Hmmm. My daughter has attended inner city public schools since 1st grade. She is in high school now. The demographics at this school are roughly 60% black; 25% latino; 5% asian; 10% white. The makeup of the PTAs is and has been 90% white and 10% black.
Writing from Oakland California.
[WS:] It looks pretty much the same in the Balto/DC area.
Back in the 1980s I was an adjunct at a community college in Salinas, CA, a predominantly Hispanic area. One of the class assignments was writing a sociological observation of students' own social milieu (usually the family). A relatively frequent theme in the assignments written by Hispanic females was discouragement from obtaining college education they received from their families. These women had to work really hard to overcome the obstacles their parents, siblings, and boyfriends hurdled their way to discourage them from attending classes or studying at home.
A friend of mine was an art teacher in a high school in that area. She run extracurricular art program, especially for girls. She noticed that some of her students came to school with blackened eyes - an obvious sign of beatings. When she investigated, she learned that these girls were beaten by their fathers, siblings or boyfriends for "coming late from school" due to their participation in these extra-curricular activities. When she wanted to report that - which as a mandated reporter she was required to do by law - these girls begged her not to because they feared that abusers would kill them. The situation became so stressful to my friend, that she finally quit her job as a teacher.
There seems to be a deeply seated anti-education sentiment among certain ethnic minorities in this country, especially Hispanics and Blacks. It is pervasive, but of course not every member of these minorities shares that sentiment. Another teacher acquaintance of mine, a Jamaican himself, told me that Jamaicans are very much different in that respect from the US black community - they value education very much and encourage their children to obtain it. The same pertains to FOB immigrants from Africa, according to him.
Yet another teacher friend of mine (a white female, for a change) who works with minority children in the DC area schools confirms that but with a qualification. According to her, many FOB immigrants are semi-literate and work several jobs and simply have no skills and time to monitor the school progress of their kids, let alone help them in their school work, although they seem to genuinely care about their kids getting education. Getting these parents to participate in PTAs or any school events is often a problem because of the language barrier and the lack of time.
However, these kids are often discouraged and ridiculed by their peers from participating in classroom activities - according to the same source. The latter was also confirmed by yet another teacher friend of mine (a black gay male) working in the school system in the Baltimore area. According to him, the worst problem was not the kids themselves, but their "crazy parents" as he phrased it. A former student of mine at Morgan State (a black female) expressed similar views and became quite incensed when I asked her to qualify some of her harsh remarks she made in the class.
And then there is Gregory Kane, a Black columnist at the Baltimore Sun, who writes:
[begin_quote]"When I suggested to Johnson that the music culture many young blacks cling to -- the one that glorifies gangstas, thugs and pimps -- is not one that will produce the number of black scholars it could or should, but may on occasion produce situations like what happened at Randallstown High School on Friday, she neither agreed nor disagreed, but offered a prediction.
"If they depend on the music to find the identity they're seeking," Johnson said of those caught up in the rapture of gangsta music, "the identity they're going to get is one that's going to ruin our generation." [end_quote] http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/bal-md.kane12may12,0,5312940.column
So let's face the reality, instead of denying it, and think about how to change it, as the Old Man had it. I am done with saving the world, saving enough for my retirement seems more important to me at the moment :). I wonder, however, what Black folks who "made it" do to encourage Black school kids to follow their footsteps to professional careers. Dwayne? Charles?
Wojtek