We Real cool.
an editorial by: Joia Erin
It seems as if there is a growing phenomenon of young black males not attending or achieving higher levels of education in America. High school is only cool if you play a sport or dress to the nines everyday, while making passing grades is seen as “geeky” or “lame”. College is being replaced with heightened, un-researched rap star, entrepreneurship, or military dreams.
College and Graduate schools are out-of-reach for the “baby-daddies” who have made irresponsible choices in their teens and early young adulthood. The “drug-dealers” view college as simply a waste of time and non-comparison to their fast riches. Jails and prisons have already claimed many young black males before the age of 14.
Most recently, many believe that rap star Kanye West created a “College Drop-out” movement among young black males with the influential release of his freshman LP in 2003.
The article title above is taken from a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks entitled, “We real cool”. This poem described the masses of young black men drafted from high schools and colleges during the 1960s-70s to fight in the Vietnam War. The poem is a play on how the draft negatively affected many black males by leaving school.
Brooks poem carefully comments on how the young men speak and behave pre and post Vietnam draft. The young men in this poem were pulled from their education, but today many black males are choosing themselves not to attend college. This poem is just one of many commentaries about the state of education among black males.
Regardless of what the initial cause for young blacks males not achieving higher-levels of education is, there certainly stands an obvious consensus that it exists. In 2005, the Henry J. Kaiser Foundation did a study on African-American Males. The study showed that 7.9% of African-American males attained college or graduate levels of education. This number was the lowest compared to other ethnic groups, excluding Hispanic at 6.3%.
Personally, scanning the average lower-division college courses, there may be 1 to 2 black males in each course. Black males are almost extinct in upper-division courses and graduate schools.
The lack of motivation is disturbing as many un-educated black males are growing up and becoming trite statistics. These black males are producing more and more scattered children, causing employment rates to soar, and entering into the federal correctional system one by one.
They are embarking upon marriages and relationships where they are content with their wives and girlfriends being the breadwinners or sole sources of their family income. This is a problem for black America.
The problem is not that black males aren’t going to college or graduate schools; the crisis is that they don’t believe that it is attainable or have no interest to attend.
The hackneyed saying maybe true, “College isn’t for everyone”, however college isn’t banned from everyone either. Saying, “College isn’t for everyone” has served as an excuse for many young black males to remain in their familiar situations.
This trend may produce a trickling effect of black males not achieving higher levels of education. The black males who dare to rise above their circumstances and try college are dramatically different from those who don’t attend college.
Educated black males are viewed as the leaders and sometimes the only great hope for the community. The hope of a community shouldn’t rest on the shoulders of such few black men. There should be more like them, and more like them to help destroy the negative statistics placed on black males in America.AMW i.e.
