SOLUTIONS TO CRIME IN BLACK AMERICA PART II

Solutions to Crime in Black America Part II

(Please scroll down, if you’d like to see the two previous blogs on this issue)

Standards-for teachers and students- must be raised, not lowered.  We now have English teachers who cannot conjugate, and high school graduates who cannot tell the difference between a verb and an adjective.  This may sound a bit trivial, but I believe that words are the clothes we put on our ideas.  The more elegant the clothing, the more elegant the ideas. The more disciplined the language, the more disciplined the thinking; and we need more discipline in any incarnation we can get it.

Much of our underclass does not understand the value or true nature of education.  I remember shortly after graduating from college telling a woman that I was working in textbook publishing.  She responded that the factory was hiring.  She knew I had a degree, but saw no relationship between that degree and the type of work I was doing.  On a higher level, our kids need to know that the education they receive in schools is there to prepare them to continue educating themselves throughout the rest of their lives.  Most of all, they need to know that it is really cool to be smart!

Another fundamental issue with the underclass and education lies in the fact that the underclass- as do all marginalized people- lives in the moment- from crisis to crisis.  While working in Child Welfare, I received calls from frantic parents whose heating gas had been turned off, desperately trying to get the gas back on because the temperature was supposed to drop THAT DAY.  In many cases, the gas may have been off for months.  They knew that winter was coming, but did nothing until the freezing temperatures were upon them.   It is extremely difficult for people who function like this to attend to their children’s educational needs that won’t pay dividends for years to come.

Governmental bureaucracies must be pressured to open up to new ideas and approaches.  Several years ago I put together what I still believe to be a powerful program for empowering parents and children.  The program was called SPEAK (Serious Parents Empowering Achieving Kids).    The Chicago Housing Authority was emptying its public housing and needed programs for helping residents integrating the world outside the projects.   I spent four years trying to get my program considered by the CHA as well as the IDCFS (Illinois Department of Children and Family Services) where I had previously worked, to no avail.  No one even saw it. This isn’t a personal lament.  I’m not the only original thinker out here, and these problems require creativity that the system precludes.

Next we come to the 800 lb. gorilla: the Black church.  The only institution that is completely owned and operated by the African American community, the church represents enormous potential in this fight.  I would need a couple hundred pages to fully explicate the role of religion and the institution itself in this matter, so what I’m writing here will be spectacularly cursory.

Back in the 1980’s, I delivered a paper before AHSA (African Heritage Studies Association, a prestigious African American think tank, founded by Dr. John Henri Clarke, whose members/ participants have included everyone from Maulana Karenga to Barbara Sizemore to Dr. Joseph Ben Jochannan, to Ivan Van Sertima) entitled The Black Church, Cultural Nationalism, and The Prevention of Crime Among Americans of African Descent.  Wildly oversimplified, the basic premise of the paper was that people act in accordance with their sense of identity, or how they see themselves.  (For example, criminals view themselves as predators and act as such).  Churches inadvertently provide a sense of identity (Who are you?  I’m a Christian).   By utilizing cultural nationalism as a tool, churches could extend their sphere of influence beyond the borders of their memberships, and impact on negative behavior in the community by helping people define themselves in positive ways. 

We must understand that all religion is intrinsically political.  African American church leaders, from Richard Allen, Bishop Henry McNeil Turner, to Martin Luther King Jr. and beyond lead the fight for just and equality from the abolition of slavery to Civil Rights and beyond.  Conversely, White preachers traveled from plantation to plantation preaching to slaves to make them docile.  They quoted Ephesians 6:5-9 and Timothy 6:1-2 among other texts to justify slavery.  The same tactics were used to subjugate the serfs in feudal Europe.  The fact that slaves had rights and were still regarded as human beings until the peculiar institution of American slavery always got left out.

Ministry students study the history of the church extensively.  They cannot lead that which they do not understand.  Yet many African American ministers are clueless when it comes to the history of their own people!  Make sense?

Jesus was of a people who could be mistaken for Egyptians a la Moses.  Yet the most popular images of Him are of a blond blue eyed European.  Between these images, and Black folks constantly singing about wanting to be washed as white as snow, I’d say we have a problem.  I could go on and on, but I’d need a 500 page tome to fully express this issue.

I’m proposing that quality of life councils, or committees be established in areas where crime is an issue.   They would consist of members of the various communities that could impact the issue: education, law enforcement, judicial, social services, and others.  Resources and ideas could be shared.  This is, by no means, a panacea.  But it is a start.  And we’ve   got to do something.

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Solutions to Crime in Black America: Part One

                The magnitude and scope of crime in Black America is such that the time has clearly come to develop a new serious approach predicated on a new and serious commitment to ameliorating it.  (For those of you who missed the last blog or would like to refresh yourselves with the causes of crime, please scroll down to the last entry). The first step is for the rest of society to recognize what thoughtful law enforcement officials already know: this level of crime is NOT simply a law enforcement issue.  It is a social, political, economic and historical problem that must be attacked as such, from all different disciplines.

First, we must hold our elected officials’ feet to the fire on the issue.  They must be held accountable for, if not developing new strategies, at least implementing them in this fight.  They must demonstrate the will to overcome this debilitating issue.  Resources must be dedicated.  We need reparations to address this issue.  Of course, anyone who has been awake since Obama’s election knows that the racist elements in this country will thwart any efforts to set funds aside specifically for African Americans.  But creative ways can and must be found to fight this battle.  If (non-budgeted) funds can be found to fight wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, surely they can be found for a more imminent war against crime in America.

An extensive advertising campaign needs to be launched.  On many levels, the issue of crime is an issue of ideas.  We must attack the ideas behind crime:   ideas such as “since my life doesn’t mean anything, neither does yours, and I have the right to take it,” or “the world owes me something” “ I proved my manhood by knocking up all those girls,”  “hurting people is fun” and the list goes on.  We have already seen the power of advertising to change behaviors.   Ads can point out that excellence is not only achievable, but expected.  The power of advertising to influence behavior is well documented.

Consider that not that long ago, it was perfectly acceptable to smoke anywhere.  Then came the “We mind very much if you smoke” campaign, and all that began to change.  Prior to that, back when filters on cigarettes were considered effeminate, advertisers convinced men smoke filtered cigarettes with the invention of the Marlboro Man, who sported a tattoo on his hand.  There was no way macho men were going to drink diet beer.  But what if they called it “lite” beer, and recruited a bunch of super tough former jocks to endorse it?  Advertisers made safety a criteria for car buying, where previously the consumers were concerned mostly about performance.  The list goes on.  These campaigns would have to be drafted by people who really understand the issues and perhaps in conjunction with African American psychologists and sociologists.

We have negative elements in our community whose messages of hatred, violence and stupidity must be repudiated.   Someone just sent me a piece on Lil Wayne (of whom I knew absolutely nothing, until that article) and the disgusting and foul message he puts out.  In this piece, Dr Boyce Watkins, stated that he was boycotting BET for disseminating this garbage.  My response was to ask about the Negro who started BET by eschewing any uplifting programming in favor of rap videos and who made no effort whatsoever to sell to responsible African Americans.  We must apply standards to all, and be willing to boycott or otherwise ostracize those who would exploit our communities regardless of the race of the offenders.

The schools have a major role to play in the war against crime.  Starting in elementary school, we can begin to plant seeds of positive attitudes and behaviors.  One place to start is with vocabulary lessons.  Words such as “honor” and “integrity” must be introduced and discussed at an early age.  Life skills classes, loaded with lessons on anger management, personal responsibility, empathy, morality and the difference between goal setting and dreaming,  need to be instituted.    There is nothing new about life skills classes.  When I was a kid, they taught classes on Home Economics that provided basic information on how to run a household.  These classes were just for girls back then. (I quietly objected to this discrimination- not out of a sense of fairness, but because I thought I’d grow up to be a swinging bachelor!  Silly Rabbit!)

Life skills must teach realistic expectations.  Far too many of our children focus their career ambitions on one of three areas: NBA, NFL or rapper.  Kids who barely made their high school teams, think they can play in the NBA.  For every successful rapper, there are probably at least a half million would-be rappers.   None of these kids have back-up plans or marketable skills.  I’ve counseled many of these kids with these goals.  I told them that becoming a rapper or making the NBA was like playing Musical Chairs with ten thousand people playing and only one chair.  No matter how good you are, only one person will be able to sit.  Virtually all of the kids I worked with had the same reaction:  “Nobody ever told me that or talked to me like that.”  The kids aren’t stupid.  No one is telling them anything!!!

We need to teach our kids real, Black history, starting in elementary school.   The only reason Daniel Boone and Kit Carson were more famous than Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, was the racism of those recording the history.    No one who knows about Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, Denmark Vesy or Toussaint L’ouverture, can ever be brainwashed by the propaganda that Blacks were content to be slaves.   One book that had a profound impact on me was the story of Piankhi, the Nubian warrior king.  I was in second or third grade when I read it.  I didn’t fully understand it at the time, but the sense of pride I felt in reading about this great African king, I believe, helped in some small way keep me on my incredibly tenuous path to a productive life.  Black history must be taught separately as well as integrated into the fabric of all history.  Everyone needs to know the magnificent contributions we have made.

The fight to properly educate our children does not begin and end with the classroom.  Thoughtful African Americans are needed on the adoption committees that choose the textbooks for our schools.  Back in the 1970’s, I worked for a major textbook publishing firm.   I was surprised to learn that almost all of the African American employees had been hired within a time frame of a couple of years.  It was clear that we weren’t welcome.  I soon learned that the only reason there were any workers of color was because the predominantly African American adoption committee in Detroit revolted when they learned that the company had no black editorial employees. Even with their Black staff, this textbook firm continued to resist any efforts to fairly represent the Black community.

The battle over textbook content has never been more significant.  The good people of Texas have been busy little beavers rewriting and whitewashing history.

Let’s not kid ourselves.  For kids from homes where there is no structure; where the moms curse the children like drunken sailors, and basic manners and respect are non-existent; this is no small task.  But we do what we can.  The educational system should distinguish between children who have parents who will pick up their report cards and those who don’t.  Strategies, perhaps involving incentives, can be devised to involve the parents in their children’s educations.  We may be able to implement some evening classes that could involve both parents and students as family building activities.  Whenever possible parents must understand that they are every bit as responsible as the teachers for their kids’ education.   Basic lessons on respect can be taught in elementary school and elevated into a more sophisticated lesson plan on through high school.

Next:  Part two of solutions (STAY TUNED)