A black high school student knocked a school conflict resolution worker unconscious in a Philadelphia high school last week in a dispute over a cellphone.
This is what eventually happens as public schools die a long, painful death. They take down communities and the people in those communities, who may already be disconnected from the world but continue a downward spiral of violence. As I said a while back, the public schools in Philadelphia have been killed. There is no hope for students there but to get out.
Teachers and several newspapers (Inquirer, Tribune) are calling for an increase in security at Bartram High School, where the assault occurred, a school in one of Philadelphia’s toughest neighborhoods on the southwest side. The drastic cuts to Philadelphia’s school budgets this year make any hiring of additional personnel unlikely, since the government has failed to come up with needed funds.
Yet one man brings a common sense perspective, with some justified profanity, to the situation of middle and high schools that have an extremely high African-American student population as well as high rates of violent behavior. Blaming the problem on single mothers who become violent and perpetuate a culture of violence in their children, he speaks frankly to black kids and their parents:
If you want to have some productivity, … you’ve got to get away from black folks. I feel sorry for the students there, because I was one of them. I was one of the students who went there but didn’t belong there.
I was the steak in trash, not due to my … skin color but due to the … environment I was in. You’re a steak. You’re a juicy steak, and somebody threw you in a … trash can. Even if you fire it, it’s been contaminated. … You have all these people talking about children are blessings, so why are you putting them in cursed environments?
Schools like these are populated by the bastard children of single mothers. Children have no accountability, because typically the mothers have no accountability. The children are violent, because typically the mothers are violent.
Do you understand why I say openly, “[expletive] the black community”? Because there isn’t one.
They asked the little girl if she felt safe. What did she say? She said, sometimes yes, but most of the time no. But they don’t have anywhere else to go. As a parent, you have failed your child if they say something like that, … because you have put them in that position. As a parent, we should be ashamed, but we won’t be. We won’t be made to feel bad.
I would prefer not to blame people, because doing so hasn’t brought about any general solutions in the past. However, general solutions are way beyond my reach. Telling individual kids to get out of Philadelphia before it’s too late can only be seen as a piece of advice that comes from a position of having been there and risen above the fray. Thanks to Tommy Sotomayor for a fresh and honest perspective on the situation in Philadelphia. There’s little doubt the same “cursed environments” can be found in urban schools in many places throughout the country.
