Being that I am a fairly well read man, I have considered myself well-informed, knowledgeable, in some case even expert. What I really am is a guy with a good memory for information. What I am is a person with an excellent talent at recalling that information. I believe that every human brain imprints everything as memory. Those who have good memories just have better ability to recall the information that is there, on demand.
Irregardless of that unsubstantiated medical opinion, I had begun to question how well informed I was about certain things. In particular, I was wondering how informed I actually was about anything I had expressed opinion on recently. It is not that I don't think I am entitled to an opinion about it, but I feel more entitled if I actually have some knowledge to inform that opinion.
Beyond that, I have started to wonder about the things that I felt sure about. How much did I really know, or was I just assuming I knew things that were not facts. I don't like portraying things as facts that I do not know to be factual. Today, while very busy and focused at work, did have a period of time where we talked about children and raising and schools. I had a breakfast conversation with the son of a teacher and the husband of a teacher. As a father of a teacher, we had a very knowledgeable group from the outside looking inward.
Many of the things we discussed kept relating back to the current topic of outrage in the country, the impact of race on police activities. We, interestingly, all had some exposure to law enforcement, and people that were active in it, as well. As we talked, I found myself citing numbers I had heard on TV, and it hit me that I had only ever heard them. I had no idea whether they were accurate or not.
I did some digging. The internet has an accuracy problem, you can't believe everything that shows up on your screen. But, the numbers were remarkably consistent. I even looked it up through MSNBC and Fox News search engines. I found the numbers to be almost identical. The hysteria around explaining why those numbers existed was completely at odds, but I expected that.
What struck me, and made me write tonight, was not much about the whole political debate. What broke my heart was that there was not this huge data scatter, that would allow the numbers we all hear repeated, to be wrong. I wanted them to be very wrong. 1 in 3 black males will do time. 1 in 17 white men will. Graduation rates for minority groups are in general, less than half that of whites. Black males are 6% of the total population in this country. They are 40-50% of the prison population. Hispanic incarceration rates are double that of whites.
Part of what got me to this post was watching the news and seeing the basketball players wearing the "I can't breathe." shirts. And, hearing the debate going on around it, about whether it was appropriate or not. I could do six of thes posts on that topic, I have opinions believe me. But, what just devistates me, is what is not part of the conversation, what will not seem to catch American attention. We have not debated why those men dribbling basketballs were not part of the 1 in how many that end up in prison.
I found that information on a different web page. I have not confirmed this, but it seems like what the government would do. We base the size of prisons, decisions to build, around 3rd grade literacy rates. If you are behind the curve there, there is supposedly a directly attributable possibility of incarceration in your future. I hope it shocks no one to know that blacks and hispanics are scoring less in literacy at the 3rd grade level than whites.
Here is where this becomes a blog post and my opinion. I don't think that is a race causation. I think it is a poverty causation. I think that is an easily broken cycle, and criminal that it exists in our nation, at this time. There is nothing more urgent to fix in this country, either.
I watched the news with really tall, really athletic black men dribbling a basketball for their living. Some really uninspired news that they would have opinions like all the rest of us. But, they have missed the golden opportunity, perhaps of their lives, and they don't recognize it. And, I mean that as no disrespect to them, or condemnation. We are, none of us, thinking about it correctly.
At some point, we are going to have to find a connection to the communities of poverty that enforces the need for education, the crucial need for knowledge. It is not black, white or brown in focus. It is survival in focus. There are 20 commercials an hour about not hitting your wife or kids, because of the domestic abuse situation in the NFL. Wouldn't it be wonderful, if you could find and sustain that level of commitment to urge our children to study, to make knowledge important to them? Instead of doing damage control, what if we did horizon broadening?
How do you impact 3rd grade literacy? You have to do it at home. You have to do it by impacting the parents/guardians. You have to change the minds and attitudes that are providing the daily reinforcement and formation to the child. Children are reflections and images of their formative adults. This is how we were created. We are children and reflections and images of God. It is not some new age hippie talk to realize that is true when applied to parent and child.
I could suggest things that are impossible. We could tie assistance eligibility to children literacy rates. To keep your rent assistance, energy assistance, food assistance, you have to make sure your child can read, write and cipher. And if the parent can't do that, because they can't read and write, we could make the programs available to teach the parent. We could make it prosecutable, to have a child that is not adequately prepared to achieve their potential. We could do a lof of things, but it won't be any of them. Those are not going to happen, and I would not advocate all of them.
We cannot figure this out, because we cannot figure out how to get back to an American icon and ideal that propelled us to be the leaders of the world. We made education available, without qualification, to all of our children. We made it mandatory. Until you are legally of age, you had to attend that school, you had to be part of the process. We expected teachers to teach, children to learn, and that there would be norms of behaviour and decorum upheld.
This system did not produce an entire society of degrees and doctorates. It did not produce more capable doctors or engineers. What it did was to create and reinforce the idea that learning was necessary. We told our children, as a whole, that they had to learn to spell their name, add up enough numbers to know if their pay check was right, read enough to know what they were signing in a business transaction. We did not ask them to do it. We did not hope they would do it. We told them they had to do it. And if they did not do enough of it to earn the grade, they repeated and kept at it until they got it. We showed them there were things in life important enough to work to get, no matter how hard.
Now, it did not work with all of them. Nothing will make it completely successful. But, we have now "progressed" to the point where we cannot retain students because of social age pressure, so your grades don't matter. We cannot fail them if they can't read their test paper, we get someone to read it to them, so it is not your responsibility to get to some level of acceptable performance. We medicate them to oblivion when they won't sit still, because your behavior is about chemistry and not expectations. We do lots of things out of a sense of compassion that, in my opinion, are actually cruel.
If you cannot manage public school, to the point of functional math and language literacy, you are not going to manage life. The great advancement of the American system was that we created a culture of accomplishment, early in life, by mandating school, mandating success in that arena. It was not perfect, but it installed in the nation a realization that somethings have to be done, have to be earned. You could did not get your trophy for just being on the team. You had to get the grade. You figured out that if you lost, you lost to yourself.
We have had poverty always, crushing poverty. We had drastic disparity of wealth. We had ecologic issues and fights over resources. We had political upheaval. We had segregation due to race. All of this was true, but we educated our children and each successive generation brought forward additional American advances and greatness. Now, we struggle to find where those advances will come from.
That last, about segregation, is important. That was shameful, and we don't want that shame any more. So, to avoid racial stigma, we have allowed poverty to be the agent of segregation, not race. How is that possible Joe? It says on the news all the time, black kids get pulled over more often than white kids. I think this is where the data lies. I think poor kids get pulled over way more often. Unfortunately, there is a much greater proportion of poor minitorities. I think that it is therefor true that blacks/hispanics "get it" more often than whites. But it is because of we have segregated our society by economics, and it accomplished an almost identical result as when we were doing it by race. with one amazing difference.
Now, the majority of society (not so poverty stricken), can have minority friends in our neighborhoods, our work places and our churches. They are good people, and we get to think "See how far we have come." We can absolve the shame. "If you want to choose to be worthless, live in the ghetto on food stamps and welfare, do drugs and act like an animal, then go do it." We don't own any responsibility for that. "It is not on me, that is your CHOICE!" How many of those conversations have you heard? I have been in hundreds, usually the loudest in the conversation.
What we do own, however, is a responsibility to keep that choice from repeating in succeeding generations. We own doing something that gives children with little hope some viable options. We own at least having an honest conversation that we don't hide behind race. We own exploring how to make it better, not just bemoan how bad it is.
See, when a cop sees a car with 5 poor kids sitting in it, he/she is going to pull it over. The cops knows that the odds are very good that at least one poor kid in that car will have warrants, and likely at least one will have drugs. How does the cop know this? It is a probability thing, it works. If we start impacting poverty and literacy, if we start making a way and a path for the parents of our youngest, poorest children to have acces to systems and help that make them different, we change the probability. When you write it poor kids, doesn't it even sound altruistic. Help the needy, here is how.
Now if we say that when a cop sees a car with 5 black males in it, he/she is going to pull it over. The cops know that the odds are very good that at least one black kid will have warrants, and likely one will have drugs. How does the cop know this? It is a probability thing. Now we are discussing racial profiling. We are talking about two different things, and I am not suggesting there is not racism, or people that are biased and motivated by their emotions around skin color/religion/language. I know it exists and is real, but I also know that it becomes inconsequential if you fix the root of the issue.
Getting the cops to stop pulling that car over is one thing, but it does not change that potential warrant, or those potential drugs. Even if we could eliminate racial profiling tomorrow, it will not change the cycle of violence and dependancy that is driving the frustraion and rage that we see on the news. It is my considered opinion that 95% of cops don't care what color a person is, but every cop knows that a young black male is much more likely to have had a criminal issue than a white kid. It is not because the cop doesn't like blacks. That may very well be true, but I think it is much less profound than we suppose. It is because the numbers are what the numbers are.
And, it is not because white kids are less likely to be troublesome or drug users than black or hispanic kids. Kids are all likely to be troublesome, it is a maturity thing, not a race thing. Cops know that as well. It is ridiculous to continue to suggest that eliminating the prism of race is where our focus needs to be. When we make opportunities equal, when we start changing social expectations, we will change outcome behaviour, for whites, blacks and browns. When we address why the poor are poor, we address the prism of race.
When you saw that I was hungry, you fed me. When you saw that I was cold, you clothed me. Familiar lines from Jesus. That is what we are missing, to all of our disservice. We need to come back to what Jesus taught us, but in meaningful ways, in the communities of greatest risk. And, then we stop driving the cycle of frustration and underachievement. We stop what drives the action on the street.
What we get out of it is so massive, so important, that it will revolutionize our world again. We could stop it so easily. But, we will not with the systems and organizations we have today, the way they are. Ask a teacher. If you want to end racism in your liftetime, as a teacher how to make 3rd graders read better. I guarantee if we listened, and acted, we could do it. The capacity of humans to be amazing is unlimited, as we are children of an unlimited God. We just have to act on it.
I love you all.
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