Read Online The Rejected Stone: Al Sharpton and the Path to American Leadership by Al Sharpton - Free Book Online
Authors: Al Sharpton
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funny, but what kind of damage is it doing to the psyche? What you should be rapping about is, You knocked me down, but I’m just gonna get rightback up . Or, Hey, you shouldn’t have knocked me down in the first place! But instead, we’re making it fashionable to be down there on the floor, embracing it, making it cool and black to be doing jail time, to have eight kids from eight different baby mamas. I think that’s sick.
Please understand, I will always preach that black men must take responsibility for their children. That’s something I believe wholeheartedly, especially since I saw in my own life, with my own father, that too many men refuse to take proper responsibility for the care and upkeep of their children. But I have to take exception to this idea that the reason black kids aren’t excelling in school is that they aren’t reared in a traditional family. I feel as if I would be doing violence to the years of hard work put in by Ada Sharpton to accede to that. This message is especially bothersome at a time when we see the very idea of what is a traditional family transforming before our eyes. It’s clear that America needs to update its image of what a family looks like. How do we get sociologists and social commentators trying to instruct America to enlarge the view of a positive family environment, while telling African-Americans that the black community’s problem is the lack of traditional families? You can’t have it both ways. We have states such as Maryland and Washington deciding that same-sex marriage is legal, and we have gays adopting kids in big numbers—but blacks have to have a mother and a father in the home together in order to thrive? Is that what we’re saying here? Because it seems to me that if the contemporary societal message is that the traditional family is not traditional anymore, then pleasedon’t use that archetype of the traditional family to beat down African-Americans, particularly black single mothers.
What the black community needs in the current environment is a redefinition of community. We need to reinstitute a place where the teachers are committed to lifting children up and not teaching down to them, where institutions such as the church are dedicated to uplifting kids, where everyone in the community works together to implant in every young person the idea that the community expects success from them. But to count heads on who has a daddy at home at a time when the daddy might actually be another mommy is unfair and counterproductive. If I’m free enough to say people have the right to marry someone of the same sex, then don’t come to me wielding that traditional model. American society is feeding blacks a nineteenth-century family photo while giving whites a twenty-first-century liberated view of family. That’s not fair, and it’s not right.
This doesn’t mean we are removing responsibility from the fathers. No, what we are saying is that if you have a child, you are responsible for that child, regardless of your sexual orientation or family type. And to extend it further, if you live in a community with children, you are responsible to help all those children, even if they don’t share your DNA. If you’re an accountant or a hairdresser, or whatever profession you happen to be in, commit some of your life to teaching, molding, mentoring young people in your community. Your lifestyle choices are your own, but your obligation is to the community and to the children. That means all of us puttingaside our ridiculous, self-centered preoccupations and taking care of our children, making sure we create an intellectual climate in which they thrive, which pushes them to reject mediocrity and excuses.
Right now, what is happening in America is exactly the opposite. We are cultivating a climate that celebrates mediocrity, even idiocy. Just fifteen minutes of reality television illustrates everything that’s wrong with the American climate—five minutes with
Please understand, I will always preach that black men must take responsibility for their children. That’s something I believe wholeheartedly, especially since I saw in my own life, with my own father, that too many men refuse to take proper responsibility for the care and upkeep of their children. But I have to take exception to this idea that the reason black kids aren’t excelling in school is that they aren’t reared in a traditional family. I feel as if I would be doing violence to the years of hard work put in by Ada Sharpton to accede to that. This message is especially bothersome at a time when we see the very idea of what is a traditional family transforming before our eyes. It’s clear that America needs to update its image of what a family looks like. How do we get sociologists and social commentators trying to instruct America to enlarge the view of a positive family environment, while telling African-Americans that the black community’s problem is the lack of traditional families? You can’t have it both ways. We have states such as Maryland and Washington deciding that same-sex marriage is legal, and we have gays adopting kids in big numbers—but blacks have to have a mother and a father in the home together in order to thrive? Is that what we’re saying here? Because it seems to me that if the contemporary societal message is that the traditional family is not traditional anymore, then pleasedon’t use that archetype of the traditional family to beat down African-Americans, particularly black single mothers.
What the black community needs in the current environment is a redefinition of community. We need to reinstitute a place where the teachers are committed to lifting children up and not teaching down to them, where institutions such as the church are dedicated to uplifting kids, where everyone in the community works together to implant in every young person the idea that the community expects success from them. But to count heads on who has a daddy at home at a time when the daddy might actually be another mommy is unfair and counterproductive. If I’m free enough to say people have the right to marry someone of the same sex, then don’t come to me wielding that traditional model. American society is feeding blacks a nineteenth-century family photo while giving whites a twenty-first-century liberated view of family. That’s not fair, and it’s not right.
This doesn’t mean we are removing responsibility from the fathers. No, what we are saying is that if you have a child, you are responsible for that child, regardless of your sexual orientation or family type. And to extend it further, if you live in a community with children, you are responsible to help all those children, even if they don’t share your DNA. If you’re an accountant or a hairdresser, or whatever profession you happen to be in, commit some of your life to teaching, molding, mentoring young people in your community. Your lifestyle choices are your own, but your obligation is to the community and to the children. That means all of us puttingaside our ridiculous, self-centered preoccupations and taking care of our children, making sure we create an intellectual climate in which they thrive, which pushes them to reject mediocrity and excuses.
Right now, what is happening in America is exactly the opposite. We are cultivating a climate that celebrates mediocrity, even idiocy. Just fifteen minutes of reality television illustrates everything that’s wrong with the American climate—five minutes with
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