Nightmare Continues for Black Boys, America
Follow
“I am a nightmare walking, a psychopath talking King of my jungle, just a gangster stalking Living life like a firecracker, quick is my fuse Then dead as a doorknob, that’s the life I choose.”
Those lyrics (with a smidgen of creative license on the last line) are from Ice-T’s title track of the 1988 gangsta flick, “Colors.” While the movie focused on gang warfare between the Crips and Bloods in East Los Angeles, a vast number of young black males across the country are falling into the same destructive mindset.
This isn’t just a “black” problem. It’s a national crisis, capable of reaching out and affecting any of us (or our loved ones), anywhere and anytime. And if you think we can jail our way out, you’re overlooking the immense pain and suffering that occurs before individuals are ever arrested. We’ve got to reach these young men BEFORE they drift off course.
Considering a new report that found only 47 percent of black males graduated from high school in 2007-008, we have a lot of work to do. Even as we try to steer those young men in the right direction, the generation behind them might be more challenging: The BEST score of eighth-grade reading assessments – which measure how many black males read at or above the proficiency level – was a shockingly-low 15 percent (Kentucky, New Jersey); several states averaged only 5 percent.
Youngsters who possess such a scarcity of skills in the Information Age are doomed to be a drain on society – one way or another. Fortunately, the situation isn’t hopeless. But it’s going to take an understanding that dollars are better spent in prevention than detention. And acknowledgment that it’s no coincidence when twice as many black students are classified as “mentally retarded” (despite evidence that students from all groups are roughly the same at each intelligence level).
Dr. John H. Jackson, president and CEO of the Schott Foundation for Public Education – the organization that produced the study – said the manner in which states spend on education is more important than the amount spent. An example is tony Palm Beach County, Fla., which graduated only 22 percent of its black high school males compared to impoverished Newark, N.J., which graduated 79 percent. “The significance of New Jersey’s success is their decision to more equitably distribute their educational resources to all of the districts and students who needed them the most,” Johnson told theGrio, “but also target those resources in areas that are proven effective – providing more access to early education, highly effective teachers and rigorous curricula.”
Not every young black boy who’s below-par as an eighth-grader, or who fails to graduate from 12th grade, is headed for the life depicted in Ice-T’s lyrics. But we know that a number of them will follow that path of death and destruction unless we do something.
And by “we” I do mean all of us.
Because it affects all of us.
DS
