African Americans

Fiftieth Anniversary of the Detroit Riot: Personal Observations and Evolutionary Analysis

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Fifty years ago, a deadly urban riot began one hot summer night in my hometown of Detroit. It ignited around 3:30 a.m., when police arrested 85 patrons of an illegal after-hours bar in the midst of an all-Black neighborhood that had been all-White 15 or 20 years before.

When the mayhem ended six nights later, 43 people had been killed, 1,189 injured, 7,231 arrested, 2,509 stores had been looted or burned, 690 buildings were destroyed or had to be demolished, and 388 families were displaced.

Detroit’s Mayor at the time was Jerome Cavanagh, a young, bright and ambitious liberal. Elected with near-unanimous support of Black voters, he had aggressively launched anti-poverty programs to make the nation’s fifth largest municipality a model of the Great Society’s War on Poverty. (1).

The rapid migration of American Blacks between 1940 and 1965 from the mostly rural South to the big cities of the North, very quickly increased the Black population from less than 10% to over 30% at the time of the riot. That meant that Detroit, which had about 150,000 Black residents before World War II, had about 600,000 a generation later. In the 1960’s Detroit was dealing with a larger influx of Southern Blacks than all but Chicago and New York.

Conditions of Detroit’s Black Community Before the Riot

Politically correct revisionist historians and sociologists (many of whom are Black) like to portray Detroit’s riot of 1967 as the inevitable rebellion of a people victimized by White racism.  However to maintain this typical liberal view one must dismiss many well established facts that contradict the narrative. Read more

Heart of Darkness: Hip Hop, Existentialist Theology, and the WASP Cult of the Other

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Introduction

Hip-hop is another cultural artefact attracting the attention of Christians working with young people.  Back in January, at the five-day intensive university course for Youth Culture and Ministry, Andrew Root, a professor of youth ministry from Luther Seminary in Minneapolis, devoted an afternoon session to the subject.  His very effective audio-visual presentation reflected what I now recognize as the received understanding of hip-hop among progressive Black academics teaching at leading American universities.

Root left unexplored the ethno-political dimension of the hip-hop phenomenon.  My subsequent journey through the proudly ethnocentric work of several prominent Black hip-hop scholars took me to the front line of the contemporary cultural war on White America.  These Black writers describe hip-hop as a primary means by which Americans talk about race.  Debates about hip-hop, according to Tricia Rose, “stand in for discussion of significant social issues related to race, class, sexism, and Black culture.”  Commercial hip-hop provides “the fuel that propels public criticism of young Black people.”[2]  Strangely, however, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Americans such as Andrew Root never ask themselves whether “the hip-hop community” (inclusive of rappers, fans, record companies, and well-connected professors) is friendly or hostile to young White people. 

Is Hip-Hop Good for Black People?

While properly repulsed by the violent and crudely sexist lyrics in contemporary commercial hip hop, Black scholars emphasize “the importance of craft, innovation, media literacy, and other practices that have made hip-hop such an enduring and inspiring force in the lives of young people, especially Black youth.”[3]  Some emphasize the ways in which the gangstas and guns, hustlers and pimps, the bitches and the hoes featured in hip-hop lyrics both reflect and contribute to “the socially and culturally toxic environment” of urban Black and Latino ghettoes.  Orlando Patterson, for example, laments “the fact that instead of artistically representing and transcending the realities of ghetto life, under the pressure of corporate packaging, elements of the street and prison culture have now been morphed into hip-hop, so much so that it is often difficult to differentiate the two.”[4]  Others celebrate the creativity of Black youth, from the “compelling aesthetic innovations of hip-hop’s founding figures” to the “countless variations” which they inspired “in the ensuing decades.”[5] Read more

“I love myself. So I must be good”

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If you read the links on previous posts you’ll find  ‘a lack of self-esteem’ adduced as one of the main explanations for low Black SAT scores. This is ridiculous on any number of counts, most obviously by avoiding the IQ elephant in the room. But where do they get the idea that Blacks have low self-esteem? In fact the contrary is the case, especially for the younger cohort for whom a preening swaggering bravado, totally unrelated to actual capabilities, is standard behaviour. And that’s not just my impression.

Bernadette Gray-Little, a professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina, performed a complex review of every piece of research available on black self-esteem.’There have been inconsistencies in the results of the studies on this topic over time,’ says Gray-Little. ‘I wanted to see if I could find any basis for a firm conclusion. And if inconsistencies occurred, I wanted to know when and why.’ …

She found that before the age of 10, whites slightly surpass blacks in self-esteem. Everyone’s self-esteem dips in the later years of school. After that, blacks narrowly but consistently surpass whites, up to the age of 21, the upper limit of the study.

The self-esteem gap seems to depend on wealth. Low-income blacks show higher self-esteem than low-income whites. But the gap disap pears at higher income levels. The study also shows that black self-esteem has not risen over time. The theory of many psychologists was that as blacks gained in civil liberties, their self-esteem would rise. But the study shows it has never been low.

The report will confound black activists who have seen raising black self-esteem as the key to overcoming social disadvantage. At the all-black Paul Robeson Academy in Detroit, students start the day by standing up and proclaiming: ‘I feel like somebody. I act like somebody. Nobody can make me feel like a nobody!’

In Britain, many companies now have mentoring schemes to help people from ethnic minorities. The Millennium Commission is funding a three-year programme to expand such schemes.

Read more

The Dark Side of the Civil Rights Movement

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The dominant narrative of the civil rights movement is a story about selfless Whites fighting Southern injustice. Usually the movement is presented as made up of devout Christians and freedom fighters, struggling against the prejudices of ignorant Southern Whites. Nothing could be further from the truth. The reality is the civil rights movement was plagued by the same forces that plague any setting where Whites and Blacks intermingle: violence, theft, criminality, resentment, and sexual dominance.

White civil rights workers who left the North to organize resistance to Southern segregation approached their jobs with religious fervor. One White woman captures this spirit: “There is no doubt in my mind this is worth dying for. … This love is growing every day and will continue to expand and expand until it defeats all hate all over the world” (Rothschild, 1982, p. 133). Please note the woman’s messianic mentality: she wants to defeat hate “all over the world.”

White civil rights workers were shocked to discover that local Blacks in Mississippi resented and resisted White domination of the civil rights movement. Grassroots Blacks wanted local, Black control of civil right organizations and sought to ensure White men and women were in a subordinated, powerless position (Rothschild, 1982, p. 132). Blacks believed Whites were smug and acted superior to Blacks (Watson, 2010, p. 267). On the other hand, White civil rights workers came to view Blacks as essentially lazy and stupid (Watson, 2010, p. 267). White volunteers were greeted with suspicion and mistrust. Read more

Dealing with Dysfunction: A Review of “What It Is Like to Teach in Failing Schools,” Part 2

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Part 1 of “Dealing with Dysfunction”

Another of Mr. Teacher’s idiosyncrasies is his view on race. Although he does not explicitly identify his ethnicity, apparently he is a White man. And despite having plenty of real-world experience dealing with Blacks and Browns he does not address race as a biological concept. When discussing the Program in International Student Assessment (PISA) that compares student academic achievement across national borders the author notes that “American educators produce similar outcomes as Finland and Korea when looking only at White and Asian students” (99). Okay, that is to be expected. But then he goes on to state that the PISA “results help to show that biology is not the leading or most significant cause for assessment differences between subgroups (eduspeak for races) because largely non-white United States Hispanics significantly outscore biologically ‘White’ Uruguayans” (101).

The above is pretty slim evidence to base a conclusion regarding the role of race in educational achievement. A closer look shows that AT’s comparison is not apt. While Uruguay is 88 percent White, that is within a Latin American context. In addition, Uruguay has a far smaller per capita income than the US, and spends a significant smaller percent of its GDP on education.[1] As a result the South American country has a shorter school day, larger class sizes, and more basic educational facilities.

Strangely, later in the book the author gives evidence that race is a significant factor in educational outcomes.

Black Canadians are just 2.5 percent of the Canadian population. Black Canadian students in Toronto — the largest concentration of Blacks in any Canadian location — have a dropout rate of 40 percent — a much higher dropout rate than their Canadian peers. There is also a large scholastic achievement gap between Black Canadians and other Canadians (212).

In addition, AT notes that Black Canadian students have disproportionately high rates of absenteeism, suspension, and expulsion. So here you have two different countries with two different educational systems with the same racial disparities. This seem to be more convincing than the author’s Uruguay example. Mr. Teacher describes himself as an Orthodox Christian, and he affirms “God’s sovereign Will in human affairs” (213). He might not believe in biological evolution, which could explain his ambivalence on race. Read more

Dealing with Dysfunction: A Review of “What It Is Like to Teach in Failing Schools,” Part 1

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What it is Like to Teach in Failing Schools: A Memoir, an Inquiry and a Critique (2016)
by A. Teacher

Even without the students present, a visitor familiar with middle-class White schools would notice that Atlanta’s “Fairfield Junior Academy” is different. Walking the halls he would observe that there were no lockers. “[W} e moved all the lockers into the classrooms because most of the fights and drug deals took place during transition time when students went to their lockers” (76). If the visitor was unfortunate enough to need the restroom, he might see “dried diarrhea on the walls and toilet in the bathroom stalls” (111). Venturing into a classroom he might encounter vandalized computers and locked file cabinets that had been broken into.

As the subtitle indicates, this book is part a memoir, part a scathing critique of the educational establishment that some call Big Ed. This reviewer has twenty years’ experience in secondary and tertiary education. Fortunately, I have not experienced many of the problems the author relates, at least not to the same degree. Thus some of the dysfunction A. Teacher (AT) describes is particular to his type of school — a failing junior high — while other problems are systemic and likely to be experienced by most public school teachers in America.

The reader might conclude from the opening paragraph that Fairfield in one of those neglected, underfunded minority schools one hears about. While it is a non-White school (70 percent Black, 27 percent Hispanic), it is not underfunded. “Our school was flushed with money” (12). There was plenty of technology — computers, iPads, smartboards, and printers in every room. There was also widespread theft and vandalism, plus poor maintenance of the facility.

American education is often top heavy with administrators. This is particularly true of urban schools. So, in addition to student misbehavior, a major complaint of Mr. Teacher was the reams of paper work and endless meetings his position required. These demands left little time for lesson planning, and made classroom management more difficult. Because every behavior issue needed to be thoroughly documented it was less likely a teacher would take action.

One way a bureaucracy insulates administrators from day to day problems is the put-it-in-writing strategy. A “Response to Intervention” form was required “to document every infraction a child commits, complete with where the incident took place, what preceded the incident, what the infraction entailed, and the consequences that followed” (89). Even with documentation teachers at Fairfield felt the administration did not support their efforts to maintain order. Read more

Rational Dialog with BLM Is Not Possible

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If we are to judge from recent events, BLM protestors (and a seemingly overwhelming percentage of Blacks in general) don’t seem able to discern the difference between the impression created by a few seconds of a video clip, and the reality and attendant circumstances behind that video.  They know how they feel when they watch a Black apparently being mistreated by police, but any further deductive reasoning is from that point quite impossible.  The combination of ignorance and moral certainty is dangerous, as we see in the Dallas shooting of police and other violent protests last weekend.

In their mind, Black Lives Matter protesters have the “evidence” already, because they think that evidence simply means something unpleasant caught on camera.  From there they demand immediate retribution, without further deliberation in the legal process.  It is ironic that one of the BLM protesters’ trite chants is “No justice, no peace,” considering their complete disregard for the judicial process.  But they are good at disturbing the peace, we’ll have to give them that.

The chanting of slogans seems to be the tool of the cognitively incompetent, because it conveniently avoids discussing any facts.  The rallying cry, “Hands up, don’t shoot,” is based on a mendacious account of the Michael Brown incident, who did not have his hands up when confronted by Darren Wilson, and did not say “don’t shoot,” but rather went for the cop’s gun.  The “Black Lives Matter” chant is repeated in a zombie-like fashion by the protesters.  But note that every slogan is based on a faulty premise: that justice has been derailed, that innocent Blacks are being shot, and that the government has somehow devalued Black lives.  “We have nothing to lose but our chains,” they chant, enraptured in an orgy of victimization and delusion. Read more