Autumn Ashante and the Miseducation of the Negro
Interesting isn't it how browbeaten Americans have become by the PC police. We're quick to point the finger at Bill Bennett for using a racial example to illustrate and explain a concept but fill a seven year old girl with the racist hatred of her forebears and she's celebrated with appearances on HBO. Unbelievable!
As a person who experienced being a racial minority to some degree, I have an unusual perspective on the whole issue of race in America. I had my own Black. White. experience, only no one painted my face or colored my hair. I was a poor white kid who attended the only local college I could afford. A predominantly and historically black college. Most of my teachers were black, most of my peers were black and many of my required undergrad courses were racially based studies. My senior seminar, a required course to obtain my history degree, was a study of W.E.B.DuBois. African-American history was a required course for all students, not just history majors, and liberal politics was pushed with a decidedly racial emphasis. I stopped counting the number of times our student body president referred to "the man" once he hit the 500 mark.
Nevertheless, there were honest academics who spoke the truth without hatred and with a clear desire to lift young black people up into a better and more prosperous society. One such professor from the history department, who also, if memory serves, preached at a local AME Methodist church, made the pointed argument that black Africans sold each other into slavery. He explained the common practice among African communities of selling and keeping slaves, a group predominantly made up of people captured in war. The young black students, more interested in gangsta rap than the free education nearly all of them were getting, protested the lecture. Many shouted at the professor and instigated heated and hateful discussions that all but ruined the class. Did I mention the professor was an educated, well travelled, leader in the local black community? They showed him no respect or deference because they had already received an education via music videos and Sharpton soundbytes.
The point is that as a society, we have come to tolerate the miseducation of the African American community by demagogues who preach helplessness and create victims. And ,while all Americans pay a price in tax dollars for the perpetuation of the poor, black underclass, blacks themselves have become unwitting victims, paying the price in wasted, unfulfilled lives. If the cycle is ever to be broken, some tough love is going to have to be meted out. Merit will have to be rewarded and society will have to be completely colorblind. Otherwise, the black community is doomed to remain a sideshow of American culture.
