Mick Hartley

Black Classes

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Mick Hartley

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What’s depressing about the debate on separate black classes is the general assumption that there’s such an easy split between black and white and asian. It ain’t like that any more. How black do you have to be before you qualify? Do you need to prove that your ancestry is 100% African. Or could you scrape by with over 50%? That’s quite aside from the obvious point that if there’s a problem with low expectations for these black youth, or with their “not cool to be clever” attitude, separate classes would only exacerbate the problem.

No surprise, I suppose, that Trevor Phillips, whose whole career is based on race, gets to see everything in race terms.

Comments

  1. Jim Avatar
    Jim

    What you say makes sense, but I remember what a librarian in school where I taught said. She said she grew up in segragated scholls, and that menat that all the niches were open to balck kids in that social biome. The valedictorain was going to be black. But here in this school, the kids were so busy asserting their blackness that there was no time left for anything else. Kids want to fit in, so thei fit inot whatever role is assigned. In the US at least, for black kids that tends to be the designated urban cool voice of the ghetto. It is a caste sytem that shoehorns them into a preassigned self image.
    The struggle against segregation muddied the conceptual water in order to accomplish something crucial. In the US blacks have been integrated all along, only as manual labor, then as entertainers or whatever. Segregating these kids out of that caste system is not as good as real,healthy integration, but it is better than leaving them in it.

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