The Freedom Writers

[DemocratSinceBirth]

I saw the movie "The Freedom Writers" yesterday. It is a true story about a teacher at Wilson High School in Long Beach, California during the early nineties. Most of them were at risk kids who were largely given up on and "pushed along" in school. The teacher in the movie, Erin Gruwell, came up with innovative ways to get through to them and gain their trust...


It made me think about the post a couple of days ago where a poster cited an article by Orlando Patterson that attributed part of the problem in the African community to a culture of poverty.One needs to point out right here that sixty five percent of African Americans live above the poverty line. So most African Americans are making it or are doing as well as the rest of America... There's also a lot of white and Asian Americans living below the poverty line. We can do better....

And I think class is the great divider in America not race...Racism is still an invideous force but except for a few retrograde lugheads it matters not if you're a black, Jew, Hispanic, or Asian as long as you have money...


A few posters suggested that it is incumbent upon employers to hire applicants who lack effective verbal skills. I disagree... I think it's up to applicants to hone their verbal skills. I am sure there are grammatical errors, misplaced commas, etcetera in my short post but my point is (we) all need to try to communicate in a language which is understood by all of us. To expect less of a person, imho, demeans them...

[noamnety]

1. Perceptions, reality

"So most African Americans are making it or are doing as well as the rest of America"

Six in 10 whites -- 61 percent -- say the average black has equal or better access to health care than the average white.

In 2000, the U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey found that blacks were nearly twice as likely as whites to be without health insurance.

Half of all whites -- 49 percent -- believe that blacks and whites have similar levels of education.

About one in six blacks -- 17 percent -- have completed college, compared with 28 percent of all whites. And 88 percent of all whites are high school graduates, compared with 79 percent of all blacks 25 years old or older.

Half of all whites -- 50 percent -- say that the average black is about as well off as the average white in terms of the jobs they hold.

A third of all whites hold professional or managerial jobs, compared to slightly more than one-fifth of all blacks, according to census data. Blacks are about twice as likely as whites -- 23 versus 12 percent --to hold lower-paying, less prestigious service jobs. Blacks also are more than twice as likely to be unemployed; in May, the jobless rate for blacks stood at 8 percent, compared with 3.8 percent among whites.

The poll found that a majority of whites -- 57 percent -- recognize that blacks on average earn less than whites. Still, four in 10 whites -- 42 percent -- believed incorrectly that the typical black earned as much or more than the typical white.

The median household income for whites was $44,366 in 1999, compared with $27,910 for blacks. Fewer than three in 10 whites earn less than $25,000; nearly half of all blacks in 1999 earned less than that. And the poverty rate for African Americans is more than double the white rate.


Copied/paraphrased from "Training the White Nation" at Sanders Research.
http://www.sandersresearch.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=899&Itemid=64