Vision Circle

Michigan Children Left Behind

LANSING - Nearly 900 Michigan schools didn't meet progress requirements and 112 must begin planning for a restructuring under a tough federal law mandating that schools improve standardized test scores.

More here.

From perusing the scores and the schools briefly, the vast majority of the failing schools are either in predominantly black and poor urban areas, or predominantly white and poor rural areas. Should we be shocked?

Poor White Invisible America

I want to make this brief, but maybe I'll get carried away. Poor White America is invisible to the black politics of liberation. The level playing field is lumpy for everyone.

For a long time I beleived that policy perscriptions for blackfolks were necessarily different than those for whitefolks. This was primarily because I recognized the geographical differences in availability to mainstream resources made simple advice more complex. "Get a job" doesn't work where there are no jobs, structurally. Furthermore, I understand that many blackfolks want more from politics than just that which simple enlightened self-interest would demand. Given a choice between the man who pushes the button of economic empowerment and the one who does so employing the rhetoric of black uplift, blacks will choose the latter, and sometimes they will do so even if he doesn't push the button.

These beliefs are in contradiction to my desire for mainstream integration. It is ghettoes that hold back blackfolks, get out of the ghetto and the playing field is leveled. That doesn't mean that the injuries don't linger but it does mean that the number one priority is leaving the ghetto. Some think going the opposite direction is appropriate, making the individual so strong that they can survive the ghetto and thereby romanticizing the ghetto, survival in the streets, thug life and all that lowbrow rot.

The continuing myth of black vs white without consideration of class (I'll coin a term in due time), ignores the disadvantages of poor whites in the level playing field. Part of the problem is that nobody can quantify exactly what advantage ghetto whites have over ghetto blacks in the mainstream. Some would have you believe it is negligable, for others, insurmoutable.

I come to look at this in consideration of the discounting of the 'level playing field' in discussions on integration and affirmative action, but also in consideration of the white strawman. This white strawman does a lot of heavy lifting for hard afrocentrists, especially when they waltz into the arms of organized labor and other grassroots activists engaged in battles against, oh say Wal-Mart.

I suggest that the integration strategies of contemporary white immigrants as well as identifyable 'bohunks' from the white Sticks, be considered in more practical ways by black liberation politics. After all, they're the ones buying Jay-Z and DMX.

Black Student Union and Class

Riffing off of Bowen it might be interesting to see exactly what former BSU leaders are doing. The University of Michigan's BSU was in some ways distinct...as there is a long history of black activism that goes back to the twenties. And we were also distinct in that we received a significant amount of money for programs. Finally...Michigan as a school is about as far from chopped liver as you can get without being private.

But off the top of my head...
1987's BSU president is now a consultant in Detroit. Used to work for one of the big three I think, now he has his own firm. His wife (who used to be VP i think) is a hospital executive.

1988's BSU president used to work as a lawyer for the armed services...now he's working on his PhD in political science at the University of Hawaii.

1989's BSU president is in Detroit...though I'm not quite sure what he's up to.

1990's BSU president is an Assistant Professor in Psychology back at Michigan. She received a young investigator's award for her work on racial identity, and she's got a massive grant that she's running out of the psych program.

1991's BSU president is working in New York in sales.

1992's BSU president just started her own foundation. It deals with issues of education and family in Detroit.

Though I can name the names until 1995...I don't know what they're doing necessarily. I was actually secretary in 1990, and my wife was vice-president in 1991.

Through the old school concept of antagonistic cooperation, we pushed Michigan to be better, even as it pushed US to be better. We've come a long way from Steve Cokely.

Class

Back when I finally got to college, I read Paul Fussell's 'Class' and I have been rather fascinated ever since. The funny thing about Fussell was that he put himself in a new bucket, the 'X' class. Class restraint was all somebody else's problem, he didn't fit in the traditional definitions.

I think the traditional breakout of class has always been too clumpy to work. Upper Class, Middle Class, Lower Class doesn't cover 300 million American people well. So I've improvised. For the most part in my writing I have concentrated on the class differences between African Americans and I've done so from the point of view that geography is destiny in a post Jim Crow society. For African Americans I have used five classes.

{Hill,Hood,Ghetto,Projects,Sticks}

Much of my guidance in these matters comes from Weiss and Garreau, but also Fussell, David Brooks, Cornel West and (of all people) PJ O'Rourke. (off the top of my head)

• The Clustering of America - Michael J. Weiss
• Edge City - Joel Garreau

As pertains to African America, I've been particularly curious about the fate of the Talented Tenth, what integration has done both positively and negatively for that group and those who looked up to them. Thus my interest in creating things like The Neighborhood Project.

As I look around, I wonder how well black politics is prepared to deal with the consequences of the expressed desires of African America not to be percieved as a monolith. Now that the monolith is smashed, who is going to pick of the biggest pieces and which direction are they heading with those fragments?

How Do

After long lurking, I'll post random musings from time to time.

Might be politics, might be "race," might be sports, might be excerpts from previous work.

We'll get down and have a little fun, and maybe we'll learn something before it's done.

So let's get ready, okay?

Hey, hey, hey.

Bush and the Enlightenment

Baldilocks asks the question Did Bush Lie?

My answer?

Nope.

But what he did was worse.

"Evil Chemistry?"

A quote from Att. Gen. Aschcroft:

"Weapons of mass destruction including evil chemistry and evil biology are all matters of great concern, not only to the United States but also to the world community. They were the subject of U.N. resolutions," he said.

This sounds like bad science fiction. Well...perhaps "bad" is the wrong word. "Pulp" is probably a better term. I can easily recall lines like this delivered by Commander Cody or Flash Gordon watching their reruns in the seventies. One argument could be that these folks mean well, and are excellent at what they do. Except for speaking. Kind of like what I was talking about yesterday when I said that I thought Bush was smart...just not "smart like THAT."

But it worries me that we don't have more "smart like that" folks in office (not just in the White House).

Death by Soundbite

Presidential campaigns are usually driven by soundbites. Bush says for example that he wants to only appoint "strict constructionist judges". There's a whole lot of information hiddeb behind that icon if you just click on it. For both liberals and conservatives, we take that term to mean that he's going to appoint people who will take an aggressive stance against abortion and a host of other issues.

But as , there is often not much there there. Wonder what would happen if we would've actually gotten a chance to see Bush (or others) pressed to expand their definitions a bit. While I don't think Bush is particularly "smart like that" (I don't think he's stupid....I just don't think he's smart in the way that a Nobel prize winner in Economics is smart), I'm surprised that he couldn't give a nice succinct answer to a really simple question: What is a strict constructionist judge?

The most important question?

The crisis of the American cities in the 1960's and 1970's is often ascribed to racial tensions, which did indeed play a part. But Mr. Rae suggests that the problems were broader, that what was later called "white flight" actually began in the 1920's with the weakening of the city center. The tragedy, in his account, is that the great migration of blacks to Northern cities in the 1930's and 40's began at the very moment when the jobs and factories they were seeking were becoming less stable.

This snippet is taken from an article that appeared in The New York Times entitled What Should a City Be? You won't hear this question brought up in a single debate. You won't see it asked on a single Sunday News program. You definitely won't hear Bill O'Reilly talk about it...but this is the most important question of the early 21st Century from my vantage point.

Think about it this way. Cities were created largely to efficiently bring together warehouses for finished/raw product, massive labor pools, manufacturing plantations, financial engines, and shipping routes. Manufacturers left for the suburbs beginning in the fifties, then overseas...along with the warehouses. The financial centers are now largely virtual with a couple of international exceptions. The freeways have largely bypassed waterways like the Detroit River.

What we have left is the large labor pool with nowhere to go for work.

Open Thread - Lucy Florence

There was not enough time to discuss all of the things that went down today at Lucy Florence, but there's no question that there's a great deal of interest in the issues that are pressing in Black Los Angeles these days.

I've invited folks to sound off here and I will probably be setting up a real Kwaku Network within the next few weeks to handle the overflow of opinions we have. What's clear is the Ofari has the pull and people don't say no to him when he invites them to speak. What's not clear is that any of this passion gets translated into action or communicated to all the people who might be interested right left or center.

The topics for this week are three.
Wal-Mart Inglewood
Wal-Mart intends on opening a superstore and the April 6th ballot initiative they are 'taking it to the people' in an end-around of the Inglewood city government. Supporters say it's all about the benjamins. Inglewood consumers deserve the lowest prices and the convenience Wal-Mart offers. Not only will there be the regular old Wal-Mart jobs that everybody jokes and spits about, but there will be a great deal of construction work necessary just to build the place. Detractors say that this is a classic sell out to union-busting capitalists who are not only generally not trustworthy, but particularly suspect in this instance. They say Wal-Mart has rigged the situation to completely bypass the political process. Furthermore, the giant is going to empty out Downtown Inglewood businesses creating 'broken windows'.

R. Kelly's Image Award
The NAACP has accepted a nomination for suspected child-molester R. Kelly. I'm afraid I can't even be open-minded about this one. That punk needs to be taken down. Let him sing in prison. The NAACP continues to fulfill its destiny as a laughingstock.

Donovan Jackson Trial
Steve Cooley's assistant DAs have no experience prosecuting police officers and the accountability of police department is completely compromised.

This is your opportunity to speak up. No time limits, no waiting for the microphone.