The Un-Education of the Black Community

What the HECK is going on? Our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents endured years of oppression and degradation in the last century. This country's courts seemingly realized the error of it's ways by throwing the Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896) decision into the trash heap of jurisprudence with the Brown vs. The Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954). In the span of those 50 years - 2 generations - the Black community (by and large) has essentially thrown the Brown decision into another trash heap altogether. All the strides that were made to ensure that all Black children would have the specter of a quality education have been squandered away in the name of being "Black."

The Brown decision didn't just give our Black children the right to sit beside a White child in school. The Brown decision was supposed to give our Black children the right to a quality education. But 50 years later, we are hard pressed to see any tangible benefits from Brown. We see affluent Black communities (near the nation's capital) where students have flashy cars, nice clothes, and all of the trappings of successful parents, yet they participate in some of the worst state-run school systems. A recent Washington Post article gave the Prince George's County Public Schools "An F for Effort." Seemingly awash in successful Black entrepreneurs and government workers, these students are slowly wasting away their educational opportunities.

I live in metropolitan Atlanta where there is a CLEAR division between the predominantly White communities and Black communities. Our predominantly Black communities consistently have the lowest state test scores. I live in a predominantly Black community in a county that has a clear division in the SAT test scores; in our schools, the SAT scores are below the national and state (which are probably the lowest in the nation) averages. If you look at the 2005 DeKalb County SAT Scores, ALL of the scores below the state average are in Black communities and ALL of the scores that are above the state average are in predominantly White communities in the county.

Some would say that this is the miseducation of our youth, I say this is the uneducation of our community. We've moved so far away from where we came from as a people. We used to treasure high moral codes of behavior and discipline. Imagine going to church every Sunday and praying to a God who you knew wasn't going to answer your prayers. Imagine getting smacked in the mouth by your next door neighbor because she heard you uttering a curse word, now our kids are cursing at their teachers and parents with equal vigor. And Lord knows the beatdown I would've gotten for coming out of the house with a do-rag on my head, now a do-rag is a fashion statement.

Yeah, some of us are doing alright: I was blessed with getting a very good college education and being able to make a pretty good living at something that I love to do. But we are leaving a mass of folk behind. There is no way for us to grow and prosper as a community when we have so much graft dragging down. We have a tendency to glorify the worst and the most morally base things in our community. The way we talk (nigga this, nigga that), the way we dress (our little girls dressed like those video vixens who are dressed like imitation hookers and our boys in sagging pants like they wear in the penitentiary), the way we relate to each other (the lack of respect for our elders) ... we've lost our way and are quickly solidifying ourselves a second-class citizenship that Brown vs. Board of Education was supposed to eradicate.

I cannot even think about sending my daughter to the public schools where I live. She is only four years old, but she is a two year veteran of the Montessori method of education. They cannot make the tuition high enough to keep me from keeping her enrolled there. And when that runs out, there are a number of options available for good private schools. I wouldn't be able to look myself in the face if I submitted to only one day of the unruly, unfocused, and uninspired atmosphere of the DeKalb County Schools in my neck of the woods! When more successful Black people decide to reclaim our right to a quality public education, I may be inclined to change my mind... something tells me that things will only get worse. I cannot be optimistic about a change in the un-education of the Black community.