[MCP] Officer Suspended Over 'Ghetto Handbook'

Sun Sep 16 21:06:06 EDT 2007

Interesting stuff.  Why is anybody surprised?  The insolence of white privilege, often abetted by apologetic African-Americans who imagine they are being helpful by extending tolerant 
"understanding" with their pacific dispositions or intentions but in fact just add to the confusion which amuses and further empowers over-entitled whites, will go on and on and on in this race-cracked society until whites in power agree that reparations is a genuine ethical obligation and not just an extremist idea by fringe intellectuals of the black academic elite.  

  There is no double standard, sp moynihan, unless you're referring to this nation's prevalent racist one which subsidizes rich white schoolkids while robbing students of color.  And you have to be short of sleep, or something just as critical to good judgment, if you're assuming any sort of intellectual or political equivalence between the Ebonics movement and what those district police officers did.

  I have a couple of brief criticisms of two things said below, one by John Lindsay, and the second in the text of the news item under review:

  First, about helping make the "transition to proper English" this is a definitely INCORRECT phrasing of your point.  There isn't a single form of "proper English."  That was the whole point of the Ebonics movement, to educate whites like myself who imagined the ideology that you just reiterated to be a fact, rather than a politically-structured form of inequality posing as common sense.  When I worked with black students in various high school and junior high school settings, I've told them that the great African American writers were masters of both "Ebonics" and "standard English," and we read aloud Langston Hughes and James Baldwin, August Wilson, Lorraine Hansberry, Ntozake Shange, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and others, all fluent brilliant writers of the English language, which has many dialects, all of which are perfect languages in form and function.  Rather than call the Eurocentric form of literate English "proper English," or even "standard English," as if
 English had one form only (both labels I taught my students to be cognizant of), I told them it maybe makes more sense to speak of it as "power English," since it is the form of English used by the powerful in this white-dominant society.  
            Having been reticent about reading aloud the four-letter-word sprinkled prose of white memoirist Tobias Wolff in his This Boy's Life, my students soon took to it with relish.  But when we read Fences by August Wilson, even though we had already dived into Langston Hughes and other Harlem Renaissance poets, they were very reluctant at first to read Wilson's lines aloud.  Luckily I was able to get them past that hurdle, and by coincidence (this was a charter school in east Oakland with a couple of older black gentlemen who worked as security guards) one of the security guards had, just the year before, played the lead role in Fences in a community theatre, so he added immense energy and legitimacy to the curriculum for my students.  I was truly blessed in that classroom by the radiant presence of so many unique voices, young women and men who all proved their gifts as poets and people of good character.

  My second point, in agreement with John Lindsay that the booklet was indeed designed to belittle and mock, to degrade and dehumanize, rather than to enlighten or to facilitate communication, it wasn't just racist, but also sexist, as the term "hoodrat" "translated into proper english" was rendered in a grossly misogynous manner that any person of any color would have no trouble recognizing as such.  

  The perpetrators of the 8-page manual merit the harshest penalty allowable by law, and owe the affected communities a public apology and some form of genuine community service, not necessarily of their choosing, for restitution and to demonstrate their reformed dispositions if they intend to be any kind of credible public servants in the future.

John Lindsay <jclind2 at msn.com> wrote:
      .hmmessage P  {  margin:0px;  padding:0px  }  body.hmmessage  {  FONT-SIZE: 10pt;  FONT-FAMILY:Tahoma  }    
Surely you jest....based on the number of insightful messages about white privilege/institutional discrimination, etc., you've posted over the years to McP....or are you playing Devil's Advocate for a would-be uninformed member who might be motivated to proffer a similar statement?!

If not, I could venture a couple or more ways to reply.

One, although I don't support the use of the N-word/ebonics, "aren't Blacks allowed to use it...while whites are not?!"

Two, its proposed usage in Oakland was "to educate teachers in order that they could understand what students were saying/writing, and then be able to help them make the transition to using proper English".....while the purpose of the security officers noted in the article is to denigrate, mock, ridicule, and the like. 

  John L.  (aka Jordan Mardan)

  From: spmoynihan at comcast.net
To: mcp at edchange.org; abdullah56 at aol.com
Date: Sat, 15 Sep 2007 13:13:07 -0400
CC: awp_project at yahoogroups.com; mcp at edchange.org; speakingoutagainstracism at yahoogroups.com; sarn at yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [MCP] [Norton AntiSpam] Officer Suspended Over 'Ghetto Handbook'

      .ExternalClass .EC_hmmessage P  {padding-right:0px;padding-left:0px;padding-bottom:0px;padding-top:0px;}  .ExternalClass EC_BODY.hmmessage  {font-size:10pt;font-family:Tahoma;}        But the use of Ebonics in Oakland was applauded?  Is this a double standard?

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: John Lindsay 
  To: abdullah56 at aol.com 
  Cc: awp_project at yahoogroups.com ; SpeakingOutAgainstRacism at yahoogroups.com ; sarn ; mcp at edchange.org 
  Sent: Friday, September 14, 2007 2:05 PM
  Subject: [Norton AntiSpam] [MCP] Officer Suspended Over 'Ghetto Handbook'

Thanks, Mustafa!!!

    John L. 

---------------------------------

  From: ABDULLAH56 at aol.com
Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2007 05:09:04 -0400
Subject: Officer Suspended Over 'Ghetto Handbook'
To: 

      Officer Suspended Over 'Ghetto Handbook'  "Wucha dun did now?" Causes Stir in Houston School District  
  AP
    HOUSTON -- A school district suspended a police officer as it investigates his distribution of a "Ghetto Handbook" and the three-month lapse before top district officials were informed of it.

The eight-page booklet, subtitled "Wucha dun did now?", was handed out to about 15 Houston Independent School District police officers at a May meeting, district spokesman Terry Abbott said. Officials declined to identify the officer who handed them out, but said he had been ordered to attend diversity training.

A supervisor immediately collected the booklets, Abbott said, but district officials said they didn't learn about the incident until someone complained to the district's Equal Employment Opportunity Office in mid-August.

"This publication was completely reprehensible and HISD condemns it in the strongest possible terms," Superintendent Abelardo Saavedra said in a written statement Thursday.

He said he has "mounted a very aggressive investigation."

District Police Chief Charles Wiley had no comment, Abbott said.

The booklet billed itself as a guide to Ebonics, teaching the reader to speak "as if you just came out of the hood." It included definitions such as "foty: a 40-ounce bottle of beer"; "aks: to ask a question"; and "hoodrat: scummy girl."

The booklet names six district officers "and the entire day shift patrol" as contributors. Abbott said a preliminary investigation has cleared those officers of involvement.

Last year, almost 30 percent of the district's 202,000 students were black and almost 60 percent were Hispanic.

Carol Mims Galloway, president of the Houston NAACP chapter, said the officer who created the book should be severely punished or fired.

"It was really a slap in the African-American community's face," said Galloway, who is running for the school board.

"We're paying their salaries with our tax dollars," Galloway said of the district police. "It does reflect on the district."

School board member Larry Marshall said the document was inappropriate, even if it was meant to be a joke.

"These are very racially sensitive times," he said. "It was a huge mistake in judgment."

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