Hell, privileged whites do it too: if my experience teaching at three elite liberal arts colleges is telling, they have their own form of antipathy to education. "who cares about knowledge? it's who I know, not what I know that matters." That attitude means that it's ok to cheat my way through everything and anything.
some of it has to do with schooling.... and I wouldn't discount the issues covered by Kozol in _Savage Inequalitie_ (a very powerful and moving book; depressing to teach it to the white elite, though!) The entire structure of schooling is pretty much dead set against encouraging anyone to want to learn. Compound that with schools that are falling apart, located in toxic waste dumps, with textbooks that are old, inadequate, and spares, instrcutors who just don't show up for work beleaguered, etc....
Well, would you like school? (I just pulled my son out of one. I had no idea. He never told me it was so bad. Not as bad as the ones Kozol documents, but the bad attitudes of the faculty are similar. So, I managed to slide him into fancy pants rich kid school on b-ball "scholarship." I have often regretted this when he came home swinging back and forth between crying over the racism or wanting to start fights with the racists -- because in the 'hood you protect your own. In whiteyville: call a lawyer.) 'cept he's blossoming intellectually and doing well in school. So...
Teen pregnancy? Fuck Cosby. Hard. If he could be bothered to drag himself out of Bell air, maybe he'd notice that there's a high teen pregnancy rate among poor whites. Not as big as that of blacks, but there _are_ cultural issues going on (not culture of poveryt, either). He could always take a look at scholarship on that very topic where he might catch an errant klew: You can tie changes in social mores and rising teen pregnancy rates to the 60s and the fucking over of the urban landscape and industrial flight.
So, Skullfuck Cosby. (Kozol points out that blacks tax themselves at way higher because they DO care about education.)
And it's not just the Bellair assholes. The other day, Lacny was complaining about an elderly white woman being racist.
Sorry. You can see the intra-class warfare happening further down the black social, uh, status ladder. It is a bludgeon people use for all kinds of reasons but mainly because they buy into the Myth of the American Dream. If I just work hard, I'll make it. So, they are super hard on their own.
I used to teach night school at an extension campus. Soc of Family. IN it we'd consider the argument I just laid out above. Nonetheless, blacks in the class would say, "Yeah, I get it. It's the economy stupid. (it was the title of the unit) But you still don't have to act that way..... " They get upset about it because they feel dragged down by them. Like lefties feel dragged down by Moore? :)
Kelley (super duper ass!)
At 04:31 PM 7/2/2004, joanna bujes wrote:
>Course not, he lives in Bel Air. On the other hand, there's no question
>that there's a psychopathology in the black community with respect to
>learning/education and its value.... A kind of amplification of the more
>general American "I'm ignorant and proud of it" that does not serve
>anyone. I remember a long and chillilng routine on the subject in that
>"kings of comedy" movie that Spike Lee(?) made a couple of years ago. The
>routine based its humor on the fact that an audience member, when asked
>for his occupation, responded that he was some sort of professional. I
>forget the exact profession, but the comic got a lot of yardage out
>of that, beginning with "You're an xxx? I bet you can't even spell that..."
>
>Until this changes, there's no hope.
>
>Joanna
"We're in a fucking stagmire."
--Little Carmine, 'The Sopranos'