How Black Culture Cripples the Intellectual Development of Black Children
How black parents, black music, the black church and an emphasis on cathartic emotional releases over reason and logic limit black intellectual growth.
By
David Gottfried
I fully concede that some black people are brilliant. I fully concede that some black artists have produced works which were so genuine and filed with such genius that they waltzed into my mind and made common cause with the innermost recesses of my consciousness.
However, I truly believe that African American cultural norms are largely anti-intellectual, curb a child’s cognitive development and retard progress in black individuals and the black community as a whole.
Many groups have had customs, attributes, or tendencies which have been destructive to that group. Many Sicilians have been corrupted and savaged by the Mafia. A small sect of Hasidic Jews performed a strange variant of the circumcision rite in which the “moyel,” or person performing the surgery, licked the wound he had just made with his knife. (And about ten years ago, two or three infant boys in NYC contracted Herpes from this perverted corruption of the ancient ritual and died). Jews and Italians should be ready to condemn those practices, some of them adhere to, which are patently unhealthy, harmful and hateful. Likewise, blacks should clean their own house.
These are some of the attributes, of the black community, which cripple the intellectual development of black children:
1) How black parents cripple the intellects of their children – “Don’t be talkin’ stupid” and “get me that thing there.”
To a certain extent, we think through words, and if a parent wanted to inhibit intellectual development, there’s no better way to do it than to frustrate the development of his child’s vocabulary. While a white parent might be more apt to say to her child, “Give me the red, green, ashtray,” thereby acquainting the child with three new words, a black parent will often say something like “get me that thing over there.”
When I was growing up, one of my closest friends was a black guy named Ernie. He was a nice guy, and one couldn’t help but feel really sad about him. His parents spoke in a grunting, midget vocabulary, skimpy in its use of nouns and adjectives. It was clear that he, like so many other black kids, were destined to start elementary school with an impoverished vocabulary, lagging behind white students even before the race had begun.
(Black people and educators have told me that black parents have a propensity to speak to their children with an anemic vocabulary.)
Very often, Ernie asked lots of questions, about time, about political developments, about housing, and no matter what sort of query Ernie proffered, his parents’ response was belittling and bellicose in the way that parents get away with being aggressive to their kids.
His Mother would put her hand on her ample hip, and in a voice dripping with scorn like a crown of thorns, she would say, “Don’t be talking stupid.”
Any exploratory or investigative or intellectual interests he may have had were nothing but stupid pipe dreams that had best be nipped in the bud; asking a lot of questions can get in the way of being a good field hand.
Of course, we were in New York City and Ernie wasn’t going to grow up to be a field hand. But he would continue in the same sort of work. Maybe he would throw containers of trash into a garbage truck. Maybe he would grow up to become a security guard. The manufacturing jobs which were a stepping-stone to the middle class for the white ethnics in the first half of the 20th century --- the Italians, Poles, Jews etc. – were fast disappearing and the sort of jobs available for black boys were few.
In any event, even though I grew up with Ernie in the mid and late sixties, when hopes for Civil Rights were at their Zenith, when President Johnson said, on the floor of the U.S. Congress, that “we shall overcome” and Bobby Kennedy prayed with Caesar Chavez, to my friend’s family it was and would always be 1955 in the Florida panhandle, and they assiduously taught Ernie to think less of himself, to remember that he was a colored boy, and to see as the acme of jobs opportunities some sort of position in which he would wear overalls and speak with a snappy and deferential, “Yes, Sir.”
Ernie, incidentally, died when he was 17, killed in an automobile accident. Actually, he had a penchant for near misses with death. Once he made the papers because he had fallen off of the pier on 69th Street, in Brooklyn, and floated, near death, for about two miles in Lower New York Bay, and if my memory serves me correctly, he once was accidentally electrocuted. He never said he was depressed, and he seemed to be well-adjusted. However, he just didn’t seem to value his life that much.
2) The tendency to revel in expansive emotions and to ignore content, reason and logic.
A) About thirty years ago, I went to a movie theatre to view “Malcom X,” starring Denzel Washington. I could not hear a thing Denzel Washington, or any of the other characters, were saying. This is because the audience, 95 percent of whom were young blacks, had a way of viewing the movie which radically diverged from the way white people want to view movies. When I see a movie, I want to comprehend the plot, and I want to determine what ideas were espoused by the film. The Black audience was not interested in any of the ideas in the movie.
To the black audience the world of words did not exist. Ideas did not exist. The only thing that existed was the glory of their vibrant, hyperbolic emotions. The audience screamed and shouted, and every woman in that theatre seemed to be having an orgasm for Denzel Washington. No matter what Denzel Washington had to say, the audience had to shout, with a screeching “Right on,” or an emphatic, “Tell it, brother,” or just an indecipherable syllabic mush that didn’t sound like any words in the English language.
Actually, some of Malcolm X’s ideas were quite brilliant, and I will never forget one argument he made, in one of his written works (this of course wasn’t in the aforementioned movie) against black assimilation which actually buttressed the argument of Jewish nationalists, something that I would wager a lot of money that black activists, who never read Malcolm, probably don’t know about.
Malcom said that assimilation for blacks would not pay, and he cited, as evidence, the story of German Jews. German Jewry, unlike the Jews in other European countries, assiduously tried to be less Jewish, be more German, and kiss the rear ends of their anti-Semitic German neighbors. And anti Semitism became fiercer in Nazi Germany than in any other spot on the globe.
B) About thirty years ago, Nelson Mandela visited New York City. The New York Times’ coverage of Mandela’s New York trip included an interview with a black girl who had attended one of Mandela’s speeches or rallies. She said that she couldn’t hear anything that Mandela had to say but that the event was wonderful. Apparently, the ideas that he may have had were of no consequence to her. She seemed to exhibit the intellectual torpor and retardation of one stuck at about age 1, when one does not traffic in words and one knows no language. The cheering and screaming and spectacle were all that mattered to her.
3) Black Music – the beat goes on and on and on
The exaltation of rhythm and the death of melody. Hearing the same rhythm ad nauseum is equivalent to repeating the same dogma. Learning however entails movement or at least growth. We have a proposition, but we add to that proposition a new proposition and we formulate a conclusion. A mind is working when it masters a syllogism. Likewise, a mind is working when it puts different notes together, and the mood of a song changes in the course of 20 seconds. When rhythm never changes, one endures the mental mortification engendered by auditory stasis. As Sonny and Cher said, “The Beat goes on.” But when the beat is static, and when there is no melody, the beat is an irksome mosquito which makes me want to put my fist through the speakers of your sound system.
When I hear the same beat, incessantly, I can imagine lyrics that are in sync with the beat. Something like this: “We give you the same old shit day in, day out.” Actually, perhaps much of white racism stems from the perceived animalism and intellectual vacuity of black music. For example, Norman Mailer, usually furiously radical, said, in “Nixon in Miami and the Siege of Chicago,” that while listening to black music while waiting for a political event to begin, he became increasingly incensed by the black music he was hearing; the drums were like sentinels sending us back through the millennia to a pre-verbal world of beastly stupidity.
4) The feminization of intellectual life
In the black community, scholarship is the province of women. Black America in large measure views education the way 8-year-old white boys view education, i.e., as sissy stuff. And so while black families (Along with white millionaires in Professional Sports, murderers of brain power) almost seem to consciously mold their sons into grotesque stereotypes, implicitly telling them to be big and dumb athletes, black girls are considered apt for academia.
And black pedagogy lives in a tea parlor ambience, administered by haughty, queenly black teachers who have concocted the notion (also concocted by many white female teachers) that scholarship shines brightest when it is characterized by servitude, by servile students dutifully kissing their teachers’ butts. For example, although I have a rather high IQ, I often did horribly in elementary school because I did not conform to the ideal extolled by our female teachers, which held that students should behave like the child cast in “The Sound of Music,” reeking of saccharine adorability.
Of course, by the seventh grade, education changes and is shorn of its ornate ribbons and curls, but a boy, alienated by the feminine slant of education in grades K through 6, and consequently not reading on grade level, will be, by the 6th grade, far too estranged from scholarship to ever overcome his early alienation.
5) The Cognitive Claustrophobia of the Black Church
I have heard more than one black preacher say that a) he had to tell his flock something, b) that powerful people did not want him to say what he was going to say, c) but that he would still say it because “G-d told me to tell you.”
The minister does not state that God actually spoke to him by producing sound with a decibel level, or making a plane skywrite his divine instructions. That is besides the point.
The preacher relays the fiction that God told him to say something because both preacher and flock enjoy denying reason. They revel in the idea that they can give an idea Divine sanction by imagining that God told the preacher to say something. When one gets into the habit of thinking like that, or believing that things are true simply because you want to believe them to be true, you will soon get into the habit of believing that the answer to question 28 is choice C simply because you want it to be choice C.
In addition, the black church squelches intelligence because it denies subtlety, complexity and ambiguity. Every question merits an emphatic no or a resounding, reverberating Amen, mouthed with all the militance of Madea (that Tyler Perry construction) pledging to “knock us upside our head.” It might be fun, and it might give one an emotional catharsis, but sometimes that which is morally correct is not easily discerned with snap judgments. Sometimes, thinking matters.