The Plight of Black Males in America

Martin Luther King Sunday

Presented to the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Huntington

January 18, 2009

Rev. Paul Ratzlaff

 

It’s dangerous to have an actual living human-being as your minister. How much more safe and comfortable to have a pre-programmed certainty, like the formula radio station that guarantees you to play only your favorites.

From time to time, I find myself out of sync with the dominant mood. This is such a time. There is so much exaltation among religious liberals in anticipation of the inauguration of our country’s first African American President.

It’s not as if I don’t feel that excitement (especially given the elation of the inaugural celebration here this past Friday!), the profound sense of being witness to something seismic in American history. That our country could elect a Black man as president is akin to the falling of the Berlin wall. Just a few years before that cataclysmic event in 1989, if you had asked me, “Is it conceivable that the Berlin wall could be taken down, Germany reunified, and the Soviet Union collapse?” I would have said, “Are you out of your mind?”

Had you asked me some years ago, “Is it conceivable that the United States would elect a black man president, with a name like Barack Husain Obama?” I might well have replied, “Are you out of your mind?”

So it is just amazing that in two days we will watch the first family, a Black family move into the White House! Who would have thunk it! Right we are to celebrate and to bow our heads in awe at this democracy and the will of the people.

At the same time that I share the excitement and the anxiety of wishing our new President safety and the wisdom to make wise choices to deal with the mess that we are in, I also worry that those of us, who enjoy unearned privilege simply by the color of our skin, will breathe a sigh of relief. We may be tempted to say, “Our work is done,” and pat ourselves on the back.

I fear that having elected a Black male as president, we may paper over the distressing futures that Black men on average face in our country.

Here’s the danger in having a living being as your minister. I feel compelled to remind us that we who are in the majority have put up with a situation that we would never tolerate were the situation to apply to White children.

Were Martin Luther King, Jr. alive to celebrate his 80^th birthday, and were he to continue to be a prophet goading us to truly be a beloved community, he might repeat his words:

I love his words “transformed nonconformity.” They remind me of his saying, “Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.” “Creatively maladjusted!” “Transformed nonconformity!” In other words, King is not lifting up people who don’t fit, but people who use their not fitting in a creative, transforming way.

I’m not at peace with the way things are, especially for black males in America. I want you to be disturbed as well. But, I pray, may we use our disturbance creatively to transform our country into the kind of country of which we dream.

The following should shake us up. I’m quoting from Pedro Noguera’s book, The Trouble with Black Boys[1]:

Nothing I’m telling you is news. You know this; I know it. But I fear we who enjoy white privilege have become inured to it. It’s become the norm. We (many of us) take it for granted. Can you imagine our outrage were this true of our children! When we send off our graduating seniors next Mothers’ Day as we have for many years, can you imagine our distress if were to send more to Ossining than to SUNY? (I barely even know where the prisons are located; I know where the many colleges of the state are! What does that tell you?)

Barbara and I moved to Morristown, New Jersey, when our son was three. Our daughter was yet to be born. In thinking about where to live, we were excited to live within the Morris School District, because we knew it to be a diversified district, having children from a mixture of racial, ethnic and socio-economic classes. (UUs had been at the forefront of the political fight to merge two districts, that of the suburban, affluent white ring – Morris Township - around the more urban, poorer, and more minority core of Morristown.) We were pleased when our son’s first grade teacher was a black woman, named ironically, Mrs. White. We were pleased when our son in elementary school had black friends, as did our daughter in the early years of her education.

As our kids grew older, however, they seemed to diverge – white kids into the gifted and talented programs, and blacks into the special ed and remedial programs. I began to wonder, “When you have a system with such incredible resources, why do minority kids not use them to get ahead?”  I was so enraptured with education as a way up the social ladder that I couldn’t imagine anyone not taking advantage of the opportunities in the school.

I remember talking with a middle class black family, neighbors of one of the members of the UU congregation. I was disturbed to learn that they were going to send their children to Catholic secondary schools. “Why?” I asked with concern. “Because we don’t want them to get spoiled by the black kids who are in the public school,” they said or something like that.

Only more recently, as I read the reflections of Pedro Noguera, an education professor at New York University, do I begin to appreciate the complexity of the situation. As Dr. Noguera observes, this is not a simple situation. There is no one magic bullet which will fix it. This inequity in Black, especially Black male, achievement is a complex of a variety of factors.

Certainly one factor is prejudice and low expectations of White (and, for that matter, Black teachers who have internalized the White perception of Black kids!) But that is not the only factor.

There’s the culture among Black teenagers, a culture that drops out of education, questioning, “what’s the use?” 

There’s the political reality of White parents not wanting any changes in their schools that appear to threaten their own White children’s achievements.

I want to examine each of these complicating factors in greater depth. First the issue of expectations. As Noguera laments in a book of essays, titled The Trouble With Black Boys, Black males though only 6% of the population occupy an enormous portion of the American psyche. They’re either put on a pedestal of athletic or celebrity success, or they are portrayed as violent, intimidating criminals. “For Black males adulation and scorn are often two sides of the same coin, and as we have seen in the cases of O.J. Simpson, Michael Vick and Michael Jackson even those who seem to be loved and adored can easily and quickly fall from grace and find themselves hated and despised.” (xii)

I want to read an extended quote:

One can only hope that the election of President Obama, and the many Black leaders around him, will broaden the scope of Black images.

The problem, of course, is that school teachers and administrators share these prejudices. Why are Black boys almost exclusively shunted off to special ed?

But prejudice doesn’t work alone. There’s obvious evidence that peer Black culture belittles academic accomplishment. Noguera confronted this in a very direct way with his son. Whereas his son excelled in the Berkeley California school district’s elementary schools, like Morristown, one of exceptional resources and diversity, Noguera’s son revolted in high school. Coming from a family of caring, involved professionals, you can imagine his parents’ despair as he took a dive in high school.

Clearly his son wanted to be accepted by his peers, youths who had given up on education, and their hopes for advancement. It’s interesting to see the research. First generation immigrants, still with the faith that education is a key to advancement, study hard. But, by the second generation, Latino/Latinas, become as cynical as Black kids, giving up on education as a tool of white oppression.

As Noguera observed about himself, he had to learn how to get along in the classroom, and then assume a different persona outside of the classroom in order to be accepted by his peers. Roberta Richin, the savvy director of Long Island’s Council for Prejudice Reduction, says that kids have to learn how to “code-switch.” That is, you have to learn how to talk white in the classroom, and how to get down with your
“bro’s from the hood.” To learn how to be successful in our schools, someone has to teach kids how to navigate the two worlds – how to adapt without giving up one’s identity.

Yet another factor in inequity is what Noguera calls the “political.” Noguera served as a teacher in the Berkeley California school system, on the Board of Education, and as a professor at the University of California there. His own children attended the Berkeley schools. He reports on the effort of the most progressive school districts in the nation to foster equity for minority students. Districts like Berkeley, Ann Arbor, Chapel Hill formed a network to advance equity in education. Here’s Noguera’s observation about the political reality that doomed these efforts:

Conflicts over what could broadly be termed ‘educational equity issues: have plagued the districts…. Most often these conflicts take the form of hostility from impatient and frustrated minority parents directed at district administrators. However, affluent parents whose students are generally well served by the schools are not disinterested parties in these disputes. [How delicately Noguera puts it!] Occasionally some of these parents also enter the fray when they believe their interests are endangered. …[T]his constituency has the ability to exert tremendous influence over district policies through its political and economic resources, which can be deployed whenever it believes high academic standards are threatened. While it is unlikely that any interest group will ever directly oppose efforts to improve the academic performance of minority students, occasionally the interventions that are proposed require a reallocation of resources or the restructuring of educational programs. Such changes often encounter fierce opposition from the parents of high-achieving students if or when they are interpreted as compromising the educational interests of their children. Examples of the kinds of measures that might evoke the ire of this constituency include efforts to eliminate or reduce tracking or to open up access to gifted and talented or Advanced Placement courses. (134) 

In other words, we become the opposition. We, liberal white affluent parents, have tremendous clout with our school districts. Too often we fear that education is a zero-sum game: if you dilute my child’s gifted and talented class, my child will lose out in the college admission competition – and ultimately in life. 

Combining expectations of failure, Black male youth’s dissing of academic success, and White affluent fear might lead one to despair. But there is hope. There are school districts that have raised the scores and academic success of minority students.

What works? Districts that have success share certain characteristics. They are focused on success for every student. They have clear systems for prevention and intervention to ensure achievement for all students. In comments that Noguera made to us last fall, he pointed out that algebra is a predictor course of college admission. If a student passes Algebra, they are likely to be on track for college. If they fail, they will likely not go to college. One would think then, that a lot of attention would be paid to who succeeds at Algebra. Maybe there could be two hours back-to-back of Algebra for those who need help (and homework would be done in the class). Maybe the best teachers could teach these courses to inspire and motivate those students who have difficulty grasping the concepts. As Noguera puts it, “High performing schools adopt comprehensive systems for prevention and intervention that accelerate learning opportunities for students who are behind academically rather than separating them and slowing them down.”

Another characteristic of high performing schools is that staff cooperates in taking collective responsibility for the success of every student.

High performing schools know what works. They use data to evaluate their effectiveness, and think about how to do things differently when they don’t work.

High performing schools develop leadership at all levels. They don’t depend on a single charismatic leader. Rather they foster leadership teams, so that when principals turn over, as they often do, they have others to step forward. (162-163)

The Newport News, Virginia school district is such a district! In other words, there is hope. We don’t have to have an educational world in which Black males are doomed to failure. It can be different.

What does this mean for our school districts in Huntington, Syosset, Jericho, Smithtown? Might our families become the centers of coalition to transform their local school districts? Might our members join together with other progressive people in their district to advocate for equity, training and nothing-less-than-success in treating all children fairly?

We are a small congregation, with only a few families sprinkled across many districts. (Many have observed that the tremendous number of school districts serves to perpetuate privilege and inequity.) Nevertheless, to remember the words of Martin Luther King, “human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.” May one family alone, or the two or three together, be the leaven of change by seeking out allies and working together to change these abysmal statistics.

It’s one thing to savor, and to celebrate President Obama’s inauguration. It’s another thing to do the work at the grass roots level that will make for his successful administration. We can’t leave the work to him alone, granted that we are so hopeful about the leadership his administration will bring. We must do the patient, work of the world right here where we live and send our children to school.

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