By capblack
Sigh, some Black folks (it’s ok- I’m Black too) really take this “It takes a village to raise a child” stuff too far.
Recently, MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry famously said in this much quoted excerpt:
…we’ve always had a private notion of children, your kid is yours and totally your responsibility. We haven’t had a very collective notion of these are our children. So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.
Hmm, so when Thomas Jefferson (yes, I know he owned slaves) promoted universal public education for American youth, was this the act of someone with a “private notion of children?”
When people’s houses are held hostage by county property taxes that often fund local public schools, is this another instance of private notions of children?
Are local option sales tax increases to upgrade public school infrastructure signs that the public plays no substantive role in young lives, especially when every state and the federal government have departments of education toward this end?
20th century visions of armed American troops and deputy US marshals fighting rabid mobs over public school desegregation dance through my mind’s eye as I type this.
A nation committed to a “private notion of children” would have spared itself such destabilizing drama and simply let educational Jim Crow stand until such time, if ever, that states wearied of it.
I find the good doctor’s perspective interesting since negation of parental control has dogged Black parents since our involuntary importation to these shores.
Slavery and Jim Crow aside, Dr. Harris-Perry’s side of the aisle seems hellbent on undermining Black parents by stripping them of school choice, an opportunity taken for granted by wealthier, often Whiter Americans; disarming them legislatively within Hoods overrun by chocolate Klansmen; demonizing our use of corporal punishment; and supporting a welfare system separating low-income parents to keep benefits flowing and a popular culture/public education complex at war with values traditional parents try to raise their children with.
If this is what the 21st century “village” offers, Black parents’ only hope rests in taking a “private notion” of their children to its exponential limit.
Otherwise, today’s vile “village” will own their children, body and soul.
I respectfully disagree with Dr. Harris-Perry and ask her to look no further than the ruins of New Orleans’ Black community as stark proof supporting my argument.
It doesn’t take a village to raise our kids- it takes united mothers and fathers raising them long before the rest of society enters the picture.
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