Found on FR.

*This is a repost from the rants and raves section from the Mobile, Alabama craigslist.*

The truth is usually a tough thing to accept, so I understand if this is flagged. It would be a cowardly thing to do, but I understand it. Some people just ignore unpleasant truths. However, if you think ignoring the problem, or trying to censor the truth, will help our black children improve, you're dreaming. This is important, so I'm happy to repost - indefinitely if necessary. I find it interesting that NO ONE has had the intellect to refute anything in the essay. They can only attempt to censor it, as if doing so somehow makes it invalid. Weak minds, weak minds.

Until recently I taught at a predominantly black high school in a southeastern state.

The mainstream press gives a hint of what conditions are like in black schools, but only a hint. Expressions journalists use like "chaotic" or "poor learning environment" or "lack of discipline" do not capture what really happens. There is nothing like the day-to-day experience of teaching black children and that is what I will try to convey.

Most whites simply do not know what black people are like in large numbers, and the first encounter can be a shock.

One of the most immediately striking things about my students was that they were loud. They had little conception of ordinary decorum. It was not unusual for five blacks to be screaming at me at once. Instead of calming down and waiting for a lull in the din to make their point -- something that occurs to even the dimmest white students -- blacks just tried to yell over each other.

It did no good to try to quiet them, and white women were particularly inept at trying. I sat in on one woman's class as she begged the children to pipe down. They just yelled louder so their voices would carry over hers.

Many of my black students would repeat themselves over and over again -- just louder. It was as if they suffered from Tourette syndrome. They seemed to have no conception of waiting for an appropriate time to say something. They would get ideas in their heads and simply had to shout them out. I might be leading a discussion on government and suddenly be interrupted: "We gotta get more Democrats! Clinton, she good!" The student may seem content with that outburst but two minutes later, he would suddenly start yelling again: "Clinton good!"

Anyone who is around young blacks will probably get a constant diet of rap music. Blacks often make up their own jingles, and it was not uncommon for 15 black boys to swagger into a classroom, bouncing their shoulders and jiving back.

They were yelling back and forth, rapping 15 different sets of words in the same harsh, rasping dialect. The words were almost invariably a childish form of boasting: "Who got dem shine rim, who got dem shine shoe, who got dem shine grill (gold and silver dental caps)?" The amateur rapper usually ends with a claim--in the crudest terms imaginable -- that all womankind is sexually devoted to him. For whatever reason, my students would often groan instead of saying a particular word, as in, "She suck dat aaahhhh (think of a long grinding groan), she f**k dat aaaahhhh, she lick dat aaaahhh."

Black women love to dance -- in a way white people might call gyrating. So many black girls dance in the hall, in the classroom, on the chairs, next to the chairs, under the chairs, everywhere. Once I took a call on my cell phone and had to step outside of class. I was away about two minutes but when I got back the black girls had lined up at the front of the classroom and were convulsing to the delight of the boys.

Many black people, especially black women, are enormously fat. Some are so fat I had to arrange special seating to accommodate their bulk. I am not saying there are no fat white students -- there are -- but it is a matter of numbers and attitudes. Many black girls simply do not care that they are fat. There are plenty of white anorexics, but I have never met or heard of a black anorexic.

"Black women be big Mr. Jackson," my students would explain.

"Is it okay in the black community to be a little overweight?" I ask. Two obese black girls in front of my desk begin to dance, "You know dem boys lak juicy fruit, Mr. Jackson." "Juicy" is a colorful black expression for the buttocks.

Blacks, on average, are the most directly critical people I have ever met: "Dat shirt stupid. Yo' kid a bastard. Yo' lips big." Unlike whites, who tread gingerly around the subject of race, they can be brutally to the point. Once I needed to send a student to the office to deliver a message. I asked for volunteers, and suddenly you would think my classroom was a bastion of civic engagement. Thirty dark hands shot into the air. My students loved to leave the classroom and slack off, even if just for a few minutes, away from the eye of white authority. I picked a light-skinned boy to deliver the message. One very black student was indignant: "You pick da half-breed." And immediately other blacks take up the cry, and half a dozen mouths are screaming, "He half-breed."

For decades, the country has been lamenting the poor academic performance of blacks and there is much to lament. There is no question, however, that many blacks come to school with a serious handicap that is not their fault. At home they have learned a dialect that is almost a different language. Blacks not only mispronounce words; their grammar is often wrong. When a black wants to ask, "Where is the bathroom?" he may actually say "Whar da badroom be?" Grammatically, this is the equivalent of "Where the bathroom is?" And this is the way they speak in high school. Students write the way they speak, so this is the language that shows up in written assignments.

It is true that some whites face a similar handicap. They speak with what I would call a "country" accent that is hard to reproduce but results in sentences such as "I'm gonna gemme a Coke." Some of these country whites had to learn correct pronunciation and usage. The difference is that most whites overcome this handicap and learn to speak correctly; many blacks do not.

Most of the blacks I taught simply had no interest in academic subjects. I taught history, and students would often say they didn't want to do an assignment or they didn't like history because it was all about white people. Of course, this was "diversity" history, in which every cowboy's black cook got a special page on how he contributed to winning the West, but black children still found it inadequate. So I would throw up my hands and assign them a project on a real, historical black person. My favorite was Marcus Garvey. They had never heard of him, and I would tell them to research him, but they never did. They didn't care and they didn't want to do any work.

Anyone who teaches blacks soon learns that they have a completely different view of government from whites. Once I decided to fill 25 minutes by having students write about one thing the government should do to improve America. I gave this question to three classes totaling about 100 students, approximately 80 of whom were black. My few white students came back with generally "conservative" ideas. "We need to cut off people who don't work," was the most common suggestion. Nearly every black gave a variation on the theme of "We need more government services."

My students had only the vaguest notion of who pays for government services. For them, it was like a magical piggy bank that never goes empty. One black girl was exhorting the class on the need for more social services and I kept trying to explain that people, real live people, are taxed for the money to pay for those services. "Yeah, it come from whites," she finally said. "They stingy anyway."

"Many black people make over $50,000 dollars a year and you would also be taking away from your own people," I said.

She had an answer to that: "Dey half breed." The class agreed. I let the subject drop.

Many black girls are perfectly happy to be welfare queens. On career day, one girl explained to the class that she was going to have lots of children and get fat checks from the government. No one in the class seemed to have any objection to this career choice.

Surprising attitudes can come out in class discussion. We were talking about the crimes committed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and I brought up the rape of a young girl in the bathroom of the Superdome. A majority of my students believed this was a horrible crime but a few took it lightly. One black boy spoke up without raising his hand: "Dat no big deal. They thought they is gonna die so they figured they have some fun. Dey jus' wanna have a fun time; you know what I'm sayin'?" A few black heads nodded in agreement.

My department head once asked all the teachers to get a response from all students to the following question: "Do you think it is okay to break the law if it will benefit you greatly?" By then, I had been teaching for a while and was not surprised by answers that left a young, liberal, white woman colleague aghast. "Yeah" was the favorite answer. As one student explained, "Get dat green."

There is a level of conformity among blacks that whites would find hard to believe. They like one kind of music: rap. They will vote for one political party: Democrat. They dance one way, speak one way, are loud the same way, and fail their exams in the same way. Of course, there are exceptions but they are rare.

Whites are different. Some like country music, others heavy metal, some prefer pop, and still others, God forbid, enjoy rap music. They have different associations, groups, almost ideologies. There are jocks, nerds, preppies, and hunters. Blacks are all -- well -- black, and they are quick to let other blacks know when they deviate from the norm.

One might object that there are important group differences among blacks that a white man simply cannot detect. I have done my best to find them, but so far as I can tell, they dress the same, talk the same, think the same. Certainly, they form rival groups, but the groups are not different in any discernible way. There simply are no groups of blacks that are as distinctly different from each other as white "nerds," "hunters," or "Goths," for example.

How the world looks to blacks: One point on which all blacks agree is that everything is "racis'." This is one message of liberalism they have absorbed completely. Did you do your homework? "Na, homework racis'." Why did you get an F on the test? "Test racis'."

I was trying to teach a unit on British philosophers and the first thing the students noticed about Bentham, Hobbes, and Locke was "Dey all white! Where da black philosopher a'?" I tried to explain there were no blacks in eighteenth century Britain. You can probably guess what they said to that: "Dat racis'!" One student accused me of deliberately failing him on a test because I didn't like black people.

THIS IS HALF OF THE ARTICLE - Read the rest at FR.  http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3037697/posts

I think I'll skip the second half.

The first half is depressing enough.

Public school.  I remember it well.

Yeah, I don't buy it partularly since the author strongly implies the only reason for the described behavior is race. Culture is not color.

There are likely schools this bad, but it is due to the social environment in which the kids were raised, not the color of their skin.

Get dat green

Eta

Where is that essay on avoiding large numbers of blacks, avoiding places with black politicians etc?

That's pretty much how I remember high school. The few black kids that were straight A student
Types were ostracized or beaten up.

"They didn't care and they didn't want to do any work."

I think more than any other line, this would probably be considered racist.  They is typically never the best word to use in the situation as it allows for no dissent.

Were there students who actually wanted to do the work but were afraid of retaliation?  We'll never know.

Unfortunately the article is true in many aspects.  I subbed for a year and half at the middle and high school level and even though I didn't look like a teacher at 25-26 years old I saw plenty of that attitude mostly at other teachers/subs but often times at me as well.  I was just glad that I looked young (cool? ) enough to not get that as much as say an old white guy would get.

The difference that I could see, which evidently the author did not experience, is that the main distinction is whether or not the black person in question was born here.

I met a couple of students that were actually from Africa and they did very well it appeared.  Also I met 2 gay black kids that didn't care what their community thought of them so it allowed them to "Act white" which means doing your work and getting good grades unfortunately.

Saddens me that the black community has terms like "Uncle Tom" and "Acting White" which literally mean you think for yourself and make the best choices for you.  I heard the term "acting white" first when I was in middle school in 96 or 97.  Pathetic then as it is now.

I also, because I enjoy classical, would routinely boggle the black kids minds playing william grant still or george walker.

Red invalidates entire article.

This reads like Kaplan's The Coming Anarchy, and has the same analytical weight, ie complete bullshit derived from cherry picked data.

Living in Mississippi, I see it every day, but it's in every state with a black population, both Northern and Southern .

Know how I know you didn't read and/or pay attention to the article?

I thought it was the part about being from Alabama

This kind of shit is more related to class than race.

When I moved (temporarily) into a Pennsylvania mill town, as a high school student, after answering questions (correctly) in class, I was accosted in the hall and asked if I was "trying to make them look stupid."

This was accompanied by a bit of physical reinforcement.

All players in this touching little drama were white.

I took great pleasure in reading the obituary of the ring leader a few years ago.

Oh and que the "Das Racist" gif

I saw the Author's point over 20 years ago when I taught at a 'normal' middle school, just south of Dallas.

It's been 10 years since I taught high school in a rural district, but, the problem has only gotten worse, not better.

The most endangered black student is the one who tries to step out of the mold, out of lockstep, and attempts to succeed.  "He tryin act all white!"

I saw that phrase, catcall, jeer crush a lot of souls.

I've never taught in an inner city school.  From what the author wrote, it matches what I have been told about Dallas ISD as well.

TRG

I  have  nothing  against  bringing  back  whips  and  plantations . for  the  child ' n   'n  all .

We could uplift people of this culture if we wanted to. It involves giving them a purpose other than sponging off the government. Same goes for those of this same type of culture with different skin colors.

The author didn't perform any analysis of the macrocosm of black america.  He even admitted it in his opening paragraph.  This "paper" was an opinion piece based on a small sample size (his school).  

I agree with most of what he says in VERY small sub-populations generally centered in under-developed urban regions.  However I grew up in a rural area with about 25% blacks, 25% mexicans, and 50% caucasian.  There was just as high of a percentage of black kids that listened to country music as white kids.  Same with being a jock, or an "artist".  

You get into urban "hoods" however and things change.

My fiancee spent four years teaching in a minority-dominated school district, two of them at the alternative school and two at a mainstream school, in special ed. Her experience was quite similar to those in the article. Now she teaches in a very affluent area (95+% white), while my brother lives a few miles away in the local ghetto (80% black). She keeps telling him to GTFO out of the ghetto, regardless of how cheap the house was, or how much he's spent on fixing it up, before he and his fiancee have children, because she knows how bad the schools are there. He makes extremely good money and could easily afford a nice house in a good neighborhood, but refuses to entertain the idea.

Kharn

Northern Nevada is pretty "Non-Diverse" if you know what I mean.

Unfortunately the article will be decried as racist among other terms but it's all too common in some areas.  South Carolina is a good example.  We have created an entire culture of poverty that is morally broken; a culture where people are used to things being handed to them and when they aren't then it's always someone else's fault- usually "whitey".  Certainly not all people act this way although as others have noted, the ones that work hard are labeled all sorts of derogatory names.  I took some classes at the local tech school a few years ago and was appalled at the behavior, lack of respect for anyone including themselves, the language used, the outright refusal to do assignments, blatant cheating, loud and angry complaining about test questions and public displayed of aggression when they felt "wronged".  I've worked in EMS for almost twenty years and seen folks at their best and worst but public education is a failure for the most part.    

We should Raise the Titanic and rebuild Rome into it's architecture of it's time in the turn of the millenia.

Would be just as easy.

The district my HS belonged to has some of the worst housing projects and some really nice neighborhoods, this was in the South, racial tensions were extremely high! That article is 100% spot on. It's sad really.

FWIW: We had a black teacher, great guy, great teacher, very helpful, smart and worldly. He said 99% of the black students were worthless and an embarrassment to his race . Oh, the 1% that weren't? They were generally in ROTC or the band, true.

We also had a female History teacher, she was black, she taught all American history from a black point of view... Screw the book, the book didn't matter. It used to drive me nuts.

I was by no means a good student, I had very little interest in class, but I did what was expected of me and kept my mouth shut. I changed schools after 2yrs because I couldn't take that shithole anymore.

I disagree with the writers statement about fighting, the fights between whites and blacks were every bit as violent as the black on black fights.

Making the qualification in the beginning does not give him immunity from then engaging in an analysis that engages in broad claims that he cannot justify or give any rigor to.  Its poorly reasoned, and plays to emotion.  Are there severe problems in public schools, and especially in the predominantly poor black population?  Absolutely, but his "analysis" is extremely flawed, even if he tries to qualify it.

Its kind of like saying "no offense" and then insulting someone.  Saying "no offense" does not negate the offense.

Not defending the guy, just pointing it out.  





No offense

I attend a HBCU, historically black college/university, and I can say I have witnessed a lot of what the article is about. You always know when the financial aid checks are cut because everyone has some new rims or new speakers for their car that cost more than the car itself. After 2 weeks, the tome it takes for FA to be dispurced, the parking garages are empty because no one shows up for class unless its test day and they immediately ask about curving before the test even commences. There are some very educated and very motivated students I encounter who are often chastised for "acting white". The ones that do show up periodically are late, headphones on with the noise so high we can hear it and the ringtones are often the most vulgar lyrics that would make a porn script writer blush. The graduation rate is 12% at my school. Why do I go there? Because comparatively speaking I am in the top of the class when if I went to a white school, that's dominated by Indians and Asian Americans, I would look like a dunce

Whats it say?

Skin color is most decidedly a determining factor in social environment and culture. They are inextricably linked.

think I'll print this for my wife. She just retired. Comparatively speaking, she had it pretty good.

Maybe she'll reup!

This letter is reposted many times on many forums. Been floating around for years.

Not that it isn't accurate, but just reading the topic title I knew immediately what the post would contain.

Well played.

I've spent a significant amount of time in a very large, predominantly African American High School on the East coast.

I can assure you it's anything but bullshit.

Long read, slightly over-generalized perspective of black students. But only very slightly.




It reinforces my own personal experiences over nearly 20 years or more of teaching higher education, and the clearcut differences between students based on race/ethnicity/culture (but NOT economics).
 

Which is an analytically biased way of making broad applications.  No one can deny your experience, but it fails to provide anything that resembles objective analysis.  Like I said above, there are definite problems within certain subsections of the population, but rambling about experiences that were cherry picked is not the way to engage in social analysis.  Selection bias is a bitch.

Well the act of cutting them off from uncle sugar is easy. Getting the momentum to do so in the form of votes and public opinion would be pretty damn hard, yes.

its true that racsim is taught and its taught in shitty places where the culture can hurt an adult as much as a parents racist ways can hurt a child.

Truth in that post.  They are one of the biggest problems in our country. Their culture is one of immorality and laziness.
 

And if you're white, thank god for the fact you presented. Because if the alternative where true, my reading comprehension might be as poor as you've displayed.

In other words, he blamed culture.

Not me. Then again, I went to public school in an 800 person town in the mountains of Idaho. We only had two paved roads in the county.

It might have been somewhat different than the school she described.

Tagged for later

Yeah I noticed that. All the successful blacks who did well and became educated with good careers seemed to avoid other black people. I have never seen a group of black people who didnt try really hard to ensure other blacks didnt prosper.  They are their own worst enemies.

I taught middle school in an inner city neighborhood. I cannot refute much of what she say. I've also taught in the Prison system as well as in a psychiatric hospital for children. I'll never go back to public school.

You keep using the words "cherry picked" implying the author used data only conforming to the author's view.

Which isn't the case here.  The Author related his/her experiences.  He/she can't help that it is not a broad cross section of the population, the ones the author has taught.

What we need is for some resourceful white students and/or teachers to set up hidden cameras and catch this so that there is irrefutable documentation.

lost me at the rape of a young girl in the superdome.

Bring them back? They never went away.

You got a section 8 plantation ran by white Democrat politicians making sure all the black folk keep producing (D) votes, the new cotton. The only improvement the dems have made over the past 150 years is shifting the enforcement duties inside the black community. Back in the day you had to hire white people to run the whips and go grab runaway slaves. Thanks to a wicked dependency on gubbmint cheese they do a pretty good job policing their own.

The author specified and gave numerous examples of those "definite problems" that you find unmentionable, and specifically identified those "certain subsections" that you seem unable to identify.
Why don't YOU provide a detailed enumeration, in your OWN words, of what YOU mean by: "definite problems within certain subsections of the population"... and do so objectively, and WITHOUT cherry-picking examples nor making any broad applications or generalizations either.
 

I taught at a mostly Hispanic school for a while, and saw a somewhat watered down version of that. But oddly, I think my best and worst students at the time were blacks. The few whites just tried to keep their heads down and graduate, the Hispanics were 85% of the population and ran the gamut. But the majority of the black kids were either all that article described and worse, or they were kids I still wish I had more just like them, even teaching now at a rich, mainly white district. They were kind, funny, good kids who were smart as hell.

At the end of the day, I believe it's culture not genetics. But man, that culture is a mess.

TRG

nvm





 

The author has a bias like anyone does, the author then uses that bias to engage in analysis while providing no other justifications for his beliefs other than his experience.  His analysis is biased (analytically speaking), and therefore by not using other data to justify his experience he is engaging in a selection bias.  I do not dispute that some of his points might be valid, but his approach is faulty and like I have repeatedly said, analytically bullshit.

I spent 10 years throwing drunks out of bars.  Some nights I felt that everyone I encountered was a complete drunken dumbass, and I could probably write a scathing piece describing
"drunk culture", but that does not mean that my analysis would be valid.