A thoughtful reader passed along some URLs for my consideration. The gravity of the three have to do with a black middle class that wants to play basketball instead of becoming a doctor or a lawyer or a PhD. I say that's a middle class problem, but people are just not used to blacks being middle class.
My kids just brought back 3.8 GPAs. So that's two semesters (or quarters or whatever) in a row for all three to be on the honor role. I suspect that they may slack off somewhere down the line, but right now they seem to be self-motivated. That's because we never gave them a choice, plus as is the case with my wife, we've been around too many rich people to think that the upper middle class is an endgame. So as long as we can get them to stick close to perfection, it's all good. But help them to understand the extent to which their fellow students are slackers and how I expect them to be leaders. It helps that they're all good looking, but basically I get no guff about the stuff that 'nerds' and geeks do. 
Suburuban integration works. I think it's relatively easy for black kids to get the compliment 'you rock'. I get them to pursue excellence not because I expect them to rock, but because I expect them to rule. Furthermore I expect them to get those expectations about themselves. That's because they're my kids and they have Bowen family expectations on their shoulders.
So when I hear about black mediocrity in the American middle class, it really doesn't bother me. The American middle class is mediocre by definition. I mean we have people who can sit on their butts all day and just talk to people on the telephone answering questions about cereal, and they make 30k a year. Go ahead, get a box of Cheerios and see if I'm lying. There's an 800 number on it. That's somebody's middle class job.
The second think I think about, aside from the old Ohio study, is this little ad on the back of the Negro Digest from the mid 60s. What indeed is the need for blackfolks to comport themselves in a particularly uplifting way? That's the elephant in the room. If they don't, then you know.. well.. uh white people are going to think you're .. and uhm you know... I can't say that word.. you know...but well, can you blame them?
At some point people are going to have to learn like I learned 15 years ago. You just have to stop second-guessing blackfolks. Every one of us. We are exactly who we want to be, every day. Nobody is holding us back, nobody is helping us out. We are at racial equilibrium. All you can do is look at the economy add the demographics and extrapolate, if that's your bag. But there are no new racial issues. There are no new racial insights. It's just as it has always been, new people are finding out about it and that's all the noise you hear. The scuffle of new shoes treading over old ground.
Now I know all of this stuff feels and sounds important, but that's a middle class phenomenon as well. As I said before, the difference between the Middle Classes are not very wide, but they are very very deep. We are more accepting of a man with no shoes, than the man who wears the wrong shoes. This scuffle is not so critical to the discussion of black progress in America as it is with age-old bourgie snot.
Oh.. here are the links:
Virginia Schools
Thus, but putting the peer pressure to work for them instead of against
them, these parents are trying to break teh idea that it is uncool to
be smart and educated. I don't know the genesis of the idea for this
"club" beyond what is presented in the article, but the concept sounds
very similar to the positive peer pressure discussed in The Pact, a
book by three black doctors/dentists from New Jersey who defied the
odds in part because they relied on each other and helped each other
through the academic tribulations to becoming doctors.
We touched on this issue before in Acting White, Acting Not.
Club 2012
Twelve-year-old Alex Carter is an A student who loves science and
reads a book a week. So it surprised his father when he announced last
year that he didn't want to enroll in an honors class that his teacher
recommended for the following term."That class is for the smart people, the nerds," Alex told him. His
father replied, "Well, who are you?"Alex is a junior league football player, an avid golfer and a
lifelong suburbanite. He's also one of only a handful of African
American students in his seventh-grade class at Eagle Ridge Middle
School in Ashburn. He dreams of becoming a professional athlete like
his dad, Tom, who played cornerback for the Washington Redskins. But as
he nears his teenage years in a predominantly white school in Loudoun
County, his parents are concerned that he could abandon academic
pursuits because he thinks they are better left to his white
classmates.
Again. A paradigm of leadership I think, would obviate this low level identity crisis. But that would require parents and schools agreement that there are core values worth maintaining. Instead, since education is made relativist by an attitude of picking whatever you feel like is important to study, education becomes fashion and subjects become accessories to personality. This is crucial.
The Pact by Samson Davis
Growing up in broken homes in a crime-ridden area of Newark, N.J.,
these three authors could easily have followed their childhood friends
into lives of drug-dealing, gangs and prison. They tell harrowing
stories of being arrested for assault and mugging drug dealers, and of
the lack of options they saw as black teenagers. But when their high
school was visited by a recruiter from a college aimed at preparing
minority students for medical school, the three friends decided to make
something of their lives. Through the rigors of medical and dental
school, and a brief detour into performing rap music at local clubs,
they supported each other. Today, Davis and Hunt are doctors, and
Jenkins is a dentist; the men's Three Doctors Foundation funds
scholarships to give other poor black kids the same opportunities. The
authors aren't professional readers, and it shows. They're clearly
reading aloud, not speaking spontaneously. But the authenticity of
their urban accents and the earnestness and sincerity in their voices
give their inspiring tale an immediacy that would be lost with a
professional narrator.
Just Ick! Ick!
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