the black student

(to read the associated article, click on the title)

I set up my personal blog so that it would be easier to check the news for relevant black issues. Today I came across news about black graduates in X state. I really didn't care about the state, because black male dropouts are a nationwide phenomenon rather than a regional one.

When I was in the 8th grade, there wasn't one black male graduate in my hometown. That is a fiasco. It is a failure of the school system, and more so a failure on the part of black culture. No matter how racist a school system is, it takes genuine disinterest to just drop-out in a society that requires a high school diploma for even the most remedial of jobs.

I realize that there are no black parents that want their children to dropout. But there must be someone other than the school system that has to take responsibility for establishing a sense of dedication and will in a child. You don't have kids, you raise them.

I also realize that countless black parents are incapable of spending a lot of time with their children because they are forced to work multiple sh***y jobs just to get by. That's systematic: but just because the parent is trapped in the system doesn't mean the children have to be. If black parents today would show the kind of dedication to education that black parents had fifty years ago, we just might be better off.

Here's how I see it: The Black Power movement gave us something we desperately needed and we bastardized the message and robbed ourselves of something equally necessary. We needed our pride, we need a strong sense of history, we need to know that the school is structured for white kids and that if we want to know some Truth...we can't get it there. But the lies in school are no excuse for ignorance. If you aren't learning what you want to learn in school, don't choose to be stupid. Use that thirst for knowledge. Go to the library. READ A MUTHAF***IN BOOK!

I have to question whether black parents are doing what they need to do to create that thirst for knowledge in their children. I'm not sure how my mother pulled it off. I know plenty of black parents who were able to do just as well as my mother in far worse conditions. I suppose it's all in the attitude.

Don't confuse it, you can be militant and intellectual, but being militant and stupid makes you a pawn. The question is: is my generation a generation of pawns to be used by the racist, military-industrial, capitalist machine; or is my generation to grow and become a class of strong, intelligent, autonomous black people capable of dethroning the power-structure that has long kept our people under the yoke of oppression.

You cannot stop what you don't know exists. Learn something.

And to my black brothers who are getting an education: If you aren't doing anything for your people after you get that cash...you might as well put on some white gloves and cork. And I mean that!