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.
And it's worked out so well for them. < /sarcasm >
Their brains addled by fear/envy.
Dimocrats wouldn't like Mandisa. She won't stay po and helpless on the Dimocrat plantation.
The nerve of the gull dressing well & studying hard instead instead of worshiping hip hop culture, drugs & sex.
Why, she's a sophmore and hasn't even birthed her first illegitimate bro yet.
Stupid is not only cool, it must be liberating for those that decide they don't have the brains or the stones to hack it in life.
Decide to give up and be a gubmint supported flunky and no one will ever expect anything out of you. That way you'll never fail to deliver either.
Sell some drugs to suppliment Uncle Sams handout and you be havin it made. Fo shizzle.
I believe this goes hand in hand with blacks calling each other the "n" word. They seem to have fallen for the degrading racist stereotypes of blacks as dumb, uneducated losers.
Sad and rather pathetic.
She'll thrive.
Her detractors almost certainly will not.
Not neccessarily. If she really wants to pursue acting, she should be sent the biography of this guy, Kevin Grevioux.
Kevin went to Howard University, has a Master's Degree in Genetic Engineering, did research at John Hopkins, and did acting on the side. He then wrote "Underworld", combining his love of genetic research with acting. Damn smart!
I feel the exact same way when I'm confronted by my own family members with, "But Jews vote democrat," or "Jews don't believe in guns!" One cousin was shocked that I had "a gun." I told her "no, I don't have a gun, I've got 17 guns!" Her response was "Well, if you've got all those guns, I'm never going to come over to your house! I forbid you to have guns!" I told her, "well, I've never invited you over to my house, and you can keep the hell away! And you forbid me? Come again?"
We really haven't spoken since then.
I'm disgusted about this sort of "group think." When my aunt told me that she voted for Gore/Lieberman, I asked her why. She looked at me funny and replied, "because he's Jewish!" My response was, "voting for someone who's Jewish BECAUSE he's Jewish is no different than voting against someone because he's Jewish!
Just once, I want to confront one of those "only a Black can represent a Black," or "only a woman can represent a woman" idiots, with, so since I'm a white male, I should ONLY vote for white males? And are women so stupid that they can't represent men? And are Blacks only capable of representing other Blacks?
Mark
Yeah, I don't get the group think mentality either. I make my own choices about things and I don't much care who agrees with me or not. That just seems normal to me. I certainly don't agree that only a woman can represent me, or only someone white. Most of the so-called "female leaders" aren't going anywhere I want to follow them to. And they certainly don't voice my beliefs and opinions.
"She speaks proper English, not Ebonics."
To me, this is analogous to the apparent inability/lack of desire of Hispanics to learn to speak English. Sadly, much as it is for those who speak Ebonics, it merely makes them look ignorant and lazy, particularly when you compare them to immigrants that come from countries with languages far removed from English, i.e. Chinese, Vietnamese, Russian etc., etc.
Hispanics seem to have taken this language based appearance of ignorance to a much higher degree, by getting everything from tool manuals to ATM instructions automatically offered in Spanish. Where is the Hindi, Tagalog or Russian? Oh yeah, those peoples seem to be smart enough to be able to learn English. I would be embarrased if I were one of these people.
And what is an Hispanic really? It is not a racial group, or even a cultural group. It is merely a multiracial group, from black to white, that happen to speak Spanish, nothing else.
I wonder, if I took a course in Spanish, and became reasonably fluent in it, would I be able to claim "Hispanic" status? By definition, I believe I could.
Now that is just damn stupid.
On my tiny Texas campus of fewer than 1,000 students, only fools refused to read and study diligently. Only fools destroyed their brains with drugs. Only fools physically hurt their brethren. In fact, "being smart" was in. We called it being "heavy." We even expected jocks to be heavy. All musicians, especially the jazz types, were heavy.
Black power meant just that: being black and powerful, being armed with education and the drive to improve our lot in a hostile environment where the very concept of racial egalitarianism was still alien to most white Americans. Black power meant sharing the good and eliminating the bad.
In time, the concept of black power changed. Instead of being a sentiment that united us, it became a source of deep division. Those who followed Martin Luther King and his nonviolent movement, for example, were not as black as those who followed, say, Malcolm X's philosophy or that of the fearless Black Panthers.
No longer bringing us together, black power had become a negative litmus test for one's degree of "blackness." We had entered the "Blacker than Thou" era. On campuses nationwide, black students separated themselves into enclaves.***
Good thoughts.
And I expect her parents have raised her right.
Good luck with the book.
What an interesting exchange.
(Denny Crane: "I Don't Want To Socialize With A Pinko Liberal Democrat Commie.Say What You Like About Republicans. We Stick To Our Convictions. Even When We Know We're Dead Wrong.")
Bump!
I hear you.
I remember a day when 'accomplishment' was celebrated right square in the face of 'equality'.
Class president used to require a 4.0 average, not a 4-0 felony conviction rate.
But, I'm old.
My foster daughter went through this stupidity. She grew up in Nashville and even had a bit of a county accent, but spoke ENGLISH.
The students here in Memphis made fun of her accent and her ENGLSIH. I told her that they were forever condemning themselves to be losers and to ignore them.
I told her in five years, they'll be a McDonalds saying "you wants fries bid that"
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