Read this NY Times article yesterday (if the article doesn’t show up, copy/paste the title in Google and then click the link). Can’t really get my mind off it. Cold hard facts:
- "Only 12 percent of black fourth-grade boys are proficient in reading, compared with 38 percent of white boys, and only 12 percent of black eighth-grade boys are proficient in math, compared with 44 percent of white boys."
- Also, young white male students who are in poverty do as well as young black male students who are not in poverty.
- "In high school, African-American boys drop out at nearly twice the rate of white boys, and their SAT scores are on average 104 points lower."
- Only 5% of college students in 2008 were black men. At the same time, black men were incarcerated more than any other demographic group—at 6.5 times the rate of white males.
Between that and thinking about what I see here in L.A. or what’s happening in the South after Katrina, all these families broken etc
For the first time in my life about this racial issue, I feel hopeless. Desperately hopeless. How to break the loop, I don’t fucking know.
In France well it’s not as dramatic but it’s awful enough. It’s like black people there saw how much the US way wasn’t working during the past thirty years and how hard it was for a handful of them to succeed. And France has a colonial past, meaning a past of slavery with its minorities that makes some people able to hire illegal immigrants from Africa, get their passports and make them work for 20 years without doing nothing to legalize their situations. It doesn’t feel like an open environment to succeed for their children. It’s survival, by any means necessary, anger, violence etc Add the fact that the culture of praising self made people is inexistent and you have a recipe for disaster.
Meanwhile an old white man is dying in its old white small village, a man that a lot would consider racist though he took care of me for six years, made me jump on his lap and has a giant picture of me above his bed. I don’t know what connection we have, it’s hard to define. But we have it, no matter what. By reading all that stuff on black people vs the world it seems inconceivable but this shit is real to me. Real. Defying the norm and reducing it into powder.
Extremely lucky. Extremely isolated too.