REAL BLACK LEADERSHIP :

The Value Of Great Expectations (William Raspberry, July 29, 2002, Washington Post)

Rod Paige and I, both black Mississippians of a certain age, over lunch were pondering the differences between the education we received as children and the education poor children are receiving today.

"One difference," the secretary of education said, "is expectation. Too many teachers accept as a fact that certain students can't learn, and therefore they set low levels of expectation." [...]

When Paige and I were boys, explanations of black disadvantage were so obvious as to be pointless. The thing our people needed, our leaders reminded us, was to do well in spite of the disadvantage, to become productive, to make ourselves necessary. Today's leaders put less emphasis on what we must do and more on what is done to us. They aren't wrong. But the unintended consequence of their emphasis is to makes us feel more like powerless victims of circumstances we can't control and less like individuals capable of significant achievement.

Suppose Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton were to spend the next several years telling black children and parents that white folk don't want them to succeed and don't think they can, but that working together this generation of black kids can seize control over their own educations and their own lives and achieve magnificent things. Suppose they made that their mission, their dream, if you will. Suppose the NAACP and CORE and PUSH and the Black Caucus at Black Entertainment Television and Jet and Ebony turned their full focus to education and to saving just this one generation of kids from crappy schools. Suppose William Raspberry and Clarence Page and Bob Herbert and Thomas Sowell and Armstrong Williams and Shelby Steele and Ward Connerly and every other black pundit, Left, Right, and Center, devoted themselves to the issue of the inferior quality of education that too many black kids get in America today. Suppose Danny Glover and Whoopi Goldberg and Harry Belafonte and every other black entertainer used their bully pulpit to demand that blacks educate themselves and that politicians give them the tools to get good educations. Suppose there were no more important issue in the public and political discourse of black America than education, education, education. Could anything serve to empower blacks more? Posted by Orrin Judd at July 29, 2002 8:05 PM