THUGGERY IS COLOR BLIND

Baltimore, Maryland Riots – April 2015

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© April 30, 2015

“Black America’s ancestors would be ashamed of how we’re conducting ourselves,” says ESPN sports commentator Stephen A. Smith, an African American, in light of the riots in Baltimore this past week.

A READER WRITES:

About all these riots I find it interesting that Al Sharpton immediately showed up in Ferguson and North Charleston where white people were in charge, but he did not show up in Baltimore that has had black officials for 40 years as far as I know. 

I find that blacks as a group blame everybody except themselves for their situation.  Until blacks accept that the over 70% illegitimate birthrate are their creation, that the lack of education is their creation, and that they use racism as an excuse. 

Jews realize that anti-Semitism has existed for centuries, but they still have succeeded in many walks of life across the world.

Like your family where no one had gone to college, of the four children in my family three of us earned college degrees.    

When I went into teaching after I got out of the U.S. Air Force, I started as an English teacher because I had a bachelor’s degree in English. 

While I was teaching, I used the GI bill to work on an MA in art education and an MFA in painting and art history; all of which took until 1976 to complete. 

In 1970, the schools were integrated and I was sent to Young Junior High to teach English.  We had a faculty that was 50% black and a student body that was primarily black, and about 30 students in each class. 

During that first year, we had only 100 white students, all the teachers up to then had been black.  I quickly learned that most of my students, none of whom where white, could not read at grade school level and were therefore severely handicapped.    

The school hired an education PhD from the University of South Florida whose solution to the low reading level was to have each student in the class tell the teacher a story.  

The teacher was supposed to write down the student’s words as the story was being told, and then the student would read the story back to the class.

That brilliant solution never told you what to do with the other 29 students most of whom were in the same boat as the student telling his or her story.

At one point in my two years there, I had a black female student intern.  At some point an intern is supposed to assume the classroom without the teacher’s presence.

When I came back at the end of the class, she was in tears because the kids had behaved so badly during my absence.  

The fact that she was black made no difference.  Before integration, all teachers in this school were black which clearly made no difference. 

My daughter who lives in Washington, D.C. knows someone who started substituting in the District of Columbia school district.  His first job was in a first grade composition class of some 18 students of whom 16 were Hispanic and two black. 

He told my daughter that the two black student behaved badly during the whole day. 

Teachers, no matter who they are, cannot teach anyone who does not want to learn.  It matters not what race they are.

It is time the black communities and their leadership start to acknowledge the issues and make an effort to resolve them instead of blaming every problem on racism.

Concerned

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Dear Concerned,

Coming from a family in which no one had previously graduating from college, three of the four of us siblings graduated from university.  

I am older than you, a Great Depression kids, while you came as a preteen from Europe, having to learn the language, the customs, the culture and the adapt to the competition for getting ahead.  

You were however white and came from a country and culture that had not experienced the history of slavery of the United States.  

We are 150 years (2015) from the shame of slavery yet its shadow is deep and pervasive in our culture. Neither the white or black leadership has ever chosen to deal systemically with this social injustice and that extends to our current African American President of the United States.  

Years ago, when I taught at several universities as an adjunct professor, I had an African American student in my graduate program. 

She, too, majored in English literature and was asked to teach the classics to senior students in this particular school.  I mention her in this context because she had experiences similar to yours only all of her students were white.

It was an ethnic school district which prided itself in its “old country values” and European heritage.  Unfortunately, many of her students were thugs, outright unequivocal thugs, no question.

During a discussion one day, she confessed to her graduate seminar colleagues – we were studying conflict management from a social psychological perspective -- that every day was a matter of physical as well as emotional survival.

In particular, her male students were rowdy, abusive and disrespectful.  They had no interest in learning the subject matter, and made it clear they would prefer to be elsewhere.  

“I was so traumatized at the end of the day that I was unable to drive myself home, which was thirty miles away, until I got my wits back under control.”

Pretty, tiny almost diminutive, a person standing barely five feet in height, she was disrupted from her discourse when someone shouted, "drama queen!"  The class erupted in laughter.  I did not.     

The comment came from a cocky white guy who clearly resented her, as she was the only black person in the class and plainly the best student.

At the point of tears, another student asked, “Why didn’t you go to the principal and report the conduct?”

She looked at him in disbelief, and turned to exit the class.  

I encouraged her to stay.  It was then that she said, “I did go to the principal when one of the biggest boys in the class picked me up, held me over his head, and threatened to throw me out the second story window.”

“What did the principal say about that?”

He said, “You’re standing here, young lady, right before my eyes with not a scratch on you, am I right?”

“You’re exaggerating,” the skeptic retorted.  With that she picked up her books and left.

*     *     *

Author Joseph Wambaugh, former sergeant in the Los Angeles Police Department, states in one of his novels that a community gets the police it deserves. 

I have found this institutionally consistent with other disciplines and other cultural settings from education to industry, from the religious to the sports world, from high tech to low tech, from parenting to the teaching profession.  

Each gets the character and consistency of a sane or insane relational setting.

Stephen A. Smith, a black man who has risen to prominence from the New York City ghetto, is a black man who is not afraid to call it like he sees it.  

This is what he said on ESPN’s “First Take” after the City of Baltimore plunged into chaos on Monday (April 27, 2015) as rioters took to the streets on the same day as the funeral of Freddie Gray, who died of a serious spine injury while in police custody:

“Our black America’s ancestors,” he proclaimed, “would be ashamed of how we’re conducting ourselves.  

"Something needs to be said,” he continued.  “We talk about police brutality. We need to understand the difference between police brutality and a brutal act by a particular police officer. 

"When you say ‘police brutality,’ what you’re doing is inciting a nation of individuals out there to go and act in a very belligerent and, dare I say, criminal fashion against law enforcement officials. And where does that get them?”

Specifically addressing the rioting and looting in Baltimore, Smith said he found it “disgusting” to see people actually supporting “those kinds of actions.”

Further, one of the biggest problems in the black community, he said, is “that we’re not looking inward.”

“We’re busy looking outside at everybody else; what everyone else has done to us; what history has done to us; how it has affected us,” he added. 

“I’m here to tell you something…our ancestors, considering our history and what they had to go through and the sacrifices that they had to make to get us to this point, our ancestors would be ashamed of how we’re conducting ourselves.”

He continued: “And it needs to be said, and it needs to be addressed and it needs to be stopped. Because I see a whole bunch of young brothers and sisters out here right now. They’re here with us. They wouldn’t act that way.”

Smith also said the rioters in Baltimore need to be treated like “criminals” and handled accordingly because there are black people suffering because of their actions.

Unfortunately, Smith is a sports celebrity and not a government insider such as the mayor of Baltimore, who appeared very much like that high school principal mentioned above, until that didn’t wash too well with the public.

Dialogue is a beginning and useful when it is expressed openly and honestly and forthrightly, not in hyperbole, but based on one's experience as you have indicated here.  

Your words and those of Stephen A. Smith echo the sentiments of persons who care, and caring is the conduit to tolerance and understanding.  

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