Posted on 12/03/2005 2:09:57 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
Mandisa likes Abercrombie & Fitch, not FUBU.
She speaks proper English, not Ebonics.
She takes honor classes and belongs to the Beta Club and National Arts Honors Society at Parkview High. She plays the violin and has danced and sung in area productions of “The Nutcracker” and “My Fair Lady.”
Mandisa Surpris, a 15-year-old sophomore, is all this.
And she’s black.
Some of the other black students don’t know what to make of her. The way she dresses, the way she talks, the grades she earns. She’s an anomaly. To them, she’s more white than black. They’ve even told her so to her face.
“It’s the most ignorant statement I’ve ever heard,” Mandisa told me. “A lot of black students have the ability, but they think that being smart isn’t cool. So they hide it.”
She can talk about her experience now because she knows how to deal with it. That hasn’t always been the case.
Last year, the comments, slights and snubs took a toll. Mondays, the start of the school week, were especially tough. She’d complain of pain in her limbs. Mom and Dad took her to several doctors. Tests were taken and exams were given. Nothing.
Then, a doctor at Emory University wondered if her illness wasn’t psychosomatic. Something, he said, must be going on in Mandisa’s life that’s making her body ache. It was a breakthrough.
Mandisa, crying, had a heart-to-heart with Mom and Dad. She told them how some – not all — black students treated her as an oddity because she didn’t succumb to their idiotic and destructive views of the black diaspora. My words, not hers.
“It was painful,” said Renald Surpris, her father. “Some black kids don’t have the education and understanding to accept people for who they are, not what they look like.”
I know what some of you are thinking. Here Rick goes again. Writing about race. Stirring up trouble. Critics say it all the time. I don’t care. I write about racial issues carefully and selectively, and sometimes, when I’m ticked off.
Like now.
My people, my people. Some of you disturb me. There’s something terribly wrong when black students — even one — at Parkview or any other Gwinnett campus criticize, ridicule and question the “blackness” of someone like Mandisa simply because she wants to excel.
It’s even sadder in this case because Parkview High is no ghetto school. Its student population doesn’t hail from lower-income apartment complexes and subdivisions. At Parkview, the parents and students consider their school the crème de la crème of public schools, the clientele upper-crust perhaps and at the very least middle-class.
So I blame parents. You black parents.
It’s your fault if your children think academic achievement is uncool, anti-black and pro-white. It’s your fault if your offspring are so enthralled with the so-called thug life that they devalue education, hard work and dedication.
And you’re especially to blame if your child’s sense of black culture means that you have to think and act a certain way, and that to do otherwise means you’re acting like whitey.
It’s your fault. And you’re crippling your kids.
Mandisa wants to pursue acting or a career in the fashion industry. She plans to attend college in New York, her birthplace. I’m sure she’ll be fine.
It’s the kids who ridicule her that I worry about. When they succumb to this crippling ignorance, we all lose. We’ll have fewer doctors, teachers, artists and more. Fewer people to be proud of.
You don't even have to be brilliant to get ostracized. Just being successful is good enough. But such is life.
I have seen this many times while at New Jersey Institute of Technology in the 1970's. On previous threads I have described the situation at Newark Central High, which is next to the NJIT campus. There were also a number of African and Carribean black students at NJIT. They did not go along with the "ghetto culture", in facted viewed it with disdain. I could today see some of the African students being told that they are not "black enough" because they happened to ace Differential Equations.
If more "uncool" blacks keep making this point, maybe something will happen. Remember the stink that Bill Cosby caused when he questioned who would hire someone who can't speak English. Thomas Sowell was on tv last week with Fred Barnes and stated that if a child drops out of high school their life is basically over. I also liked what he said about the way for a black person to succeed in society. Finish school, go to college, stay out of trouble with the police, get a job, get married and buy a house. Its hard to believe its all that simple, but it really is.
<< A lot of black students have the ability, but they think that being smart isn’t cool. So they hide it >>
As, thanks to the same bullying ignorance and while their mothers are off paying for their SUVs and as-far-beyond-their-means houses, do lots of white kids in the bus-ized and gang-ridden government [AKA "public"] "schools" to which they are sentenced during their formative years.
The problem with intelligent, independent people is that they have little need for leaders, and little inclination to follow the orders of self-appointed leaders. The hive-mind of the Democrat Party hates that.
What they want are people who are dependent, people who feel that everything they are, and everything they own, were given to them because of the struggles of the Group. And if it was given to them, it can be taken away should they ever be disloyal to the Group. They are absolutely frightened of people who can make it without help, and who are aware that they made it by their own efforts. Such people cannot be extorted from, "to give back to their Community"
Don't forget Bill Cosby, or to go historical, George Washington Carver. Two classic examples of fine Americans who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, despite being born in adverse circumstances.
You mean Michael Steele...but point well taken.
Other notables include Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Jesse Lee Peterson, Star Parker, Alan Keyes, J.C. Watts, Larry Elder, Kenneth Blackwell, Mychal Thompson (yes, the basketball player), and many others who are not quite so well known (like others on this thread and me). May there be many more.
Great article. They should syndicate that one.
I worked for a Black boss at the Georgia Education Dept. in the 1980s and he always maintained that a child who said "AH AX" could not learn to read "I asked." He said first you have to train the ear, then you can train the child to read. And if you can't learn to read, you can't learn anything else that's going to get you ahead. Just liaten to the parade of Katrina Whiners demanding that we "hep' them (i.e. carry them on our backs). Not a one that i have heard speaks recognizable English.
And I'd add David Robinson, as both an athlete AND a scholar! He graduated from the US Naval Academy with a degree in math!
Mark
i actually remember this among black kids when i was growing up in Cambridge, Ma . I wonder where they are now.
Add Edwin Moses, gold medalist in the 400m internmediate hurdles in the 1976 Olympics, bronze in 1988, physicist.
Add Edwin Moses, gold medalist in the 400m intermediate hurdles in the 1976 Olympics, bronze in 1988, physicist.
Remember back in the 60's when blacks talked about wanting opportunities to succeed? Now it seems they want excuses not to.
I don't know. In this convoluted society we live in, it may soon become a job qualification.
Amen to that! And black folks I've met who are this way are generally pretty classy and decent people and generally have as much contempt for the black status quo as whites do. To me, it would be just downright insulting for anyone to suggest that I couldn't form opinions and act independently of some racial or cultural group. That would be ridiculous, yet these black democrats seem to fully except this limitation that is inferred upon them.
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