Rick Telander
Bad grammar more than just slip of tongue
April 26, 2006
BY RICK TELANDER SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST
Slang, jargon, shortcuts, vernacular, jive -- whatever you want to call the stuff, we all use improper speech at times. I used "ain't'' in my column recently.
But it was with distress that I read
Dwyane Wade's comment about teammate
Udonis Haslem's tossing of his mouthguard at a ref in Game 2 of the Bulls-Heat series.
"I don't think he would do nothing like that intentionally,'' Wade said.
The sentiment's fine.
I mean the grammar.
The double negative, harmless as it seems -- maybe used for effect, maybe not -- connected in my mind for an instant the depressing bridge between the tenuous, alluring fame of black male stars in professional sports and the reality of the failing young black male in American society.
Nobody likes to pile on the oppressed, but the statistics just keep streaming forth.
Study after study, chart after chart, survey after survey all show that young African-American males are falling by the educational and employment wayside at an ever-increasing speed.
And the reasons for the skid, as USA Today stated in its Monday editorial, "appear rooted in literacy skills.''
Young males, generally, are having their adaptive difficulties in a world made topsy-turvy by technological advances, old-fashioned school systems and liberated females.
But where things are gloomy for white boys, they are nearly tragic for black boys.
It's stunning, yet instructive, to see that basketball idol Michael Jordan's alma mater, North Carolina -- a good school and the 2005 NCAA men's hoops champion -- has a current freshman class that is 60 percent female.
But then one sees that historically black Clark Atlanta University has 70 percent females enrolled.
Numbers paint bleak portrait
And in a statistic almost too sad to recount, research by the University of Chicago's Consortium on Chicago School Research, states that only 3 percent of black and Latino male ninth-graders in Chicago's public-school system can expect to graduate from a four-year college even six years after leaving high school.
Do the math on that one: a high school freshman teacher could stand before a group of 25 of those young, perhaps-not-yet-demoralized Chicago boys and say, with cruel logic, "Not one of you will be a college graduate.''
Yet the fictitious belief that high-paying sports somehow will save them remains the dream of too many of those same young men.
Nor is it hard to blame the minority kids for such pipe dreams when grand images of millionaire athletes (and other equally rare mass-media entertainers such as movie stars and rappers) bombard them with messages to eat, drink, walk, consume and dominate just as the millionaires do.
Latinos who slip through the cracks of the school system -- and thereby the upward employment system -- often are dealing from a dual-language disadvantage.
Not so African-American males.
At least, theoretically.
But their disengagement from the learning process -- particularly from the "uncool'' elements of literacy: reading, writing, spelling, grammar, speaking properly -- come back to blindside them in this information-age economy as surely as a wide-receiver crackback.
The NCAA has just noticed that "diploma mills,'' quasi-high schools built around elite basketball teams, are a national disgrace.
Consider that one of these mills, the New York Times said, consisted of a traveling team, the head coach and not a single teacher.
'Like a geek or a nerd'
Even conservative writer Stanley Crouch, an iconoclastic African-American thinker who normally touts the unfettered freedom of the individual to control his own destiny, seems appalled by the descent of black males toward the educational abyss.
"Once upon a time, it was understood quite well across the black community, from the bottom to the top, that getting an education dramatically increased the chances of triumphing over the limitations imposed by bigoted attitudes toward color or class,'' Crouch writes. "Remaining ignorant put one perilously close to slavery.''
But now, getting smart is too often ridiculed by black youths as "acting white.''
It's a tough place to be. Darned tough.
Adolescent males of all hues respond to primitive, sometimes unfathomable calls that are governed by hormones, restlessness and the idolization of power.
And the socialization of those boys -- and the creation of valuable, productive citizens -- is a slippery, many-layered task indeed.
Which is why it was disturbing to see recent Bears acquisition Ricky Manning, just signed to a $21 million offer sheet, allegedly involved in the beating of a man at a Denny's in Los Angeles.
The beating was one thing. But the reporting officer said the assailants, of whom Manning allegedly was one, taunted the victim for using a laptop computer, saying he "looked like a geek or a nerd.''
Maybe he looked like a future success.
Dwyane Wade always has seemed like a good sort, and his heart and talent are unquestioned.
But I can't help wondering about the message he and his peers give to scholastically impoverished kids, simply by doing things as apparently inconsequential as speaking incorrectly.
Pro athletes can make the most inspirational of heroes, but they might be the falsest of gods in the end.
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