The Nation of Islam, which held its annual convention and day of atonement in Tampa last weekend, missed an opportunity to specifically underscore one of its most fundamental messages to the very region it was convening in. The site selection committee surely knew there was much more here than the Clearwater-based Church of Scientology, with whom the NOI has formed a bond around their mutual interests in ending drug abuse and increasing literacy. No less relevant, the Bay Area is also home to some of the most notoriously underperforming, majority-black high schools in the country. Such that one of the dailies ran a high-profile headline recently asking: “Are Schools Failing Black Males?”
It’s a subject as controversial as it is convoluted. Students, parents, neighborhood dynamics and cultural mores are hardly incidental to the discussion. For example, if getting good grades is “acting white,” then that’s a self-destructive paradigm. It’s also acting dumb.
In effect, Minister Louis Farrakhan might have been addressing the issue in his keynote speech without spelling it out. “Ain’t nobody going to do something for us,” he declared. “We’re going to have to do it for ourselves.”
Nobody is suggesting that the solution to the chronic academic underperformance of black males doesn’t include more outside help–from tutors to better-motivated teachers–but it’s also manifestly obvious that students themselves, their parents and that unconscionable 70 percent rate of black, out-of-wedlock births are the keys to any turnaround.