First lady Michelle Obama and President Barack Obama were the respective featured commencement speakers this year at Bowie State University and Morehouse College\u2014two historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) founded nearly 150 years ago. While the Obamas could have taken the opportunity to inspire black graduates entering an uncertain future, both chose, instead, to pepper their remarks with problematic and unobliging stereotypes about black youth. While doing so, both also conveniently neglected to call attention to the policy changes that President Obama could have enacted to help alleviate the insurmountable odds that young people of color\u2014and blacks in particular\u2014face in the United States.<\/p>\n
When the first lady addressed Bowie graduates last Friday, she summoned the likes of Dr. King, Thurgood Marshall and Fredrick Douglass to help weave a brief history of the school\u2014founded in Maryland just as the Civil War was coming to an end. And yet, as she talked about a long tradition of black students\u2019 hunger for education, she added that about 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation and more than fifty years after Brown v. Board, \u201ctoo many of young people just can\u2019t be bothered\u201d to pursue an education. Michelle Obama said that rather than walk miles to school everyday, black students sit \u201con couches for hours playing video games, watching TV.\u201d And the stereotypes didn\u2019t stop there. \u201cInstead of dreaming of being a teacher or a lawyer or a business leader,\u201d proclaimed the first lady, \u201cthey\u2019re fantasizing about being a baller or a rapper.\u201d<\/p>\n
Michelle Obama\u2019s banal descriptions come at a time when many of us are waiting with bated breath for the Supreme Court\u2019s decision on affirmative action, which could reverse the positive\u2014and still developing\u2014results of Brown v. Board. Although the first lady pointed out that one in three black students drops out of high school, and that only one in five between the ages of 25 and 29 have a college degree, her remarks appear to put the onus not on a system designed to ensure black failure but on lazy individuals.<\/p>\n
Forget that Chicago Mayor and former White House Chief of Staff under Obama, Rahm Emanuel, is backing the closing more than fifty schools, which will disproportionately affect black students\u2014as violence rages on and is literally killing black and Latino youth. Forget the ways in which Obama has made \u201cpainful cuts\u201d to Pell Grants\u2014benefits available to students whose families cannot otherwise afford to pay for college (read: black, brown and Native families who have fared worse under Obama, and can never seem to catch up to the wealth that white families have secured after centuries of inequities). Michelle Obama\u2019s remarks reserve blame not for an entire structure that betrays black students at multiple levels, but on black students themselves whom she condemns for wasting time in front of television sets. The first lady\u2019s remarks about black youth fantasizing about \u201cbeing a baller or a rapper\u201d might cut extraordinarily deep for those youth who essentially learn literary criticism by close readings of rap lyrics. Those youth are grasping rhyme, metaphor and syntax before the concepts are even introduced in their public school. And there is innately nothing wrong with\u2014and, in fact, much to be celebrated about\u2014the art of hip-hop, or learning to survive as a so-called baller when other avenues have systemically been closed to you.<\/p>\n
Read more: http:\/\/www.thenation.com\/blog\/174449\/first-couples-post-racial-bootstraps-myth#ixzz2U8K8JUP1<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
First lady Michelle Obama and President Barack Obama were the respective featured commencement speakers this year at Bowie State University and Morehouse College\u2014two historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) founded nearly 150 years ago. While the Obamas could have taken the opportunity to inspire black graduates entering an uncertain future, both chose, instead, to pepper […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35760","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-important-news-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35760","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35760"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35760\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35761,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35760\/revisions\/35761"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35760"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35760"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35760"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}