(ThyBlackMan.com) When I was a kid in special ed, I remember the female suburban teachers from my early elementary school days telling my grandma that “I wasn’t as smart as the suburban kids who looked like them” and boy did I prove them wrong 20 years ago when my grades got better to make my first A-B Honor Roll that following year.
Here are The 10 Biggest Lies About Black Males And Academic Success In America:
1. There are more black men in prison than in college – I’ve heard some people including some black people perpectuate this lie constantly in the media. In fact, there are approximately 600,000 more black men in college than in jail. Google It.
2. Young black boys can’t read – Many of our young boys have bought into this myth that “As long as you can throw/run the football or dribble a basketball, then you never have to learn how to read” and I don’t buy into that myth at all. In fact, I couldn’t read until 4th grade where my literacy level and grades got better.
3. Black boys today are more “violent” than previous generations – the violence among black boys is much less than it was before the crack epidemic and less than half of what is was before they were called “superpredators“.
4. One third of black boys will at some point be incarcerated – That false propagandic statement was made by a European man named Thomas P. Bonczar back in 2001. They are far from the “superpredators” that Hillary Clinton made them out to be her 1996 speech.
5. Black boys are “naturally disadvantaged” because of mostly single parent households – This notion holds little weight and is often used as a prop for more serious issues such as teen pregnancy and mass incarceration among young black boys.
6. Black boys “underachieve intentionally” because being smart is “acting white” – This is one of the most racially charged ignorant statements I’ve ever heard because when I was in elementary school, I’ve never “acted white” because even when I wasn’t smart for the first half of the 90s, I was still a black boy then.
7. Black males don’t wanna be teachers – This notion is false because there are plenty of black males who wanna teach kids who look like them so they won’t be shipped off to prison and it’s the #1 profession for college educated black men.
8. Black men are underrepresented in higher education – There are currently about 13 million black men ages 18 and over in college and make up 5.5 percent of the college student population.
9. Black men are an “endangered species” – I’ve heard some black people in public and on social media say such things and it bothered me. Although my thinking is, “If you say that, then you’re totally wrong” and despite the fact that “they” have historically and still is committing eggregious acts of genocide against black men, I don’t buy that notion either because like intellectual black people say “Blacks don’t fully die, we multiply“.
10. Black male college athletes get “free education” at PWIs – Many black men have bought one of the biggest lies these coaches tell them is that they will get a decent “free education” in college and many of these PWIs (predominate white institutions) like North Carolina academically exploit and harm black male student college athletes.
An example of the academic exploitation of black male college athletes was a few years ago when there was a huge scandal that came out of The University of North Carolina, where basketball is the king & there was an academic corruption & exploitation scandal that uncovered that 3,100 students (most of them were black athletes) were put into fake classes between 1993-2011 & because the administrators & other professors knew that most of the black athletes couldn’t read, they were complicit in this academic conspiratorial corruption & exploitation to keep the athletes eligible & uneducated.
The Conclusion – We have to teach our young men the truth about their history as well as the systems that are place designed to destroy them.
Staff Writer; Joe Davis
FB Page; http://www.facebook.com/joe.davis.165470