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.
I heard Gabs on the radio this morning talking about the education gap. Poor Gabs can’t address the issue because, like the troika, he is a white male. Deval doesn’t suffer from this disability and is free to discuss the impact of modern black culture on young black children.
I recently viewed Patrick’s clip “Reforming Education: The Case for Leadership”. A man from the audience expresses frusturation with the public schools. Patrick’s reply admonishing union-bashers garnered a positive from the audience. Was the room stacked with union loyalists? I wonder what the questioner thought of his answer.
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Patrick said the state should be looking into opening up pilot schools in Gloucester, like they have in Boston. How can he both praise pilot schools and not recognize how unions have thwarted their progress? I mean give me a break! It’s all for the kids, right?
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There are couple other problems with Patrick’s answer. First, there is NOTHING stopping a local district from opening a Horace Mann charter. No state intervention is needed. Furthermore, concerns about a local school district need to first be addressed with the local school board. Many people don’t know about pursuing that route, and others are stunted by a puppet/rubber stamp board.
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Second, Patrick drops the edubabble buzzwords of the day — “educating the whole child“. The whole child movement is all about reducing accountablity and increasing budgets. It’s the “soft skills” of the education world. It’s the nonsense of “mulitple intelligences”, “constructivism”, and the “hierarchy of needs” — that has eroded the teaching profession, consumed huge amounts of resources (with no demonstrable ROI), it’s the desire to measure “school climate”, hurt feelings over labels such as “underperforming”. And it’s all done in the name of children. It’s a scam and a shame, and people should be outraged.
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Many months ago, I went to one of the Joint Comm. on Education’s listening tours, and Patrick was there. Good for him. But clearly, he was only hearing one side of the debate. I am more than disappointed in his education platform. As a former teacher and current school committee member, I am seriously concerned.
I am a big supporter of public schools. I think they do a competent job at least they have for my children, my wife and myself. Deval Patrick’s ad really angered me because it was false. The education system is not failing. It is bogged down with all the BS code words, union intrigue and political correctness. Pilot and Charter schools are beneficial because they create a competitive educational environment. Competition creates a pressure to which the public schools must respond or else they lose the precious lifeblood of funding. Comptetition can only make public education better in the long run.
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Even if the educationalsystem was perfect and stripped of all the crap of which you so eloquently wrote, in the end it still all comes down to the parents.
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If children aren’t performing up to snuff parents need to look in the mirror and ask themselves:
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Do they provide a rich learning environment for their children at home?
Have they read to them, corrected their speech, spoken correctly around them, behaved appropriately around them?
Do they insist that homework be done and do they review the homework, every night?
Have they communicated with the teacher if a problem arises?
Do the kids go to school every day, on time?
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Teachers can only teach those children who are willing to learn. That willingness to learn has to be fostered and nurtured at home. This could be Deval Patrick’s message to Massachusetts.
I find it so strange that someone would publish a lengthy quote (or apparent quote) from someone else and then ask why Deval Patrick didn’t say it.
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On the other hand, you point out that a picture says 1,000 words and that Deval makes a strong case for learning and parenting by showing that he is an engaged and loving parent.
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So what exactly is the problem?
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Apparently one of your rules is that only African-American people can comment on social problems faced by African-American people. Since I’m white, I’m not sure I’m eligible to comment on this topic (by your rules) but it seems to me that there is a wide range of legitimate positions about how to solve social problems among people of color and the community as a whole. Over a hundred years ago, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois famously disagreed on how to strike the right balance in educating young Blacks.
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I don’t know why you insist that Deval Patrick and Bill Cosby must agree on substance or emphasis or approaches to problems. Unless you have another rule that all African-American men must think and act alike.
Someone like Bill Cosby is free to say whatever he feels is true about the plight of young blacks in America. His quotes delineate many of the reasons that the education gap, discussed above, persists 50 years after Thurgood Marshall won the Brown v Board of Education case.
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When I say that only Deval is free to speak about this problem I mean to say that if a white man said what Bill Cosby said he would be tarred and feathered on this blog and everywhere else. I was trying to show (I guess in a ham-handed fashion) that there is a double standard when it comes to talking about race and that people who want to improve education should really face the problem. As you can see from the paucity of responses, it is avoided like the third rail. Bloggers point to the lack of educational achievement in the urban public schools as evidence of institutional racism and failure of the public school system. I think the causes of the gap are fairly well expressed by Cosby.
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I don’t know where Deval Patrick stands on the issue because he has never discussed it. Whether he agrees with Bill Cosby is no concern of mine. Your implication that I feel that all black men should think alike is untrue. I indicated that I felt that Deval Patrick was a prime example of what Bill Cosby is trying to accomplish. Here is a young black man who is married to the mother of his children. He is a brilliant lawyer; a corporate leader; a self made millionaire and a loving husband and father. He came from nothing and achieved all this. He did it through education, pure and simple. His commercial says he wants to stop our state from falling behind. On Tuesday the new SAT information came out showing the gap between Asian and Whites on one end and Blacks and Hispanics on the other end. When I saw the SAT results, I thought about what Cosby had said a few years back upon the 50th anniversary of Brown v. BOE. I believe that if DP talked about it and convinced one black child to eschew the rap and jive and learn English, Math and Science, he would be doing that child an enormous service. I also thought that he would never raise the issue however, because it is proscribed in the rules of the left side of the Democratic Party. I typed out my thoughts and posted them.
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I am sorry if you find my material unworthy of recommendation. I will take your criticisms to heart and try harder next time. Thank you for having given me another teachable moment. I have really benefited from it.