Social Issues in Education

5. West talks about the problems that black people face today in American society. What makes West different is that he doesn’t just blame society for those problems, but he also attributes some of the blame to the black population and their attitudes towards the problems they face. Some of the problems that the black population is directly responsible for include the lack of black leadership, the lack of conviction among the people that something must be done to alleviate their plight, and their complacency with how things are. He believes that if we can get the entire population to see the suffering they are enduring as something that can be changed and if we can change the attitude of the white population to believe that the race problem isn’t just a social problem but a moral one, we can fix the race issues in America today. To West the racial issue transcends every faction in American lives from social and political, to moral and ethical and we should use each of those factions to get rid of the race matters in America today.

4. “To engage in a serious discussion of race in America, we must begin not with the problems of black people but with the flaws of American society- flaws rooted in historic inequalities and longstanding cultural stereotypes…The implication is that only certain Americans can define what it means to be American- and the rest must simply ‘fit in’.”(P6-7)

“The fundamental aim of this undermining and dismantling is to replace racial reasoning with moral reasoning, to understand the black freedom struggle not as an affair of skin pigmentation and racial phenotype but rather as a matter of ethical principles…” (P 38).

“Where there is no vision, the people perish; where there is no framework of moral reasoning, the people close ranks in a war of all against all. The growing gangsterization of America results in part from a market-driven racial reasoning that links the White House to the ghetto projects.” (P 48)

“There has not been a time in the history of black people in this country when the quantity of politicians and intellectuals was so great, yet the quality of both groups has been so low.” (p 53).

3. Afrocentrism- a contemporary species of black nationalism, puts black doings and sufferings at the center of discussion.

Nihilism- the lived experience of coping with a life of horrifying meaninglessness, hopelessness, and lovelessness.

Conservative Behavioralists- promote self-help programs, black business expansion, and non-preferential job practices. Their projects rest on a cultural revival of the Protestant work ethic in black America.

2. In one of my classes at AJ Moore we showed a movie on the Lost Boys of the Sudan called The Lost Boys. This was a movie about the movement of a group of boys from the Sudan to America and the culture shock they experienced when trying to go to school and get jobs and make a life for themselves. The boys had a certain idea of what the black people in America were like and it was the stereotypical view of gangster black people. When they played basketball with some neighborhood black people they were talking later about how aggressive they were which shocked them. They also said that they probably were reaching in their pockets and stealing from them while they were playing basketball. Generally the boys from the Sudan thought all black people in America were gangster robbers that are really bad people. West talked about all the general views people have of the black population and how hindering that can be for the people that think they can’t get out from under the stereotypes.

In a Pop Culture class I took at HBU, the professor talked about the gangster image that is now so popular in black culture. He cited the roots of this get up in black history all the way back to when black people would perform right after they were granted freedom. What blacks would do to entertain the white folk was dress up in exaggerated clothes that were too big with makeup and would almost look like rodeo clowns. Ironically, today the gangster get up is marked by large clothes that are 3 sizes too big for them and pants that are falling down. It is interesting to see where this image comes from, and I would guess that most black people that follow this image don’t know where it comes from either. This also relates to why they wear their pants so low. When people are sent to prison, their belts are taken away and their pants fall down as a result, so wearing their pants low was a sign of having been in prison. It is interesting that the black people are hanging on to all these things that are markers of their chains that the white people have given them in the past.

1. How would West respond to Kozol’s issues that he points out in his book and the solutions and causes for them?