There are big differences in outcomes for Black youth when my generation was in the K-12 system in the forties and fifties as compared with Black youth today. The biggest difference is that the parental education/economic range of those of us who succeeded back then was far greater. Modern America’s desegregated school systems have not been able to duplicate the educational feats we saw through the first three Black generations following the Civil War. Now I know they never will. Schools, per se, are only partially to blame. Destruction of Black communities and their spirit are primarily responsible. Community is defined by two basic factors that link people: geography and spirit. The former decline, communities, was inevitable with desegregation; but not the spirit.
There is a significant disparity in the educational success of ALL poor American youth currently as contrasted with their higher income counterparts. The rich-poor academic achievement gap is 30 to 40 percent larger today than it was four decades ago, and is now nearly twice as large as the Black-white achievement gap. In 2013, for example, 77% of individuals from families in the top income quartile had earned bachelor’s degrees by age 24, but only 9% of people from the lowest bracket had done so. Poor Black male youth are disproportionately represented among the lowest achievement group.
The ONLY benefit my generation gained from segregation, and it was a considerable benefit, was that we lived in all-Black, comprehensive communities. DuBois’s Talented Tenth — our educational, social and financial elite; along with our churches, teachers/coaches, and youth-serving organizations, linked together geographically and spiritually, and had an advantageous impact on those of us in families with low incomes and low levels of education. Nearly all of us were poor.
Today, as never before, the poor Black family lives essentially alone. Certainly, they live in areas with large Black populations; so lack of Black neighbors is not the problem. About 75% of the influences on children’s success-assets development comes from the local community. The problem is that there are considerably fewer relatives and members of today’s “Talented Tenth” present in those areas on a continuous basis and supportive in the development of children’s success-assets. Consequently, the poor, under-educated Black family unit is in a situation that is exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to escape.
It is one thing to live among a large number of people who look like you. It is quite another to live in an environment where on a daily basis, poor Black children can see all three elements of the education/economic spectrum — the poor start, the success steps, and the better ending; and, most importantly, where every day they can talk with, and touch, the successful people who look like them as we did “back in the day.”
Another difference between the two eras is in how racism is played out. Classical Racism is racism in its purest form and it has two components – Attitude, e.g., “My people are superior to your people in fundamental, unalterable, genetic bases, as ordained by God;” and Actions based on the attitude.
Classical racists take overt, deliberate, and continuous actions to harm the despised persons and thwart them in their pursuit of happiness. Harm includes physical violence and malicious, verbal harassment that is intended to demoralize the targets. Classical racists prevailed in the past era and were not subtle; their intentions and actions were clear to us, so the strategies and tactics we used were easier to construct and more effective.
The smarter (slicker) ones in the “Classical” group today know, as they did in yesteryear, that the most certain means of achieving the desired effects of racism — lower progress for the hated groups; to have the effects last forever; and to ensure that debilitating conditions are passed to the children — is to have the targets of racism retard their own success trajectory; and, further, to retard the trajectory of other individuals within their own communities. The obstacles inserted into the society through the special ingenuity of this set of racists defy easy identification. They don’t wear sheets and hoods today, but expensive suits.
If our children do not understand the progress we made through the first three post-slavery generations and how those achievements propelled the success of today’s most advantaged Blacks, we cannot blame American whites, racism, or the schools; but ourselves. Perhaps those of us who escaped did not know exactly how our escape was made possible, which is quite feasible, or we forgot, also feasible. We can’t teach what we don’t know.
The critical era that must be understood for “teaching” children how to advance today is not 1619 to 1863, formal slavery, but from 1875 to 1965, beginning about ten years after the Civil War, when significant Black achievements were made against enormous odds.
When next you hear people talking about how much better WE did then as compared with poor Black youth today, please remind them of the huge differences between the two eras.
