Don’t Be Like That: Does black culture need to be reformed?

[THEANGEL&THEGAMBLER]

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/09/dont-like

Don’t Be Like That
Does black culture need to be reformed?
by KELEFA SANNEH

It was just after eight o’clock on a November night when Robert McCulloch, the prosecuting attorney for St. Louis County, announced that a grand jury would not be returning an indictment in the police killing of Michael Brown, who was eighteen, unarmed, and African-American. About an hour later and eight hundred miles away, President Obama delivered a short and sober speech designed to function as an anti-inflammatory. He praised police officers while urging them to “show care and restraint” when confronting protesters. He said that “communities of color” had “real issues” with law enforcement, but reminded disappointed Missourians that Brown’s mother and father had asked for peace. “Michael Brown’s parents have lost more than anyone,” he said. “We should be honoring their wishes.”

Even as he mentioned Brown’s parents, Obama was careful not to invoke Brown himself, who had become a polarizing figure. To the protesters who chanted, “Hands up! Don’t shoot!,” Brown was a symbol of the young African-American man as victim—the chant referred to the claim that Brown was surrendering, with his hands up, when he was killed. Critics of the protest movement were more likely to bring up the video, taken in the fifteen minutes before Brown’s death, that appeared to show him stealing cigarillos from a convenience store and then shoving and intimidating the worker who tried to stop him—the victim was also, it seemed, a perpetrator.

After the Times described Brown as “no angel,” the MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry accused the newspaper of “victim-blaming,” arguing that African-Americans, no matter how “angelic,” will never be safe from “those who see their very skin as a sin.” But, on the National Review Web site, Heather MacDonald quoted an anonymous black corporate executive who told her, “Michael Brown may have been shot by the cop, but he was killed by parents and a community that produced such a thug.” And so the Michael Brown debate became a proxy for our ongoing argument about race: where some seek to expose what America is doing to black communities, others insist that the real problem is what black communities are doing to themselves.

Sociologists who study black America have a name for these camps: those who emphasize the role of institutional racism and economic circumstances are known as structuralists, while those who emphasize the importance of self-perpetuating norms and behaviors are known as culturalists. Mainstream politicians are culturalists by nature, because in America you seldom lose an election by talking up the virtues of hard work and good conduct. But in many sociology departments structuralism holds sway—no one who studies African-American communities wants to be accused, as theTimes was, of “victim-blaming.” Orlando Patterson, a Jamaica-born sociologist at Harvard with an appetite for intellectual combat, wants to redeem the culturalist tradition, thereby redeeming sociology itself. In a manifesto published in December, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, he argued that “fearful” sociologists had abandoned “studies of the cultural dimensions of poverty, particularly black poverty,” and that the discipline had become “largely irrelevant.” Now Patterson and Ethan Fosse, a Harvard doctoral student in sociology, are publishing an ambitious new anthology called “The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth” (Harvard), which is meant to show that the culturalist tradition still has something to teach us.....

 

[Dzali OG]

Without reading the article, yes it does.

We need our brehs and brehettes to get back to science. We must put these entertainers in proper context: entertainment. Not above actual contributors.

Entertainment is not a route to real power. It's the route to well......entertain the powerful.

 

[Insun Park]

Yes

 

[Apollo Creed]

Quit letting Non Blacks tell you what Black Culture is. Mediocrity, Drug Abuse, Violence, etc aint Black Culture.

 

[Matt504]

Quit letting Non Blacks tell you what Black Culture is. Mediocrity, Drug Abuse, Violence, etc aint Black Culture.

These things are very much a part of Black culture.

 

[Apollo Creed]

These things are very much a part of Black culture.

I guess we have different definitions on what Black is.

 

[Bawon Samedi]

These things are very much a part of Black culture.

Knock it off.

 

[Matt504]

I guess we have different definitions on what Black is.

The subject is culture.

 

[Matt504]

Knock it off.

What is Black culture in your opinion?

 

[Apollo Creed]

The subject is culture.

Those things aren't a part of my culture, so more power to you if it's apart of yours.

 

[Bawon Samedi]

What is Black culture in your opinion?

I'm nit going to tell you again.

 

[Matt504]

Those things aren't a part of my culture, so more power to you if it's apart of yours.

What is Black culture in your opinion?

 

[Apollo Creed]

What is Black culture in your opinion?

Family Focused, Education, Music, and overall strength and Achievement.

Anything else is deviation from the culture caused from trauma due to the global events of History and it's impacts on Blacks.

Every where on Earth where you have Black People Music and Family especially are focal points.

 

[GoldTeef]

Family Focused, Education, Music, and overall strength and Achievement.

Is this for most blacks across the world or just african americans?

 

[Taadow]

What is Black culture

This is what has to be answered before stuffed-shirt magazines and alleged institutions of "higher-learning"
start writing anthologies about what's wrong with it...