[eDebate] African American's and Zero Percent Graduation

[Dheeraj Chand]

Dear Scott -

I am not trying to engage in some kind of poverty-pissing-contest with you, so please don't think that I am trying to do so. Nor am I trying to pick a fight and create bad blood - I think that such things are antithetical to constructive communication.  You have my congratulations on picking yourself up out of disgusting cirumstances. I have a lot of respect for people who are able to do so, my father and grandfather being among them.  Relatively few people are able to get a masters degree in this country, fewer a doctorate and even fewer then choose to attend law school.  Kudos to you. 

Where we disagree in this matter boils down largely to our understandings of the nature of freedom.  You seem to be operating under a very Sartre-an understanding of freedom : "We are only who and what we choose to be at every point in time. Ultimately, the onus is on us." My notion of freedom is slightly more Hegelian: I say that while the will is definitionally absolutely free, it is not enough to examine something on a definitional level and that you must examine the relationship between a concept and its instantiation.  The proper political understanding of freedom, I think, is to look at freedom as a measure of the capacity for an individual to participate in those aspects of the society in which s/he is situated that are of the polis. Let's play with Greek for a bit: to participate in the polis is certainly different than to just vote or to give speeches, it is more than that.  To be a participant in the polis is to be of the culture and the people, to be recognised as such, to have the capacity to effect meaningful and significant change within the society and to be able to operate within the cultural and ethical constraints of the society.  The notion of polis goes beyond demographics and beyond community and is in my opinion a far more meaningful concept than either. It is also far more revealing tool for sociological analysis.  To be free, then, is to be able to participate in the polis.  It is not enough to be able to make a choice, it is also a question of from what you can choose and why you choose what you choose.   Under a Sartrean model, the condemnation of Jean Valjean (of "Les Miserables") is quite clear: Jean could have not stolen the bread and let his family die. After all, he had a choice. Problem solved, no reason to write one of the most compelling psychological novels in history.  I, however, don't think that it's that simple.  It is not enough to merely proclaim the death of God and the ultimate freedom of humanity - you have to understand where and how this freedom exists and is actualisable within existent societies. 
So where does this leave us? I'm not making the claim that the human subject is some kind of automaton who merely responds to social stimuli and inputs, not at all. I'm no behaviourist.  What I am saying, though, is that a large part of who we are as individuals is necessarily a reflection and an evaluation of the society in which we live, and that you cannot evaluate a person based purely on a series of choices that they make sans context.  

Discussions of freedom aside, I think that you are not giving much credit to those people whom you write off as "dismissing education" when they choose to go for athletics.  I am not going to make an attempt to speak for all of these athletes, I can only speak from what I know from my friends.  For a lot of my friends, they were willing to sacrifice their own lives to try and make the lives of their siblings a bit better. Alanis had seven brothers and sisters - it was important for him to do whatever he could to try and make their high school experiences better than his was.  My grandfather "threw away education" as well: he joined the Royal Air Force so that he could help put his eight siblings through college and still provide money for his widowed mother's retirement.  WHat you seem to conceive of as nothing but a greedy desire for a career in the professional leagues with lots and lots of fat cash is more commonly a desire to get a job that will allow for the support of the highest number of family and friends at the highest level possible.  Look at the way professional athletes spend their money: yes, there is of course a certain level of gratuitous spending on clothes, cars, etc. but there is also a lot of money distributed back amongst family and friends.  There was an interesting article several years ago on Shaquille O'Neal in "Sports Illustrated" which examined his personal staff.  He had hired uncles and cousins of his to do nothing but go with him when he bought his clothes and give him advice (fashion and image consultants), his aunts and other cousins to cook his food for him (chef), etc... Is that greed?  I have never had to grow up with the kind of poverty and desperation that would make the slim chance of making it to the professional leagues seem like a gamble that I would have to take. 

Couple of clarifications: 

a) When referring to white, middle-class backgrounds in my earlier post, I was referring to myself and not making some kind of sneering "You wouldn't understand, cracker." type of comment to you.  That would be stupid, since I don't know you.

b) I'm not trying to trivialise or delegitimate your background and what you've acheived in spite of it. I'm just asking you to realise that you are the exception, not the rule. You proclaim, "Well, I did it." So you broke through a system that's rigged against a large number of people - it doesn't prove that the system itself isn't rigged.

You're not addressing the cultural issues that I brought up in my previous post. Our society has largely chosen to present and conceive of black people as perpetually not middle class.  For those of you with DVD players, I recommend that you watch the DVD of "Bamboozled" with the director's commentary turned on.  When our society at large rewards athletes and entertainers over everything else, are you surprised that a large number of people opt to go for that route?

best wishes,

-dc


"By operating at every level of of the social body and by mingling ceaselessly the art of rectifying and the right to punish, the universality of the carceral lowers the level from which it becomes natural and acceptable to be punished.  The question is often posed as to how, before and after the Revolution, a new foundation was given to the right to punish. And no doubt the answer tis to be found in the theory of the contract. But is perhaps more important the reverse question: how were people made to accept the power to punish, or quite simply, when punished, tolerate being so. The theory of the contract can only answer this question by the fiction of  juridical subject giving to others the power to exercise over him the right that he himself possesses over them.  It is highly probable that the great carceral continuum, which provides a communivation between the power of discipline and the the power of the law, and extends without interruption from the smallest coercions tot he longest penal detention, constituted the technical and real, immediately material counterpart of that chimerical granting of hte right to punish."

-Michel Foucault, "Discipline and Punish: The Birth of The Prison", pg 303, 1975
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Scott M. Elliott, Ph.D. 
  To: Dheeraj Chand 
  Sent: Saturday, March 02, 2002 6:08 PM
  Subject: Re: [eDebate] African American's and Zero Percent Graduation


  I come from what what we call in the south a white trash background. A family with six boys--only two of us graduated from high school. I was the only one to go to college. Two brothers living in tralers and married by the time they were 17.  I Got kicked out of my house when I decided to go to college rather than work at the family sawmill. Lived in a car for a few weeks until I found a couch to crash on. Had a girlfriend's father point a shotgun at me becuase he did not want his daughter dating a college boy. That asshole made his son give up a full ride golf scholarship so he could take a job as an electricians helper. 
   
  I come from the rural equivalent of "the hood." Went on to get a doctorate and now finishing a law degree. That is why I have no sympathy for people who are given opportunities and piss them away.
   
  We all have choices--many that are made when we are young. I could have followed the rest of my family and either worked myself to death in the logging industry or grow pot. I chose a third option.
   
  Still no sympathy
   
  Scott
   
    ----- Original Message ----- 
    From: Dheeraj Chand 
    To: Scott M. Elliott, Ph.D. 
    Cc: ifjxh at hotmail.com ; edebate 
    Sent: Sunday, March 03, 2002 5:35 PM
    Subject: Re: [eDebate] African American's and Zero Percent Graduation


    Dear Scott, Josh et al -

    I think that the issue at stake here is not so much that young black males are being used and tossed aside by colleges (which they are - I remember reading an alarming paper several years ago about how male track and field athletes are generally coerced into majors that pretty much preclude them from getting jobs) so much as it is that our culture has pretty much created circumstances such that black men feel that athletics and an eventual shot at professional sports is their only chance to get into college and out of the "hood", as Scott so mockingly put it.  I realise that it is illiberal to speak from personal experience and non-veridical sources, but I am from Houston, TX and was friends with several people from the "hood" because of my participation in high school track, soccer and lacrosse.  I still am friends with several of them - with others it is just that we have grown apart over the years.  For someone living in the squalor and danger of various "hoods" in Houston, the desire to get out is often paramount.  I don't know how its handled elsewhere, but in Houston public school funding is based on property taxes and local-fundraising.  Often, schools in the "hood" get no funding and are unable to impart an education to their students that would be comparable to that of any school in one of the various suburbs of Houston.  My buddy Alanis (who is Hispanic, and not black, but I figure that what he had to say pretty much applies here) explained it to me as such - with his high school experiences, he could either try to :

    a) rely on his track and field talents to get him into a third-tier college, such as the University of Houston, and eventually get out and maybe get some kind of competitive career,

    b) rely on his grades and his standardized test scores (which are most probably going to be lower because of the caliber of education that he had received) to get him into a fourth-tier college, which would probably enable him to get some kind of retail managerial position in the Houston area, but only that much

    c) go through the Houston Community College system and hope to transfer to a first or second-tier university eventually.

    Unfortunately, in the case of option C, he still occupies a room at his parents house, which is badly needed for younger siblings, makes enough money to contribute to the family expenses to enable them to get by as they were when he was in high school (if that b/c of tuition, books, commuting to college, etc.), and has no guarantee of getting into an institution such as the University of Texas, Rice, Trinity, etc. If I have neglected any other first or second tier schools in Texas, it was by accident and not intention.  This option leaves him with SHIT.

    Option B, is virtually the same, but with a slightly better pay-off.  The way that recruiters outside the city of Houston handle degrees from schools such as TSU, HBU, and the like (which are coincidentally traditionally and largely ethnic schools) is largely dismissive.  Unless you are very lucky, at best your degree will get you into a graduate program at the University of Houston.  More realistically, it will allow the holder of the degree to obtain a management position in a retail or sales business of some kind.  That still involves all the expenses of Option C, with higher costs and a longer time-frame. The eventual pay-differential may be higher, but in the mean-time he still has a family to help support.

    This leaves Option A. If he gets into UH as an athlete, he's guaranteed a full scholarship and a stipend. This means that he can get out of his house, freeing up room for his siblings, and in addition he can contribute to the family financially.  Furthermore, he will be in a higher-ranked university, which will give him some options afterwards, even if he declines the option of pursuing a career in the small world of professional track and field. 

    Given his education and his circumstances,  Option A is the most compelling to him.  Now while the rhetoric of this may have you think that I'm constructing a thought experiment with some hypothetical homo pedagogicus, this was exactly how Alanis explained his choices to me during our senior year of high school when we were all doing the college applications bit. 

    What is my point? It seems to me that the social trend is de facto that we are breeding a social class of people to function as our entertainers and modern-day gladiators when we do nothing to alleviate the circumstances that cornered my buddy Alanis.  If anyone here is a fan of Oliver Stone's films, recall the conversation between Willie Beaman and "Coach" Pacino in which Beaman describes his childhood - from the beginning of his life, Willie had always been surrounded by media images and a culture that had depicted the successful black man as either an athlete or a musician - always the superstar eccentric instead of a hard-working middle class sort.  

    Given our culture and our society, Scott, are you at all surprised that a large number of people who live in the "hood" who choose not to be sucked in by the nihilism that such an environment tends to encourage instead opt for careers in entertainment or athletics (which in the professional sense are certainly more about entertainment and wealth-production than they are with the purity of the sport)? With the education that they're allotted, it's generally speaking their best option.  And yes, Scott, I supppose that they could try harder, but there are only a certain number of hours in a day, and when you have to work in addition to studying and pursuing your sport, I think that it's a little difficult to do so. 

    Perhaps instead of concluding "no sympathy" regarding this whole mess, you should pay closer attention to the sociological aspects of it and not make asanine comparisons between collegiate athletes and graduate students.  You ask a question of statistics - here's one for you. What percentage of students with graduate degrees who finish are virtually guaranteed a middle-class existence of some sort?  Pretty much most of them, right? Can you make that claim for college athletes? Of course not. A person who holds a bachelors degree of some sort and is pursuing higher education is in no way making the same sort of gamble that the holder of a high school degree pursuing a career in professional sports is. The grad student can always rely on his/her bachelors degree and partial graduate experience to find some kind of well-paying work.  Can a holder of a high school degree and some collegiate athletic experience do the same? Of course not. 

    Perhaps I have taken this a bit too personally, but this subject that we are discusing academically is actually the lived experience of several dear friends of mine, which makes it hard for me NOT to take it personally.

    Have a lovely weekend,

    -dc

    "By operating at every level of of the social body and by mingling ceaselessly the art of rectifying and the right to punish, the universality of the carceral lowers the level from which it becomes natural and acceptable to be punished.  The question is often posed as to how, before and after the Revolution, a new foundation was given to the right to punish. And no doubt the answer tis to be found in the theory of the contract. But is perhaps more important the reverse question: how were people made to accept the power to punish, or quite simply, when punished, tolerate being so. The theory of the contract can only answer this question by the fiction of  juridical subject giving to others the power to exercise over him the right that he himself possesses over them.  It is highly probable that the great carceral continuum, which provides a communivation between the power of discipline and the the power of the law, and extends without interruption from the smallest coercions tot he longest penal detention, constituted the technical and real, immediately material counterpart of that chimerical granting of hte right to punish."

    -Michel Foucault, "Discipline and Punish: The Birth of The Prison", pg 303, 1975
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