Dumb As a DOOR Knob: Academic Performance of African Americans Continues to Decline

It appears that over the past decades, since the times of slavery and Jim Crow and up until the civil rights and black power movements, the value in which education is perceived in the African American community has reduced significantly. It was Malcolm X who said “Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today.” In general terms, academic prowess and proficiency is on the decline for America regardless of ethnic persuasion, with the exception of Asian Americans. In fact we may be producing the stupidest generation in American history and present statistics suggest that U.S. high school students are basically incompetent in the areas of math, science, history, economics and geography.

According to a survey conducted by the National Geographic Society, only 37 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 can find Iraq on a map of the world and that 50 percent of Americans cannot locate the state of New York on a map. Moreover, only 43 percent of all U.S. high school students knew that the Civil War was fought sometime between 1850 and 1900. Today, American 15-year-olds do not even rank in the top half of all advanced nations when it comes to math or science literacy based on report published by the National Center for Education Statistics.

Although the aforementioned is for all Americans, statistics for African Americans is even worse. A new study released by Seattle Public Schools revealed that African-American students whose primary language is English perform significantly worse in math and reading than black-African immigrant students who speak another language at home. Findings of the Seattle study indicate that only 36 percent of black students who speak English at home passed their grade's math test, while 47 percent of Somali-speaking students passed. Other black ethnic groups did even better. In reading, 56 percent of black students who speak English passed, while 67 percent of Somali-speaking students passed with other black ethnic groups scoring higher again. However, still in concert black students scored lower than the district average of 78 percent for reading.

As it stands presently, the African American community is moving farther and further away from the traditions and values that maintained our collective integrity – specifically the value and importance we attributed to reading and education. Today about 41% of African American males graduate from high school in the United States according to the Schott Foundation for Public Education and just 22 % of African American males who began at a four-year college graduated within six years (National Student Clearinghouse/Study by Consortium on Chicago School Research at U of Chicago).

Maybe this is why 69% of African American children in America cannot read at grade level in the 4th grade, compared with 29% among White children. Up until Brown V. Board of Education, it was discriminatory practices like segregation that kept Africa Americans poorly educated, now it is ourselves. Until we realize that more education is part of the answer, we will always be confronted with social and economic inequity.

Yes, the school systems are not servicing the needs of African American males as effectively as other ethnic groups. Many years ago, a black man who knew how to read was a threat to mainstream America, and during slavery such a skill was punishable by death. Now, education is no longer considered as a valuable, revolutionary act and we eventually victimize ourselves, just as much as the school systems our students attend.

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Ignorant and Stupid At the Same D### Time

I must admit, I am disappointed, afraid and frankly appalled at the extent to which sciolism is displayed in America, especially among folks that look like me. It seems that we parade our ignorance and lack of respect and appreciation for presenting ourselves in the best fashion, as if it is something to be proud of.

The badge of honor through the lyrics include: “On the phone, cooking dope, at the same damn time and Selling white, selling mid, at the same damn time.” The only lyrics that are missing and would be a better reflection of the kind of mind set that would spend time creating such garbage is “ignorant and stupid at the same d*** time.” Yes I said it and this is all it can be. On the front in there are no other words to describe this type of belief system other than brainless, deficient, doltish or imbecilic and on the back end, cloddish, birdbrained, dense, misinformed and nescient.

Just like those who would actual sing and learn the words. I ran on it by happen stance when looking for NPR. A local radio talk show was playing it in Atlanta and the female disk jockey played the song and started singing it – the station will remain anonymous (V-103).

Now I know having fun and making people laugh is a good thing, but when it plays and promotes music that reflects injudicious and lowbred stereotypes, either the host, or the listeners should call in and correct this type of behavior. No wonder we are where we are as a community. Just this week a TSA screener was arrested at JFK Airport for throwing a cup of hot coffee at an airlines pilot who asked her and some colleagues to tone down a profanity-laced conversation and incessant use of the N-word" in a public terminal.

No wonder in Detroit, students tested from Detroit Public Schools have scored the worst in the nation time in science, according to national test scores. Results suggest that 80 percent of eighth-graders scored below the “basic” level, meaning they lack fundamental skills in science, while 17 percent scored at the basic level. Not to mention not a single student scored ‘advanced’ in reading and 73% of 4th-graders scored below the ‘basic’ level, which was the worst in the 40-year history of the test. The NAEP reading test found 73 percent of Detroit fourth-graders below the “basic” level - meaning they lack even the basic skills that are the building blocks of reading.

But this is no different than other places across the nation, where data reveals that African American students lag behind their white peers by an average of more than 20 test-score points on the NAEP math and reading assessments at 4th and 8th grades (a difference of about two grade levels). In the 2008 National Assessment of Educational Progress conducted for grades 4, 8, and 12, findings revealed that the reading scores of African-American boys in eighth grade were barely higher than the scores of white girls in fourth grade. This may be why just 57 percent of African American students graduate on time compared to 82.7 percent of Asian students and 78.4 percent of white.

Now I am not hating, just pointing out the reality of attending behavior and how we as a collective are more likely to blame others and our environment than ourselves. Used to be a time when education and reading, even when our parents couldn’t read or never attended school, was valued higher than all except family and God. There is no valid reason or excuse as to why just 41% of Black men graduate from high school in the United States according to the Schott Foundation for Public Education.

Although the impact of systemic and historic racism are factor of everyday life for African Americans, especially males, what we do to ourselves (or do not do) contribute just as detrimentally to why we have the chances of going to prison were highest among Black males (32.2%) and are nearly half of all the murder victims annually of which around 96 % of whom were killed by other African Americans.

With songs as the one I referenced by the Atlanta rapper “Future,” and radio stations not having the decency to make responsible decisions about what is best for our community, it is no wonder we have folks like Curtis A. Davis Jr. was once friends with the three men he’s now charged with shooting to death March 27 at an apartment in Chicago, leaving one victim one victim on the porch with 33 bullet wounds, all because of an argument over a jacket. Or that there have been eighth separate flash mob attacks in Minneapolis in the last two months. Or Norman Washington Coley, 20, of Charlotte, who was just accused yesterday of burning his girlfriend’s child with an iron and then assaulted his girlfriend after becoming upset.

These may be examples some may think I am stretching, but I can give you another more recent, closer and terse example. A student in the department in which I teach is pregnant. She is trying to figure out what to do. She doesn’t want to leave school or her boyfriend. Which by the way is of the self-described “no-good, gangsta, thug motif.” Over the holidays he suggested that she make some money for them by “working the pole”, which she did while she was pregnant but not showing. Sitting down with her you find out that she knows better, she knows that HIV and STI rates among African American account for almost 70 percent of the new cases annually yet she still has sex without a condom. She knows that the dude she is with is bad, because her pregnancy was due to him raping her one night after he saw her dance in the club when they were not together. So now she and her mom are trying to figure out what to do. My suggestion was it should have been thought about before this and to leave the young man alone – which she won’t because she loves him. She says he wants her to have the baby and get back to stripping – Ignorant and stupid at the same d### time.”

Maybe it is wrong for me to care so vehemently about my community. Even still, I got it honestly from my family, especially the strong women and men that raised me being born in the segregated south. I know that there are many problems that are out of our control, but likewise, there are an inordinate number of things which we can control. We are a far cry from the men who valued education and liberty of the 60s and 70s to the new role models engendered in rap artist. One of my favorite quotes is by ... Martin Luther King, Jr.: “Nothing in the world is more dangerous than a sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” He is right. We may not be able to change everything, but one thing for sure we can change is being ignorant and stupid at the same d*** time.”

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King to Martin in Reverse 20 Years later

The Roman poet Caius Valerius Catullus (87–54 BCE) once wrote, “I can imagine no greater misfortune for a cultured people than to see in the hands of the rulers not only the civil, but also the religious power.” I like to think that he was speaking about a time in Europe when Christian fundamentalist rulers from kings and politicians to clerics and priest ruled and the punishment for speaking out against these individuals and/or their laws was torture and death for expressing opinions different from those of the primary belief system. These words are no truer today in America when the world is viewed from the perspective of a man of African descent.

I remember that day April 29, 1992 when it all hit the fan. I was a few months away from receiving my PhD and going off to live and work in South Eastern Nigeria for a year for my postdoc. It was the day an all-white Simi Valley jury, despite the videotape, concluded that the evidence was not sufficient to convict LAPD officers Laurence Powell , Timothy Wind, Theodore Briseno and Sergeant Stacey Koon . Upon which, within hours of the verdict, Los Angeles and the nation erupted in riots.

Now a similar occurrence is in the purview of mainstream America that like the Rodney King video has sent shockwaves around the world and enraged the African American community. It is another consequence of the collective unconscious of many white people in America - racial profiling, a two tiered justice system and the continuance of the perception that black males are suspicious and their lives not of equal value to white men. This is the narrative of Trayvon Martin, Sean Bell, Kenneth Chamberlain, Sr. (68), Kendrec McDade (19), Aaron Campbell (25), Ariston Waiters (19) and countless others. The strange thing is that this is not the 1890s (decades after reconstruction) or the start of the black codes and Jim Crow, or the 1960s, when killing a black man was a formality considered haute couture by all white juries, it is 2012; a period supposedly that is post racial and run by an Africa America President. The only thing common was that they were all unarmed, considered suspicious and black.

This is the historical, epistemological and ontological reality that Africa Americans, especially men grow up with – that whites in America grow up to incorporate and accept as an unquestionable learned behavior, mostly as a function of a contingency of reinforcement (habit) as Thomas Jefferson wrote, "I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments of both body and mind. …. This unfortunate difference of color, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people."

From the unknown runaway slaves to Emitt Till (in picture above) and Medgar Evers and from Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, logic advocates such deaths are the response to irrationality particularly in the configuration and embodiment of fear. I say this because as a construct, fear is often presupposed and rarely a product of fact. However, the unfortunate truth is that historically in our society, black men have been portrayed as a people to be feared; savages, unable to be tamed. A point asserted by Frantz Fanon ironically 50 years ago in his 1952 book “Black Skin, White Mask”. Fanon described the man of African descent as "phobogenic object, a stimulus to anxiety."

It is hard for me to accept that the aforementioned rings a historic truth, although asks any white person, they would disagree, either intentionally or unknowingly for their experience are different and they desire to repress their historical relationship with African Americans. They desire to ignore that the rise of the gruesome vigilante ritual of lynching occurred after the demise of slavery and that lynching by either the police or citizen, was a violent way to send a message to African-American to stay in their place, as deemed by more economically and politically powerful whites. In fact it can be argued that the most common reason for lynching in America was to target and intimidate disesteemed racial groups.

The Black Codes were laws passed on the state and local level in the United States to limit the civil rights and civil liberties of African Americans. Moreover, both northern and southern states had passed discriminatory legislation since the early 19th century. What we experience now is no different, being regularly subjected to stop and search procedures based on racially biased drug profiling disproportionate to our representation in the population and actual drug use. We are more likely to be stopped, arrested, brought to trial and convicted of felony charges than white Americans, a consequence of institutional racism that cannot be any different than previous the Black Codes and our present “justice system.” Our present policies and laws continue to sustain what the 1968 Kerner Commission described as "two societies, separate and unequal." America maintains a well-entrenched system of discrimination, subordination, and racial violence just as pervasive. But we cannot take such issues to the Justice system since laws assert that arguments regarding racism or other prejudices are not legally relevant and are a slap in the face of our courts and system of justice.

Marcus Garvey pointed out that in America and around the world, that “the white man has succeeded in subduing the world by forcing everybody to think his way & those who have come in contact with it and accepted it have become his slaves.” And for anyone to disagree I would ask them to vehemently prove otherwise. There is an irrational and historic perception of African American men by whites. It is a simple fact. Whether it is the “Big Black man theory" espoused by Lawrence Vogelman or the use of used the acronym N.H.I. (no humans involved )to refer to any case involving a breach of the rights of young Black males by the police of Los Angeles.

The actions of the officers in the Rodney King case, just as in Trayvon Martin's and the others cited are blatant criminal offenses. Many would not have occurred if the black codes and Jim Crow laws had not been renamed the “war on drugs and crime," which disproportionately target people of color. And sadly, what Mamie Till said during the period of her son’s death still rings true: “It is doubtful that any Black male growing up in the rural South in the period 1900 to 1940 was not traumatized by a fear of being lynched.”

Is it ironic or morose, that twenty years ago this month that a jury found four white police officers not guilty in the abuse and police brutality of Rodney King, and that now we are dealing with video evidence in the murder of unarmed young black male. This time they didn't make an arrest, to take the shooter to court. At least thier was the arrest of J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant in the killing of Emitt Till, although they were found not guilty by an all white jury. They are even trying to smear the name of Trayvon Martin, just like it was done with Emitt Till, when the Memphis Commercial Appeal published an article reporting that Louis Till was executed by the U.S. Army in Italy in 1945 for raping two Italian women and killing a third. The information had been leaked by Mississippi Senator James O. Eastland to the press.Morose definitely, ironic too, since if I reverse their last names in occurrence I am left with Martin King. Ironic indeed, forty years after his murder.

New Smart Bullet Steers in Midair and Follows Target to Hit Targets a Mile Away

Gun violence has incessantly plagued the African American community. In 1996, 29,183 males were killed by guns: 12,014 in homicides, 15,808 in suicides, 1,004 in unintentional deaths, and 357 in deaths of unknown intent. During the same time period, firearms were the second leading cause of death for African-American males aged five to 14, and the leading cause of death among African- American males aged 15 to 24. In 2007, the homicide rate for black male teens was 67.1 per 100,000, nearly 20 times higher than the rate for white males (3.4 per 100,000). Now there may be a new factor on the horizon that may increase these morbid rates of violence. Just over the two weeks in Chicago, 55 people were shot of which 10 were killed by gunshot wounds withing 50 hours. This past Thursday, 13 people were shot and2 dead in an six hour period in Chicago.

Two researchers from Sandia National Laboratories have created a four-inch bullet that can hit a target a mile away. With the use of laser points at the target, and an optical sensor on the bullet, it locks in and follows its target until it hits it. The 4-inch-long bullet has guidance and control electronics to steer its fins in midflight as it homes in on a target as well as little fins on the bullet keep it from spinning and help “steer” its path.

Continual course adjustment means the bullet can hit laser-designated targets at distances of more than a mile making it in essence a 50 caliber self-guided , miniaturized, low-budget guided missile. “It’s a bullet that can change its flight path so that it can more accurately hit a target at long range,” said Red Jones, one of the two researchers, in an interview with ABC News.

According to a press released distributed by the New Mexico company, the bullet is a prototype, and “engineering issues remain. The new bullet can make course corrections 30 times per second and will hit within eight inches of its target.

Sandia is run by the U.S. Department of Energy and operated by Lockheed Martin, says it is looking for commercial partners to develop the new bullet for mass production. Potential customers include the military and law enforcement.

The concern is will these type of bullets, like most weapons be used to mow down traditional targets, African American males or even worse, seep into the streets as most weapons and technologies for African American males to used them on each other. The fact today remains that Blacks are victimized by offenders armed with guns at higher rates than other ethnic groups and continue to be disproportionately victims of firearms homicide

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