Although colonized, most Africans were likely never called the N-word or told to sit at the back of a bus or denied entry to certain aspects of society. Their drive to succeed comes out of sheer determination to escape war, famine, disease, preindustrialized existences. They are encouraged by their communities to excel, not coerced by peer pressure/ media mad-mouthing/ societal restrictment to drop out.
Woah, that almost sounds like an admission that "black" doesn't fully define the problem. That people coming from different backgrounds could actually have differing levels of success.
How come virtually every other ethnicity has been able to avoid this level of degradation? The problem doesn't end in the classroom, from birth 90% of blacks are guaranteed to suffer some adversity the general population won't. Forgive me if I strongly beleive society's even less progressive and more backwards then it was 10 years ago.
I think ideas that start out with good intentions are backfiring. When BET came out it was probably seen as a way to deal with a black population feeling alienated by mainstream TV. This black school is doomed to be the same thing. Once this black school has a bad name due to the criminal element simply moved from other schools and congregated together, and people have the general impression that it is a sub-standard school which is unsafe, people will quickly realize what a bad plan it is. Until people can see other people as equals there is no hope to end this problem. The idea of this school is that black students need black role models... but that in itself says black students cannot see a white person or an asian person as an equal otherwise they wouldn't need black role models. I think the black population has to take some responsibility for the fact they have not been able to recover from the oppression that existed before. Blacks are not the only group on the planet to have seen oppression... other groups experience genocide.
And what better way to mend fences and build camaraderie against the various black communities then having them as participants of an united classroom? Surely 8 months is long enough to have a Diaspora studies that'd be inclusive of blacks of all stripes- Jamaicans, Trinidadians, Guyanese, Sudanese, Ethiopians, Nigerians, Congolese, Zimbabweans, etc.
But why mend fences between African cultures and the black North American / Caribbean slavery descendants? Is the rift that is causing these youth not to succeed really between Africans and those from the Americas? It seems more likely that the rift exists between the mainstream and the blacks from the Americas... so shouldn't the effort be in trying to get that group to more fully integrate?
Wow 400 years of primarily British/French history with some Natives interspersed only to mention the vast majority of polyethnic contributions to Canada in the last 2-3 weeks of a lethergized History class dying for winter break to begin. I'm sure someone from Bangladesh or Somalia feels really at ease
.
That is the history of Canada. There haven't been any Bangladeshi prime-ministers or Somalian ships sailing up the Saint Lawrence River to discover new lands. If there had been prominent Bangladeshi-Canadian and Somalian-Canadian contributions in Canadian history it would surely be in the text books. If I take a Japanese history class I don't expect white people to get much coverage.
Are you serious? Free will and free choice don't go far when everyone and their mother is hammering in defeatest propoganda on impressionable, still developing minds. Like I said earlier blacks do succeed but often at the cost of their social status. If it's easier to sacrifice grades for friends and recognition, adoloscence of any race will do it.
This is probably the bigger issue. It probably is the defeatist propaganda that everyone and their mother is spewing out that has a major role in the problem. The defeatist attitude isn't isolated to the non-black population... black people can be equally defeatist. How much sense does it make that blacks succeeding would be at the expense of their social status? It isn't the white people that are taking their social status away when black youth succeed... it is a segment of the black community. So how does creating a black school where students are expected to be black (whatever that means) resolve the issue of students being stereotyped and expected to be a certain way? How can an all-black school better allow a student to find his individuality than a school with goths, punks, elitists, whites, blacks, asians, rich, middle class, poor, etc? Do you really think individuality can rise from telling a whole bunch of black students that they are the same?
There is a big difference between teaching the subject material in a respectful manner where students have the oppurtunity to debate it and the visceral raping of an entire people's identity to make a quick buck.
Making a quick buck is what Hollywood does. It tells history-like stories that people want to watch and sometimes the era in which the story is not too favourable to a particular group... but those are the time periods in the movie so what gets played is similar to what existed at the time. Germans and Japanese often get played in a bad light to in historical films, many people lost relatives in the war to Germans and Japanese, and yet despite that history those groups have no problems integrating into society.
A half millenia of suffering is imcomparable to any other man-made atrocity ever inflicted upon humanity. Heck I'm sure far more than 350,000 black slaves were swallowed by the seas than every victim in the Tsunami. Again the media makes a misericordiam out of black protrayals while whites are the saviours.
No. It is equal to what other groups have experienced in history but without the genocide. The population affected is probably much larger but actual torture and killing as a percentage of the population seems to have been much less.
When Jack Bauer or House does unethical things are they still not heroes? Micheal from Lost was a likeable character father figure who the writers decided to make into a double murderer for no apparent reason. This was after a long hiatus of his character. Soon after with much tacked on villany he disappears for good. Please stop pretending like there's no racial bias in the media/entertainment industry because clearly there is.
You really have a thing for the show Lost. Supposedly Michael is back in season 4 if the writers ever return to work so I guess we don't need a black school... yay, after a year off Michael is back... like Daniel from Stargate after his season away but of course Daniel was white so it isn't proof of anything... but Teal'k stayed on longer than any other character and he was black.
I guess it's better to tackle a problem head on, then pretend it's not there. It's no secret segregation already exists in Toronto schools, it's only those who rarely socialize outside of own their ethnicity that would be unaware of it.
Well the people I hang around with include a wide array of cultures and I think the opposite is true... I think people who only hang around their own culture convince themselves there are larger obstacles than really exist. Of course this group of people is relatively successful so obviously their answers would be different to those who frequently break the law, don't care about education, and then find a reason to blame society for all their unproductive choices in life (noting that there is some partial blame that can be placed on society since the problem seems to have originated indirectly from the times of slavery and segregation). The biggest obstacle to employment is to have not graduated from a Canadian college or university and immigrants hit this obstacle, regardless of race, all the time. I know there are other obstacles such as people who turn down qualified candidates for lack of "Canadian experience", I know there are police officers who will treat those in minority groups totally different from those who are not, I know people buy into stereotypes too much and overlook the individuality of people, etc. But many black people do succeed... there is a way to overcome the obstacles, without a black school (which would probably make things worse), and succeed if the individual can accept that the effort invested in school is worthwhile, that they are not defined by stereotypes, that friends that abandon you in school because you succeed are not really friends, and believe that they are capable of success.
A black school will convince students they are part of a black definition. It removes individuality and decides that colour of skin is more important than who and what a person truly is. Is a black student who likes music or sports not stereotyped as being black going to be more of an outcast at an all black school or a mixed school? The problem black students are already surrounded by black people, at home, in the neighbourhood, and as friends and obviously all those black people are not teaching them the right path and right values, so why would a black school somehow do what the black community does not? Wouldn't trying something different actually involve changing the life experience of these youth?
I would really like to see some real statistics that actually dig deeper and find a solution that makes sense. Show me statistics that show congregating black people together away from the rest of the population increases their chance of success in society. Those stats should be available now... there are black neighbourhoods with hardly a white person in them... what are their grades? What are the grades of black students when there is only one or two black students in the whole school... is it higher or lower than the average black students grade? I don't know the answer but until someone can show me something that would give me any hope that this racially based policy might actually have side benefits in the form of improved grades I can only see it for what it is... segregation based on skin colour that denies the fact that these people are individuals.
