George Bush Hates Black People

Sure, Kanye West's post-Katrina rant sounded more like the ramblings of a crazy conspiracy theorist than a qualified expert on urban race relations, but the longer I work with inner city youth in West Oakland, the more I see how right Mr. West indeed was. While there are parts of the country where race divides aren't as apparent, where the substantial majority of the poor and rich alike are white (like where I hail from in Indiana), here in Oakland, the race-class divide is disturbingly apparent. The social service I work for currently gives aid to about 150 different homeless and at-risk youth a month, aged between 14-24. And despite an almost equal percentage of black and white citizens in the Oakland area, all but one of our regular clients at the shelter are black or Hispanic kids. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to notice the gross imbalance of those statistics. At the moment, we have a government that refuses to acknowledge the institutionalized racism within the education and incarceration systems, which exhibits itself in the social blights of drug abuse, teen pregnancy, and urban violence.

We are losing entire generations of bright, young black men to the machine of anger and violence, perpetuated by a system that shows them on a daily basis that there is no way out of the cycle for them. Incarceration policies unfairly target the poor, which are, in many cases, young black men. The Bush Administrations policy of accelerated defunding of public schools also unfairly targets poor, urban districts, which have a greater chance of being primarily black or Hispanic children. Where rich, whiter schools have a greater chance of picking up the slack with their tax base when the government defunds their districts, these poorer schools are left to keep it together with the scraps left behind. They can no longer fund the extracurricular arts, sports, and music programs that inspire kids to greater things than the street life. They cannot afford even the most basically qualified teachers, because the cost of living is too high to keep them, and even when the qualified teachers stay on account of charity, their creativity is stifled by the curriculum constraints developed for kids whose experiential frames are vastly different from those accustomed to street life and the gangsta lifestyle.

On top of that, the Bush policy of abstinence only sex ed is doing our impoverished kids a serious disservice, promoting the silence and ignorance around the subject of sexuality and sexual freedom that are already rampant in urban culture. Here's a newsflash: Oakland kids are growing up in a milieu where 13 year old girls are frequently lured into the world of prostitution. And you're telling them to keep it in their pants until marriage?! Come on. These kids deserve to know the truth and be armed with the tools to protect themselves from predators, disease, and peer abuse.

It doesn't matter who gets the Democratic nomination within the next few weeks. Neither one of them will be the magic bullet to fix this issue. It's going to take a lot of hard work, love, and grace from the people who have the choice to look the other way. They are just children, but they are shooting each other in the streets, prostituting each other to pedophiles, and spending their entire lives in jail on account of the three-strikes rule, all because the Bush Administration has aggressively looked the other direction. I'm tired of seeing bright kids come into my office, talking nonchalantly of shooting each other and snorting heroin, because they truly believe they have nothing to live for or to contribute to society.