Fight or Flight (revised)

The Greatest and Second Greatest Generations
As a black American, I am especially mindful of a group of pioneers, the successive generations of courageous black activists who pushed the frontiers of freedom in wave after wave, beginning with their emancipation. Whereas some have argued that the "Greatest Generation" of (mostly white) Americans were the brave soldiers and sailors who fought against tyrannical enemies in World War II, I have long believed that the "Greatest Generation" of black Americans were the ex-slaves who lifted themselves and their children up from mass ignorance into mass literacy in the decades following the Civil War.

And my nominee for the "Second Greatest Generation" of black Americans would be the courageous activists who risked their lives to wage the successful Civil Rights Revolution in the 1960s in strenuous efforts to complete the journey of black Americans from slavery to freedom.

Unfortunately, the journey wasn't completed, so there is still much work to be done. Many of us anticipated that far greater progress would have been made between the audacious 60s and today than actually occurred. Significant achievement gaps between blacks and whites narrowed, then displayed an obnoxious persistence. Obviously we need a few more waves of pioneers to reach our destination.

But as I grow older, I am saddened to note that courage, like other human qualities, ebbs and flows from one generation to the next. One generation's record breakers may be followed by another generations' regression to the mean. My sadness has also tempered some of the elation that I would have otherwise felt by the publication of my younger daughter's first book, Opting Out, Losing the Potential of America's Young Black Elite (Maya A. Beasley, University of Chicago Press, November 2011). Warning: the next few paragraphs contain shameless plugs from a very proud Daddy ... :-)

My daughter's book is an expanded and greatly enhanced version of the PhD dissertation that she wrote while she was at Stanford University. She begins her "Acknowledgements" as follows:

"The inspiration for this book comes from my time in Palo Alto toward the end of dot-com boom. As a graduate student living on a small stipend, I was keenly aware of the immense wealth flowing through Silicon Valley and the opportunities being taken up by young professionals. As a woman of color, however, I was also acutely aware of the dearth of African Americans that were a part of this phenomenon. I had known many intelligent, creative black students during my college years at Harvard, and as a graduate student at Stanford I had encountered a diverse undergraduate student body. I wondered how it was that Harvard and Stanford had relatively large black undergraduate populations, yet so few of the professionals I observed off campus were black."

After reviewing the relavant literature that provides extensive support for her findings, her book presents an exploratory study of the career decisions that were made by 30 black undergraduates at Berkeley and Stanford . She focused on the decisions that many of them made not to pursue careers for which they were qualified in high paying, high prestige fields -- e.g., science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), and finance -- after they correctly or incorrectly perceived the existence of racism among the predominantly white members of the faculty who taught the courses that led to the degrees that provided entry to those professions and among the practitioners of those professions. Many of these elite students opted instead for careers in more "racialized" fields, her term for fields that already contained a substantial number of black professionals. In other words, they chose not to become pioneers.

My daughter sent me chapters from time to time as she was writing her dissertation, and I recall my blood pressure soaring by thirty or forty points on each reading.  Her quotes of the students' explanations for why they were opting out were all the more galling to me coming behind her quotation from one of my personal intellectual heroes at the beginning of her first chapter,

"The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men." (W.E.B. DuBois, "The Talented Tenth," 1903) 

Given such golden opportunities, how could these highly talented youngsters not want to become pioneers?

The Third Greatest Generation and Second Thoughts

When I wrote the first version of this essay about two months ago, I stopped at the end of the preceding paragraph. I was not only saddened by my daughters' findings that so many of the students in her sample underperformed in the face of racism as per psychologist Claude Steele's findings about "stereotype threat", but by the painful irony that, even as her book was being delivered to the stores, my daughter was confronting circumstances in her own employment that were uncomfortably akin to the ones the students had hoped to avoid.

But since then, I have been re-reading sections of her book, especially the sections that indicated that the students' perceptions were not based so much on their own direct encounters with racism, but on the more extensive experiences of their parents and other friends and relatives in their parents' generation, the generation that walked through the doors in the 70s and 80s that were opened by the Civil Rights Activists in the 60s. They learned from their elders what racism looks like when you're one of the first to integrate an organization or a work place, how ugly it is, and how painful it can be.

But as my daughter and I continued to discuss her findings, a new possibility emerged. Perhaps the students she interviewed at the beginning of the New Millennium had only learned half of the lessons their parents and relatives might have taught them? Perhaps their parents didn't teach the other half because they were hoping that times had changed enough so that those other lessons wouldn't be necessary?

Whereas the Second Greatest Generation fought their integration battles in the glare of the nation's media, the battles fought by the generation that followed them through the doors of integration were solitary skirmishes and barely noted. Like soldiers coming home from an unpopular war, there were no media to mark their triumphs, no parades to thank them for their service. So the question is:

How did that next generation, the Third Greatest Generation if you will, conjure up the courage to persevere unnoticed, to quietly become the first black Americans to integrate so many fields and so many work places that were hitherto bastions of segregation that their children had the option to fall back into these now safer "racialized" occupations because the racists had been quelled?

And then I watched Soledad O'Brien's excellent documentary on CNN, "Black in America, the New Promised Land: Silicon Valley" ... actually, I watched it on TV, then downloaded it to my Mac and watched it three more times!!! If you haven't seen it yet, stop reading this essay, click the link in the previous sentence, download the video from iTunes, and watch it right now!!!

OK, I apologize. That's a bit over the top. But the video is a brilliant example of TV journalism at its best. Whereas Ms. O'Brien noted that there were no black entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, my daughter had identified the blockage in the pipeline at the source, at Berkeley and Stanford, the elite colleges that supplied a hefty percentage of the Valley's engineers-turned-entrepreneurs. If talented black students were opting out, it follows that Ms. Obrien's camera crew would have difficulty finding any black entrepreneurs ... except for the ones who just moved from all over the country into the high-tech boot camp in a house in the Valley for nine weeks to prepare to make do-or-die presentations to fat-cat venture capitalists. These were the black entrepreneurs whom the camera crew followed around day-after-day as the stars of Ms. O'Brien's reality TV documentary.

I won't spoil your fun by summarizing the video, except to say that for me, the high point came when an Indian professor, as in, a dark-skinned professor born in India, challenged the entrepreneurs to acknowledge three undeniable facts:

• Many black Americans seem to feel that past injustice will entitle them to special treatment in the future. It doesn't work that way.
  
  
• The only substantial help they would receive would be the help they gave to each other.
   
• Prejudice in the Valley was still so powerful that they should seriously consider hiring well-spoken white students from Berkeley or Stanford to make their presentations to venture capitalists on their behalf -- which is what the dark-skinned professor had been advised to do many years ago when he was starting his own company.

After he rubbed their noses into the harsh realities of ongoing prejudice, after the shock of his comments settled in, the black wannabe entrepreneurs did not emit a "stereotype threat" response. They didn't opt out. They buckled down and helped each other make the best presentations of their lives!

Yes, courage ebbs and flows from one generation to the next, but the good news from this video is that it's flowing again. It's flowing ... :-)

______________________
Related notes:

• Earnings Lost by Opting Out of STEM
• The Paralysis of Racism
• Affirmative Action Strategies 
• Crossing the Finish Line at HBCUs

The Paralysis of Racism

By the end of the 20th century, "racism" had become such a "bad word", so politically incorrect that even racists took offense at being called "racist" ... Of course this didn't mean that racism had vanished; what it did mean was that our society had made substantial progress in the hundred years between the aftermath of the Civil War and the legacy of Civil Rights. In the heat of the moment it's sometimes difficult to keep things in perspective, to suppress one's feelings that nothing has changed.

Nevertheless as an African American, I must never delude myself into thinking that I have ever been subjected to the kind of violent racism that was inflicted on my mother's father, who was born a slave. Things have gotten substantially better, yet not nearly as much as justice demands. But as the world's Jewish community raised its fists and cried "Never Again!" after the Holocaust, American blacks raised theirs to say that the only acceptable direction is forward, that we are never going back to "that", ever, never.

It's useful to distinguish between two kinds of racism: individual and institutional. Individual racists betray themselves by the racist things they say and do;  whereas institutional racism is built into an organization's structures and operating procedures, so its exposure usually requires statistical analysis.

• For example, our suspicions would be raised if we discovered that only 5 percent of the police force was black in a city whose population was more than 30 percent black.

• Or we might become suspicious of a city's voter registration requirements if only five percent of its black residents were registered. 

Of course, both of these examples are so clear cut as to preclude explanations other than institutional racism. But in the real world, the data is rarely so indisputable nor are individual racists so clumsy as to utter the "N" word.

Nowadays, politically correct racists invoke euphemisms, e.g. Governor Romney's recent "anti-entitlement campaign strategy", and achieve their racist objectives by quietly perpetuating the structures and procedures of institutional racism. Worse still, politically correct racists cite the very statistics that should be used to demonstrate institutional racism to insinuate the inferiority of its black victims. As an educator, my favorite example is using statistics that document the persistent achievement gaps between black and white students, not as evidence that our schools and universities are failing our black students, but to insinuate that the black students are inherently inferior. As one of my black students said to me a long time ago in one of the first classes I ever taught, "Statistics is the white man's trick bag"

This misuse of institutional statistics by crypto-racists, like Governor Romney, paralyzes the thought processes and discussions that are essential for our society to continue to make progress in eradicating institutional racism. I must admit that whenever I detect racism, I become hypersensitive and furious ... and then I notice my non-racist white friends and colleagues moving on quiet tiptop out of range. There can be no dialogue until I calm down. Of course, being a to-the-bone-Libra, I eventually do calm down and coldly perceive the real danger: the inconvenient truth that lurks within the misused stats, a truth whose burdensome, unfair implications cannot be ignored.

For example, most of the professors in most colleges have minimal teaching skills. This should surprise no one because most professors receive no formal training as classroom instructors. Nevertheless substantial learning occurs in all colleges, even in classes taught by the most incompetent instructors. Why? Because students come to class with varying degrees of prior preparation and motivation that compensates for the pedagogical deficiencies of their instructors. Students who come with better preparation usually do better than students with less; and those with less have to work harder for their A's and B's. White students generally come to college with stronger academic backgrounds than black students; so the black students have to compensate for their deficient preparations by working harder. Like my grandmother once told me when I was a small child, a black man has to be "twice as smart as a white man and work twice as hard to get half as far." That's unfair, but so what. Black students have no choice but to grit their teeth and work harder.

For educators, especially for black educators like myself, the challenge is to develop more effective teaching methods that would make it easier for students with entering deficiencies to master the missing fundamentals as quickly as possible, then move into the deeper, more interesting aspects of a course's subject matter. And this is what makes teaching such an exciting opportunity today. Information technology has finally given educators the tools we need to meet this challenge ... but the challenge won't be met if blacks and whites are distracted and/or paralyzed by racism.

_______________________

Related notes:

• Fight or Flight
• Playing the Race Card
• The White Man's Trick Bag
• Academically Adrift -- A Dissenting View
• At the Gates of Distraction 

Playing the Race Card

I have long suspected that Speaker Gingrich and the other Republican candidates, except Governor Romney, lacked the cash reserves or the organizational skills to go the distance. Our presidential candidates seem to need two tries to get their election operations right, as demonstrated by the failure of Speaker Gingrich and Governor Perry to gather enough signatures to get on the ballots in the important Virginia primary.

This pattern makes President Obama's stunning first time victory in 2008 shine with even greater retrospective brilliance and makes Governor Romney's eventual nomination on his second try all the more likely. It's important to remember that the Republican primaries and caucuses are not winner-take-all affairs. So while our silly pundit corps will be focusing on who "won" in Iowa, New Hampshire, Florida, South Carolina, and Nevada, the Governor will be patiently tallying up his non-winning 2nd and 3rd place delegate counts like the proverbial tortoise overtaking the flashy-dashy hares.

I have also expect that the 2012 election will turn out to be the most vicious presidential contest in recent memory. After the Democratic and Republican Party conventions next summer, the Fall 2012 election campaign is likely to descend to unprecedented depths of ugly, with both sides blaring endless propaganda smears at each other in the national and local media.

On Christmas Day the New York Times reported that Governor Romney's latest campaign theme, "The Anti-Entitlement Strategy" raises the ugliest specter of all. I confess that the Governor's explicit playing of a thinly coded race card this early took me by surprise.  Of course it was silly of me to have expected that he would have waited until much later in the game, especially when so many of the voters in these primaries will be the open and/or closeted members of the racist segments of the far right. Tacking to the right to win enough votes in the early primaries to be able to cinch the nomination later on requires that Romney be seen drinking with gusto from their bloodiest cups. 

But Judgement Day is coming. November 6, 2012. Be there!!!

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Fortunately for the rest of us, Dr. King was not just a man of great wisdom, but a man whose mastery of the written and spoken word enabled him to share his wisdom in a manner that made his sharing one of the unforgettable experiences of our lives. So on this day that we celebrate his birth, perhaps the best tribute we can render is to listen to some of what he said and read some of what he wrote, yet again:

• "I Have a Dream" ...
  
  
  
• Letter from a Birmingham Jail
  "6 April 1963
  My Dear Fellow Clergymen:
  While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities "unwise and untimely." Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would have little time for anything other than such correspondence in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work. But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statement in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms" ... Please click here for the rest of Dr. King's letter. Thank you.