Dennis Prager finds it interesting that this USA Today editorial does not mention vouchers in its call for more successful schools. Do they really believe that would be a bad thing, to give black parents most choice about where their kids go to school?
And no mention of religion. Couldn’t church and clergy and religious-discipline help?
There’s no talk about family structure. There’s no talk about marriage and sexual discipline. There’s no talk about the boost of being raised by a mother and a father.
Fathers are not indistinguishable from mothers.
You can see the message on brick wall murals in inner cities: Yes we can. You can hear it in the music of Black Eyed Peas’ frontman will.i.am: Yes we can.
You can imagine hearing it pass the lips of thousands of black mothers, perhaps after awakening their sons early to complete homework before they head off to school, just as President-elect Barack Obama’s mother did: Yes you can.
There’s no question Obama was elected by Americans of all races and ethnicities to be president of all America. But many hope that his presidency will have a profound impact on one group most in need, African-American boys.
Obama’s success notwithstanding, the American dream remains a more distant hope for black boys than it does for any other group. Taken as a whole, their eighth-grade reading and math scores are scales below those of other students. In many school districts, virtually the only students getting expelled are black males. They make up 9% of enrollments but 20% of the mental-retardation classifications.
The social price of this is terribly high. One in five black males lacking a high school diploma is incarcerated. Other statistics are similarly discouraging.
Black males might come from the same families, neighborhoods and schools as their sisters, but the girls’ outcomes are very different. For the most part, black females are doing far better than black males, outdistancing them by wide gaps in high school graduation and college enrollment rates. Many colleges report that black women have higher graduation rates than white men.
This gender gap has many causes, starting with the fact that 70% of black children are born into single-parent families. The girls have mothers for role models; the boys lack fathers. Then, ladle on daily doses of inner-city crime, violence, drugs and toxic popular culture, which disproportionately affect boys.
CHAIM AMALEK EMAILS:
In terms of natural selection, a penis, vigorously and fearlessly employed to inject semen into the vaginas of fertile women counts for much, much, much more than the results of any IQ test. White racists/supremacists, writers, lawyers, bloggers, etc. who take comfort in their putative intellectual superiority while ceding the planet to those they take to be their inferiors need to rethink a few things.
The better question: why are white men fathering so few white children? Why is it that Luke Ford, a man deep into his forties with a beard but little life savings, has no children, even though his chosen faith expects him to have procreated? It is easy enough to make fun of black people (and who among us does not like a good shvartze joke?), but the fact is that whatever their IQs, they and other peoples who look upon the white man with deep resentment are winning the planet.
I am tempted to say that this is all very dysgenic, but maybe not. Maybe not.
KHUNRUM EMAILS: "Easy to answer. They’re expensive….and many people my age never stop supporting them. In Thailand the children take care of the parents in their dotage (although that is changing) Here it’s the opposite. If you are not paying for the kid’s rehab expenses then perhaps you’re footing the costs of higher education.”
