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It shouldn’t be a surprise that a 17-year-old Black teen was gunned down in Florida. The mentality of Mr. Zimmerman is the mentality of many K-12, college and university administrators who’ve replaced education for Black students in white spaces for benign neglect and abandonment of culture. Yes it’s true, Blacks and Native Americans in Minnesota’s public institutions have been “gunned-downed,” “murdered,” “suspended and expelled,” in an ongoing and more powerful effort in 2012 to, “Kill them before they grow.”
"Go places? Do graveyards count?" (Photo Comic edited by IBNN)
by Donald W. R. Allen, II – Editor in Chief/The Independent Business News Network
Minneapolis, MN (IBNN/Education Editorial/March 25, 2012)…I live in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It just so happens that Minneapolis is one of the most racist states in America. The racism that affects Minneapolis is one directed towards its people of color. It shows in the form of economic racism, institutionalized racism, wealth racism and a racism that is perpetrated by some of the last people who you would think – same-race racism.
Institutionalized racism can be seen in our K-12 public school systems, or commonly called the “Drop Out Factories” where it is common play to suspend or eject 16 Black students for every 1 White student; our public schools (Minneapolis) rank first in having the widest education success gap between Black and White students. (See the numbers here – Google Doc.)
The disparity gets worse when you include Native Americans in Minneapolis.
In Minnesota’s higher education institutions the retention of Black students is at an historical low. In 2011, some local campuses lost more than 15% of the student body by midterm. Colleges and universities make their federal dollars from student aid – but what happens to the disenfranchised student that has left the halls of higher education? There is little to no concern for tailoring programs to define and address the significant loss in Blackness on local college campuses. There’s a saying on the streets, “A pimp will always accept money from a prostitute, regardless of what she/he needs.”
Haven’t Blacks and Native Americans earned the right to a fair and balanced education? In my hometown of Minneapolis, an education should be a civil right – but administrators have turn away from cognitive thinking in favor of misguided administrative programs that hand out hefty salaries to administrators that in some cases have never ran a shoe shop. This is the kind of racism that is focused to kill our children before they grow.
The bad words in Minnesota’s halls of education are Blacks, Black males, and Black males graduating and Black children.
In spite of the recent shooting in Florida of an unarmed teen, Blacks in Minnesota have been murdered repeatedly as it pertains to a fair and balanced education with opportunities to grow.
To be continued…Part II: What’s Happening to our Black Educators?
