HOW DO WE EXPECT BLACKS TO OVERCOME 142 YEARS WHEN WHITES CAN'T DEAL WITH 50?

NOTE: This is kind of a routine exchange I have with Joseph Brown, lead editorial writer with The Tampa Tribune of a Sunday. Joseph is a Chicago boy who graduated from my alma mater, the University of Iowa. So, we have a connection. Also, I worked for Nalco Chemical Company, a Chicago international firm.

I share it with you as it is apropos to A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD, which is still in the preordering phase.If interested in receiving a preorder autographed copy of this book, send a check(s) to: Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., 6714 Jennifer Drive, Tampa, FL 33617-2504 in the amount of $20 (S&H included) within the US, and $30 (plus S&H) outside the US. All checks in US dollars.
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Subj: How do we expect blacks to overcome 142 years when whites can't deal with 50?

Date: 4/1/2007 12:22:12 PM Eastern Daylight Time

From: THEDELTAGRPFL

To: jbrown@tampatrib.com

HOW DO WE EXPECT BLACKS TO OVERCOME 142 YEARS WHEN WHITES CAN'T DEAL WITH 50?

Joseph,

I have been remiss in reading you the last few Sundays as I've been correcting galleys and working the format of my new book A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD. The book just happens to bear on your current theme: "It's Bad Choices, Not 'The System'."

I think you and minority faculty members of higher education you reference both have a point. All life is a matter of making choices from our earliest days.

Some of us have been lucky in that we were grounded in the consequences of making bad choices, with clear evidence that should we fall there would be no safety net to catch us.

I have felt one of the luckiest coincidences of my life was that I was born poor in which I had no chance to get ahead without initiative and intuition of making choices congruent with my best interests. As a consequence, I have had a considerably easy and productive life but I will admit that I have worked hard, usually harder than anyone else in my group, and that I have not been attracted to cultural diversions supposedly endemic to my "needs." I never drank or smoked in college, never joined a social fraternity, and would not go to athletic contests if my studies demanded attention. I didn't date because I was always afraid that should I let up I might flunk out, yet I became involved in leadership campus activities. I was on the varsity fencing team for three years, joining it only to avoid physical education classes, and I did go out for baseball, but dropped out when scheduled to go to Arizona for three weeks during spring training.

My point is that I am a white guy that made choices that have given me a good life, and several successful careers as a chemist, salesman, executive, consultant, professor, author, publisher, poet, journalist (columnist), as well as a husband, father and grandfather.

In a high school class of some two hundred, there were about fifteen of us that took four years of math, four years of English, physics and chemistry, psychology and biology, as well as the other required courses.

Every one of those fifteen graduated from college, nearly all with most distinguished careers in medicine, academia, engineering, management, law, and as owners of industries.

Several of that fifteen came from families if not wealthy of comfortable circumstance that ensured that they would get a college education.

I grew up in the era of two-parent families where divorce was less than rare; it was nonexistent. All fifteen of these students were white.

My four children went to private schools, traveled the world, and got a sense of the sights and sounds beyond the American shores. Not one of them graduated from college. I have a stepdaughter who is attempting to break that record.

It didn't help my children, I suppose, that I left that affluent lifestyle and circumstance when they were young, retiring the first time in my thirties. It probably didn't help either in that I considered education a privileged and not a right, not forcing the privilege on them.

Yet three of the four are more affluent than they ever experienced as children.

This is a microcosm of the problem you described and I've used myself as laboratory to explain why the minority professors are correct in saying we have a systemic cultural and social problem that holds blacks back. You are also correct in saying blacks are not showing the gumption to make "right choices."

My life forces were formed a half-century ago when parents were honored, older siblings and friends respected, and nuns, priests, police officers and merchants were authority figures in charge. It was a controlled existence, and therefore not too dynamic.

Everything disintegrated after WWII when the working middle class exploded, leaving conventional values, beliefs and wisdom behind.

When you don't have a cultural history in place that supports and frames your life, as was the incipient case then, you can and often do go off the rails. I have relatives that in today's dollars would be making $70,000 or more who never owned a home, always rented, never had a savings account, were always borrowing from relatives to make ends meet, hated their jobs, envied everybody and smoked and drank themselves to death.

These relatives loved to entertain, loved to be the "big spenders" and loved to tell the same "want to be" and "going to be" stories over and over again, while they remained permanently stuck in place. What is worse, they connived to manipulate their aging parents or to outright steal from them. Not a pretty picture.

Speaking systemically, then, I have watched since a half-century ago the working middle class fade. I would visit my professor uncle in Detroit, and play baseball with the kids of these well heeled automotive working class families. In those days, they earned incomes as lucrative as professionals in medicine and law, and yet they lived paycheck to paycheck. Now, that well-heeled existence is all but gone.

Everything you say about black kids is as true of white kids, only exponentially different because blacks are still only about 12 percent of the population but always heavily profiled as if a larger segment. It appears Hispanics will soon surpass them in numbers, which are even having more difficult adjustments.

A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD is about the 1970s and published to show the problems haven't changed. I quote The Thin Edge Report (1975) that indicated live births for adults were up by 23 percent since 1940, but up 323 percent for teenagers to record 608,000 illegitimate children.
It is in the seven figures today and not just among black teenagers.

This points to a systemic problem.

Now, to your point about "bad choices." How do we correct that? You see it as a self-inflicted caste system, a system to which you have escaped because you are a respected journalist and your opinion on many faceted subjects is sought and taken seriously. You also see black kids who stay in school, graduate from high school, get a job, and get married as a remedial corrective. I don't disagree, but how do these kids escape the caste system to make that happen?

I don't think any of us escapes our caste system. I still see myself as a poor lower class white guy that writes books now, and has had a decent life through hard work. You can't spend your impressionistic years in an Irish conclave and think differently.

The other night on "The News Hour with Jim Lehrer" on PBS a man who keeps statistics on NCAA basketball players found that in the Final 65 NCAA Teams there is a deplorable failure of players to graduate. Most of these failures are among blacks who dominate basketball. Georgetown and the University of Florida were the exception with 100 percent of their players graduating.

This is not systemic poverty but its twin, which does have the feel of a caste system.

I tutored black athletes when I was in college, some of them all-American. Football was a job to them and college was a necessary nuisance. They found it boring. Most of them didn't see themselves as student-athletes; nor did they see themselves playing in the NFL, but going back home and getting a menial job, not a professional position. I am talking college now, not high school.

The other night I was talking to my college student daughter. She was wondering if I thought the middle class was disappearing. I answered, the working middle class is. She asked, why, and this bears back on all I've said here.I told her the working middle class has been taken care of for more than fifty years, many companies paying them generously, paying 100 percent of their medical insurance, free permanent life insurance policies, free college tuition for taking classes after work, generous vacations, and holiday schedules. I told her seventeen years ago I wrote that this was the golden goose that was about to croak (Work Without Managers 1990) because entitlements had exceeded the National Debt in being over $3 trillion, while companies continued to ignore the fact living on the edge, disregarding competition looming from the East.

As for workers of this working middle class, when you are taken completely care of, when you never have to grow up, when you are suspended in terminal adolescence from birth to death, I continued, you ignore or miss the changes, because you're not trained to face them, or to be responsible for yourself, and thus your future is left up for grabs. That is an indictment of the working middle class after fifty years.

It is 142 since the Emancipation Proclamation, not fifty years, and systemically the transition from a color conscious to a colorblind society has not been complete. You were lucky and I was lucky, too, but both of us know something about dysfunctional families and dysfunctional extended families. Neither of us, I believe, is totally out of the woods on that score.

Am I suggesting patience? No, I am suggesting prudence in working your considerable intellectual influence in support of more faces on television in all its media, more faces on campus in the faculty and student population, more faces among priests and teachers, police officers and business owners, more faces as writers and poets, novelists and dramatists, more faces as actors and musicians, more faces on school boards and city councils, and more faces in the stands and theaters when blacks perform.

We have to see ourselves in others before we see ourselves in ourselves.

The middle working class worker who has lost his high five or low six figure job is now too proud to work for less, so he sits home drinking beer, badgering the family, and moaning "woe is me."

It was the same fifty years ago in my extended family, but I had a mother that would have no part of that. I see a lot of black mothers with equal strength today. One mother defended her six-year-old child who was sentenced to jail for hitting a teacher. Six-years-old! That is not even the age of reason, yet a police officer arrested and charged her. That is insane.

Joseph, we are a society out-of-control with our leaders are not leading. They are not leading because they think it is all about them and not all about what I have written here. This is a systemic problem and it is why I wrote this book.

Always be well and never lose your courage,

Jim