Lifting Up Black Boys
of Jackson, MS Welcomes You! Celebrating FAMILY
WHEN
Second Tuesday & Fourth Thursday Monthly 6:30pm - 8:00pm
WHERE
Fondren Presbyterian Church 3220 Old Canton Rd
PHONE
(601) 922-4968
P.O. Box 13092 Jackson, MS 39236
PFLAGJacksonMS@aol.com
398 Hwy. 51 • Ridgeland, MS (601) 853-3299 • www.villagebeads.com
York. Many were grown-ups who had never before set a toe in the Deep South. For three days, they stalked the (eerily empty) streets of Jackson and the campus of Jackson State, waiting for the ghosts of hooded night riders to leap from the shadows. In the end, mostly they were surprised by what they didn’t find. “It’s clear that one of the draws for folks was the mystique,� Walker said. “I would like to think all of them came because of COSEBOC, but I know a lot of them came because of Mississippi. Many people came up to me and said, ‘Wow, this is not what I thought it was going to be like.’ They were relieved but excited about having the experience of making that trek to Mississippi, just because of its reputation.� Perhaps also lured by the symbolism of Mississippi’s dark racist past, President Obama’s White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans decided to hold its second Black Male Summit on the campus of Jackson State immediately after the conclusion of the COSEBOC conference. (The first one was held in March at Atlanta’s Morehouse College.) As the White House continues to work out the details and goals of Obama’s muchdiscussed “My Brother’s Keeper� initiative, having the COSEBOC educators all gathered in one place gave White House officials a keen opportunity to figure out how much they can do on behalf of black boys with limited funds at their disposal. (The president’s promise of $250 million to $300 million for the initiative, which would work out to just $5 million to $6 million per state if spread around evenly, is hardly enough to fund a well-equipped community center in each state). Racial Literacy Needed? Howard Stevenson is a professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania whose area of specialization is a topic most white educators would probably rather sit for a root canal than confront head-on: How their unwillingness or
from page 15
The Challenges
T
he Schott Foundation for Public Education’s “Black Boys Report� shows that Mississippi’s black male graduation rate was for the 2009-2010 school year was lower than the national average.
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51 percent of black males graduated here compared to the white male graduation rate at 62 percent during the 2009-2010 school year. The national black male graduation rate was 52 percent. With 124,557 enrolled black males, Mississippi’s graduation rates ranked 37th in the nation. Mississippi’s graduation rate for black males was 46 percent during the 2007-2008 academic year. 17.6 percent of black students were suspended in Mississippi during the 2009-2010 school year compared to 6.4 percent of white students and 4.7 percent of Latino students. 7 percent of Mississippi black male students are proficient readers by National Assessment of Educational Progress’s standards by eighth grade. 8 percent of black male students in Mississippi are proficient in eighthgrade math, according to NAEP requirements.
“We could become a model for the nation in educating young men and boys of color� inability to deal with their own racial biases and stereotypes leads to horrible and stressful interactions with black boys in their classrooms—interactions that can have a devastating effect on the boys’ academic achievement. For whites and certainly even for African Americans, thinking about, discussing and recounting a racial encounter can be enormously stressful. Stevenson demonstrated by having the participants in his COSEBOC workshop pair up and tell each other
about any racial incident that came to mind. When asked to share their feelings later, the participants were surprised and alarmed by how much stress they felt during the retelling, almost like they were living through it again. It is this stress stemming from racial conflicts with their white teachers that is killing the performance of black boys in school, Stevenson claims—thousands of “micro-aggressions� between teacher and child that the teacher may not even be clued into. And according to Stevenson, it really doesn’t matter what the teacher’s intentions are; it only matters what the student is perceiving are the reasons for the encounter. Stevenson wants teachers to develop what he calls “racial literacy,� which means learning how to identify stress in their students and knowing how to recast the moment to bring down the student’s stress level. Stevenson says most of us develop avoidance skills when it comes to racial stress, rather than engagement skills.
PUGH
May 28 - June 3, 2014
BONDING
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