What’s up with African American literacy rates? David L. Horne, PH.D. | 10/3/2013, midnight

In the world of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other quick strike information processes, why is there a definite lack of evidence of a steady upward progression of reading and writing skills among African American contributors?

Post secondary education statistics continue to demonstrate that far too many African American students who finish high school do so as functional illiterates—that is, they cannot read and write at a basic level requisite for functional participation in modern life. In California, both the California State University system and the University of California system still annually allow (and mainly require) a significant proportion of incoming freshmen to register for developmental English courses—sometimes called “dumbbell” English— in order to assist the students in preparing to take regular-level freshmen college basic education courses. These developmental courses generally do not count toward a student’s graduation but must still be paid for through regular tuition. Both university systems realize this is not a very efficient use of taxpayer dollars, however, the literacy levels of the students coming to them out of high school require this kind of intervention. As of 2009, the Department of Education reported that literacy rates for more than 50 percent of African American children in the fourth grade nationwide was below the basic skills level and far below average; and by the ninth grade nationwide, the situation had gotten worse, with the rate dropping below 44 percent. Yes, there is still an unemployment crisis in the nation’s Black communities, but what is feeding and ensuring the longevity of that crisis is the ballooning illiteracy rate among Black youth and adults. What happened to that post-antebellum slavery zeal that put educational attainment, including reading and writing skills, as the sustained priority for advancement in American society? How did we drop that ball? These are bedeviling questions especially with Sept. 24 labeled National Punctuation Day, and it was accompanied by a broad national reflection on the lack of proper writing skills among modern American youth. Officially, NPD, “is a celebration of the lowly comma, correctly used quotation marks, and other proper uses of periods, semicolons, and the ever-mysterious ellipsis.” Giving even a casual glance at regular comments typed into Twitter, Instagram and on Facebook pages, American youth are in deep need, accompanied by deepening denial, of literacy help. And, citing the old chestnut, “when White folks sneeze, Black folks catch the flu,” where there is this dire a problem among America’s youth in general, African American youth are staring at death’s door regarding functional literacy in America. What can be done about it, if anything? Where there is still parenting going on, we need to encourage the love of reading (not just urge our youth to read so-called great books), and we need to encourage African American youth to actually write sentences in letters, notes, homework assignments, etc. We might even spend a little time checking—proof-reading—their material ourselves. African Americans simply cannot afford this self-imposed hump onto already overloaded backs. It’s one thing to still have to fight everyday acts of random racism in our lives. That’s the nature of the beast we deal with. It is another thing altogether though, to handicap ourselves. Suicide has never been our favorite or most popular response to oppression, but we have to call this literacy problem what it is—cultural and political suicide. C’mon ya’ll. Let’s get with it. Forward not backwards. Professor David L. Horne is founder and executive director of PAPPEI, the Pan African Public Policy and Ethical Institute, which is a new 501(c)(3) pending community-based organization or non-governmental organization (NGO). It is the stepparent organization for the California Black Think Tank which still operates and which meets every fourth Friday.

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Source: http://ourweekly.com/news/2013/oct/03/whats-african-american-literacy-rates/

This article discusses an issue that has dogged that African American community for centuries.

Black couple who refused vaccine due to infamous Tuskegee syphilis study die from COVID-19 three hours apart—Raw Story—Celebrating 17 Years of Independent Journalism. (n.d.). Retrieved August 1, 2021, from https://www.rawstory.com/black-couple-who-refused-vaccine-due-to-tuskogee-study-die-from-19-three-hours-apart/

Time in the US, Pastimes, Music; Feelings, Despair, Hope

Time in the US, Pastimes, Music, Playing, Favorite; States, North Carolina

I feel like schools should read this book in order to acknowledge how badly African Americans were being treated even after fighting for America.

Jamison, A. M., Quinn, S. C., & Freimuth, V. S. (2019). “You don’t trust a government vaccine”: Narratives of Institutional Trust and Influenza Vaccination among African American and White Adults. Social Science & Medicine (1982), 221, 87–94. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2018.12.020

IZA – Institute of Labor Economics. ‘COVID-19 and the Labor Market’. Accessed 6 October 2020. https://covid-19.iza.org/publications/dp13707/.

Knittel, C. R., & Ozaltun, B. (2020). What Does and Does Not Correlate with COVID-19 Death Rates (Working Paper No. 27391; Working Paper Series). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w27391

A Path to Reproductive Justice: Research, Practice and Policies. (2020, July 15). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YYQ_bKQij0&feature=emb_logo

Racism: The Ultimate Underlying Condition. (2020, June 18). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cozo8lj_RTA&feature=emb_logo

APHA. (n.d.) Advancing Racial Equity Webinar Series. https://www.apha.org/racial-equity

Craven, J. (2020, May 21). It’s Not Too Late to Save Black Lives. Slate Magazine. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/05/covid-19-black-communities-health-disparity.html

Yu, Q., Salvador, C., Melani, I., Berg, M., & Kitayama, S. (2020, May 14). The lethal spiral: Racial segregation and economic disparity jointly exacerbate the COVID-19 fatality in large American cities. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/xgbpy

Sood, L., & Sood, V. (2020). Being African American and Rural: A Double Jeopardy from Covid‐19. The Journal of Rural Health, jrh.12459. https://doi.org/10.1111/jrh.12459

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"The Fifteenth Amendment stated that people could not be denied the right to vote based on “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” This construction allowed states to continue to decide the qualifications of voters as long as those qualifications were ostensibly race-neutral. Thus, while states could not deny African American men the right to vote on the basis of race, they could deny it to women on the basis of sex or to people who could not prove they were literate." Before the 15th amendment women and colored men and women were not allowed to vote but the 15th amendment allowed these privileges and prevented discrimination amongst the rights of someone based on their race and gender and states cannot deny these rights to the people because it is a constitutional law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sargent_Claude_Johnson

I dont believe some of this, blacks never had a voice during . That time if they were to speak up during that time they would often get punished. Blacks had no say in there freedom, slavery wasn't abolished to help slaves, Abraham Lincoln didn't do it out of the kindness out of his heart.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

Photo of Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, and James Baldwin: three of the most prominent African American writers of the Civil Rights era. Image credit: New York Public Library Digital Collections.

I love the details, the pride, the power of this description!

This is such a powerful articulation--borrowed from Baldwin as the epigraph makes clear--of the social construct of whiteness.

A riff on the title of TNC's forthcoming book, itself a a riff on WEB Du Bois's famous description of black experience in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). As he opens that book in a chapter entitled "Of Our Spiritual Strivings":

BETWEEN me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it.

This reminds me of the incident during the Baltimore Uprising in April where Toya Graham beats her son. Stacey Patton wrote about this:

The kind of violent discipline Graham unleashed on her son did not originate with her, or with my adoptive mother who publicly beat me when I was a child, or with the legions of black parents who equate pain with protection and love. The beatings originated with white supremacy, a history of cultural and physical violence that devalues black life at every turn. From slavery through Jim Crow, from the school-to-prison pipeline, the innocence and protection of black children has always been a dream deferred. http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/04/29/why-is-america-celebrating-the-beating-of-a-black-child/

Hard not to relate this piece to another great statement of African American experience: Frederick Douglass's 1841 speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”

A line from Elvie Thomas's "Motherless Child Blues":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmj23UrVF80

The trope of the motherless child is a popular one in African American art. Of course the destruction of families was a major consequence of the slave trade and the institution of slavery.