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A difference between inner-city and suburban schools
By adamg on Wed, 10/18/2006 - 10:08am
Harold M. Clemens reports the police showed up at the inner-city school where he teaches last week with drug-sniffing dogs:
... same way my students go through a metal detector and get patted down everyday before entering the building, while white boys in the middle of nowhere walk into their pristine schools unacosted and gun everything in dat bitch down. ...
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Comments
that's great. he would be
that's great. he would be the first person screaming about the disparity in protection if there was a shooting inside his school. you can say whatever you want, but there is a major problem with firearm related violence in the city, and keeping guns out of schools should be an absolute priority, even if it is not politically correct. also, after reading his full post, i dont know if i should even take mr clemons seriously, but comparing metal detectors in schools to slavery is insane, and only minimizes what an atrocity slavery was.
well..
Careful, it doesn't look like you read the post carefully enough. He's talking about the dogs reminding him of slavery and how dogs were used during slavery, not the metal detectors reminding him of slavery. Did any of the schools during the recent school shootings have metal detectors or drug sniffing dogs? No. There's a HUGE disparity between the way 'inner-city' school children and suburban school children are treated. He astutely compares the 'war' on drugs as an analogy to the school shootings, but he's not addressing gun control in the post. He's talking about drugs and police harassment. He's saying that the lack of a 'war' on meth is ridiculous compared to the 'war' on pot as he sees it in his place of business.
Harold makes some good
Harold makes some good points, as usual, but the comment about schools in the middle of nowhere makes no practical sense. Really, would there be any good reasons for a one-room Amish schoolhouse to have metal detectors and a security guard? Would it make sense for a school with less than 500 kids, in an area that sees less than 1 murder a year, and has no gang activity, to spend a big chunk of it's budget on security? City schools are surrounded by more crime, just by virtue of their locations. It makes sense to have tighter security. And while I don't agree with the current persecution of pot smokers, I don't feel sorry for kids who are caught with drugs at school, be it by dogs, drug tests, or locker searches.
wasn't slavery 140 years ago?
harold seems to have some bad memories of the dog's searching for "nigras" in the slave days.either harold is 160 years old or he needs to get over it.
Just because chattel slavery ended 140 years ago...
...doesn't mean we have achieved racial parity and justice. Although slavery "officially" ended in 1865, the legacies of slavery (Jim Crow, the post bellum South, share cropping, the brutally racist penal systems and law enforcement systems of the South, the KKK (of which many elected officials and law enforcement officers were appart), institutionalized racism, Civil Rights Movement, bussing, segregation) are not so distant memories. Dr. King and Malcolm X's assasinations were only 38 years ago. Gaping wounds like that don't heal overnight.
I went to a predominantly White high school. Never once did we have dogs sweep through fro drugs. Kids were smoking pot at lunch and dropping acid in class. They would huff chemicals and drink in the bathroom. I'm sure there were other substances.
The point I walked away with was that kids will be kids. We all did some dumb-ass/illegal stuff as a kid. But certain kids are looked at harder because their neighborhood, because of crimes that happen outside of the school, it gives authority an excuse to get these kids in trouble. These kids aren't doing anything different then other kids, but they have to start their adult lives at the disadvantage of a record.
this whole thing is silly.
this whole thing is silly. slavery's impact upon society, or whether or not racism still exists is not, and should not, even be up for debate. every single person holds some sort of prejudice. the author of the original post (clemons) demonstrates some pretty obvious prejudices on his website. i just don't think one can argue one point - the firearm related violence in the city is grossly disproportionate to the firearm violence in the suburbs. the likelihood of a student bringing a firearm to school is statistically and practically more likely in the city rather than the suburbs. these things are not debatable. to not try and prevent violence in the schools, by whatever method is reasonable, would be outrageous. if mr clemons is offended by what he perceives as too much security, i would think he would be even more offended if one his students was a victim of gunfire inside the school. but then again, he strikes me as a person that would find something to complain about no matter what course the schools took.
Firearms in Schools
Okay genius: how many school shootings have been in city schools? I mean, you say "the likelihood of a student bringing a firearm to school is statistically and practically more likely in the city rather than the suburbs. these things are not debatable" I don't see any proof you've offered and don't know of any studies that prove your point. In fact, given the presence of metal detectors in city schools, the likelihood is less because the gun will never get in the door. But keep imagining the city as a scary scary place. If we're going to use statistics as a guide, suburban high schools are the ones which should have metal detectors. But then again, violent crime never really happens in the suburbs does it? It's all just a city problem.....
I'm with Harold in wondering when the drug sniffing dogs are going to go through Wellesley High School.
um i live in the suburbs and
um i live in the suburbs and went to an affluent suburban high school and we still have drug dogs so you dont know what you are talking about either
A critical examination of race...
...is never silly. In fact, it is a mjor field in acedemia worked on by some of the country's brightest scholars.
And slavery's impact on today's society is valid and important discussion considering how the African American experience is treated in our education system. They had me believe that Martin Luther King solved everything and institutional racism is no longer sanctioned, that everyone - Blacks, Women, other-sexed peoples, Asians, etc - are all equal now.
White people make up 80% of the population, Black people 12%. Yet, according to the FBI, 68% of racial biased hate crime victims are black compared to 20% White. That means although White people account for 7 times as many people, the relatively small Black population has 3.5 as many hate crimes commited against them.
Tell me again why discussing racism is silly?
my numbers are bigger than yours
tblade,
there were 6 hate-motivated murders in America last year. In all, there were 16,900 murders. There were 3 hate-motivated rapes, compared to almost 94,000 rapes overall. There were over 10 million property crimes, of which less than 4,000 were hate motivated. And those hate crimes include non-racial hate crimes.
In 2004, black-on-white made up 8.5% of all murders (where the race of both victim and offender are known), while white-on-black was 3.5%. Both percentages are overstated since the FBI is extremely stingy with separating Hispanic crime data from non-Hispanic white data.
In 1995, whites (including all Hispanics) made up 56% of rape arrestees, blacks 42%. Victims, however, were evenly divided by race.
Whites make up 67% (or less) of the population. You might be able to get close to 75% if you add white Hispanics, unless you're the FBI and count all Hispanics as white, a practice I'm sure colleges, employers and courts are going to emulate any day now (yes, that's sarcasm).
That said, I agree it's unreasonable to expect black Americans to somehow ignore their past and its impact on their present situation.
However, we're now pretty far removed from Harold's point, which I'm somewhat unsure about what it actually is? Does he want an end to BPD drug sweeps in Boston schools? Or remove the metal detectors?
Hate crime stats
Where are you getting your hate crime stats? Just curious, because different municipalities have different definitions they use.
Also, of course, these crimes go very underreported. I know of someone who was a victim of a clear hate crime and couldn't report it because she could be fired from her job that has the legal right to fire GLBT individuals.
http://1smootshort.blogspot.com
fbi
sure, eeka, they're from the FBI 2005 crime stats.
My stats...
...came from the US Census Bureau (population) and Hate Crimes came from the FBI.
I think he's right about the
I think he's right about the drugs enforcement being hypocritical, but not the guns. While it's true school shootings have only occurred in suburban/rural schools, those are aberrations committed by lone lunatics. Kids in the burbs don't carry weapons around with them. It's not like in Roxbury, where you have a significant minority of teenagers who carry guns or knives on a daily basis. I'm not necessarily blaming the kids, it's obvious why you'd do it if you live in a violent neighborhood, but weapons should not be in schools. If it weren't for metal detectors, you'd have a lot more kids bringing guns in.
He's right about drug enforcement though, it's undeniably targeted at certain neighborhoods and against certain groups of people. In the hood, there's a minority of kids who are involved in selling harder drugs, but most kids don't do anything regularly except smoke weed and drink. It's kind of hard to view coke and heroin as recreational drugs when you grew up with junkies and dope dealers in the street keeping you up all night. In a lot of suburban areas, you have a lot of kids sniffing coke, taking shrooms and acid, using speed, popping all kinds of pills, and they don't have to deal with getting stopped and frisked on the street or having drug-sniffing dogs sweep through their schools. The biggest drug problem in America right now is meth, it's everywhere in a lot of rural areas, and instead the government's dedicating its resources to busting people for smoking weed. I think conservatives would feel a lot differently about the war on drugs if it was kids in their communities getting searched for no reason and arrested over small amounts of drugs.