A Crime Against the Innocents

Back in the late 1980s, when I taught at Cal State Northridge, I remember, in particular, two young black male students. They were roommates, and after performing a little better than average, they showed up on final examination day and rattled off two new versions of the “dead grandmother” alibi to justify a need for an extension.

After listening to them, I remember “going off” in front of their fellow classmates and telling them how I resented their attempts to “shuck and jive” me with such lame excuses. I told them they were two of the fortunate few black men to even be in college, and they had a responsibility to take it seriously. They stumbled back, embarrassed and startled by what certainly must have seemed my unjustified volcanic rage. But the truth was, I didn’t want to lose them. I’d long since realized that there were few, if any, black males in my classes.

Previously, I’d taught their damaged peers in the California Youth Authority and by and large, the bulk of my incarcerated students had one common bond: They were functionally illiterate. I soon resolved it was important not to create another failed educational experience. So I strove to quickly assess their skills and try to strengthen them. But more important, it was essential to tell them, constantly, that they could be winners.

A few years later, while I was meandering through the African Marketplace Festival, a young man grabbed my arm and identified himself as a former student from my Youth Authority classes. He said that a book I had required the class to read had turned his life around. He proudly told me that he was enrolled in a community college.

All of these memories came back recently as I read the results of a study by the San Francisco-based Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice. The study documented what has been occurring over the past 15 years and found that there are 10,474 African American males enrolled in the UC and Cal State systems and 41,434 in our prisons. Funds drained from a once-proud educational system have now been funneled into a first-class penal system.

The result is that the state of California has become a modern-day King Herod. Like the despot from the New Testament who ordered the slaughtering of all male babies to ensure that a Messiah would not survive, our government policies and our lack of leadership are implicitly achieving that. If the current trend continues, by the turn of the century one out of every seven black babies boys will have a greater chance of going to jail than to college.

As citizens of a mighty state, we should be ashamed that we have allowed such a trend to continue. Through complacency, benign neglect or bigotry, each of us is implicated in this crime.