Why are our schools failing black children?
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Resident evil:
A new documentary
indemnifies one of America’s most prominent statesmen

By Ian Grey

Journalist Christopher Hitchens’ 2001 book The Trial of Henry Kissinger is as smartly written and exhaustively researched an indictment of the former US national security advisor and secretary of State as one could possibly need. But BBC documentarians Alex Gibney and Eugene Jarecki’s take on Hitchens’ work is more viscerally effective, if only because it mates Hitchens’ dry accusations to images of the incalculable human suffering Kissinger’s policies wrought.

Graphic courtesy www.trialofhenrykissinger.com

More than 20,000 American, 100,000 South Vietnamese, and nearly 500,000 North Vietnamese military died after Kissinger and President Nixon took over the Vietnam War in 1968. As many as 600,000 perished in Cambodia while Kissinger advised during our secret war against that country. The genocide in East Timor, instigated by Kissinger’s policies, eventually caused the death of 200,000 noncombatants.

Both book and film go beyond a mere list of Kissinger’s dubious achievements. They ask, if Slobodan Milosevic and Augusto Pinochet can be tried for crimes against humanity, why not Kissinger? What follows is a flawed but sober indictment of US unaccountability that, in its finest moments, both literally and figuratively gives voice to the casualties of Kissinger’s lust for power.

Coolly narrated by Scottish thespian Brian Cox, shot and edited in crisp digital video, and clocking in at a brisk 80 minutes when another 40 would be welcome (and, in some cases, needed), the film lets the details damn its subject in place of obtrusive editorializing. Shots of recently declassified documents often do the "talking" and are intercut with grueling war footage of blasted and burned bodies — often children — and interviews with practiced Kissinger hunters such as journalist Seymour Hersh and legal scholar Michael Tigar. Even more illuminating are interviews with former Kissinger cronies such as Alexander Haig, who comes off as a cackling member of the ethically unencumbered living dead. (Notable Haig quote regarding Hitchens: "He sucks the sewer pipe.")

Along the way, Trials trails Kissinger from birth to his present status as a $25,000-a-pop guest speaker. The filmmakers present a psychological rationale for the suave, plug-shaped man’s power mania. Born a Jew in Germany who fled the Fatherland in 1938, it’s suggested that his power hunger was born of the helplessness of a smart, scared boy on the run. It’s the film’s flimsiest argument.

Once in the United States, Kissinger made a beeline from the US military to Harvard, to a first taste of political power assisting Nelson Rockefeller’s failed presidential bid. Kissinger later became both secretary of state and chief of the National Security Council to presidents Nixon and Ford.

The film portrays the Kissinger/Nixon-brokered Vietnam peace process as a means to solidify the adviser’s power base. Unhampered by ethical considerations or nitpicky constitutional issues, Kissinger opts to target villages and urban centers instead of military targets in the secret US bombing of Cambodia. Clandestine arms shipments and encouragement turn oil-rich East Timor into another killing field. It’s also strongly suggested that, when International Telephone and Telegraph (IT&T) and PepsiCo objected to Chile’s democratic election of a leader intent on nationalizing that nation’s resources, Kissinger played an active hand in the South American nation’s violent regime change—including the murder of Chilean Gen. Rene Schneider. When told of Kissinger’s denial of complicity in these actions, a military attaché involved in the incident says flatly, "He’s a liar."

The picture that emerges is of a cold mystery of a man remotely juiced on his burgeoning rep and in perpetual emotional disconnect from the atrocities he orchestrated. At the peak of the Vietnam years, he finds time to not only hang out with Jill St. John and Frank Sinatra but to give an interview about his sex life, wherein he coyly admits to being "a secret swinger."

In fact, the film touches on the idea that Kissinger used his unlikely celebrity to gain even more power and validity in a country he saw, from his outsider’s viewpoint, as accepting celebrity as the ultimate validation. Considering that President Reagan was waiting in the wings, and given our blind trust in the increasingly bellicose jingoistic bile most Hollywood movies spew, it would have been nice if Gibney and Jarecki had elaborated a bit more on this theme.

Ironically, Hitchens’ on-screen appearances are Trials’ biggest deficit. Clammy-looking, chain-smoking, and self-important, he comes off as the sort of smart-ass liberal that makes reactionary support for opposing positions understandable. Fortunately, Hitchens appears only sporadically, though he does fire off a few memorable bon mots; he notes that, with Kissinger, the phrase "mass murderer" isn’t "a piece of rhetoric — it’s a job description."

It would be comforting to think that Kissinger was an aberration, and the Nixon administration an ethically corrupt exception, but at a critical juncture in the film, a British commentator points out that "international law applies to everyone except Americans." Gibney and Jarecki, without straining the linkage, show that Kissinger was a pure distillation of an ongoing strain of US politics defined by total power and cynical, cold-blooded expediency. As a wretched example of the perils of centralized power, his story is more timely than ever.

Source: Baltimore City Paper

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Why are our schools failing black children?

By Mabie Settlage

I am a middle school teacher, and I’ve been teaching for 15 years in inner-city South Central Los Angeles. My students are both Latino and African American. There has been a continuing "discussion" in LA of the behavior of African American, or Black students provoked by a letter by a teacher at John Muir H.S. in Pasadena, and an article about it in the LA Times. In response, I would like to offer some observations.

First, it was said that the teacher, in complaining about the "disruptive behavior" of Black male students, and blaming it for poor educational results and low test scores, was only offering "empirical evidence, supported by statistics." But empirical evidence, offered without context or history, can be as manipulative and misleading as false propaganda. It’s very American to say, "Let’s look at this minute, just this minute," and then try to make generalizations or draw conclusions. That’s ridiculous and an utter waste of time.

On Sept. 11, 2001, events in the US horrified the world. What happened, the empirical observation, has been replayed for political purposes ever since. But the "why," which would necessitate examining context and history, and that might prevent such an event from happening again, is ignored. So it is, too, in respect to America’s ongoing race relations and racial issues. We refuse to let history shed any light on current reality.

Ten years ago, a bevy of right-wing ideologues put out a spate of "scholarly" books, papers and publications that categorized Black and Brown youth as violent, based on an imagined "jungle past." Nowhere in their writings was there any discussion of white violence. Yet from the beginning of this country, white violence has led the society, from the encounters with Native Americans, forced slave labor of Africans, escape from English governmental control, development of a docile labor force, and denial of voting rights to all but white property-owning males. The Twentieth Century saw the development and use of weapons of mass violence, targeted at civilians, as the leading employer and mainstay of US industry, only to be recently overtaken by the prison industrial complex of today.

History and a culture of violence
One particular chapter of this history of white violence is especially taboo -- lynching. Whites would gather in hundreds and thousands to beat, cut, hang, and burn Black people, in forms of violence as extreme as any ever perpetrated by humans. Lynching by white mobs is always left out of the discussion of how violent and mob-like non-whites can be.

The US uses children to drive the commercial economy. The psychological temptations and seductions used to generate desired consumer behavior are often violent, often sexual. Our society sells music, videos, attitudes, clothes, movies, TV air-time, and toys via a culture full of violence and disrespect for authority. All American children (and increasingly, children around the globe) are affected, both academically and culturally. But when children mimic the behaviors they have been socially inundated with, we blame them and their parents, as individuals. We expect discipline from children who are products of an increasingly undisciplined and selfish commercial society.

Many areas of our society have been adversely affected by the direction in which youth culture has been pushed by US capitalism in its drive for profits. But observably, the most affected are children whose social setting is more disorganized and alienating. This often includes Black children, and also Brown children, though for the time being, they have not been as heavily targeted for blame by the media. Even in respect to this, however, we must acknowledge that school shooters have been overwhelmingly rural, white, and male. Is it an accident that the media are suddenly singling out Black youth as the culprits guilty of educational failures at the same moment that the LA mayor and police chief are singling them out as the cause of violence and crime?

Language and cultural respect
Let’s look at some recent history. At my school, we have sixth, seventh, and eighth graders. When I entered the system, there had been a successful lawsuit charging that English learners, mostly Latino/a immigrants, were not being served by the State of California. So we teachers were trained. In order to bring up the test scores of those targeted children, I had over 125 hours of training, one part off-campus for two weeks that I paid for. Sure enough, the test scores of those children went up. One of the principles that we were taught was respect for the culture of Latino/a (Mexicano/a and Central American) children, to understand their history, and show respect for the language they came into the system with.

When this same idea was suggested as also being meaningful to help African American children raise their test scores, and named "Ebonics," it was trashed and ridiculed in the media and by political figures. There was no attempt to understand it was the same principle that was being applied to immigrant children. Of course white society doesn’t respect Black culture and history; as a nation, we never have.

For "English Learners" (EL), the term used for immigrant children, there are several possibilities for grouping children to achieve success. For so-called "English Only" (EO) students, the term used essentially for African American children at my school, there are only two, often overcrowded classes in groups that stay together over the entire three years of middle school, no matter how successful or dysfunctional the group is. The only "alternative" is Special Ed, for children defined as having learning disorders or disabilities.

I have seen the EO sixth grade classes given again and again to the newer or weaker teachers, who often know nothing of the children’s history or culture, and they often fail to teach, to reach, or to discipline these students. I have watched students who enter in poorly-behaving groups being kept in those same groups because there are no different group levels, as offered to EL students.

Timidity, indifference,
and embarrassment
Tragically, I have seen sweet sixth graders enter my school, restless and hopeful, and leave three years later, behaving obnoxiously, undisciplined, defiant, and uneducated. My school did not help them, it hurt. I have written letters to LAUnified School District school board officials, and complained in local and regional education and school district meetings over the years, to embarrassed silence by everyone, regardless of race.

With respect to Black children, if white teachers are intimidated, Latino teachers are distant, and Black teachers are embarrassed, who is going to step forward to demand and nurture good behavior and academic success for them, as for all our children?

The US has a history of distorting, fabricating, and embellishing the supposedly good behavior of white society and the supposedly bad behavior of any "others," but especially Black people. This belief system and methodology originally justified racial chattel slavery, and is now used to justify the prison/industrial complex. We can understand this fully, only if we are willing to put in work to understand the history and colonial make-up of our class and race relations. Through this work, we can deconstruct our own assumptions, and increase our expectations of Black children.

Black male youth in the media
Understand the role of the media. The Pasadena teacher’s letter, widely publicized by the Los Angeles Times and other news outlets, are also simultaneously stigmatizing Black youth as the culprits in a supposed wave of killings. Is this a coincidence?

Thirteen years ago, in NY, a brutal rape and beating took place in Central Park. A white professional woman was brutalized, and five Black boys were arrested, charged, and forced into confessions. There was a media frenzy, and the boys were called a "pack," "fiends," and "super-predators ‘wilding’ in the park." People in the city called for the death penalty. Donald Trump took out full-page ads calling for their execution, although they were juveniles not charged with a capital crime. Earlier this year, a man unconnected to the five confessed that he alone had raped and beaten the jogger. Now even the DA is moving to overturn the convictions. It had been a media hype, damaging to everyone, especially the boys who did 13 years in prison for a crime they did not commit.

A letter similar to that from the Pasadena teacher, and to the letter from teachers at LA’s Washington Prep High School was written about a month before at Jefferson High School, similarly criticizing Latino students there, resulting in a campus riot, and it did not get reported in any LA media. The news media target those they want to denigrate.

Empirical evidence or
evidence of empire?
Here is some other empirical evidence. Real money has been taken out of schools in California and put, almost dollar for dollar, into prisons. To keep this profit-motivated system going, the state needs thousands of uneducated, angry young people coming into the criminal justice system every year, and the public schools are providing them.

African American children are fundamentally no different from any other children. They need hope. They need firm, consistent, academic and social education. I have seen caring, but very firm teachers get control of even the "worst-behaving" classes at my school, when the system cares to assign them.

Mabie Settlage is a long-time middle school teacher. She has been an anti-racist community activist in LA and in the US southeast where she is originally from. She has conducted training and workshops on uprooting white supremacy, and written about education issues from a classroom teacher’s perspective.

Source: Turning the Tide

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