Black Violence in Schools: White People to Blame

Black Violence in Schools: White People to Blame

Colin Flaherty

The Tampa Bay Times just figured out why local black schools are a hot mess of chaos, violence and danger.

White people did it.

Which, of course, is the same reason why black schools are also violent and dangerous in Baltimore, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Milwaukee, Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Rochester, Utica, Albany, Syracuse, Pittsburgh, Harrisburg …. this is a very long list.

The Times documented how black violence in epic amounts is directed at students, parents, teachers, administrators, vendors, neighbors, bus drivers, -- pretty much anyone who gets anywhere close to these black schools.

Pretty much the way it is around the rest of the country -- as documented in that scintillating best seller, Don't Make the Black Kids Angry. In fact, there was so much of it, many episodes did not make the final cut and can be found here: The Missing Chapter on black violence in schools.

The paper also showed the great lengths schools went to ignore, deny, condone, excuse, minimize, and even lie about the level and intensity of the violence.

Some news from the Times:

"In just eight years, Pinellas County School Board members turned five schools in the county's black neighborhoods into some of the worst in Florida.

First they abandoned integration, leaving the schools overwhelmingly poor and black.

Then they broke promises of more money and resources.

Then -- as black children started failing at outrageous rates, as overstressed teachers walked off the job, as middle class families fled en masse -- the board stood by and did nothing."

The black people committing the violence? Innocent victims of circumstance.

Curiously missing from the several-part series -- over 15,000 words -- is any mention of a federal policy that declares any disparity in performance, behavior and discipline, in schools is the result of one thing and one thing only: White Racism.

And how every public school teacher in America knows that. And how it changes the way they discipline students. Back to Tampa:

"This is what it's like to go to school in Pinellas County's black neighborhoods:"

Salimah Bullock started second grade at Campbell Park Elementary in the fall of 2013. She didn't make it 10 minutes before a classmate punched her in the face.

Every day after that brought new threats.

"They cursed at me, called me ugly and threatened to put their hands on me," Salimah said.

Just months later, the 8-year-old got caught between two boys fighting.

She left school that day in an ambulance.

Salimah's story speaks to a jarring reality: In Pinellas County's most segregated elementary schools, violence has become a part of daily life.

At Campbell Park, a second-grader threatened to kill and rape two girls while brandishing a kitchen knife he carried to school in his backpack.

At Fairmount Park, a 9-year-old hit a pair of kindergartners in the head with a souvenir baseball bat.

At Maximo, a group of kindergartners pinned a classmate down on the playground, pulled off her pants and fondled her.

On the day Salimah was hospitalized, there had already been more than 1,100 violent incidents at the schools in 2013-14. The experience left her mother, Tammy Bullock, so disturbed that she moved the family back to Philadelphia. She said she would rather take her chances in that city's public school system than remain in St. Petersburg.

"I've never seen anything like this in my whole life," Bullock said of Campbell Park. "It led me to believe that God didn't want my family in Florida."

Until recently, district officials under-reported serious incidents to a state clearinghouse that tracks dangers in the classroom - an apparent violation of state law that made the schools seem safer than they really were.

"I don't know if the district really understands what the behaviors are there and how extreme they can get," said Jenna Strickland, who taught kindergarten at Lakewood from 2008 to 2014. "The district doesn't have any idea of what's really going on at these schools."

It's not just Tampa, of course -- as any cursory look at black violence in black schools in the rest of the country quickly shows.

Let's start with the "utter chaos" and a "wild brawl" at a black high school in Philadelphia, Overbrook. November 2013. Let's go to the CBS affiliate:

It's mayhem. Students are in the hall, they're smoking in the bathroom; cigarettes, marijuana," the worker said. "We can't contain them and it's really hazardous for us working and these kids are not being educated at all.

This same worker captured a cell phone video of students running across cafeteria tables to witness another fight that occurred three hours before.

It's a zoo in here. Parents really need to come up here and see what's going on in this school because it's ridiculous," the worker told CBS.

An employee at the school who asked not to be identified told CBS that this type of behavior isn't uncommon.

Oh yeah, it's been happening there a lot for a long time.

How about Paterson, New Jersey: in March 2014 the headline actually tells a good part of the story: "Teachers say brawl at Paterson's School 12 part of regular trend of violence."

Other media outlets called it a large fight. Regardless, the teachers' union said, oh yeah, that's been happening here a long time:

The school district called the fight at the grade school "isolated." But the head of the teacher's union said it happens all time: "We've received emails from teachers at the school that there have been numerous acts of violence and that they're occurring on a regular basis," said Gene Harvell, second vice president of the Paterson Education Association, the union that represents city teachers.

Or St. Louis, which had the same problem of the black violence in schools and the same white teachers causing it.

A reporter at the Fox affiliate talked with a teacher who described what normal looks like at Ferguson schools: Constant chaos. Constant violence, now spilling over in attacks on teachers. And oh yeah, that has been happening there a long time, said the reporter, as he rifled through a stack of papers documenting recent incidents.(193)

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch was ready with an explanation for the recent bulk removal of black students from black classrooms in the soon to be renamed Michael Brown Memorial High School (OK, I made up that part) in Ferguson: The white teachers were to blame.

"Many new teachers are white and previously taught in more affluent suburban schools," explained the paper. "Some are struggling to connect with their students, most of whom are black and come from impoverished backgrounds." The penalty for not "connecting" is taunting, harassment, and violence so bad that many white teachers quit St. Louis-area schools after the first day of classes.

What about Baltimore, one of the largest black school districts in America? Out of 2,998 teachers surveyed, 80 percent had been victimized in the workplace, said the local ABC affiliate. In the city of Baltimore alone, school employees filed more than 300 injury claims related to student assaults in 2013. In Baltimore, four teachers are assaulted every day. Many on video.

Investors Business Daily figured it out as well as anyone in July 2014. The paper did several stories documenting how technocrats from the Department of Education of the Department of Justice were invading school districts around the country -- enforcing the new policies laid out in the President's Executive Order on Educational Excellence for African Americans. Including policies to correct how black students "disproportionately experience school discipline."

The report calls for more black teachers and fewer black student suspensions. IBD called the coming catastrophe:

As we predicted, the Obama regime's anti-suspension policy is backfiring. Los Angeles teachers complain unsuspended violent kids are intimidating them and effectively ruling their classrooms.

In 2011, the Education Department accused the Los Angeles Unified School District of discriminating against black boys, who were suspended for bad behavior at a disproportionate rate. The agency ordered it to reduce suspensions in the hopes that unruly minority students would stay in school and graduate.

The district shall develop and implement a comprehensive plan to eliminate the disproportionality in the discipline imposed on African-American students," the five-page decree says. The superintendent agreed to "modify its policies, procedures and practices.

Last year, Los Angeles schools became the first in the state to ban "willful defiance" as grounds for suspension. As a result, their overall suspension rate dropped to 1.5% from 8% in 2008.

Instead of being kicked out of school or suffering other serious punishment, even repeat offenders get "restorative justice" therapy.

They can negotiate the consequences for their bad behavior, which usually involves "dialogue sessions," in which teachers join unruly kids in "talking circles" to foster greater "cultural understanding." Talk invariably turns to racism and "white bias." Teachers are trained to make sure black kids "feel respected.

The leftist group that has trained more than 2,000 LAUSD teachers and "restorative justice coordinators" says the program combats bias that contributes to disproportionate discipline.

Of course, it also provides rowdy minorities an excuse for continued bad behavior.

Indeed, the policy has only increased classroom disruptions and threats against students and teachers, just as we predicted in a January piece, "Anti-Discipline Push May Threaten Students."

Over at NPR, the enablers insist on reporting that the black children who are suspended are really victims of racism -- not their own, often criminal, behavior. Black students are suspended and expelled at significantly higher rates than white children in 13 Southern states, according to a new analysis of federal data. During the 2011-2012 academic year, 1.2 million black students were suspended from public schools. Although, black students were only 24 percent of the students in these Southern school districts, they were 55 percent of students suspended and 50 percent of students expelled.

Glen Singleton is the Pied Piper of the Educational Racial Grievance Industry. He and his minions travel to hundreds of school districts throughout the country instructing white teachers how they must first have a "Courageous Conversation" if they are to teach black students.

And by courageous, Singleton means the white teachers must be brave enough to admit they are racist -- and their racism is responsible for the disparity between white and black students in behavior, performance and discipline.

As the president laid out in his executive order.

Singleton says black students do not really misbehave in schools all that much. It is just that white teachers do not understand black students. For example, black students like to talk loudly in class. Singleton says they are not really disrupting the class, that is just how they learned to behave in church.

It's a black thing.

And black and white learning styles are different: "White talk" is "verbal," "intellectual" and "task-oriented, Singleton says. While "color commentary" is "emotional" and "personal." Singleton says white teachers have a hard time reaching black students because black people talk about "racial matters daily, if only among themselves." But white people "are conditioned not to do that."

While Glenn Singleton preaches there is nothing wrong with black violence in schools that getting rid of white teachers won't cure, black school officials throughout the country ignore black mayhem because they do not want to "criminalize" students.

Trayvon Martin is the most famous example of that. Trayvon was caught with stolen goods and burglary tools but never arrested because of that policy. Jack Cashill wrote a great book about it that is the first, last, and final word on the criminal history of St. Trayvon.

The secret of disproportionate levels of black violence in schools is no secret. It is the subject of frequent stories at black web sites including the TheGrio.com, Huffpo Black Voices, The Root.com, Ebony, Jet and others.

Glenn Singleton is way past trying to deny it. But he does explain it in his manual, Courageous Conversations:

"White educators are prone to wondering why black and brown boys are prone to fighting in school," he writes. "They question why violence is taught in homes of color. Missing from this analysis however is how these boys might be affected by growing up in a White-governed country which threatens young men of color at will, distrusts their ability to succeed and follow the law, and allows daily racial stress to mount in neighborhoods, schools and classrooms."

Those darn white racists have been very, very busy.