Oh please, this is so delusionally vainglorious, I’m almost lost for words.

Non blacks reject plenty of facts and knowlege. The difference is we’re expected to pretend that this always happens to co-incide with the limits of reality; if we don’t go along, much rage ensues.

Whilst I’ve been taught to value education myself, there is a difference between valuing learning and knowledge and elevating everything you are told-by those in charge of how education is defined-to the status of knowledge or fact, uncritically.

Conflating the two costs black people, heavily, so at least some awareness of that could been seen as an exercise in self responsibility.

There is also some history here that needs to be unpacked. Bill Cosby did not invent the idea that “black culture” needs to take care of itself. Malcom X was saying something similar when he argued for community support of Black retailers and professionals, and the pan-African movement did a lot to instill as sense of pride in African Americans by arguing for a common culture and reference point.

I think we’ve moved in to a more sophisticated place where we can recognize both things as true: There is no monolithic Black Culture, no annual meeting or spokesperson, and yet the presence of racism in our society *does* create certain shared experiences and there are very real cultural trends that emerge. However, those trends are exploited to make overly broad statements about what it means to be “black” and “white” and the most rigid enforcers of these stereotypes come from popular culture. Witness the infuriating website “Stuff White People Like.”

Sorry, I’ve been living back at Mom’s for awhile now. Such close proximity to someone who really believes this crap has left me incapable of anything but snark.

On a more factual level, these “statistically proven” facts you bring up are highly contentious. The issue of disproportionate levels of black incarceration for example: Are they more likely to offend? Given harsher sentences? More likely to be convicted, relative to whites? Is the increase in incarceration a cause of more offenders, or is it shifts in the punitive justice system? Or is it the expansion of prisons? On out of wedlock births: Is it that blacks and/or poor people are more inclined, culturally, to have babies out of wedlock? Or is it that the number of marriageable men are lower, relative to whites–a function of the decline in union membership (itself a function of changing labor policy), economic opportunities, and depressed demand for non-skilled workers?

“The other side,” as you write, isn’t exactly as clear–or even as “cultural–as you suggest. And that of course, was part of the point of the post: the idea of a “black community” or “black culture” is an ideological construct. There are many communities, many cultures, and all are situated in particular contexts.

JutGory:

Statistically speaking, the “black community” does have problems that can be identified (high rates of out-of-wedlock births, high incarceration rates, poor school performance, and black-on-black violence).
Take education, for example. It is fair to say that some of those problems can be tied to societal factors (poorly-funded urban schools), but they can also be tied to cultural factors (less emphasis on academic achievement by one’s peers, or even outright ridicule by one’s peers for “acting white” by valuing education). To fix the problem, both sides have to be addressed.
That WILL NOT happen if it is presumed that any criticism of the “black community” springs from racism.

You’re showing your hand here. The first and most obvious problem with your argument is that the dysfunctional black pathology narrativeis in fact racist. The “acting white” meme is the laziest kind of cultural analysis — it assumes that there is something specifically black about disdain academic/intellectual achievement; white kids and Asian kids apparently never get picked on by their peers/classmates for being nerdy and bookish. Right. This stance also assumes that this alleged penchant for anti-intellectualism is more pronounced among black people. (I seem think of a certain former president and a certain former Alaskan senator whose disdain for book learnin’ marked them among lots of people as just “regular folk” who didn’t put on airs.)

Let’s consider this: black kids are less likely to be placed in AP/honors classes (and black males, especially, are more likely to be seriously disciplined than their nonblack counterparts for disruptions). What happens is that the few black kids in honors classes — or in more moneyed, predominantly white school districts — end up socializing with the white peers with whom they spend much of their class/school time, and are picked on for not exhibiting sufficient racial solidarity. It’s happened to all of my friends who went to school in the suburbs. Is it problematic? Absolutely. But it’s a fundamentally different than equating academic achievement with racial treason, and it is always conveniently interpreted by those ostracized/wounded black teenagers (and social critics with agendas) as hating on those kids for “doing well.”

I say this as a black dude who went to an academically rigorous Philadelphia public high school that was overwhelmingly African American — that idea is complete nonsense. But there are obvious reasons why that narrative gets so much attention.

In summation: GTFOHWTBS.

We are all branches of the same tree so when you are critical of Black or White Americans, you do damage to the entire Human Tree.