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Tonya
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Tonya
Post Number: 425
Registered: 07-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, August 24, 2006 - 07:30 pm: | 
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Ghetto Culture is Killing Civil Rights
By Juan Williams
Washington Post | August 22, 2006
Have we taken our eyes off the prize? The civil rights movement continues, but the struggle today is not so much in the streets as in the home -- and with our children. If systemic racism remains a reality, there is also a far more sinister obstacle facing African American young people today: a culture steeped in bitterness and nihilism, a culture that is a virtual blueprint for failure.
The emphasis on young people in today's civil rights struggle is rooted in demographics. America's black, Hispanic and immigrant population is far younger than its white population. Those young people of color live in the big cities and rely on big-city public schools.
With 50 percent of Hispanic children and nearly 70 percent of black children born to single women today these young people too often come from fractured families where there is little time for parenting. Their search for identity and a sense of direction is undermined by a twisted popular culture that focuses on the "bling-bling" of fast money associated with famous basketball players, rap artists, drug dealers and the idea that women are at their best when flaunting their sexuality and having babies.
In Washington, where a crime wave is tied to these troubled young souls, the city reacts with a curfew. It is a band-aid. The real question is how one does battle with the culture of failure that is poisoning young people -- and do so without incurring the wrath of critics who say we are closing our eyes to existing racial injustice and are "blaming the victim."
Recently Bill Cosby has once again run up against these critics. In 2004, on the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, Cosby took on that culture of failure in a speech that was a true successor to W.E.B. DuBois's 1903 declaration that breaking the color line of segregation would be the main historical challenge for 20th-century America. In a nation where it is getting tougher and tougher to afford a house, health insurance and a college education -- in other words, to attain solid middle-class status -- Cosby decried the excuses for opting out of the competition altogether.
Cosby said that the quarter of black Americans still living in poverty are failing to hold up their end of a deal with history when they don't take advantage of the opportunities created by the Supreme Court's Brown decision and the sacrifices of civil rights leaders from Martin Luther King Jr. to Thurgood Marshall and Malcolm X. Those leaders in the 1950s and '60s opened doors by winning passage of the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act and fair housing laws. Their triumphs led to the nationwide rise in black political power on school boards and in city halls and Congress.
Taken as a whole, that era of stunning breakthroughs set the stage for black people, disproportionately poor and ill-educated because of a history of slavery and segregation, to reach new heights -- freed from the weight of government-sanctioned segregation. It also created a national model of social activism to advance the rights of women, Hispanics, gays and others.
Cosby asked the chilling question: "What good is Brown" and all the victories of the civil rights era if nobody wants them? A generation after those major civil rights victories, black America is experiencing alarming dropout rates, shocking numbers of children born to single mothers and a frightening acceptance of criminal behavior that has too many black people filling up the jails. Where is the focus on taking advantage of new opportunities to advance and to close the racial gap in educational and economic achievement?
Incredibly, Cosby's critics don't see the desperate need to pull a generational fire alarm to warn people about a culture of failure that is sabotaging any chance for black people in poverty to move up and help their children reach the security of economic and educational achievement. Not one mainstream civil rights group picked up on his call for marches and protests against bad parenting, drug dealers, hate-filled rap music and failing schools.
Where is the civil rights groundswell on behalf of stronger marriages that will allow more children to grow up in two-parent families and have a better chance of staying out of poverty? Where are the marches demanding good schools for those children -- and the strong cultural reinforcement for high academic achievement (instead of the charge that minority students who get good grades are "acting white")? Where are the exhortations for children to reject the self-defeating stereotypes that reduce black people to violent, oversexed "gangstas," minstrel show comedians and mindless athletes?
In order to face this century's class battles, young minds need the self-confidence that comes from examples of inspiring historical personalities, such as a black woman born into slavery who made herself a national leader, Sojourner Truth, or a black man living under rank segregation, A. Philip Randolph, who defied corporate power to break segregation in organized labor. Frederick Douglass had to teach himself how to read before standing up to defeat slavery.
These examples should empower young people to believe in themselves and to organize across racial lines and build institutions with a solid footing in the nation's political and economic power. This is real black culture, and it is based on strong families creating determined, self-reliant young people.
The defining challenge for this generation of Americans dealing with poverty is putting the next generation in a position to move even higher. Individuals must now use the opportunities made available to them by the sacrifices of past generations if they are to achieve victory in America's long and still unfinished civil rights movement.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=23997 |
Tonya
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Tonya
Post Number: 427
Registered: 07-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, August 24, 2006 - 07:42 pm: |
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Blacks must keep their eyes on the truth
Stanley Crouch
We live in a peculiarly twisting and turning time in which the responsibility of defining our troubles becomes ever more befuddling. Now Juan Williams, because of his new book, "Enough," is getting the treatment.
Williams, so goes the critics' tales, is a man who went blind in the long storm of racial trouble and has converted to that lunatic, black middle class, which rejects its lower-class brothers and can do nothing but "blame the victim."
How did Williams become excluded from the squad of acceptable black commentators after debating the right-wing gang on Fox News, writing a biography of Thurgood Marshall and another book examining the role of faith in Afro-American progress, and working on the impressive PBS documentary of the civil rights movement, "Eyes on the Prize"?
Williams would be just fine if he had denounced Bill Cosby instead of championing the comedian's opinions and basing "Enough" on substantial research that corroborates Cosby's attacks on the self-destructive behavior in the black lower class.
"What happens," says Williams, "is that youbecome some sort of a leper if you don't lockstep your opinions in line with white liberals. They run the programming of CBS, NBC and ABC, and they don't want you to rock the boat of received opinion. I have done my homework and I have seen these problems grow to epidemic proportions. But I have to say that these white liberals have bought the line of the do-nothing black leadership on the one hand, andhave been convinced that the high dropout rate, the violence and the misogyny you hear in one rap recording after another are just natural to black culture and not an aberration."
Williams means that what he calls a "culture of failure" is a historical aberration. Once upon a time in America, black people from the top to the bottom realized the importance of education in supplying some of the most reliable tools with which to combat the limitations imposed by racism. Though 500 black men just graduated from Morehouse College, there is now a 50% dropout rate among black high school students in America. Though Dorothy Height and the Council of Negro Women warned against irresponsible sexual behavior many years ago, 70% of black American children are born out of wedlock.
Racists might look at the gloomy numbers and say that they were right all along: Black men and women are not ready for civilization. But we have learned so much about the gene pool over the past 50 years that we can now dismiss such stupidity and realize that what we are seeing has less to do with genetic doom than with learned behavior, or learned misbehavior. It is still, however, an inarguable form of doom.
I strongly recommend "Enough" as a very welcome turning away from explaining everything in terms of white America's unlimited power and unlimited disregard. Had black Americans ever truly believed that, there never would have been a Thurgood Marshall or a Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and all of those who came before them. In our moment, Bill Cosby opened the door for new discussion. For the good of all, Juan Williams is helping to hold that door open. If you enter, you will risk nothing but your received opinions.
Originally published on August 24, 2006
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ideas_opinions/story/446015p-375507c.html |
Nels
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Nels
Post Number: 534
Registered: 07-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, August 25, 2006 - 12:52 am: |
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No, niggahs are "Killing Civil Rights". |
Chrishayden
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 2633
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: 
Votes: 1 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, August 25, 2006 - 11:15 am: |
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Your civil rights are not contingent upon anything much less the expectations and requirements of bootlickers like Juan Williams and Stanley Crouch. You are born with them as a citizen and you have to commit a felony before you lose even some of them and then you do not lose them all.
Tonya I want to say you are sick in the head but you are just like those two. The minute you feel like you are discriminated against you will start howling about your rights.
When it happens don't come crying up on this list unless you are ready to get flayed. |
Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 4981
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: 
Votes: 2 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, August 25, 2006 - 11:52 am: |
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As the word "civil" implies, any legal rights a person has are contingent upon whether or not the government of his country had passed laws to prevent citizens from being denied due process. We are born with the human right to be free but this does not guaratee that the powers that be will not be oppressors. The only bootlicker involved in this discussion is the one who pays homage to the idea that in America justice is color blind. |
Schakspir
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Schakspir
Post Number: 557
Registered: 12-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, August 25, 2006 - 01:03 pm: |
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That's funny. I never hear either Juan or Stanley saying anything about poor sociopathic white boys in Southie, Boston--the white man's equivalent of the South Bronx. Or poor whites in Appalachia, or Baltimore, or Bensonhurst, etc. I guess poor whites haven't yet earned the right to be relentlessly scrutinized for their own pathologies. |
Schakspir
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Schakspir
Post Number: 558
Registered: 12-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, August 25, 2006 - 01:07 pm: |
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And apparently, Juan Williams has never heard anything about DOWNSIZING. |
Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 4989
Registered: 01-2004
Rating:
Votes: 2 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, August 25, 2006 - 01:56 pm: |
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Maybe Juan has embraced a different mentality wherein he has refrained from getting bogged down in detailing everything that's wrong with white people. Discrimination is a fact of life so blacks should sometimes view it as a way to learn from the mistakes exclusive to white people; at some point black folks have to become pragmatic and realistic. And so it goes. |
Tonya
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Tonya
Post Number: 431
Registered: 07-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, August 25, 2006 - 02:03 pm: |
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Now that, Cynnique, I agree with 500% |
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