And the best way to take away black people’s ability to reproduce themselves is to label black boys as problem children who are violent misfits with ADD – and do that early and often. For African Americans, particularly young men, public schools have become the equivalent of a minor-league system to feed the modern slave institution known as the prison industrial-complex.
Check out these numbers in Nashville, Tenn. Nine metro middle schools have suspended more than half of all the black boys in the schools. JT Moore said it has suspended 58 percent of African American boys, but just 10 percent of its white males. It’s a similar gap at Bellevue: 58 percent suspension among black boys, and 13 percent of white males, according to the Education Department.
Black boys are being branded earlier and earlier, and the stigma is often permanent, greatly increasing black boys’ prospects for a lifetime in the streets, pushing up daisies or becoming entangled within the American Penal System. According to Metro’s numbers, six elementary schools have suspended only black males, and four of those schools have a mixed population of blacks and whites overall.
How are black boys supposed to recover from this? How could we allow this to happen, black parents?
It isn’t just in Nashville. In Tennessee, African Americans are four times as likely to be suspended. Nationally, blacks are sent home three times more often than white kids.
Young black men are the nation’s most feared, most despised and most maligned demographic in the nation. There is not even a close second. This nation is one that destroys what it fears — and it has always feared and abhorred young black men.
It doesn’t help that black parents rarely show up for parent-teacher conferences and that they have to practically be bribed to show up at school functions for their children. My mother once volunteered for my school when my younger sister was there. She told me the only time she could get the parents to ever participate in any activity was when she held a contest for parents to win money. So the parents really did have the time; they just didn’t have the interest until they could profit themselves. Disgusting. The only time they would ever go to the school on their own, my mom said, was when they believed someone had been wrongly suspended or expelled. But by that time it is always far too late.
You black parents don’t seem to care, so why should they? Here in suburban Atlanta, they are shutting down multiple public schools in DeKalb County, Ga., and parents are in some sort of righteous uproar, ready to tear the county apart. But I wonder aloud how many of these parents were active in the school system before all of this went down. I’m willing to bet it was a pathetic few.
Black parents: when you leave your black boys fate in the whims of a school system that hates them to begin with, this is what happens. They will do to black males what they please, getting black boys — your children — prepped and prepared for eventual careers behind bars. –terry shropshire
