains, which means, “Prejudice is not inevitable…To the contrary. With a conscious goal to see someone as unique, the default response—race-based and stereotyped—can evaporate. We have some control over how we look at people. You’re not responsible for what goes into your head—and people are fooling themselves if they think they can be colorblind—but we are responsible for what we do with our information.” Sharon Begley, Wall Street Journal, 11-19-04

WHAT MAKES WARD CONNERLY WORK

You may not recall but Ward Connerly is the Black Trustee at the University of California at Berkeley who led the successful attack on affirmative action in California that resulted in a dramatic reduction in Black enrollment at Berkeley. He calls affirmative action a “…racial spoils system that undermines the very ideals of the civil rights movement.” Makes you wonder what he calls the White old boy network that, for years, has given preference to the sons and daughters and friends of those who happen to have the right color skin.

KEVIN McCASKILL PROMOTES SEPARATE BUT EQUAL?

Kevin McCaskill should reconsider his support of a new school department exclusionary policy that has the potential for establishing a dual school system: one for the “haves” and one for the “have nots,” which, of course will eventually lead to a system with mostly Black and Hispanic students on one side and mostly White students on the other. The Supreme Court, in its wisdom, determined long ago that separate is not equal, a fact that McCaskill seems to have overlooked in his assessment of the new policy. As the saying goes, Mr. McCaskill, those who are ignorant of their own history are bound to repeat it, and the kids will suffer under their leadership. n