THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 8, 1995 TAG: 9510060611
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY BENJAMIN D. BERRY, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 92 lines
I announced to my family and colleagues last week that I intend to be present for the Million Man March called by Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam. I expected that there would be objections offered to this idea from family, and especially from friends and colleagues.
Minister Farrakhan has a reputation of preaching an anti-white, anti-Semitic, anti-American message, and of encouraging violence. Respectable African Americans steer as far clear of this man as possible. How then, could I, a professor at a respected institution, suggest attending his march?
Since my announcement, I have discovered that a growing number of men who hold respected positions in this and other communities plan to attend, as are several young African-American men who are ``on their way up.''
My reasons for attending the Oct. 16 march in Washington may speak to the thinking of many others, and I present them here.
The condition of African-American males is now, and has been for a long time, at best tenuous. Some observers even describe the black male as ``an endangered species.''
``Emerge,'' which bills itself as ``Black America's Newsmagazine,'' reports that close to 80 percent of black males between the ages of 15 and 25 are now or will be caught up in the criminal justice system. Black males of that age are the people most likely to be the victims as well as the perpetrators of violent crime. They are less likely than their white counterparts to finish high school and more likely to be in special education classes; they are likely to be the products of single-parent homes and to become the absent fathers in future single-parent homes. They are the most frequent victims of a rising homicide rate.
These young men see themselves as having been abandoned by American society. National, state and local governments have given up on them. The educational system has turned its back on them. As they swagger down the street in clothes that have come to be identified with the ``hip- hop'' culture, even other blacks cross the street to avoid them.
Out of fear or revulsion, or a combination of the two, America has condemned this generation of African- American males to the junk heap of history, and, if we are to take the statements of the Republican-led Congress as indicative of what America thinks, we are placing the blame for most of our domestic problems at their feet.
Most African Americans are aware that these young blacks did not create the situation into which they were born. There are fundamental problems with the way our society is now structured, fundamental flaws in the way we handle the subjects of race and gender, and a fundamentally flawed distribution of wealth.
These are the root causes of the crisis which confronts America in the 1990s. And taking young, unwed women (read black women) off welfare, building more prisons to house criminals (read black criminals), executing perpetrators (again, read black) of violent crime will not ease the situation. White America is simply unwilling or unable to confront its own shortcomings, and finds in the young, poor black males a convenient scapegoat.
African Americans, particularly black males, cannot be content to sit back and blame everything wrong on the white-dominated society. As Minister Farrakhan has said, we must take control of our own lives, reestablish our own families, educate our own children, support our own women, and prepare our own young men to assume their rightful place in the society.
The fact that the society has given up on this generation does not mean that we give up on them. A people without hope ceases to be a people; a generation without hope is doomed.
My primary reason, if not my only reason, for attending this march is to say to the next generation of black men that there is hope, that you are not alone, that those of us who have fought the battles in the past have not fled from you to the comfort of the suburbs. We are here with you. We will share with you whatever wisdom we have acquired that you might live better lives. We will not leave you alone to fight the newly blossoming racism by yourselves.
And racism is blossoming again, this time with the blessing of many white political, judicial, academic and religious leaders. The conservative congress and court, the fundamentalist church and conservative voices in the media are combining to give racism and racist acts legitimacy once again. The anger expressed by young black men is completely justified and the vast majority of African Americans share that anger. It is for us to help this generation channel the anger into productive avenues. The African-American men who have survived beyond the age of 25 (and that is what we have done, survived) need to demonstrate how that survival was accomplished, and to teach those survival skills to the next generation.
A first step in this teaching is being there on Oct. 16, 1995, just as a major step in the previous struggle was being there on Aug. 28, 1963. I was there then. With God's help, I will be there in 1995. MEMO: Benjamin Berry is a professor of American Studies and History at
Virginia Wesleyan College.
ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Berry
by CNB