All of this has come to the surface lately for reasons beyond recent, Cosby-centered discussions.
[ warning...the following personal anecdote may not be terribly crisp due to my weariness at the moment]
I was sitting in a bar with a group of old friends - guys I've known since childhood - when one of them paused, looked around and noted how each of us, though Black males, had managed to avoid or navigate (to date) the problems that get so much press.
This wasn't said in a spirit of self-congrats (he's not that sort of bloke) but more in a spirit of wonder that not one of us had fallen down in the usual ways. I mean, out of a group of 10 guys, all members of an often targeted group, you'd think at least one would have gotten caught up.
This started a debate about what we had in common - what helped this group not only survive but do remarkably well in a variety of fields (net engineer - your esteemed listmember, space probe robotics scientist, film maker, actor, musician, etc).
My buddy who works with the jet propulsion lab (the space probe people) talked about how what he called the "science fiction outlook" gave him a view of life beyond the neighborhood and an analytical mechanism for context when things outside the house got too heavy. I think what he meant by this was that the long view of the big sci-fi authors - like F. Herbert with *Dune*, set tens of thousands of years in the future - gave him a feeling that all things were in motion and allowed him to see social structures (which is one of the gifts bestowed by the best sci-fi).
Another friend mentioned the discipline and safely sealed social life of church attendance which he described in the way a Marxist might capitalism - as a stage, a necessary precursor to what comes after.
But I think Jay MacLeod's _Ain't No Makin' It_ describes the cause of our collective success (which I'm defining here as being reasonably sane and functional in an essentially hostile and unhealthy system).
Here's the passage that sticks out for me:
If students like the Hallway Hangers are to be motivated to achieve in school must not be at the expense of their self-esteem but in support of it. Schools serving low-income neighborhoods must help students build positive identities working-class, black and white, young men and women. Rather than denying the odds and vow to overcome them instead of resigning themselves to the marginalized fate of the Hallway Hangers. When their passion and intellects are stimulated by indignation, youths are often moved to challenge the heretofore hidden social, political, and economic forces that weigh so heavily upon their lives. For some, this means an intensely personal drive and ambition. Others begin struggling to create a better world. In still others, these impulses coexist; such youths work for social, political, and economic reconstruction as well as personal transformation. For all of them, in contrast to the boys in this study, education has recovered its mission: It has become emancipatory.
........
Yeah, I really dig that. I dig that a lot.
And this is precisely what, in somewhat different ways, the church and the local school and our families and Issac Asimov did for me and each and every one of my friends -- this was a sort of reality adjustment machine, making us aware of the true obstacles, not giving us false hopes but insisting we do our best even so.
When I was a child, my mother would say to me *life's tough, you have many enemies. Learn all you can so you'll always be ready.* I always thought that was pretty cool; like my mom was Genghis Khan or something preparing me for battle. But of course, she was wasn't she?
In different ways, from different sources, this is the message each of us received as children. And, I suppose that's why we could gather together as adults - all still alive and whole, having exceeded our families' dreams and many of us working to make it possible for others to do the same.
Ideally, through smashing capital but that's a story for another time.
.d.