"it's like trying to teach a dog to be a cat"

Here, KRS-One comments on the structures that exist for African-American youth. If material and curriculum in schools are culturally irrelevant, how do they expect students to be engaged and learn? He recognizes the devaluing of non-white culture in school and declares to schools that if the schools help create a bad environment for a student, he himself becomes bad. He comments on the civil war among the black community. This is an important idea to note because one often sees the media framing an issue such that it appears that the entire black community has this certain opinion as a collective whole, when that is certainly not the case. He also frames the issue in such a way that possibly sees the classroom as a means of curing the lack of appreciation for black culture in wider society.

A Survival Curriculum for Inner-City Kids
By KRS-One
Published: Saturday, September 9, 1989

Young black New Yorkers are raised in a racially polarized society. The murder in Bensonhurst of Yusuf Hawkins is not an isolated incident. The number of racially motivated crimes has escalated since Howard Beach, as the city's mayoral candidates ought to know. And these crimes are only the most obvious form of racism.

Young black kids experience a more subtle form of racism when their heritage and culture are stripped from them early on in their schooling. While no single cause accounts for the problems of inner-city kids, much of what black youth is missing - self-esteem, creative opportunity, outlook, goals - can be traced to what we're not learning in schools.

If more creative effort and dedication is not put toward educating the large, vital and energetic populace that is this city's black youth, the city may soon be consumed by the symptoms of racism, and an already polarized New York may tear itself apart.

In the city's schools, Afro-American kids are taught white American history, while our own heritage is blatantly ignored. Everyone is supposed to learn about being (white) Americans. As I say in my song ''Why is that?'' It's like trying to teach a dog to be a cat.

I was homeless for seven years. My mother, a single parent, was overwhelmed with responsibility. Her uncertainty about the future created unbearable pressure at home. I ran away at the age of 13 to live an even more uncertain life, bouncing from park to subway to shelter. But at least I was in control.

The lessons they were teaching in school - Thomas Jefferson and the Civil War, etc. - left me empty. Aggravated at what I was expected to learn, I was even more aggravated that I wasn't even being taught what I desperately wanted to know.

Most of what I know of myself and my culture, the things I try to bring across in my songs, I picked up either in conversation with enlightened adults or through my own study. I took to the public libraries for shelter, but I came out with much more.

If my story has a happy ending, it is the exception. Most people refuse to understand that black inner-city youth, alienated by their schooling, are left with nothing else to grab onto.

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"the Dionysian trap for young black men"

Black youth need to rise up and stop being lazy...the American Dream is there's for the taking..."cultural explanations are wholly deterministic, leaving no room for human agency"...they need to stop being in the middle of the "cool-pose culture":

A Poverty of the Mind
By Orlando Patterson
Published: March 26, 2006
Cambridge, Mass.

SEVERAL recent studies have garnered wide attention for reconfirming the tragic disconnection of millions of black youths from the American mainstream. But they also highlighted another crisis: the failure of social scientists to adequately explain the problem, and their inability to come up with any effective strategy to deal with it.

The main cause for this shortcoming is a deep-seated dogma that has prevailed in social science and policy circles since the mid-1960's: the rejection of any explanation that invokes a group's cultural attributes — its distinctive attitudes, values and predispositions, and the resulting behavior of its members — and the relentless preference for relying on structural factors like low incomes, joblessness, poor schools and bad housing.

Harry Holzer, an economist at Georgetown University and a co-author of one of the recent studies, typifies this attitude. Joblessness, he feels, is due to largely weak schooling, a lack of reading and math skills at a time when such skills are increasingly required even for blue-collar jobs, and the poverty of black neighborhoods. Unable to find jobs, he claims, black males turn to illegal activities, especially the drug trade and chronic drug use, and often end up in prison. He also criticizes the practice of withholding child-support payments from the wages of absentee fathers who do find jobs, telling The Times that to these men, such levies "amount to a tax on earnings."

His conclusions are shared by scholars like Ronald B. Mincy of Columbia, the author of a study called "Black Males Left Behind," and Gary Orfield of Harvard, who asserts that America is "pumping out boys with no honest alternative."

This is all standard explanatory fare. And, as usual, it fails to answer the important questions. Why are young black men doing so poorly in school that they lack basic literacy and math skills? These scholars must know that countless studies by educational experts, going all the way back to the landmark report by James Coleman of Johns Hopkins University in 1966, have found that poor schools, per se, do not explain why after 10 years of education a young man remains illiterate.

Nor have studies explained why, if someone cannot get a job, he turns to crime and drug abuse. One does not imply the other. Joblessness is rampant in Latin America and India, but the mass of the populations does not turn to crime.

And why do so many young unemployed black men have children — several of them — which they have no resources or intention to support? And why, finally, do they murder each other at nine times the rate of white youths?

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"if our ppl studied calc like we studied basketball, we'd be running MIT"

In this article, Henry Louis Gates Jr takes a bold stance, with the support of other prominent African-American men, in bringing in the frame of meritocracy and borders blaming the black community for its place in the world. President Obama lists "diligent effort and deferred gratification" as necessary requirements for success in society. But later in the article, Obama notes that the "silence" exists because there is a false notion that if African-Americans acknowledge responsibility for their actions, then "it lets larger society off the hook".

Gates finds Cosby to be justified in recognizing the need for black children to speak Standard English. Gates notes that while there is value in AAVE, only speaking AAVE, limits "imaginative and economic possiblities". In another article, The Ebonic Plague, Gates reacted to the Oakland school board's decision to use AAVE as a tool to reach and teach black youth saying the resolution was "obviously stupid and ridiculous".

Breaking the Silence
By Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Published: Sunday, August 1, 2004
The New York Times Op/Ed

''Go into any inner-city neighborhood,'' Barack Obama said in his keynote address to the Democratic National Convention, ''and folks will tell you that government alone can't teach kids to learn. They know that parents have to parent, that children can't achieve unless we raise their expectations and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white.'' In a speech filled with rousing applause lines, it was a line that many black Democratic delegates found especially galvanizing. Not just because they agreed, but because it was a home truth they'd seldom heard a politician say out loud.

Why has it been so difficult for black leaders to say such things in public, without being pilloried for ''blaming the victim''? Why the huge flap over Bill Cosby's insistence that black teenagers do their homework, stay in school, master standard English and stop having babies? Any black person who frequents a barbershop or beauty parlor in the inner city knows that Mr. Cosby was only echoing sentiments widely shared in the black community.

''If our people studied calculus like we studied basketball,'' my father, age 91, once remarked as we drove past a packed inner-city basketball court at midnight, ''we'd be running M.I.T.'' When my brother and I were growing up in the 50's, our parents convinced us that the ''blackest'' thing that we could be was a doctor or a lawyer. We admired Hank Aaron and Willie Mays, but our real heroes were people like Thurgood Marshall, Dr. Benjamin Mays and Mary McLeod Bethune.

Yet in too many black neighborhoods today, academic achievement has actually come to be stigmatized. ''We are just not the same people anymore,'' says the mayor of Memphis, Dr. Willie W. Herenton. ''We are worse off than we were before Brown v. Board,'' says Dr. James Comer, a child psychiatrist at Yale. ''And a large part of the reason for this is that we have abandoned our own black traditional core values, values that sustained us through slavery and Jim Crow segregation.''

Making it, as Mr. Obama told me, ''requires diligent effort and deferred gratification. Everybody sitting around their kitchen table knows that.''

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in this episode, kyle is told by everyone that "jews can't play basketball" so he undergoes an operation to "become black" so he can make the basketball team...

South Park New Vagina Episode