The Reality Based Community Approach to Race in America
Race talk, dirty laundry, Bill Cosby and James Watson's Big Racist Mouth
I have not read Amazon.com Come On People but I heard him on Meet the Press two weeks ago. I read his prior book and I've spent the last forty years of my life black in America. Now, up front, I come at this from having grown up in privilege—my parents were academics—but because of an age skew my father, certainly, had not grown up in privilege. My mother's father was a land-owning farmer in Alabama so she had some form of privilege. I say this because I'm about to defend Bill Cosby and I recognize that how one sees what is happening in Black America is colored by one's original class position. So I grew up in suburban Northern California, in the 1970's, in an middle-to-upper middle class neighborhood. My father was an Alpha Phi Alpha, my mother was a Kappa. We had it drilled into us at home and at church, study and community service. Study because we were the generation that was being given a chance, doors had been opened and we were going to be given the opportunity to Arrive, to Be Somebody. Community Service because those of us to whom much had been given by dint of birth much would be asked. My parents drilled into us that we were that talented tenth that Du Bois spoke of.
I say this only to claim my positioning. None of us can look at what is going on and say that Bill Cosby is wholly wrong. Regardless of whether or not you think he should be airing dirty laundry or what emphasis he puts on the laundry, no one can actually state that Cosby describes a set of observations that do not map well to reality. We all know that they do. It would be a mistake to read Cosby as saying that black folks cannot do any better or any different than we currently are . That was what James Watson was saying and we'll get to that tottering old man momentarily. Yes, conservatives of the Bill Bennett variety will look upon Cosby's statement, tie it to what Watson said, and then nod their heads at his sagacity and smile in what they see as their vindication. That's their script, that's their knee jerk reaction. The Left leaning knee-jerk reaction is to stop at that analysis and go no further. Earl Ofari Hutchinson at Huffingtonpost.com demonstrates the position I'm talking about here and here . Is it possible that one can genuinely be concerned about certain cultural issues and not be inherently conservative? Yes, in fact, one can. When I was going to high school in the early 80's, I heard 'why you trying to be white' from other black kids on a very regular basis. We cannot pretend that, for instance, this isn't said to black kids who excel academically.
What's more every black academic knows, because they are there that they have to work harder and actually be smarter than others in order to get any kind of recognition at all. To conform with that reality, and I would submit that there are very few Blacks in America who would suggest that it is better to not attempt to conform to it, while working to change it (it is offense against Justice that blacks are more harshly judged than whites) we must be courageous and complex. Because of how we know how those who, either explicitly or implicitly harbor fantasies that blacks are inferior kinds of Homo sapiens , would seize on any statements that might sound like blacks having to change some internal dynamic as vindication we have to be willing to be brave enough to lay ideas out on the table. At the same time, we have to be complex enough to recognize that the moral stance condemning racism does not rest on the idea that blacks must, as a whole, map some identical metric to whites or some other group. As Stephen Pinker put it, “The case against bigotry is not a factual claim that humans are biologically indistinguishable. It is a moral stance that condemns judging an individual according to the average traits of certain groups to which the individual belongs 1”. Now, I want to be clear that neither I nor Drs. Cosby and Pouissant are saying that there is something inherent in black folks that creates the kinds of distressing behaviors that can be observed (and I will even concede the point that Cosby was hyperbolic in some of his pronouncements)
The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education had the following to say on black high school graduation rates:
In 2006, 85.6 percent of young blacks ages 25 to 29 had completed high school. This was the lowest percentage since 1996. For whites ages 25 to 29, 93.4 percent had completed high school. The drop in high school completions for young blacks in all likelihood is due to the low rate of high school graduations of black males. In 2006, 83.1 percent of black men ages 25 to 29 had a high school diploma. Just two years earlier in 2004, more than 91 percent of black males in that age group had completed high school. Twenty years ago in 1986, 86.4 percent of black males in the 25 to 29 age group had graduated from high school.
For blacks in the 25- to 29-year-old age group, 18.6 percent hold a four-year college degree. This is only slightly better than the rate for black adults as a whole. For whites in this age group, 34.3 percent hold a four-year college degree. This is 3.3 percentage points higher than the white adult population as a whole. Therefore, the college completion rate gap between young blacks and young whites is actually larger than for the population as a whole.
These figures are discouraging and portend a solid and continuing economic gap between the races for the foreseeable future. If, as appears to be the case, the educational gap between young blacks and whites is larger than the educational gap for black and white adults as a whole, it is almost certain that racial gaps in income, wealth, poverty, and unemployment will persist for generations to come 2.
In this report, the focus is on how what makes a difference in retaining black students once in college:.
Clearly, the racial climate at some colleges and universities is more favorable toward African Americans than at other campuses. A nurturing environment for black students is almost certain to have a positive impact on black student retention and graduation rates. Although often troubled by racial incidents, Brown University is famous for its efforts to make its campus a happy place for African Americans. In contrast, the University of California at Berkeley has had its share of racial turmoil in recent years. The small number of black students on campus as a result of the abolition of race-sensitive admissions has caused many African Americans on campus to feel unwelcome. This probably contributes to the low black student graduation rate at Berkeley. The decline in black student admissions and the low graduation rate at Berkeley is serious. It is an important issue to be addressed by the university’s administration.
Many of the colleges and universities with high black student graduation rates have set in place orientation and retention programs to help black students adapt to the culture of predominantly white campuses. Mentoring programs for black first-year students involving upperclassmen have been successful at many colleges and universities. Other institutions appear to improve graduation rates through strong black student organizations that foster a sense of belonging among the African-American student population. The presence or absence of these programs may have some impact on graduation rates.
The presence of a strong and relatively large core of black students on campus is important. Among the highest-ranked colleges and universities, institutions that tend to have a low percentage of blacks in their student bodies, such as CalTech, Bates, Middlebury, Grinnell, Davidson, Carleton, and Colby, also tend to have lower black student graduation rates. Black students who attend these schools may have problems adjusting to college life in an overwhelmingly white environment. And these schools are less likely to have a large number of black-oriented social or cultural events to make black students feel at home.
Curriculum differences also play an important role in graduation rates. Carnegie Mellon University and CalTech are heavily oriented toward the sciences, fields in which blacks have always had a small presence. It continues to be true that at many high-powered schools black students in the sciences often have been made to feel uncomfortable by white faculty and administrators who persist in beliefs that blacks do not have the intellectual capacity to succeed in these disciplines.
High dropout rates appear to be primarily caused by inferior K-12 preparation and an absence of a family college tradition, conditions that apply to a very large percentage of today’s college-bound African Ameri-cans. But equally important considerations are family wealth and the availability of financial aid. According to a study by Nellie Mae, the largest nonprofit provider of federal and private education loan funds in this country, 69 percent of African Americans who enrolled in college but did not finish said that they left college because of high student loan debt as opposed to 43 percent of white students who cited the same reason 3.
These statistics, while not encouraging are not as bad as I had feared when I started my response.
1Pinker, S. ' The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature”
2http://www.jbhe.com/news_views/56_b_w_disparities.html
3http://www.jbhe.com/preview/winter07preview.html
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