Thursday, January 22, 2009

UPDATE: BLACK TEEN MURDER RATES

Since the esteemed Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page was kind enough to "Friend" me today on Facebook, I felt duty-bound to check for recent writings of his that my pertain to the AskYourDaddy.blogspot.com conversation.



FLICKR/candylikeabar/ELTON SAULSBERRY


Given all of the Obama-driven news he's had to cover of late, I was surprised to find that Page, like me, was concerned about newly dispatched statistics regarding murder rates among young black males. (His observations on the crisis were posted a full week behind mine but, like I said, the man's been busy...)

And the song remains the same.

We can use more federal support for police on the street and other traditional law enforcement funding that was trimmed during the Bush administration, the Fox report suggests. We could also fight harder for tougher prosecution of crimes committed with a gun.


For the full article, CLICK HERE...

To offer your own thoughts, scroll down or comment below...

1 comment:

Geo said...

We have a captive audience in the schools. Youth ages 4-18 are required by law to attend public school. Grab them there, hold on tight and don't let go until you have Barack Obama.

I love the burgeoning Charter School movement because the curriculums can be tailored to suit our needs.

In most major cities the dropout rate for black youth is over 40 percent. If the schools were nurturing our children accordingly that number would be significantly lower. The current public school curriculum and the administering of it is not capturing the imagination of our children, it's not challenging them and it's not identifying and cultivating their individual talents. There's just not enough appeal there to reach our at-risk youth. Not to mention the fact that our children are on the bottom of the totem pole with regard to math and science especially as compared to South Asian schoolchildren, for instance.

Where in the Curriculum Bible does it say that a four year old cannot arrive at school Monday morning and eat a fruit salad from the student run organic produce garden on the school grounds, then scamper off to math class, 2nd Line over to music class, bolt to the driving range to hit balls for an hour, back to the garden for lunch, burn off that salad in art class and maybe end the day splitting atoms or something in science class.

We have got to take matters into our own hands. The system has failed us.

Once we hearken back to the pre-Brown vs. The Board of Education days and start molding Kings and Queens again things will start to fall back into place. Or at least I hope.