[Mb-civic] NYTimes.com Article: Breaking the Silence

Sun Aug 1 09:50:30 PDT 2004

The article below from NYTimes.com 
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Breaking the Silence

August 1, 2004
 By HENRY LOUIS GATES JR. 

"Go into any inner-city neighborhood," Barack Obama said in
his keynote address to the Democratic National Convention,
"and folks will tell you that government alone can't teach
kids to learn. They know that parents have to parent, that
children can't achieve unless we raise their expectations
and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a
book is acting white." In a speech filled with rousing
applause lines, it was a line that many black Democratic
delegates found especially galvanizing. Not just because
they agreed, but because it was a home truth they'd seldom
heard a politician say out loud. 

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. 

Yet in too many black neighborhoods today, academic
achievement has actually come to be stigmatized. "We are
just not the same people anymore," says the mayor of
Memphis, Dr. Willie W. Herenton. "We are worse off than we
were before Brown v. Board," says Dr. James Comer, a child
psychiatrist at Yale. "And a large part of the reason for
this is that we have abandoned our own black traditional
core values, values that sustained us through slavery and
Jim Crow segregation." 

Making it, as Mr. Obama told me, "requires diligent effort
and deferred gratification. Everybody sitting around their
kitchen table knows that." 

"Americans suffer from anti-intellectualism, starting in
the White House," Mr. Obama went on. "Our people can least
afford to be anti-intellectual." Too many of our children
have come to believe that it's easier to become a black
professional athlete than a doctor or lawyer. Reality
check: according to the 2000 census, there were more than
31,000 black physicians and surgeons, 33,000 black lawyers
and 5,000 black dentists. Guess how many black athletes are
playing professional basketball, football and baseball
combined. About 1,400. In fact, there are more
board-certified black cardiologists than there are black
professional basketball players. "We talk about leaving no
child behind," says Dena Wallerson, a sociologist at
Connecticut College. "The reality is that we are allowing
our own children to be left behind." Nearly a third of
black children are born into poverty. The question is: why?

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. 

"A lot of us," Mr. Obama argues, "hesitate to discuss these
things in public because we think that if we do so it lets
the larger society off the hook. We're stuck in an
either/or mentality - that the problem is either societal
or it's cultural." 

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. 

These issues can be ticklish, no question, but they're
badly served by silence or squeamishness. Mr. Obama showed
how to get the balance right. We've got to create as many
opportunities as we can for the worst-off - and "make sure
that every child in America has a decent shot at life." But
values matter, too. We can't talk about the choices people
have without talking about the choices people make. 

Henry Louis Gates Jr. will be a guest columnist for the
Op-Ed page this week. Thomas L. Friedman is on leave until
October, writing a book. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/01/opinion/01gates.html?ex=1092379030&ei=1&en=9316ab41d0ead568

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