For many years one of my childhood heroes, Bill Cosby, has been advocating for change in African American society.  Juan Williams has expanded upon Cosby’s crusade.  If Deval Patrick really wants to address the problems facing our African American urban youths he should also speak out.  Deval can’t be as blunt as Cosby is.  Cosby isn’t running for anything and could care less what anyone says about his position.  Deval can advocate for change; he is a walking, talking example of what education can do for a young poor African American man or woman.  There is no limit to the heights to which one can rise in America and Deval Patrick, Barak Obama, Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice and Oprah Winfrey are all prime examples.  Historically, Frederick Douglass, George Washington Carver, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison all rose to unexpected heights due to education and talent.  Talent is innate in many ways and education, unfortunately, is not.  Cosby worries out loud about the plight of millions of talented young African Americans who are squandering away their chance to grab a piece of the American Dream for themselves and their families.]]> Deval needs to find a nice way to say what Cosby said on the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education:

“I am talking about these people who cry when their son is standing there in an orange suit. Where were you when he was 2? Where were you when he was 12? Where were you when he was 18 and how come you didn’t know that he had a pistol? And where is the father? . . .”

“The church is only open on Sunday and you can’t keep asking Jesus to do things for you. You can’t keep saying that God will find a way. God is tired of you.  I wasn’t there when God was saying it, I am making this up, but it sounds like what God would say. In all of this work we can not blame white people. White people don’t live over there; they close up the shop early. The Korean ones don’t know us well enough, so they stay open 24 hours.”

“People putting their clothes on backwards: Isn’t that a sign of something gone wrong? . . . People with their hats on backwards, pants down around the crack, isn’t that a sign of something, or are you waiting for Jesus to pull his pants up? Isn’t it a sign of something when she has her dress all the way up to the crack and got all type of needles [piercings] going through her body? What part of Africa did this come from? Those people are not Africans; they don’t know a damn thing about Africa.”

“With names like Shaniqua, Taliqua and Mohammed and all of that crap, and all of them are in jail. Brown versus the Board of Education is no longer the white person’s problem. We have got to take the neighborhood back. We have to go in there — forget about telling your child to go into the Peace Corps — it is right around the corner. They are standing on the corner and they can’t speak English.”

“Basketball players — multimillionaires — can’t write a paragraph. Football players — multimillionaires — can’t read. Yes, multimillionaires. Well, Brown versus Board of Education: Where are we today? They paved the way, but what did we do with it? That white man, he’s laughing. He’s got to be laughing: 50 percent drop out, the rest of them are in prison.”

“Five, six children — same woman — eight, 10 different husbands or whatever. Pretty soon you are going to have DNA cards to tell who you are making love to. You don’t know who this is. It might be your grandmother. I am telling you, they’re young enough! Hey, you have a baby when you are 12; your baby turns 13 and has a baby. How old are you? Huh? Grandmother! By the time you are 12 you can have sex with your grandmother, you keep those numbers coming. I’m just predicting. . . .”

“What is it — young girls getting after a girl who wants to remain a virgin? Who are these sick black people and where do they come from and why haven’t they been parented to shut up? This is a sickness, ladies and gentlemen.”

Only a dramatic change in the culture can solve the education gap problem.  There is little or nothing that government can do.  If a black child does not learn how to speak proper English he will not, in all likelihood, succeed in the American system.  If he is not exposed to math and reading in his childhood he will not feel comfortable in a school setting.  If he has no positive male role model he will not know how to properly behave around women. If black society does not tell young black women that having a child in your teens almost guarantees a life of poverty and dreams deferred, then we will continue to have whole generations of black children raising black children. Deval has a touching photograph on his website that shows him and his wife reading to their children.  The way he is raising his children should be a paradigm of how it should be done.  Here is a loving father and mother nurturing their two young daughters. A picture says a thousand words and this picture seems to me to be an endorsement of what Cosby has been preaching.

Our Elementary and Middle School students also have fared well in nationwide testing.  For example, in 2005 Massachusetts was ranked number one in reading and mathematics at the 4th and 8th grade levels on the NAEP test which is referred to as the “Nation’s Report Card.”  Commissioner Driscoll tells me that it is “the only national, continuing assessment of what American students know and can do in various subject areas.”  Before you go on attacking what the Commissioner said you should also know that Afromerica.com ranked Massachusetts as the number 1 state for public schools. In 2003 Massachusetts earned the highest rank for Middle School achievement from psk12.com.]]> Is there room for improvement?  Of course there is, there is and always will be room for improvement.  But Deval’s plaintive plea regarding the state of our schools is a pandering attempt to appeal to our baser instincts. He should stop wringing his hands.  He should come out and criticize the teachers union and support the rapid expansion of the charter school system. His commercial should address the crisis caused by the special education system in this state.  But of course, he will never do that.

I like Patrick’s positions on early childhood education but I find his tepid endorsement of charter schools and the MCAS system to be a symptom of his being wedded to the teachers unions as all good lefties must do.  His ad should be narrated by Bill Clinton because it seems that both Bill and Deval would say anything (within the left’s allowed parameters) to get elected.  I think Deval should take my advice and hit Gabs where it hurts.