Its a Black thing but its not a Black thing....

A notion or a thought illuminated in my mind. This thought is rather simplistic in nature but can have a drastic effect on the effectiveness on the plight of the African student. It is my premise that the reason why more African students are not help is because we our hypothesis is all wrong about why the student is not succeeding. Indeed we receive information stating that the African student is not succeeding in the classroom at the same rate of his Caucasian counterpart and we think that there is something wrong with the African student. However this is the same backwards thinking that led to believing that the African race could not read, write, or have intellectual thought and should have stayed a slave.
The fact of the matter is that the African; male in particular problem with learning is not a racial problem but a social problem. A social problem that is indeed limited to the individuals that suffers from the problem. It is not their skin that generate the problem but rather the state that some Africans in that make them more susceptible to this issue. It is well know that there is a higher occurrence of sickle cell in the black race but that does not equate to the fact that every black will have sickle cell. There is a high occurrence of diabetes as well but this does not allow for all blacks to have problems with blood sugar. Correlation does not equal fact and that is probably the problem we are facing with effectively helping our young African youth. I believe if we prepare the African student as we prepare all students that are successful then in turn the African student will succeed to. I believe and will continue to believe that this is a battle of atmosphere. No one is born a killer, drug dealer, priest, teacher, or doctor but it is a person’s atmosphere along with personal choices that influence whether a person will or will not make a positive or negative impact on their lives and those around them.
I would love to stay that it is ultimately the choice of an individual whether he or she succeeds. But good intentions without the resources or guidance to help them succeed render those intentions almost useless. Also, I think that it is very difficult to curb someone’s training that they have been receiving for almost twenty years. As the Bible states, “train up a child in the correct manner and when they are old they will not depart from it”. Then this must also be true of its counterpart in training a child improperly. I do not say this to discourage or take away hope. I just believe that if we are to truly affect their lives then we have to reprogram their thinking instead of just holding a carrot in from of them like a donkey. We must treat them as if we are training the next leaders of America. We must be more aggressive in our message without diluting it to a sales pitch. I think we are cutting at the problem but we are not digging to the core. How can we expect the world to see them as future leaders of America and successful students when we ourselves target them like a lost generation? I think that they can feel that they are labeled lost, and that also plays into the way that they act.