http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/01/op...5b6b8bf8056d7d
Excerpts from a New York Times column by Gates. Excellent stuff.
Why has it been so difficult for black leaders to say such
things in public, without being pilloried for "blaming the
victim"? Why the huge flap over Bill Cosby's insistence
that black teenagers do their homework, stay in school,
master standard English and stop having babies? Any black
person who frequents a barbershop or beauty parlor in the
inner city knows that Mr. Cosby was only echoing sentiments
widely shared in the black community.
"If our people studied calculus like we studied
basketball," my father, age 91, once remarked as we drove
past a packed inner-city basketball court at midnight,
"we'd be running M.I.T." When my brother and I were growing
up in the 50's, our parents convinced us that the
"blackest" thing that we could be was a doctor or a lawyer.
We admired Hank Aaron and Willie Mays, but our real heroes
were people like Thurgood Marshall, Dr. Benjamin Mays and
Mary McLeod Bethune.
Scholars such as my Harvard colleague William Julius Wilson
say that the causes of black poverty are both structural
and behavioral. Think of structural causes as "the devil
made me do it," and behavioral causes as "the devil is in
me." Structural causes are faceless systemic forces, like
the disappearance of jobs. Behavioral causes are
self-destructive life choices and personal habits. To break
the conspiracy of silence, we have to address both of these
factors.
It's important to talk about life chances - about the
constricted set of opportunities that poverty brings. But
to treat black people as if they're helpless rag dolls
swept up and buffeted by vast social trends - as if they
had no say in the shaping of their lives - is a supreme act
of condescension. Only 50 percent of all black children
graduate from high school; an estimated 64 percent of black
teenage girls will become pregnant. (Black children raised
by female "householders" are five times as likely to live
in poverty as those raised by married couples.) Are white
racists forcing black teenagers to drop out of school or to
have babies?
Mr. Cosby got a lot of flak for complaining about children
who couldn't speak standard English. Yet it isn't a
derogation of the black vernacular - a marvelously rich and
inventive tongue - to point out that there's a language of
the marketplace, too, and learning to speak that language
has generally been a precondition for economic success,
whoever you are. When we let black youth become
monolingual, we've limited their imaginative and economic
possibilities.
Linear Mode
