Major Payne: The Digital Divide and the Lack of Black Officers in the Military

The hopeful face of a military officer?

It’s time to get serious about closing that racial gap in learning. After all, if the military is going to eliminate that pesky problem of being led white officers it is, then, vital that the test scores of Black recruits improve so that academic standards at The Coast Guard Academy and Naval Academy don’t have to be lowered anymore to ensure that an acceptable number of Black people can be admitted: 

The U.S. Naval Academy has agreed to a legal settlement with a dissident faculty member after a federal investigation found evidence that it had illegally denied him a merit-pay increase to punish him for his public criticism of its affirmative-action policies.

The findings and settlement, announced on Wednesday by the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, represent a significant victory for Bruce E. Fleming, a tenured professor of English. He is the civilian employee who filed a complaint with the federal agency in September 2009 after being denied a merit-pay raise that year.

The office's finding also represents the latest embarrassment related to affirmative action for the Naval Academy, where the superintendent resigned last year in the wake of a scandal over excessive administrative spending related to its diversification efforts and to athletics.

Don’t get us started on who is actually enlisting in the armed forced and who is failing the entrance exam at a rate of 40 percent. Just how diverse are senior officers?:

The U.S. military is too white and too male at the top and needs to change recruiting and promotion policies and lift its ban on women in combat, an independent report for Congress said Monday.

Seventy-seven percent of senior officers in the active-duty military are white, while only 8 percent are black, 5 percent are Hispanic and 16 percent are women, the report by an independent panel said, quoting data from September 2008.

One barrier that keeps women from the highest ranks is their inability to serve in combat units. Promotion and job opportunities have favored those with battlefield leadership credentials.

The report ordered by Congress in 2009 calls for greater diversity in the military’s leadership so it will better reflect the racial, ethnic and gender mix in the armed forces and in American society.

Efforts over the years to develop a more equal opportunity military have increased the number of women and racial and ethnic minorities in the ranks of leadership. But, the report said, “despite undeniable successes ... the armed forces have not yet succeeded in developing a continuing stream of leaders who are as diverse as the nation they serve.”

 “This problem will only become more acute as the racial, ethnic and cultural makeup of the United States continues to change,” said the report from the Military Leadership Diversity Commission, whose more than two dozen members included current and former military personnel as well as businessmen and other civilians.

There’s not much we can do about the lack of Black people in special forces units that exist across the branches of the military unless we are willing to compromise what makes them special in the first place.

Demographic changes do point to the future of the Navy, Air Force, and Army being significantly darker; but, like the future of the state of Texas, that doesn’t necessarily mean it will be better.

Just who is going to fly those F-16, F-22, and F-35’s in this future Air Force? We already know which group does the majority of the dying in wars in the Middle Eastern wars, but diversity is the future so this must change.  It is for this reason imperative that the so-called digital divide must be immediately sutured closed::

Researchers have noticed signs of segregation online that perpetuate divisions in the physical world. And blacks and Hispanics may be using their increased Web access more for entertainment than empowerment.

Fifty-one percent of Hispanics and 46 percent of blacks use their phones to access the Internet, compared with 33 percent of whites, according to a July 2010 Pew poll. Forty-seven percent of Hispanics and 41 percent of blacks use their phones for e-mail, compared with 30 percent of whites. The figures for using social media like Facebook via phone were 36 percent for Hispanics, 33 percent for blacks and 19 percent for whites.

A greater percentage of whites than blacks and Latinos still have broadband access at home, but laptop ownership is now about even for all these groups, after black laptop ownership jumped from 34 percent in 2009 to 51 percent in 2010, according to Pew.

But wait. Black people have greater access to the internet via cell-phones and equal access to laptops? Then where’s the digital divide? The federal government has worked overtime to equip those less fortunate (yes, many will be white, but a disproportionate percentage will be Black) with tax-payer funded cell phone service:

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission took the first step Thursday toward reworking two related programs that provide telephone subsidies for low-income residents, with commissioners calling for part of the funding to support broadband service.

The FCC's Lifeline Assistance and Link-Up America programs, in place since 1985, now subsidize monthly telephone service and installation for poor U.S. residents. The FCC voted to launch a notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) that asks for public comments on whether to include broadband and bundled telecom services in the programs.

The NPRM also looks for ways to eliminate waste and abuse in the programs, and questions if the programs' budgets should be capped. The budget for the Lifeline and Link-Up programs, part of the larger Universal Service Fund (USF), has grown from US$162 million in 1997 to $1.3 billion in 2010.

"This trend is unsustainable," said Robert McDowell, a Republican member of the commission.

Some critics have noted that prepaid mobile phone plans seem to be driving up the programs' budgets, which are supported by fees on traditional long-distance telephone service. But Democratic commissioners questioned a cap on the fund, saying it would be difficult for the FCC to support both phone service for low-income residents and expand the program to cover broadband with a cap in place.

The federal government pays for cell phone service for those less privileged. Like food stamps, welfare, free lunch programs, section 8 housing and virtually every government program, it can easily be surmised that those less fortunate are disproportionately Black people. Is this how the digital divide was ultimately fixed, and would this explain why Black people overwhelmingly use cell phone internet connections for entertainment purposes?

Detroit Public Schools recently unveiled a plan to give out 40,000 laptops to students as part of a stimulus plan. Half of Detroit schools are closing. And half of the students attending those schools fail or lack the ability to read. And yet somewhere someone thought it would be a great idea to pass out free laptops (paid for, of course, courtesy of the taxpayer).

Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. believes the United States Constitution should be changed to give an iPad, laptop and free broadband access to every “ghetto” child. He also mentioned something about free housing for everyone to stimulate the economy.He didn’t mention Alvin Greene action figures as a plausible way to jumpstart the economy, though we here at SBPDL heartily endorse such an idea not so much because it would stimulate the economy so much as it would stimulate our funny bones.

The United States military, already overburdened with white recruits enlisting to be Real American Heroes, is taxed to the breaking point with white males representing the core of the nation’s officers in every branch of military. United States special forces units are even worse.

Only the digital divide can explain this horrific situation. Requiring lower scores for Black applicants to gain entry to The Coast Guard Academy and Naval Academy portend absolutely nothing; but they do help make our military a more diverse fighting machine. Blame that on the digital divide, along with the low scores of Black recruits and the low proficiency of Black students.

It’s time that Congress not only pass The Michael Oher Act, but it is also high time Congress enacted the Digital Act Granting and Guaranteeing Equal Representation (DAGGER) in Technology Act: Free iPads and iPhones, plus broadband access for all Black people.It will be costly, but DAGGER could cut to the root of the racial gap in learning once and for all.

Though Black people might never use this technology for educational purposes and only for entertainment, we Americans will be able to claim that we at least mightily and altruistically strove to close the racial gap in learning and thus create potential Black recruits for the military that can finally pass the entrance exams.

In Black Run America (BRA) it is an inconvenient truth that white males still have too much power.And this is why we constantly see reports such as the one recently ordered by Congress that found the US military is too white and too male at the top, in desperate need for diversity.

I call on all good Americans to support and the Congress to pass DAGGER to save America.

Black History Month Heroes: Trevor Garfield from "187"

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The United States of America in 2011 is an interesting place to live, especially if you are an educator. White and Asian students seem to be enjoying excellent tutelage from Crusading White Pedagogues (CWP), though the goal of every teacher is to close the racial gap in learning. Black kids are posting low graduation rates, test scores, grade point averages (GPA) and low scholastic aptitude test results.

They do however, have high rates of disciplinary problems and many all-Black schools have a high rate of teenage moms up for casting on MTV's Teen Mom show. 

If white kids and Asians continue to excel, won't that only perpetuate the racial gap in learning? To rectify this problem, organizations like Teach for America are recruiting the top graduates from Ivy League schools away from Wall Street and law school to instead accept two-year contracts to bring CWP-style teaching to the inner cities of America.

Heroism - as we learned - is something Black and Hispanic people in America do at a rate double that of lowly white people. It was deduced in that entry that roughly 88 percent of teachers in America are white, though 44  percent of the students K-12 are non-white (As an aside, in the South, more than 50 percent of students get free lunches, a number that will only increase as the non-white population rises).

Perhaps if only more Black people were teachers, then Black pupils would put up better academic results. Maybe if people are segregated by race in homeroom with positive mentors of the same race, then academic results will improve.

Maybe. Right?

Atlanta City Schools currently are under probation for a lack of institutional control  after a huge cheating scandal led overwhelmingly by  Black teachers, principals and the Board of Education was uncovered. A panel was held in Atlanta to discuss how to save an ever growing lost generation of Black students who have a greater chance of landing in prison then they do graduating from college. Spike Lee said Black male teachers are needed to offer positive role models to Black school children:

On Monday, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan renewed his call for more black men to pick up the chalk and teach.


Joined by filmmaker Spike Lee, Duncan issued the invitation during a town hall meeting and panel discussion hosted by Morehouse College and moderated by MSNBC contributor Jeff Johnson. The event was part of the Department of Education’s TEACH campaign, designed to raise awareness of the teaching profession and get a new generation of teachers to join the ones who are already making a difference in the classroom.

This might be the only way left to finally eradicate the racial gap in learning, though an invisible barrier that Disingenuous White Liberals (DWL) strenuously deny exist – IQ – stands in the way of this noble goal.

Perhaps this barrier to achieving a leveling of the racial gap in learning can explain why so few Black male teachers are found in classrooms. How many Black males graduate high school? How many Black males graduate college?

What percentage of current teachers are even Black males? The answer might surprise you:

The AP reports that Duncan told the crowd that black males make up less than 2 percent of the country’s 3 million teachers, and that the nation is facing a severe teacher shortage as the current workforce ages. Addressing the racial disparities in education will demand a national teaching corps that’s equipped to understand and meet the needs of black and Latino kids, and educators play a unique role in influencing and shaping young people’s lives. It’s a message Duncan is diligent about slipping in whenever he can. Latino and black males make up just 3.5 percent of America’s teachers, Duncan’s said.

At a speech Duncan gave at a gathering of the National Council of La Raza last year he told the crowd: “I want to encourage you to develop a new generation of Hispanic teachers. Twenty percent of all public school students in the U.S. are Latino. But only 5 percent of their teachers are Latino. In Chicago, the numbers are just as lopsided—41% of students are Latino but only 15% of teachers are Hispanic.”

For all the controversy surrounding the Obama administration’s education reform policies, this is a legitimately, unequivocally positive message to send to young people. There is a body of research that suggests what is perhaps fairly intuitive: a teacher’s race matters, and kids of color take in information differently when there’s a teacher of color at the front of the room.

Trying to find a Black male teacher is a task on par with NASA’s mission of locating a Black engineer. Where are the Black male teachers?:

Recently, Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced TEACH, a national campaign to increase the number of African-American and Latino males being prepared as PK-12 classroom teachers. Nearly 40 percent of public school students are African-American or Latino. In many school districts this statistic hovers above 90 percent. Yet, less than 8 percent of the nation's teachers are African-American and fewer than 4 percent are Hispanic/Latino. In schools inside central cities, 73 percent of teachers are white. In urban schools outside of central cities, 91 percent of public school teachers are white.

Teaching is a glamorless,  thankless position entailing long hours in exchange for anemic compensation. Basically a teacher is a paid volunteer and we all know how volunteer rates by race play out. But, really, why so few Black male teachers? Could it be a vicious cycle of IQ denial that has created this quandary?:

The shortage of black male teachers compounds the difficulties that many African American boys face in school. About half of black male students do not complete high school in four years, statistics show. Black males also tend to score lower on standardized tests, take fewer Advanced Placement courses and are suspended and expelled at higher rates than other groups, officials said.

Educators said black male teachers expose students to black men as authority figures, help minority students feel that they belong, motivate black students to achieve, demonstrate positive male-female relationships to black girls and provide African American youths with role models and mentors.

We need more Black male teachers, just like we need more Black males to stop fathering children out-of-wedlock and to finally pay child support. America simply needs Black male teachers!

Where can we DWLs go to find positive examples of Black teachers ready to engage the gritty Black underclass that white flight has left behind and CWP’s have failed to educate? Why, Hollywood of course!

Samuel L. Jackson starred in an underrated classic 187 (playing Trevor Garfield) that deals with a dedicated Black male teacher bent on reforming inner city schools, no matter the costs:

Trevor Garfield is a black high school science teacher at Roosevelt Whitney High School, a high school in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. A gangster student to whom he had given a failing grade threatens to murder him, writing the number 187 on every page of one of Garfield's textbooks. The administration ignores the threat, and the thug ambushes Garfield in the hallway, stabbing him in the back and side abdominal area multiple times with a shiv.


Fifteen months after surviving from the ordeal, Garfield, now a substitute teacher, has relocated to John Quincy Adams High School in the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles, but the trouble starts again when he becomes a substitute to a rowdy, unruly class of rejects, including a Chicano tag crew by the name of "Kappin' Off Suckers" (K.O.S.). Their leader, Benito "Benny" Chacón, a menacing felon attending high school as a condition of probation, makes it clear to Garfield that there will be no mutual respect between them.


The tension mounts when a fellow teacher, Ellen Henry, confides that Benny has threatened her life, an action against which the administration of the school refuses to take action, fearing legal threats. Ellen and Garfield develop a close friendship that approaches the beginnings of a relationship, but which is stymied by Garfield's diffident and destabilizing behavior, likely arising from PTSD and his confrontations with the K.O.S.. Garfield's past also garners him the unwanted admiration of Dave Childress, a burned-out, alcoholic history teacher who carries and keeps guns at the school.

Why can’t the real world produce Black male teachers with the tenacity, drive and educational dedication of Garfield? Where can they be found in the real world?

 Most DWLs have never set foot in an inner city school, walked through the metal detectors, talked to the multiple resource officers on hand to keep law and order at the school or seen the worn-out faces of white teachers who entered that same building full of optimism and hope only to be broken by a reality no one dares acknowledge.

At the end of 187, this reality is shown for all to see. For a few fleeting moments, though, Samuel Garfield represents a Black Fictional Hero: a Black male teacher dedicated to teaching inner city even if it costs him his life.

Until he decides to play Russian Roulette. Isn't that what the traditional majority of America has been doing under Black Run America? Every time a concession is made, the hope that the inevitable "And Then?" won't follow is akin to playing a treacherous game of Russian Roulette.

CNN video on Black teachers can be watched here. 

NASA's Final Frontier: Finding the great Black Scientist

We all know what NASA's current mission, with Muslim outreach now the primary goal of that once vaunted organization.

Houston, 1969: How did these white guys ever succeed without Black people?

The next few days will see some long-awaited entries finally "go up" at SBPDL, but a quick thought on a story that came to our attention yesterday. NASA is attempting to address the "critical" shortage of Black people within the ranks of science and engineering fields, at a time when many high schools are doing away with honors programs and gifted classes because of a shortage of Black people in their ranks. With fewer Black students taking AP exams (and fewer garnering a three or above), one is left wondering where NASA will locate potential Black astrobiologists.

Curbing excellence seems to be a ploy to remove all remnants of white people excelling where Black people constantly fail. Perhaps if science labs are removed from high schools (as in Berkeley), the stunning athletic achievements of Black people will somehow progress our levels of scientific knowledge.

Instead of investing money in the "gifted" segments of society, we are intent on de-investing from those programs and redistributing that money to areas of consistent failure:

NASA has selected the United Negro College Fund Special Programs Corp. of Falls Church, Va., to administer a $1 million career development and educational program designed to address the critical shortage of U.S. minority students in science and engineering fields.

The NASA Astrobiology Institute's (NAI) Minority Institution Research Support (MIRS) program in Moffett Field, Calif., is providing the funding for the four-year effort. The program will provide opportunities for up to four faculty members and eight students from minority-serving institutions to partner with astrobiology investigators. Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and the future of life on Earth and the potential for life elsewhere.

"Providing new education opportunities for minority students will both enrich lives and answer a critical need for proficiency in science and engineering," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said. "But just as importantly, the program is an investment to cultivate imaginative thinking about the field of astrobiology."

The United Negro College Fund Special Programs Corp. will use its extensive database of 14,000 registrants to develop an online community to provide webinars, virtual training and videoconferences, and provide outreach and recruitment for program participants. The program's objective is to engage more teachers from under-represented schools in astrobiology research and increase the number of students pursuing careers in astrobiology.

"Our nation's underserved populations are a tremendous resource on which we must draw, not just for science, but for everything we do," said Carl Pilcher, director of NASA's Astrobiology Institute. "We are extremely pleased that the NAI MIRS program will continue contributing under the leadership of such a strong and experienced partner."

Founded in 1998, NAI is a partnership between NASA, 14 U.S. teams of universities and other organizations, and seven international consortia. NAI's goals are to promote, conduct, and lead interdisciplinary astrobiology research, train a new generation of astrobiology researchers, and share the excitement of the field.

One of the first rules of SBPDL is that any organization that fails to have significant numbers of Black people  (or vocational fields) is operating at crisis level. Only with the introduction of large numbers of Black people can offset this horrible situation, for the efficiency of an organization and its status as a progressive, tolerant company (or vocation) is at stake.

So how many Black astrobiologists are there?:

During the Astrobiology Science Conference held at NASA Ames in April 2002, less than 1% of the 800 attendees were African-American.  To increase the visibility and participation of underrepresented scientists, The Minority Institution Astrobiology Collaboratory (MIAC) was formed.

A sane society would have no problem asking why that might be, but an insane society merely inquires as to how a greater representation of Black people will be possible (hint, lowering standards to becoming an astrobiologist).

One institution that has allocated money for NASA (and is a predominately Black university) is Alabama A&M. A top producer of Black people with advanced doctorates, Alabama A&M is also home to growing controversy that involves NASA, tens of millions of dollars and a chief compliance officer who used to be a janitor:

According to high ranking officials at Alabama A&M University, the FBI has started asking questions about recent events at the Research Institute.

That's the flagship scientific research program, an 11-year-old separate corporate entity that employs A&M professors to handle millions in private and government research contracts on behalf of NASA, the Defense Department and numerous companies, such as Boeing.

"Yes, some senior administrators have been informed of a potential situation with the Research Institute," said university spokesperson Wendy Kobler on Thursday when asked about the FBI investigation. "Of late, there have been no follow up conversations about the ongoing inquiry into the Research Institute."

According to the former institute attorney, Annary Cheatham, after a summer of more than five firings and forceouts, there's just about no one left at the institute with a background in science or with the necessary security clearance.

The institute's small governing board, which includes former A&M trustee Shefton Riggins and current A&M trustee Tom Bell, on June 14 held a private meeting and fired the man who had helped found the institute, physicist and longtime director Dr. Daryush Ila.

They hired Dr. Tommy Coleman, who has a background in plant and soil science. In July, the board removed Coleman and put in director Deidra Willis-Gopher, a former teacher.

Kevin Matthews, a former Madison County janitor, became the new chief compliance officer. And Cheatham, who was brought in as general counsel for the institute on July 20 and let go 15 days later, said the bylaws were rewritten to place Matthews on the Institute board with Riggins and Bell, meaning Matthews is, in part, supervising himself.

Yes, the chief compliance officer that oversaw millions in grants was a former janitor.

Like all government agencies, NASA exceeds its employment of Black people (correlated to the percentage of the overall US population) by 49 percent.  This isn't enough, as NASA lags in diversity:

In a year of firsts, the nomination of an African-American to lead NASA hasn't grabbed national front-page headlines used for a black president moving into the White House, or for the selection of a Hispanic justice for the U.S. Supreme Court.


Yet, if former astronaut Charles Bolden is confirmed as the next NASA administrator, he will take over an agency still struggling to match the racial diversity found in the nation's population, much less the federal work force in general.

Part of the reason is because minorities are underrepresented in the science- and math-related professions from which NASA draws, said space policy expert Howard McCurdy.

But that doesn't excuse NASA, he said.

"The federal government has viewed itself as having a special responsibility to be a model employer, to go beyond what the occupational distribution allows," said McCurdy, a public affairs professor at American University in Washington, D.C.

"I don't sense that NASA moves much beyond what the occupational categories provide them. They are much more comfortable with technical challenges than with social ones."

When it comes to racial parity, NASA falls short in all but one ethnic group, Asian-Americans. At Kennedy Space Center, the situation is a little different.

Blacks, who make up 12.8 percent of the U.S. population, represent 11.3 percent of NASA's employees. They make up 17.9 percent of the federal work force. At KSC, blacks make up 7.6 percent of the work force, compared with 10 percent of Brevard County's population.

Hispanics represent 5.9 percent of all NASA employees, although they make up 7.9 percent of the federal labor force and 15.1 percent of the nation's population. Ten percent of KSC's work force is made up of Hispanics, compared with 6.9 percent of Brevard's population

Asian-Americans, who make up 4.6 percent of the national population, represent 6.3 percent of NASA's work force. That's nearly double the 3.4 percent they represent of all government employees. At KSC, 4.2 percent of the work force is made up of Asian-Americans, compared with 2.1 percent of Brevard's population."

We once went to the moon. We can't go back now, not because mankind is getting dumber, but because mankind is having to curb excellence so that Black people won't be left out. Honors classes, military entrance exams, AP exams, the SAT, LSAT, MCAT and ACT, the Wonderlic and any other test that requires a No. 2 pencil must go, because they deny Black people the opportunity to bless many vocations with wondrous variety and diversity. 

American innovation has been handicapped by the failures of Black people and to compensate for this continued poor academic showing (and thus high rate of barber shop employees), all companies or organizations - both public and private - must lower standards.

To understand why America made it to the moon in 1969 is to understand where America would be ranked in the PISA scores internationally were the white score not saddled with those of an underachieving racial group. 

The contributions of Black people can not go unnoticed: where would the world be without the Super Soaker or this nifty invention to hold sagging pants up?

We can only look at modern Huntsville to see where mankind is heading, thanks to Antoine Dodson.

Those of us looking at the year 2010 coming to close realize the world of Harrison Bergeron is upon us.