Guess I`ll be the racist again
speaking of oprah
do you know why she open a school in africa ,instead of the U.S.
She wants to make sure people who really want to learn goes to that school
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I don't blame Oprah for putting her school in South Africa. It is because she has realized that that is where she could change the greatest number of lives for her money.
Talented Black Americans that have a lot of gumption can nearly all get scholarships to the best schools in this country. They do not need Oprah's help. Oprah did not need an Oprah top get where she is today: she had all sorts of obstacles in her path, being passed around between relatives, raped as a young girl, a goofy name, all the problems that befall thousands of Black women. But she managed to get where she was today by sheer talent and force of character.
What she is trying to do in South Africa is to help the talented and driven, who cannot expect to rise as she did, because South Africa is a much poorer country than the USA. Black women get a lot less respect in the RSA than in the USA, where they are nearly as successful as men. There are no Black South African Oprahs.
I spent 32 years teaching at a mostly Black private college here in Miami. We seldom get students that are both talented and driven like young Oprahs and Bill Cosbys. Many of those that are talented tend to lack the drive, and those that have the drive lack the talent. Those who have both get scholarships to Ivy League schools, or Howard, Moorehouse, or the better state universities. We graduate students who are capable of coping with standard middle-class jobs, just as Punxatawney State graduates dependable White drudges.
About two thirds of my students are women. In a typical class of 25, I will have an average of 2 women drop out due to pregnancy. None of them has been married. I doubt that the early months of pregnancy are normally an unsurmountable barrier to finishing the class, but they invariable ask for an incomplete, and then fail to finish the requirements by the deadline. Typically, they will show up two days before the deadline and ask what they need to pass. Usually this is to complete several written assignments, take one or two exams and the final. Typically, they know no Spanish, quite often including stuff that everyone in Miami should know, like "Buenos d?as, ?C?mo se llama usted?, el sombrero, caballeros and damas (the words on restroom doors)". Typically, they fail and drop out of college.
I have no idea why they can't just use some form of birth control. I am sure they do know were babies come from, and can only surmise that they have gotten pregnant because they prefer raising a child on welfare to studying.
There is a great amount of anti-intellectuality present in White American culture, but this is greatly multiplied in Black American culture. Sports and rap music are seen as the best ways to rise above the ghetto, and of course, neither of these is the sort of career that will typically result in success for more than a dozen years or so. In the same way, advertising of the sort that suggests that expensive crap will buy respect and success seems to be a lot more pervasive among Black Americans than among White Americans.
Rural Southern culture is divided among Blacks and Whites. Most American Blacks have their roots in the rural South. When the son of a sharecropper goes to college and joins the middle class, he is indistinguishable to White culture by the second generation, if not the first, from educated White middle class society. The Black son of a sharecropper is still Black, and can make this obvious to the rest of society only by improving his diction and a very careful attention to wardrobe, living quarters and such. The majority of poor Blacks that surround him are always a threat that can pull him down. White middle class people can have a drinking problem or a drug problem, but Black middle class people can only be seen as drunks and junkies by Blacks and Whites alike.
I know a number of Black Bohemian intellectual types here in Miami, some are my best friends, and they have a very difficult time winning respect from anyone. Not that White Bohemians get much respect in Miami, either. We do have the King Mango Strut, which has outlived not just the Orange Bowl Parade, but the Orange Bowl itself. I drove down NW 7th St yesterday, and it has all been razed except the scoreboard. I suspect it won't be long that this city-owned land will change hands with some corporation that will enrich some city officials and build something we really don;pt need, like condos or a shopping center.
Oprah and Bill Cosby are dead right about what they do and say. I am pretty sure that Oprah agrees with Cosby on damn near everything, but she is still in mid-career and making the sort of speech that Cosby makes would tend to wreck her career, and that would accomplish nothing positive for either her or anyone else. Cosby is retired, richer than God, and speaks out of desperation. Cosby has shown by his actions what he is sure is the ideal role model: after his success on I Spy, he took time out to work with the Children's TV Workshop, and then went to the University and got a PhD in Education. I can't think of any White American actors who have done half as much. Oprah simply has sought to do the most good for the most people, and has seen that bestowing a capable, talented and driven female elite on the RSA will have far more effect than anything that twice as much money could do in the USA .
