This Article Is Required Reading Family
On so many levels family, our feces is beyond stank. Why Black folks are in such denial escapes me, but I know as much as I'm blogging this post that our agenda is straight raggedy. Period! And it looks like I'm not the only brother feeling this way. Last week, the Pew Research Center published the astonishing finding that 37 percent of African-Americans polled felt that “Blacks today can no longer be thought of as a single race” because of a widening class divide. “By a ratio of 2 to 1,” the report says, “Blacks say that the values of poor and middle-class blacks have grown more dissimilar over the past decade. In contrast, most blacks say that the values of Blacks and whites have grown more alike.”
In Sunday's New York Times, Henry Louis Gates (photo courtesy of Salon.com) puts the situation on blast. Here's an excerpt: "In 1965, that the out-of-wedlock birthrate and the number of families headed by single mothers, both about 24 percent, pointed to dissolution of the social fabric of the Black community. Today, 69 percent of Black babies are born out of wedlock, while 45 percent of Black households with children are headed by women.
The sad truth is that the civil rights movement cannot be reborn until we identify the causes of Black suffering, some of them self-inflicted. Why can’t Black leaders organize rallies around responsible sexuality, birth within marriage, parents reading to their children and students staying in school and doing homework? Imagine Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson distributing free copies of Virginia Hamilton’s collection of folktales “The People Could Fly” or Dr. Seuss, and demanding that Black parents sign pledges to read to their children. What would it take to make inner-city schools havens of learning?"
Continue reading Henry Louis Gates piece>>>