Civil Rights 2.0 Coming: The Collapse of Public Schools and the Consequences of Disciplining Black Students

Are we on the verge of a push for Civil Rights 2.0, or is this just another manifestation of the perpetual revolution that has been ongoing since the great victory over restrictive covenants in 1948 (Shelley vs. Kramer)?

Disciplinary actions required in school systems across the nation [Federal Probe Targets Uneven Discipline At Seattle Schools, NPR, 3-7-13] primary result in individual black students being expelled or removed from class - when aggregated together - display a community collectively out of control.

Completely.

 

The Eurocentric nature of laws governing proper behavior hurts non-white kids in NYC Publics Schools (Source: CS Monitor)

100 percent.

Out-of-control [School suspensions: Does racial bias feed the school-to-prison pipeline?: Rocketing school suspensions may feed the school-to-prison pipeline – and even violate civil rights., Christian Science Monitor, 3-31-13].

President Obama is paying attention [Obama admin pressures schools into racial disciplinary quotas, College Insurrection, 10-13-12], with his administration attempting to implement a tiered, race-based school discipline policy.

It’s because of the white man’s Eurocentric rules, discriminating against black (and brown) students, that we find ourselves in this situation.

The Eurocentric nature of laws governing proper behavior hurts non-white kids in LA Unified Schools (Source: CS Monitor)

A school system awash in white privilege, where black (and brown) students are disrupted from learning at there own pace. [Big City Discipline, CS Monitor, 3-31-13].

The Obama Administration issued an Executive Order to establish a government panel in July of 2012 to explore why blacks are disciplined at rates higher than other races [Obama backs race-based school discipline policies, Daily Caller, 7-27-12]:

His July 26 executive order established a government panel to promote “a positive school climate that does not rely on methods that result in disparate use of disciplinary tools.” 

“African Americans lack equal access to highly effective teachers and principals, safe schools, and challenging college-preparatory classes, and they disproportionately experience school discipline,” said the order, titled “White House Initiative On Educational Excellence.”

Well, the Eurocentric American public school system has finally been put on notice, with black students in South Bend, Indiana uniting to demand the creation of a black student services department that will find out why such discrimination (translation: disciplining unruly black students) exists. [South Bend schools get call to action: Some seek creation of black student services department, South Bend Tribune, 6-176-13]:

"I'm here because silent voices can't be heard," Gladys Muhammad said. "We're tired of discriminatory practices." 

One by one, Muhammad and a group of others approached the podium at a recent South Bend school board meeting to speak to the board and administration. 

Among these African-American community leaders' concerns is the disparate number of black students who are identified as special education, as well as the suspension rate of African-American students here. 

In April, The Tribune published a series called "Learning and teaching in the midst of race, special education and discipline" that described the district's recent citation by the Indiana Department of Education for the disproportionalities. The sanction requires that 15 percent of the school corporation's $6.1 million federal special education grant -- which amounts to some $900,000 -- be spent on early intervention services for struggling students in an effort to ultimately avoid labeling them as special education. 

But Muhammad and others are coming forward to ask the school district to do more. 

They'd like a black student services department to be created. 

It could be similar to the district's bilingual services department, they said.

Know this: in the New York, LA, Houston, Chicago, Dade County (Miami), Clarke County (Nevada), Broward County (Florida), and Philadelphia public school systems, white kids are a clear minority of the students enrolled.

Yeah, its the same in Chicago

And they are an even smaller minority of those students who are suspended.

Imagine 2050 has already happened in these cities/counties, with no racial nirvana/utopia/heaven created; the inverse is true.

It’s time for a divorce.

The white man’s law is too restrictive for most black (and brown) people; conversely, the quality of life – or lack there of - black (and brown) people create in formerly majority white cities is tantamount to a regression to the mean that makes life for white people incredibly difficult.

In the absence of whiteness, darkness prevails.

 And as we see in a nation governed by Black-Run America (BRA), our public school system is little more than a day-care center – in many urban areas, a heavily armored day-care center – for the unwanted detritus of the black/brown community.

Here’s the problem with the American Public School System in a nutshell:

                 

• The Bell Curve is real – racial differences exist
• Black males/females mature faster than their racial counterparts
• Lacking in future time-orientation, blacks engage in violent acts at far greater rates than their racial counterparts (no concept of risk/reward)

It’s time we learn to embrace white privilege; once its gone, you are left with 2013 Detroit.

New Orleans Times Picayune: City's Greatest Liability is Really its Greatest Asset

 Up is down. Left is right. Black is white. And in New Orleans, the population that collectively makes the city one of the world's most dangerous is actually the key to its resurrection [African-American men in New Orleans are an untapped workforce, new report says, New Orleans Times Picayune, June 12, 2013]:

The answer to New Orleans problems? Increasing the white proportion of the overall population in the city

Beleaguered by high unemployment and an economy drifting away from blue-collar jobs that had kept many African-American men employed in past decades, New Orleans needs to do a better job of educating and advancing the careers of black men, according to a report that Loyola University released Wednesday.

The report, published by the Lindy Boggs National Center for Community Literacy, describes black men, who account for 26 percent of the city's population that is able to work, as an untapped resource as the city's growing construction and manufacturing businesses place more and more value on education beyond a high school diploma.

"If New Orleans is to substantially reverse decades of economic decline, high crime rates, and a shrinking city tax base, then greater educational attainment and economic progress for African-American men will be critical," the report's conclusion states.

The report, coupled with another from the New Orleans Fatherhood Consortium that advocates for better data to be collected on men as parents, came about from patterns that Boggs Center Director Petrice Sams-Abiodun noticed in her research as a family demographer.

"Our primary goal was to think about the recovery and rebuilding of New Orleans," she said, and in doing that, to be "sure to be very vocal that poor or marginalized men, and in particular African-American men, had access to opportunities."

New Orleans' job market has been in decline for 30 years, but the changes have hit the African-American community especially hard. The city lost almost 47,000 jobs between 1980 and 2004, according to the Boggs Center report, which was based on data compiled by the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center. And from 1980 to 2011, the employment rate for black men fell from 63 percent to 48 percent, leaving the majority unemployed or having given up looking for work entirely.

By contrast, white men in New Orleans saw their employment rate drop only from 80 percent in 1980 to 74 percent in 2011, meaning that they fared better through the oil bust of the 1980s and the economic downturn in the first decade of the new century.

The report suggests that higher levels of education within the white community accounted for a resiliency the black community didn't have.

As the value of education rose in many industries, black men were once again left behind, according to the report. Though the number of black men in New Orleans with high school degrees has grown by leaps and bounds, the number of those with associate degrees -- typically awarded by a community or technical college after two years of study -- hasn't changed since 1980: 15 percent. By contrast, 66 percent of white men in the city have at least an associate degree -- up 20 percent in the last 30 years and leaving whites in better position to stay employed as the job market changes.

And for those African-American men in New Orleans who have held onto jobs, they continue to take a hit on wages compared with their white counterparts, the report states. Annual salaries for black men have fallen 11 percent since 2000, down to $31,018. In a striking disparity, white men have seen their wages rise 9 percent during that period, to an average of $60,075.

The job market has always been especially tough for black men who spent time in prison, and it continues to be so. The report says that 84 percent of the 3,300 men over age 18 in New Orleans jails are African-American. On top of that, blacks spend almost twice as long awaiting trial in the troubled Orleans Parish Prison, further undercutting their ability to hold onto any job they may have had.

John Thompson, founder of Resurrection After Exoneration, a nonprofit group geared toward helping exonerated former felons to find employment, said that need is more fundamental than providing higher education for former or convicted felons leaving prison.

"Give me a trade over education any time," he said. "It's what a man needs now to feed his family."

Thompson also called for ending the stigma that comes with the label "convicted felon" on job applications. "We tell (ex-cons) they need to be a productive member of society, but society is not giving them an opportunity," he said.

After laying out one grim statistic after another, the Loyola report turns to conclusions that echo Thompson's firsthand take. It says more must be done to feed African-American men into jobs in burgeoning industries. It calls for programs to recruit high school graduates into the petrochemical industry, and for providing better job-skills training to the poor, to convicts and to black men working low-wage jobs.

"If we could address the inequalities and disparities of black men, we'd have a stronger New Orleans," Sams-Abiodun said.

 Meanwhile, a renaissance of sorts is happening in New Orleans.

And it's called gentrification. [Gentrification and its Discontents: Notes from New Orleans, New Geography, 3-1-13]:

One Storm, Two Waves

Everything changed after August-September 2005, when the Hurricane Katrina deluge, amid all the tragedy, unexpectedly positioned New Orleans as a cause célèbre for a generation of idealistic millennials. A few thousand urbanists, environmentalists, and social workers—we called them “the brain gain;” they called themselves YURPS, or Young Urban Rebuilding Professionals—took leave from their graduate studies and nascent careers and headed South to be a part of something important.

Many landed positions in planning and recovery efforts, or in an alphabet soup of new nonprofits; some parlayed their experiences into Ph.D. dissertations, many of which are coming out now in book form. This cohort, which I estimate in the low- to mid-four digits, largely moved on around 2008-2009, as recovery moneys petered out. Then a second wave began arriving, enticed by the relatively robust regional economy compared to the rest of the nation. These newcomers were greater in number (I estimate 15,000-20,000 and continuing), more specially skilled, and serious about planting domestic and economic roots here. Some today are new-media entrepreneurs; others work with Teach for America or within the highly charterized public school system (infused recently with a billion federal dollars), or in the booming tax-incentivized Louisiana film industry and other cultural-economy niches.

Brushing shoulders with them are a fair number of newly arrived artists, musicians, and creative types who turned their backs on the Great Recession woes and resettled in what they perceived to be an undiscovered bohemia in the lower faubourgs of New Orleans—just as their predecessors did in the French Quarter 80 years prior. It is primarily these second-wave transplants who have accelerated gentrification patterns.

Those people 'gentrifying' New Orleans, and helping turn around a once moribund city - courtesy of a population that was 70 percent black prior to Hurricane Katrina - are the greatest asset Orleans Parrish has right now.

And the greatest liability to the salvation of the city is the population the New Orleans Times Picayune claims is its greatest untapped resource.

Up is down. Left is right. Black is white

You Say it Best When You Say Nothing at All: The 2013 Juneteenth Shooting in Columbus, Ohio

Per Wikipedia, Juneteenth is a holiday celebrating freedom for black people:

Juneteenth, also known as Freedom Day or Emancipation Day, is a holiday in the United States that commemorates the announcement of the abolition of slavery in the U.S. state of Texas in 1865. Celebrated on June 19, the term is a portmanteau of June and nineteenth, and is recognized as a state holiday or state holiday observance in 42 of the United States.

Didn't you get the memo? 

Freedom Failed. [Teen charged in boy’s shooting at Juneteenth Festival, Columbus Dispatch, June 17, 2013]:

Columbus police have charged a 15-year-old boy with felonious assault in connection with a shooting on Saturday at the Juneteenth Festival at Franklin Park that injured an 11-year-old boy. 

Lovauntea J. Mickens, of 723 S. Napoleon Ave., is accused of firing the stray gunshot that hit the boy in the leg about 7 p.m. during the festival. 

The injured boy was taken to Nationwide Children’s Hospital in stable condition. Police have not released his name. 

The shooting disrupted an annual festival dedicated to celebrating and honoring African-American Independence Day. Juneteenth marks June 19, 1865, when news of the abolition of slavery reached Galveston, Texas. 

Four juveniles were arrested in fights before the shooting, Lt. Bela Bernhardt said.
Police closed down the festival after the shooting. It was supposed to have run through yesterday.

How about a more direct version of the story that helps to define just what the black community (regardless of what city they are found in) represents in 2013 [Juneteenth shooting: Teen arrested for shooting 11-year-old at Ohio festival: A Juneteenth Festival in Ohio was cut short after a shooting., UPI, June 16, 2013]:

Ohio police have arrested 15-year-old Lovauntea J. Mickens on assault charges after a 10-year-old festivalgoer was injured by a stray bullet in Columbus on Saturday, the Columbus Dispatch reported. 

Authorities shut down the Juneteenth Festival, marking the day Texas slaves learned of their emancipation, after an 11-year-old boy was accidentally shot in the leg. 

"To know why we're coming together and we mess it us up that's so awful, it's sickening," Crystal Coleman, a vendor, told NBC 4. 

"Every year they get out here and show out. Now we're not going to have anything we can do that represents the African-American community and it's a disgrace," Columbus resident Benita David said.

Dear Benita David... the shooting at the Juneteenth Celebration, like the shooting at the Mother's Day Second Line parade in New Orleans, or the violence at Indiana Black Expo in Indianapolis is indicative and representative of the black community.

Lovauntea J. Mickens celebrated Juneteenth the exact same way scores of black males have celebrated your average Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday or Sunday -- by engaging in Spontaneous Blackness.

Perhaps Milwaukee's Juneteenth Celebrations are more indicative though of what one can expect from black emancipation [Juneteenth Day arrests spark spirited debate, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, June 20, 2012]:

It's good to have Juneteenth Day behind us as Milwaukee looks forward to a safe, peaceful summer. 

But, yes, 54 arrests at the festival do seem a bit troubling. 

Milwaukee police reported most of the arrests at the annual north side street party were for disorderly conduct. Unlike previous years, there were no flash-point incidents reported. No bottles were thrown at officers, and no fights broke out after the festival ended. 

No ugly scenes were caught on camera, only to be replayed on local TV for days.The number of arrests prompted a spirited debate on my social message sites between folks who think the Juneteenth Day celebration is more trouble than it is worth and those who accused the media of playing up bad news. 

As usual, there were plenty of opinions in both camps. 

Chanin Kelly-Rae, an African-American woman who now lives in Seattle, said the arrests at Juneteenth Day recalled her own experiences. 

"I wouldn't go to that festival for all the tea in China," wrote Kelly-Rae, who graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and spent several years teaching in Milwaukee Public Schools before leaving in 2001. 

"I grew up in Milwaukee and remember all too well this event. I also know my parents made us stay away because someone usually got shot, robbed, there are fights and all sorts of risk," she said.

Freedom failed.

Funny, in Oakland, the Juneteenth Celebration was cancelled back in 2008 because the organizers couldn't meet safety deadlines:

After 21 years, Berkeley's Juneteenth celebration — the most established and consistent festival of its kind in the East Bay — has been cancelled by its organizers because they could not meet planning and safety deadlines, city officials said Monday. 

The Berkeley Juneteenth Association Inc. sent a letter to the city April 18, saying it had decided to scrap the festival, which generally draws 15,000 to 20,000 people to the Alcatraz/Adeline corridor in south Berkeley on Father's Day. 

News of the cancellation did not surface until this week, and there are conflicting stories as to why the festival fell apart. "I can't speak to why (the association) chose to cancel it. I just received the e-mail informing us that they had decided to cancel it," said Manuel Hector, the city's former special events coordinator, who now works in the city's mental health division.

Freedom failed.

  WCMH: News, Weather, and Sports for Columbus, Ohio

Desperate Measures: Chicago Edition

Just last week, the New York Times was crowing about the drop in murders in the Second City. If you read the fine print, you'd note the extraordinary methods to which the Chicago Police Department has been forced to operate in the hopes of lowering crime and murder rates in the city [Chicago Tactics Put Major Dent in Killing Trend, NYT, June 11, 2013]:

Just before World War II, Chicago was a 91 percent white city. Today, almost all murder and gun crime is courtesy of Chicago's non-white population

A year after this city drew new attention for soaring gun violence and gang bloodshed, creating a political test for Mayor Rahm Emanuel in President Obama’s hometown, Chicago has witnessed a drop in shootings and crime. Killings this year have dipped to a level not seen since the early 1960s.

As of Sunday night, 146 people had been killed in Chicago, the nation’s third-largest city — 76 fewer than in the same stretch in 2012 and 16 fewer than in 2011, a year that was among the lowest for homicides during the same period in 50 years. 

In recent months, as many as 400 officers a day, working overtime, have been dispatched to just 20 small zones deemed the city’s most dangerous. The police say they are tamping down retaliatory shootings between gang factions by using a comprehensive analysis of the city’s tens of thousands of suspected gang members, the turf they claim and their rivalries. The police are also focusing on more than 400 people they have identified as having associations that make them the most likely to be involved in a murder, as a victim or an offender. 

Critics question whether the city can continue to pay for the added police presence. By the end of April, $31.9 million of the $38 million set aside in the city budget for police overtime for the year had been spent, city records show.

Leaders of the police union, who describe some of the current efforts as “smoke and mirrors,” caution that the dismal statistics of 2012 are being used to paint a falsely upbeat picture of 2013, and say they doubt such intense policing efforts are financially sustainable in any major city without expanding the force.

“It seems a little soon to know whether this is a long-term trend,” said Jens Ludwig, director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab. “I think everyone in Chicago hopes it is very much a trend. I wouldn’t pop the Champagne yet, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed.”

 The budget for police overtime is almost exhausted. 

Understand why Jim Crow existed? (Courtesy: HeyJackass.com)

And it's only mid-June. 

Poor police. 

They are trying to administer the white man's law in a city where large swaths of the real estate under their jurisdiction no longer operate under those same rules [hence the need for the Chicago Police Department to release such public relations white papers as -- Strengthening Relations Between Police and Minority Communities: Ensuring accountability for effective policing in Chicago’s diverse neighborhoods].

As of Saturday night of this weekend, seven are dead and 38 people in the city of Chicago have been shot (technically, 45 have been shot, but 38 have thus far survived their wounds). 

Don't go popping the champagne yet. [6 dead among 26 shot across Chicago, Chicago Tribune, June 16, 2013] and [Man dead, 12 others wounded across Chicago, Chicago Tribune, June 15, 2013]

Better advice: don't even put the champagne on ice. 

Instead, let's get ready to put more bodies on ice [Ambulance drives into West Side shootout, Chicago Tribune, June 8, 2013]:

An ambulance happened upon a West Side shootout early Saturday morning that left two men in critical condition.

The ambulance was eastbound  about 12:15 a.m. in the 3500 block of West Lake Street in the East Garfield Park neighborhood -- not responding to a call -- when the paramedics saw men ducking behind cars and firing guns, Chicago Fire Department spokesman Larry Langford said from outside John H. Stroger, Jr. Hospital of Cook County overnight.

Paramedics called a "10-1" over the radio, a term used to signal that a police officer, paramedic or firefighter is in distress and in immediate need of help.

"There were definitely bullets flying," Langford said.

Other responding firefighters and ambulances were told to hang back until the shooting stopped, Langford said.

"We have to hold until police get there, it's not safe," Langford said. "They called for help and police responded."

Two men were shot -- one in the head, the other in the chest -- and both taken to Stroger hospital. The ambulance that rolled into the scene was one of two that ended up transporting the men shot.

Yeah -- no need for champagne in Chicago. 

It's Time for a Divorce

It’s time for a divorce.

No longer should white America’s future be wedded to that of black America.

In re-reading Coleman Young’s autobiography (you know, the first black mayor of Detroit), I came across a chilling passage that leapt from the page with a greater force than a viewing of the fine documentary Africa Addio.

Published in 1994, Hard Stuff: The Autobiography of Mayor Coleman Young – the era of The Bell Curve, Alien Nation, Pete Wilson and Prop 187, the LA Riots, and an actual backlash against affirmative action and Organized Blackness – Mayor Young let slip the truth of what the Civil Rights Era had birthed: Black-Run America (BRA):

My whole life, I’ve been the first black person to do this and enter that – one of the first blacks in the Catholic school, one of the first blacks to venture into the white officer’s club, the first black official in the CIO, the first black mayor of Detroit, the first black member of the Democratic National Committee – and every time, I was merely raising the old quota by one. We need to continue raising it. If quotas are the only way to keep the white folks honest, let there be quotas. Let us build on their long and revered heritage in this country to which I can personally attest. Put in the historical context, it’s obvious that all the carrying-on about quotas really isn’t about quotas at all; it’s about turf. A lot of white folks don’t want to give it up. And if they must, which they know they ultimately will, they’re not going to give up any quicker than they have to.

To a great extent, I regard the civil rights slowdown of the last two decades as a predictable middle-class, Republican reflex to retard the reform movement that swept them off their feet in the sixties and early seventies. When the black and other politically enlightened communities set out to reverse Jim Crow, the results (the Great Society programs, anti-discrimination laws, and especially affirmative action) were assailed as merely Jim Crow of a different color – which of course they were. But I have a problem with anybody who has a problem with any type of legislation that might try to atone for the generations of suppression and indignity systematically inflicted upon a race of people. Our sluggish white friends have to understand that aggressive measures like affirmative action are the only way to make up for the deep-seated wrongs of the past.

On that point, the common response from many white people these days is that they’ve personally done nothing to keep the blacks down; but the fact is, they’ve all benefited incalculably from the discrimination and inhumanity imposed by their ancestors. Affirmative action does not ask why society to pay for the social crimes of its ancestors, only to give back what has been wrongfully obtained and passed down. If the hypothetical sale of my great-grandfather, for example, brought $500 dollars on the auction block, he was a form of primitive capital with which a landowner improved his property and net worth…

Since you have money to spend – my money – shopping malls have sprung up in your neighborhood, which has prospered as a result. There is very little evidence of hopelessness or desperation where you live; very little crime, drugs, social decline. Your children have gone to safe, well-funded schools and then to college. Meanwhile, my neighborhood has been abandoned and neglected. There is little money with which to improve our situation, and few businesses are interested in moving into an area that they consider blighted. (p. 307-308)

“Jim Crow of a different color.”

After 40 years of black political rule, Detroit is in ruins.

Were the black population (currently 90 percent of the cities occupants) to magically disappear and be replaced with white people, the city of Detroit could come back in less than a year.

Rebuilt. Refurbished. Reenergized. An influx of capital would come pouring into the region, only held back by the current occupants of the city – whose lack of economic viability is visible in the crumbling infrastructure of Detroit.

Instead, the black population of the failed black city begins to migrate out of Detroit, threatening the stability of whichever community they move to ['It's not my fault you paid $250,000 and I paid a buck': Long-time residents not always pleased by new neighbors who buy foreclosed properties, NBC News, 2/28/2011]:

Three years ago, Lamar Grace left Detroit for the suburb of Southfield. He got a good deal — a 3,000-square-foot colonial that once was worth $220,000. In foreclosure, he paid $109,000.

The neighbors were not pleased.

"They don't want to live next door to ghetto folks," he says.

That his neighbors are black, like Grace, is immaterial. Many in the black middle class moved out of Detroit and settled in the northern suburbs years ago; now, due to foreclosures, it is easy to buy or rent houses on the cheap here. The result has been a new, poorer wave of arrivals from the city, and growing tensions between established residents and the newcomers.

"There's a way in which they look down on people moving in from Detroit into houses they bought for much lower prices," says Grace, a 39-year-old telephone company analyst. "I understand you want to keep out the riffraff, but it's not my fault you paid $250,000 and I paid a buck."

The neighbors say there's more to it than that. People like John Clanton, a retired auto worker, say the new arrivals have brought behavior more common in the inner city — increased trash, adults and children on the streets at all times of the night, a disregard for others' property.

 Divorce is painful.

It is messy.

But most often in a failed marriage, it is necessary.

The late Mayor Young’s views on the true role of the Civil Rights movement are undoubtedly shared by a large percentage of the black community, and their allies we’ve labeled Disingenuous White Liberals (DWLs), who utilize black anger and resentment to gain favor (and revered social status) against less progressively-minded whites in the status game that is modern America.

What black people in America and DWLs have never, ever been told, is a simple, one-word response:

“No.”

We now have powerful evidence of what happens when white people give up their ‘turf’ --- 2013 Detroit, Atlanta, Memphis, Birmingham, Gary (Indiana), St. Louis, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Newark, and Camden offer a glimpse into a world where the perpetual, unending war of the Civil Rights revolution is waged against whites.

When formerly white turf is ceded to blacks, the proverbial sod they inherit dies quickly. 

Just look to Chicago...

The resentment and hatred so many blacks feel for whites is put into vengeful prose by the late Coleman Young, allowing those willing to see – those willing to listen – that there can be no peace.

Only separation. 

In the end, always remember white America owes black America nothing. 

Nothing at all. 

It’s time for a divorce.