Shattering The Myths Of Black Deviancy

From www.exodusnews.com/editor, al-051.htm
            Published: August 19, 1999

            SHATTERING THE MYTHS OF BLACK DEVIANCY
            By Earl Ofari Hutchinson

            When a recent panel of black scholars, writers and activists tackled
            the perennial issue "the crisis of the Black family," speaker after
            speaker ticked off the familiar list of ills that plague
            African-Americans. They include: the high rate of drug and alcohol
            use, teen pregnancy, father (and mother) family absenteeism, gang
            violence, welfare dependency, and poverty.

            The mostly Black audience applauded and nodded dutifully at the
            torrid escalation of self- flagellation. But the speakers and the
            audience were only re-sketching the standard portrait of Black life
            as a vast wasteland of violence and despair and Black communities in
            permanent crisis and chaos.

            This picture was first painted in the 1950's and 1960's by corporate
            and government grant-seeking sociologists who branded Black
            neighborhoods cesspools of decay. They carved a growth industry out
            of studying "Black deviancy" and "the pathology of the ghetto."

            By the 1990's a legion of pop scholars put a new twist to ghetto
            pathology. They didn't just dissect it, they blamed Blacks for
            creating it. It didn't take long for a parade of "gangsta" rappers,
            Black novelists, essayists, poets, playwrights, and film makers to
            cash in on these stereotypes. They rapped, wrote, and made films
            that claimed that life in today's Black communities is a survival
            test where people daily dodged bullets, went to funerals of friends
            and relatives killed by gangs, stepped over people lying in a drug
            or alcoholic stupor, hid from rapists and molesters, and despaired
            over absentee or abusive fathers.

            This has proven to be a sure ticket for them onto tell-all talk
            shows, brought hefty advances from publishers, boosted record sales
            and secured movie deals. They peddled the notion of Black deviancy
            so well that much of the public, and that includes far too many
            African-Americans, chant mantra-like that Blacks are poor, violent,
            abused and sexually depraved. Much of the media feeds these myths
            and half-truths with a near daily diet of
            crime-drug-gang-dereliction stories and nurtures it with its tabloid
            obsession with sex, violence and depravity.

            The true reality is that most Blacks don't live this kind of
            existence. During Black History Month, the Census Bureau released a
            comprehensive report that paints this picture of Black life in 1998.

            - - Nearly nine out of ten African-Americans aged 25-29 are high
            school graduates, and fifteen percent have college degrees. College
            enrollment among Blacks has soared forty percent over what it was a
            decade ago.

            - - The Black high school drop rate is only marginally higher than
            that of non- Blacks.

            - - African-American median income continues to grow, and the drop
            in poverty rates for African-Americans accounts for sixty percent of
            the overall drop in poverty in America.

            - - Twenty percent of African-Americans worked in management or the
            professions. - - The number of Black owned businesses leaped nearly
            fifty percent, and their gross receipts rose 63 percent from 1987 to
            1992.

            - - Nearly sixty percent of African-American children under 18 live
            in a married- couple family.

            Also, other government and private studies show that Blacks have
            lower rates of drug, alcohol and tobacco use than young whites.

            Even though inherent Black deviancy is mostly myth, some Black
            leaders also play a numbers game to magnify the problem. They
            endlessly tell the media how many Blacks are unemployed, in prison,
            join gangs, peddle dope, suffer from AIDS, drop out of school and
            get pregnant.

            They grab an occasional spot on news talk shows and shake a few
            dollars out of the fast disappearing number of liberals for their
            organizations. But the doomsday scenario not only is wearing thin,
            it is self-defeating.

            Many Americans believe that the problems of the ghetto are self-made
            and insoluble. Many politicians agree. They refuse to spend another
            nickel on job, welfare, health or education programs, oppose
            affirmative action, and demand more police and prisons.

            Many Blacks have become cynical, and refuse to support Black
            organizations or causes, circle the wagons in their businesses,
            professions or neighborhoods and frantically distance themselves
            from the Black poor.

            Some Blacks gain from trading in the myths and half-truths about
            themselves, but most lose. And there's everything deviant about
that.

            Earl Ofari Hutchinson is the author of "The Crisis in Black and
            Black." email: ehutchi344@aol.com

Hey, stop sweatin it fam, and let the haters hate. Besides we've been hated on so long--- it just wouldn't feel right if we weren't anymore. I think we actually enjoy being the hated, highly underestimated underdogs. With out such a position we just wouldn't be who we be, and achieved all the world renowned ish we've achieve and influenced over our rich 400 year history.  By the way, can you please describe your complexion to me?

  But Halle is lighter than Jeda, Isn't she?  Anyway, I figured you were a reddy, you ooz of such an AfAm.  It's odd how the lighter we are the more passionate or should I say, militant,  toward such issues we are often times,   

And of course if lightskinned people had some desire to be free, it would come from the dark skinned parent who was enslaved.

So the idea that our desire for freedom came from our white genes, is just racist nonsense.

It of course came from our dark skinned parents, who wanted to be free.

By the way, slavemasters refused to feed children until they were old enough to work.

The slave mother would have to give the child part of her food until the child was old enough to work.

A fierce loyalty to their mother who half starved herself to keep her lightskinned/darkskinned children alive, after the whiteman raped her himself or forced her to be mated with the black males who were paid for and sent specifically from plantation to plantation to impregnate slave women and then leave, may have developed. 

Donzman,

I once saw a canadian commercial and it showed a blackman and talked of the horrible crimes committed by a criminal and at the end of the commercial.

It announced that the blackman being shown was the POLICEOFFICER who caught the criminal.

So apparently Canada is trying to deal with the terrible stereotypes of Black people.

Stereotypes are stereotypes Donzman. As usual they are based on a little fact and then blown way out of proportion.