From: Jasper
Date: 10/20/03
Time: 4:15:11 PM
Remote Name: 68.77.161.88
Charlie,
People like me are not ordinary to the kind of kid we are talking about. The pimps and the drug dealers are. They fit into the realm of what these kids see as possible for them.
These kids were not raised as we were with a strong work ethic and a network of people close to them in their day-to-day lives outside of school to give them the moral values our families and neighbors gave us. Those values have to come from somewhere else. They have to begin early and they have to be sustained until the kids internalize them.
The strongest role models these kids have are their teachers, the school administrators and the custodians. Even a kindergartener can see the hierarchy in the school’s social order, the status attached to them and the power that comes from that status. If a classmate believes he (usually it’s a he) is misbehaving she (usually it’s a she) can exert power over him by threatening to tell the teacher. A teacher might try to keep the kid in line by threatening to tell the principle. Nobody threatens to send him to the janitor. Maybe they should. I can see many great possibilities in that. A threat to tell the parents is only meaningful when the parents share the teachers’ values and concerns.
The criminal justice system was not set up to deal with people who have a strong sense of social responsibility. It was set up to defend the greater society against people who don’t. People who have a wide range of mindsets about what it means to be socially responsible administer it. Some of them are in it for the good they hope to do. Some of them are in it for the money or the prestige and some of them are in it to advance personal agendas. They treat people of different social classes differently. Remember what Fuhrman said about that. In poor areas he said, “Mostly you just use your stick.”
If you live in the wrong neighborhood you don’t have to do anything wrong to suffer police harassment or to go to prison. You just have to get stopped by the wrong cop, get assigned the wrong prosecutor and go before the wrong judge. Well-meaning speakers touting the virtues of a good education can’t change that reality.
The idea of moving where the pastures were greener died for black Americans with televisions in every home. We could see that job opportunities for black people were no better in one state than another. We could see that it was different for white people.
The welfare system obviously had to change because it discouraged people from working when they could to provide for themselves and their children. But do we want to replace a system that didn’t function as it was supposed to function to tied people over when they couldn’t work with one that forces them into dead in jobs for wages that keep them in poverty? That, to me, looks too much like the old sharecropping system in the South and the company store system in the North that replaced one form of slavery with another.
Don’t we have to move aggressively on all social, political, educational and economic fronts to turn the dead end jobs into entry-level jobs? Isn’t it the job of all of us to make those jobs visible and credible opportunities for greater success? –Jasper