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Wednesday, March 08, 2006
I don’t normally do book reviews, but every once in awhile you get one that really rocks you, makes you think, and makes you want to tell others about it. As you all know I do books on tape since I spend a lot of time waiting for my husband while he’s at the doctors, at physical therapy, etc… Recently I came across one called Street Soldier, by Joseph Marshall, Jr. The copyright was 1996, so yes it is an older book, but still very relevant today. Especially for teachers of inner city schools. Mr. Marshall started a boys club called the Omega Club and the first thing he did that was different, was invite not just the kids from the streets but their parents! He talks of how the drug dealers are the modern slave owners. The blacks who sell the drugs are enslaving their own people to the drugs. He also talked about how the black language is a language of hate against their own people – words like nigger, ho, crack ho, etc., are put downs and show a lot of disrespect especially towards the black women. He talks of how respect is not something you get from someone else, but something you give yourself. If you let someone else give it to you, they can also take it away. He talks of how a friend is not someone who will “get your back” during a fight or when you are in trouble, but a friend is someone who will lead you away from trouble not towards it. He talks of life on the street and how it is not life, but death on the street. He gets angry at the young black boys who say he doesn’t understand. In his opinion life on the street is a lot of “gottas” – gotta take care of my homies, gotta get my money, gotta get my drugs, gotta get my respect… well, you read about what he says about “getting” respect. Oh, yes, there are the few intonations that all this is the white mans fault, but he goes further to say it is the black communities fault more than anything. The black community allows these young kids to run the streets and doesn't help them to learn differently. They just accept it and don’t try to change it. He is one man making changes! On one radio broadcast he summed it all up beautifully. He started the broadcast with a line that this show was ‘dedicated to his grandmother and all the other grandmothers out there for whom we have made the streets – unsafe!’ Even though I didn’t agree with some of things he said or felt his partner in the business went a bit too far in saying the prisons were the white mans way of keeping them down, Mr. Marshall made a stronger point. He states that between employed white men and employed black men the imprisonment rate is almost equal. The difference in the ratio, he states, changes because the unemployed Black Men choose a life of crime and drugs more often then unemployed white men. And the prisons are full more with the druggies, the robbers, the murderers, who chose a life of crime. Instead of taking responsibility, they place blame and make bad choices. Like I said, I didn’t always agree with the entire content of the book, but it is well worth the read if you are involved in inner city schools, black education, etc., because he made one very important point. In spite of all his and the Omega Boys Clubs efforts (yes girls joined, too) to get them off the streets, to get them college scholarship funding, once they were in college they were not prepared. Black children are not brought up to study, because in his opinion they are raised by crack mothers, absent fathers (if not physically then emotionally), and although they have large families, there really is little family unity and family support or supervision. He ended up bringing in a special teacher who taught the Club kids how to study, how to write, how to read, and how to speak in a real language and not street gutter speak, to be able to speak in complete and understandable sentences. As he says, not all are graduating still, and only one of the original eight managed to complete college, but at the time of the book progress was being made. I am going to see if he has a follow up book, because this one definitely caught my interest.
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