Naomi Schaefer Riley's, April 30th blog on Brainstorm titled, The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations, and her subsequent firing, is just what I needed to get my ass off the couch, and begin blogging. The nerve of Ms. Riley for telling the truth.
Where we disagree slightly, is I feel the most persuasive case for eliminating Black studies can be summed up in the events which took place here in Baltimore, on St. Patrick's Day. I just happened to be on the street that night, and observed hundreds of Black youth causing havoc amongst each other, and the unfortunate tourists who happened to get in their way. Children were fighting everywhere you turned. Police cars cased them from one corner to the other -- mobs of seventy or more, screaming, laughing, while cursing at the officers trying to get a handle on the situation. A few blocks away at Pratt and President streets, sits the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture.
And who could forget this sordid piece of St. Patrick's Day madness that will live on in infamy - a young tourist cold-cocked, and stripped of his possessions while everyone stood around laughing. What I witnessed from President Street to Redwood, Charles and Baltimore streets was simply degrading, animalistic behavior from children that demeaned the entire race of human beings who now identify themselves as Black. If I were a tourist seeing that, I would never stepped foot in this town again!
As a life-long resident, it made me depressed to realize that as long as Baltimore is sixty-seventy percent Black, this city will always be on the verge of disaster, because the Black youth are scaring away the tourists - period, the end!
Here's another example of even younger children: I lived in Highlandtown, a block away from from Highlandtown Elementary, in Baltimore City. The language, and the vulgarity I heard day after day when school let out, coming from ten-year-olds was shocking, but not nearly as horrifying as their daily haranguing about all the fights and beat-downs that took place during the day - in elementary school. And this so-called Ebonics bullshit and hip-hop manner of speech - my god, listening to it reminds me of the way slaves used to speak five-hundred years ago, like these kids never left the South.
Also, since the F.B.I. began keeping track of murder statistics in America around 1976, there have been more Blacks killed by Blacks, than American soldiers killed in all the wars fought since the Korean War.
Black History - Black Studies, Black Museums, Black people, African American - anything but American equals separatists, and a big ol' disaster!! Everything you worked for in the 1950s and sixties, you turn upside down. Not integration -- separatism is what many of the Black nationalists leaders where calling for back in the day, and you got it. You embrace a word associated with the dark arts from ancient times, and actually believed you could change the vibration of that word to mean something good. I'm sorry to tell you folks, but the whole ideological choice to identify with Blackness was perhaps the dumbest idea any people on the face of this Earth have ever had - second only to dropping the first atomic bombs on a people. Because as soon as Blackness came into you're lives, you were destined to become the Blackest of Black, manifesting the very definition of the word, as well as its vibration into the hearts and minds of your children - the proof is irrefutable!
Guess what? You're Americans - period, the end! It doesn't matter how you got here - slavery wasn't illegal back in the 1600s, it was a business. Africans rounded up Africans and sold them to slave traders. This country would have never let you in the front door other-wise. But the reality is your ancestors helped to build this Nation with their blood, sweat and tears. So why on Earth would you ever attempt to separate yourselves from that which you have as much claim to as any other American living within our boarders?
Slavery is not the issue, every nation on Earth was at some point forced into slavery. The real issue is how you missed an opportunity to get paid back in the 1960s, not because of slavery, but because of all those Jim Crow Laws across the south. You didnt listen to learned men of Constitutional Law, even though a great precedent-setting victory had been won in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) In stead, you marched and prayed to your former mas'sr's concept of a God that though slavery was a good thing and got your asses beaten in the process. Heroic, but completely unnecessary.
After 50 years of trying to pound so-called Negro History upon the youth and adopting Blackness in the 1960s, the majority of Black people are still living on plantations of their own making. Because it's not what the White man has done to limit you, it's what you have done to limit yourselves.
Ms. Riley got it right of course and shouldn't have been fired for speaking what is apparent - the truth. But everyone wants to placate and act like the incidents above, as well as a multitude of others are not the typical behavior of a certain race of people living in Baltimore, MD, and many cities across this country. When will inner city Black people own up to the truth that they are considered scary, ill-mannered, dirty, angry, disrespectful of others, calamitous, and should be avoided at all cost? The very definition of Blackness.
And it's not because White folks and every other race of people on the face of this Earth perceive you this way, it is because of your children's behavior, which speaks for itself.
