Still the Same Age: babies havin babies
My lil sis P studies the Bible with a youngster in my fam's congregation. P's study is still in high school. Yesterday evening, I was in the whip with both of them, making conversation. You and I know youngsters love talkin about school. Not neccessarily what they learned in Geometry class, but definitely the drama.
So I'm kickin it with the youngster. She goes to Grover Cleveland, which, in my HS days was a non-descript jack-leg school on the Westside. Apparently it still is. P told me that Grover was known as a dangerous school in her day (and she's just 2 years behind me)...I don't remember that though. When I think about the gangsta schools, I think Burgard, Riverside sometimes South Park and Bennett...but never Grover.
But the youngster was tellin me it's a zoo. In the most matter of fact way she told me about this girl getting jumped the other day in the lunch room. "But she deserved it though. She always talkin' bout somebody. She be tellin' me about this girl and that girl and I'm always like, 'Worry about yourself.' So when they jumped her, I was like, 'That's what you get.'"
That's standard fare for youngsters these days...and back in my day. There was no such thing as getting jumped at City Honors (the No. 4 public school in America, according to Newsweek). All we did in CHS was learn and take advantage of the lack of rules. Yesterday evening the youngster was tellin me how a lot of the bad behavior is in reaction to Nazi teachers. I can feel that. She said this year's freshmen class at Grover is the worse. They're so bad even she -- one of their peers -- is surprised by their hubris. That's kinda scary.
My lil sis teaches grammar school and it was revelation to hear that she routinely YELLS at the kids. Whenever I see P with kids, she's doin the daycare/fav-aunt/Oprah thing she does, so to hear that the kids in her classes are so unruly that she has to raise her voice -- her...P...my lil sis -- that's serious.
Anyways, this is all getting me to the end of my convo with P's study. She told me that, when Board of Ed had the funds, Grover had a FRIGGIN DAYCARE in the school. That was how prevalent and pervasive teenage pregnancy was/is. I asked P's study if a lot of the girls had kids and she answered in the most "what are you stupid?" tone ever, because to her, that's a given.
Then I ask if a bunch of girls are pregnant as we speak. She said, "Yeah! It's a bunch of girls that's bout to have babies."
Imagine that, lil girls walkin round school with baby-stomachs. But not a few, a slew.
It's such a probelm in the community. Teenage pregnancy doesn't get the same attention it got in the late 80s and early 90s when the epidemic was still new on the American landscape. I can remember how weird it was to see my friend Erica and my cousin Halima walkin round school pregnant. My blood-bro Tony's sis had her first kid still in CHS, too. It all was a weird site. partly because CHS didn't have the same problems as our public counterparts, but also because it was still a visual schock, even by the mid 90s, to see a familiar peer in a physical state meant for a grown woman. Both my older cousins impregnated girls that were still in HS, while they were still in HS. That was crazy. But now? Please. That's standard fare for the lil girls in the community.
Back when the epidemic first began, it was shredding the black community that was already tattered, but hanging on by a few seams. Crack was KILLING us...MURDERING us. And we had crack babies, AIDS and these fatherless kids being born. The girls in HS, now, lettin these boys and -- sadly -- sometimes men impregnate them, they're the daughters of the lil girls in late 80s and early90s that birthed them in HS. That first generation of mass teenage-pregnancy babies are in high school now and the cycle is continuing. We aren't learning much. These jack-leg young niggas don't know anything about bein a father, because they never knew their pops. These young girls don't know much about expecting and demanding a certain level of respect -- healthy respect, not the deviant respect we see given to women in black hoods because of the matriarchal environment produced by the astounding number of black men in jail, on drugs, dead early...you get the picture.
And we won't even get on the abstinence/sex-ed topic.
When I got out the car last night and bid the youngster a good evening as P took her home, I was kinda depressed a lil bit. Buff is an odd animal for black people. I mean, you can probably count the successful blacks in this city on three or four hands...and I don't think I'm exagerrating. I've described the Buff Mentality on this blog before, its infectuous in a sordid and detrimental way. The sad thing is that, even though the city looks to be at the infant-stage of, perhaps, a lil renaissance...in the hood, it's The Same Age.
So I'm kickin it with the youngster. She goes to Grover Cleveland, which, in my HS days was a non-descript jack-leg school on the Westside. Apparently it still is. P told me that Grover was known as a dangerous school in her day (and she's just 2 years behind me)...I don't remember that though. When I think about the gangsta schools, I think Burgard, Riverside sometimes South Park and Bennett...but never Grover.
But the youngster was tellin me it's a zoo. In the most matter of fact way she told me about this girl getting jumped the other day in the lunch room. "But she deserved it though. She always talkin' bout somebody. She be tellin' me about this girl and that girl and I'm always like, 'Worry about yourself.' So when they jumped her, I was like, 'That's what you get.'"
That's standard fare for youngsters these days...and back in my day. There was no such thing as getting jumped at City Honors (the No. 4 public school in America, according to Newsweek). All we did in CHS was learn and take advantage of the lack of rules. Yesterday evening the youngster was tellin me how a lot of the bad behavior is in reaction to Nazi teachers. I can feel that. She said this year's freshmen class at Grover is the worse. They're so bad even she -- one of their peers -- is surprised by their hubris. That's kinda scary.
My lil sis teaches grammar school and it was revelation to hear that she routinely YELLS at the kids. Whenever I see P with kids, she's doin the daycare/fav-aunt/Oprah thing she does, so to hear that the kids in her classes are so unruly that she has to raise her voice -- her...P...my lil sis -- that's serious.
Anyways, this is all getting me to the end of my convo with P's study. She told me that, when Board of Ed had the funds, Grover had a FRIGGIN DAYCARE in the school. That was how prevalent and pervasive teenage pregnancy was/is. I asked P's study if a lot of the girls had kids and she answered in the most "what are you stupid?" tone ever, because to her, that's a given.
Then I ask if a bunch of girls are pregnant as we speak. She said, "Yeah! It's a bunch of girls that's bout to have babies."
Imagine that, lil girls walkin round school with baby-stomachs. But not a few, a slew.
It's such a probelm in the community. Teenage pregnancy doesn't get the same attention it got in the late 80s and early 90s when the epidemic was still new on the American landscape. I can remember how weird it was to see my friend Erica and my cousin Halima walkin round school pregnant. My blood-bro Tony's sis had her first kid still in CHS, too. It all was a weird site. partly because CHS didn't have the same problems as our public counterparts, but also because it was still a visual schock, even by the mid 90s, to see a familiar peer in a physical state meant for a grown woman. Both my older cousins impregnated girls that were still in HS, while they were still in HS. That was crazy. But now? Please. That's standard fare for the lil girls in the community.
Back when the epidemic first began, it was shredding the black community that was already tattered, but hanging on by a few seams. Crack was KILLING us...MURDERING us. And we had crack babies, AIDS and these fatherless kids being born. The girls in HS, now, lettin these boys and -- sadly -- sometimes men impregnate them, they're the daughters of the lil girls in late 80s and early90s that birthed them in HS. That first generation of mass teenage-pregnancy babies are in high school now and the cycle is continuing. We aren't learning much. These jack-leg young niggas don't know anything about bein a father, because they never knew their pops. These young girls don't know much about expecting and demanding a certain level of respect -- healthy respect, not the deviant respect we see given to women in black hoods because of the matriarchal environment produced by the astounding number of black men in jail, on drugs, dead early...you get the picture.
And we won't even get on the abstinence/sex-ed topic.
When I got out the car last night and bid the youngster a good evening as P took her home, I was kinda depressed a lil bit. Buff is an odd animal for black people. I mean, you can probably count the successful blacks in this city on three or four hands...and I don't think I'm exagerrating. I've described the Buff Mentality on this blog before, its infectuous in a sordid and detrimental way. The sad thing is that, even though the city looks to be at the infant-stage of, perhaps, a lil renaissance...in the hood, it's The Same Age.
posted by Twistinado @ 1:04 PM
1 Comments:
At 5:20 PM,
Anonymous said…
i have mixed feelings about this issue. mostly because it bothers me that the current culture has made sex among ALL children little more than a newfangled twist on tag, and yet, because black families are less likely to encourage, support and sometimes, less able to afford an abortion, black girls are more easily identifiable(by their big baby stomachs) as having loose morals and even looser knee joints. i have a feeling that there are a great many white girls (purple girls, green, yellow, whatever) out there for whom a teen pregnancy marked a decisive turning point in their lives, but have no place to turn for guidance because their decisions were brushed under the rug for their own "safety" and "happiness." i've heard people make the statement that in general, black people are for having babies, not killing them. actually, i imagine its more of a class issue than race -- and of course, girls of all races make all different kinds of decisions. the major point i am trying to make is that teen pregnancy is teen pregnancy whether or not it ends with a live baby, and yes, it is out of control. but it bothers me that girls and women who choose to birth their babies after having premature and/or irresponsible sex are stigmatized, while girls who choose not to must battle silently within themelves as they reluctantly join the jeering chorus watching lakeisha waddle down the hall.
these kids need families. all of them. they need villages made up of families. traditional african culture educates all members of the community in duties as an individual, as a member of a family, and as a member of the society at large, with respect at every turn to gender differences and gender roles. feminism, schmeminism, the roles men and women play in family life are important for OUR children to learn, because our culture is violently ill in large part because the family structure has been all but decimated. unfortunately, the education our kids get educates some members of the community using primarily a history that doesn't mirror them, with no emphasis whatsoever on how to be a woman or a man, or a mother or a father. that's ridiculous. maybe not for becky and roger; i'm willing to let their parents decide what's best for them. but if we keep acting like anything in this culture was created to grow our boys and girls into anything but cogs in somebody else's machine, we'll end up with exactly what we already have, and then some.
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