A
“Drug Problem” that Black America Needs Desperately
Deborah A. Dessaso
1/10/05
The
brouhaha that erupted in the Black community following Bill Cosby’s remarks
about low-income Blacks is still going strong.
In case you’ve been hiding under a rock lately, here is a sample of
Cosby’s opening salvo:
"Ladies and gentlemen, the lower economic people are not holding
up their end in this deal. These people are not parenting. They
are buying things for kids – $500 sneakers for what? And
won't spend $200 for 'Hooked on Phonics.
"They're standing on the corner and they can't speak English.
I can't even talk the way these people talk: 'Why you ain't,' 'Where you is'
... And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. And then I heard the
father talk. ... Everybody knows
it's important to speak English except these knuckleheads. ... You can't be
a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth!"
Needless
to say, debates within the Black community are raging over the appropriateness,
correctness, fairness, and a host of other “nesses” of Cosby’s comments.
But whether you agree with him or not, one thing is clear.
As many columnists—Black and otherwise—are pointing out, at least the
Black community is talking about a particular load of dirty laundry which
heretofore we have been politely avoiding:
just what part does personal responsibility play in resolving that
seemingly intractable problem of Black under-classedness?
My solution, as suggested by the title, may seem completely ludicrous,
but before you get completely apoplectic, let me explain what I mean.
Not long ago, I saw a cartoon by Walt Carr, an illustrator for the
Washington Informer, a Black-owned newspaper.
The cartoon showed two Black men walking down the street as one said
to the other:
I had a drug problem when I was young.
I was drug to church on Sunday
morning. I was drug to
funerals. I was drug to the school
bus stop every
morning. And I was drug to the woodshed when I misbehaved.
Black America needs to rediscover these “drug problems,”
beginning with the scenarios mentioned in the cartoon.
I know it’s not politically correct to tie proper behavior with old-fashioned
home training, but I truly believe that this is as good a place as any to
begin a discussion about the fate of the Black underclass.
Let’s begin with parents/guardians.
The Black community needs to train a lot of them to be, for want of
a better term, “druggists.” These
adults need to be “drug” through parenting classes, counseling, and any other
program that teaches them how to be responsible adults.
Consequently, they should be equipped with the tools needed to
get their kids “drug” from kindergarten through at least undergraduate school,
and “drug” through the employment process (even if this means being “drug”
through relocation). Afterwards,
parents should be “drug” through courses which teach them how to teach what
they learned to their children.
To reinforce this teaching, pre-teens and teenagers need to be “drug”
through a series of seminars and workshops that spell out the financial, economic,
spiritual, psychological, and other benefits that accrue when they delay having
children until their mid-to-late twenties.
Studies show that the differences in the quality of life of children
born to Black, teen-age mothers versus those born to Black women a few years
older are staggering.
Of course, this brings us to the $64,000 question:
who is going to do all of this “drugging?”
Here’s a clue: many years
ago, Black author and activist Carl Rowan wrote the book, Just
Between Us Blacks in which he predicted correctly that although integration
would bring many favorable things to middle- and upper-middle class Black
Americans, it would remove for the most part, the “druggists,” those who by
their teaching and example gave everyone in the community hope that virtually
anyone could rise above dysfunctional circumstances.
How was this done? When
all around you were doctors, business owners, teachers, and other professionals
going about their day-to-day lives, you knew what you could become, Jim Crow
notwithstanding.
Today, most middle- and upper-middle-class Blacks live in the suburbs.
Consequently, inner-city Blacks rarely see models of successful Black
lives. As Rowan also predicted,
the inner cities have become cauldrons of discontent filled with Blacks who
see no way out of their crumbling economic status except violence and death. The live-for-now attitude is no joke. Too many young Black males in urban America expect to see too
few birthdays beyond their teens or early 20s—so we shouldn’t be surprised
if $500 jackets and $200 tennis shoes that provide instant status are considered
more important than phonics, which may take years to make a difference.
Few neighborhoods outside of urban Black America prove the truthfulness
of the proverb, “Without a vision, the people perish.”
We sorely need the visionaries who use to live in our communities to
reconnect to the neighborhood. Only
through connected communities can we expect to maintain vigilance over the
rights and freedoms our foreparents fought so hard to secure.
The impetus behind this connectedness must start with a reloading,
as it were, of those values that carried Black people through the horrors
of slavery, the sliver of hope of Reconstruction, the neo-slavery of Jim Crow,
and the bright hope of the civil rights era.
The starting point, as Walt Carr’s character pointed out, is the family.
In her article, “United We Stood, But Divisions Now Show,” Jonetta
Rose Barras points out that “African-American families have deteriorated as
black leaders have pointed to government policies as the reason for teen pregnancies
and absent fathers. They have
refused to embrace ‘family values,’ seeing them only as part of a Republic-inspired
platform, although blacks even during slavery had a strong belief in family.
This decline is at the root of much of what ails many lower-income
communities.” (Barras, washingtonpost.com, 6/27/04, B03).
The Black underclass comprises nearly a quarter of all Black Americans,
and in this era of increasingly gentrified cities, Black elected officials
would do well to remember that the only thing standing between them and defeat
might be that very same underclass.
More importantly, no minority group that lacks the support of a quarter
of its members can expect to sustain whatever legal, socioeconomic, or political
gains the group may have made.
So, fellow Black Americans, we know what needs to be done.
When do we start “drugging?”
