The Right State

The Washington Post has an article called, “Poll Reveals a Contradictory Portrait Shaded With Promise and Doubt.”  In this story, Steven Homes and Richard Morn discuss a poll in which black men talk about their views on each other and racism.  Interestingly, they reserve their harshest criticism for each other.

Six in 10 black men said their collective problems owe more to what they have failed to do themselves rather than “what white people have done to blacks.” At the same time, half reported they have been treated unfairly by the police, and a clear majority [55%] said the economic system is stacked against them.

More than half said they place a high value on marriage — compared with 39 percent of black women — and six in 10 said they strongly value having children. Yet at least 38 percent of all black fathers in the survey are not living with at least one of their young children, and a third of all never-married black men have a child. Six in 10 said that black men disrespect black women.

Three in four said they value being successful in a career, more than either white men or black women. Yet majorities also said that black men put too little emphasis on education and too much emphasis on sports and sex.

Eight in 10 said they are satisfied with their lives, and six in 10 reported that it is a “good time” to be a black man in the United States. But six in 10 also reported they often are the targets of racial slights or insults, two-thirds said they believe the courts are more likely to convict black men than whites, and a quarter reported they have been physically threatened or attacked because they are black.

As a former high school coach and school teacher, I have seen many black young men come through the school doors full of potential and talent.  Of these a good many become successful and yet so many of them developed attitudes against education as being too white.  Many young black men rather than spend time around their parents, they hang around their older peers and develop a disdain for women and hard work.  And then so many then blame their failures on ‘white society,’ they were ‘discriminated against.’  Come on!

So lets look at how I handled discrimination.  In 1979 I was hired by a municipality but could not start work for three months because the man I was replacing was a black man.  They had to jump throw lots of hoops for me to officially begin work.  I guess I could have been bitter about the delay, but I wasn’t.

About 15 years ago, after conducting exhaustive research on a new business, I was turned down any help by the Small Business Administration because I was ‘white.’ They had both time and money for anyone who was black.  I guess I could have used this setback as an excuse to fail, but I didn’t.  You make your tracks, and I made mine.

I could go on and on.  Almost everyone I know has been discriminated in one way or another.  Everyone has to make a personal decision whether or not to make it an issue.  And that is what our teachers need to teach their students: reasons for success rather than failure.

I will agree with them on it being a good time to be a black man in America. Only in the United States can a man take himself from nothing to something.  All it takes is commitment and hard work.

Tags: Affirmative Action, Culture, Politics by Chuck
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At what point does the state have an interest in deciding who attends what school based on race?  Affirmative Action is a failed social engineering project whose time has come and gone.  Craig Martelle of Strategic Outlook has the same view: “I am an opponent of Affirmative Action - its useful time is well past and at this point, it is discriminatory because the content of one’s character is not as big a factor as the color of one’s skin.”  The Supreme Court has maneuvered itself into the fray long ago with the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka, Ks.  In that ruling the court rightly reversed another landmark ruling in Plessy v. Fergusson which instituted ‘Separate but Equal’ stating it was okay for blacks and whites to have separate facilities as long as they were equal.  In reality, the facilities were neither separate nor equal.

Unfortunately the outcome of the Brown case led to the massive bussing of white students in mostly white schools to mostly black schools and vice versa.  Apparently busing was considered an option because of a shortsighted belief that it was white kids who make a school better.  All it did was bus white students to poor schools and black students to poor schools.  This was NOT the intention of our founding fathers when they encouraged communities to build area schools.  This was a time when children walked to their schools, where parents went worked in unison with their children’s teachers to educate the kids, and it was a time when teachers and parents were neighbors working towards the same goals.  The Brown ruling reversed almost 200 years of neighborhood schools or rather it was how the lower courts construed the Brown case.  This lower court ruling which allowed busing was a blight on the American consciousness and, in my opinion, set back race relations for years.  One remedy would have been to equalize funding between white and black schools.  When the educational and monetary discrepancies between the two group equalized, they would begin to integrate on their own.  Forcing blacks and whites together only made tensions higher.

Since then the High Court has attempted to focus and narrow what constitutes discrimination and how to make Affirmative Action more palatable to the American people.  With the Bakke decision the Supreme Court intervened in the University of California Medical School at Davis.  Again they intervened in a Michigan Case in which Sandra Day O’Connor writing for the majority ruled that race could be used in admissions as long as it is only one of several factors.  I might note here that in my opinion, the Michigan case was wrongly decided.  Racial discrimination is racial discrimination no matter what the color of the one affected.

Now the US Supreme Court has a chance to make things right.  At issue are two cases, one in Seattle and one in Kentucky.  In the first, the Seattle schools system allows students to pick which schools they wish to attend with the only caveat being the schools rely on tie breakers including race to decide who goes where.  This is wrong.  Does the school district use such factors as social class and gender in their determinations instead of just race.  Probably not.

The second case from Kentucky is also troubling.

The court also will also consider a school desegregation policy in Kentucky. That case is somewhat different, because the school district had long been under a federal court decree to end segregation in its schools. After the decree ended, the district in 2001 began using a plan that includes race guidelines.

A federal judge had said system did not require quotas, and that other factors were considered including geographic boundaries and special programs.

Craig at Strategic Outlook pretty much sums up how I feel on these Affirmative Action cases before the Supreme Court where the very legality of Affirmative Action is at stake.  As I said earlier, discrimination is discrimination, no matter what the color of the individual.

We need no more victims. We need people to make good of themselves, just as the NAACP’s president has done. And when the Supreme Court hears the cases from Kentucky and Wasthington, I think you’ll see that any public school concessions regarding skin color, violate the equal protection clause of the Constitution. This will be the first step in removing race barriers and getting that much closer to true equality.

Tags: Affirmative Action, History, Culture, Politics, Supreme Court by Chuck
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