HemlockGrey wrote:The poor literacy rate is a product of decades of essentially oppressing blacks and forcing them into second-rate educations. While that is no longer protected by law, many blacks born into the slums do not leave the slums; partly because the drug/gang business is so damn lucrative, there's little incentive to get a better life. Such problems are also sustained by the highly detrimental and terminally stupid rapper/gangsta culture that has sprung up and dominated pop culture. In my school, a good, solid school with good educational standards in a middle/upper-middle class suburban neighborhood, there are literally hundreds of people who would give their left nut(or equilevant thereof, depending upon gender) in order to live out the 'gangsta' lifestyle, evidently not knowing about the phenomally short lifespan that goes with it.
It's also the result of people like Jesse Jackson an Al Sharpton and other race hustlers, telling the last couple of generations of Black kids, over and over and over, that Whitey's rigged the system; Whitey's keeping them down;Whitey's never gonna let 'em succeed, etc.. The predictable, and indeed inevitable, result of them hearing this for so long is that they decide that if the game is rigged against them, they'd only be suckers to play. So why study and work to achieve good grades? They'll only fail anyway; Whitey'll make sure of that. Why work their way up from minimum wage jobs trying to succeed honestly; Whitey'll just make sure they never make it. If the game's rigged, only a chump would stay in and play it, and the young Black kids say "I ain't gonna be nobody's chump", and so they join gangs, they sell drugs, they steal cars, they burglarize homes, they mug people on the street, they knock over convenience stores, etc. etc..
The last couple of generations of black kids have been listening to what the race hustlers like Jackson and Sharpton have been telling them. And they've listened so well that even Jackson once said that when he hears footsteps behind him on a city street at night, and turns aroung to see a white kid following him, he's relieved. The only problem is that Jackson doesn't see just how much responsibility he has for making things turn out this way.
). And we were lucky--most of the time, the administration was pretty supportive of us, or at least didn't go out of its way to irritate us, the liberal professors actually liked having some conservative dissent to stir up discussions, and the debates with the students were friendly more often than not.
