does right = white?

I know that most people like to sound interested in this stuff, but usually skip it because it is kinda boring, but real-ity is real, son!

The following commentary is from journalist, Khalil G. Muhammad of the Globe Newspaper, via New America Media:

Recently, I showed my college students a clip of Bill Cosby’s and Alvin Poussaint’s appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show. After hearing Cosby plead for poor blacks to embrace their parenting responsibilities, many of the students said they wished their parents had followed his advice. They regretted that some of their peers had done poorly in school, abused drugs and alcohol and run afoul of the law. These problems, they agreed, might have been avoided with more supervision at home.

They might have been the perfect audience for a Cosby town hall lecture on the dangers of self-destructive values in black America. They might also have been perfect illustrations of the growing “values gap” between poor and middle-class blacks described in a widely cited recent Pew Research Center poll.

Except almost all my students are white.

The article goes on to detail some commonly held perceptions of society and addresses the commonly held notion that "white is right." I mean, it must be right, it does rhyme...

He makes a good point in pointing out what the child welfare activist Jane Addams did to help immigrants in Chicago of the late 1800s and early 1900s, by providing them assistance in adjusting to American life, safeguarding them from a life of crime. Blacks were turned away because they were seen as too unruly and "ignorant." This is a sentiment that is as potent now as ever, at least when speaking of the other side of the gap of black society-- the lower class.

Carrying on into today's society, a great divide has been made between blacks with money and those without. It's to a point that those with more white values raise their noses, judge, and even persecute their "brothers."

If we insist on explaining racial disparities in terms of black vs. white values, then we need to explain what exactly white values are. When we do, we’ll find that whiteness is an inadequate standard by which to judge good black people vs. bad ones.

As my students would tell you, the real white world is as pathological, as respectable and as diverse as the black one.

As my brother (If I'm Huey Freeman of my household, he's Riley) might say, "Ain't no M'fer better or smarter than I. It's some B.S. Don't judge me, fool. I'm smart as hell!" And I agree. As far as intelligence goes, we need to change the way we judge it, but that's a topic for another day...