Cedric, call home
JR., JOHN J. DIIULIO
Cedric, Call Homi The Cost of Escaping the Ghetto By John J. Dilulio Jr. The tale of Cedric Lavar Jennings, now finishing his junior year at Brown University by way of the District of Columbia's...
...Cedric got his first official dose of campus pluralism at the required "diversity workshop," run by a rabbi and a Hispanic "student facilitator" who explained the first official exercise: "cultural pursuit...
...And Clarence Taylor, the scripture-quoting chemistry teacher who had worked so hard to convert the smart but sullen freshman into the high school's most accomplished senior, had Cedric memorize Hebrews 11:1: "Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen...
...She made sure her son was either in school, the locked apartment, or at church—visiting Scripture Cathedral four times a week...
...At Brown, Cedric, one of the school's 6.5 percent full-time black undergraduates, was quickly encircled by 160 student-led groups...
...Cedric returned home, "comfortable in this place I hate...
...While on the streets he fathered several children (including one of Cedric Jr.'s cousins...
...But his great hope merely threw the magazine away and headed off to a party at Harambe House...
...Many old, inner-city black churches have become "commuter churches" whose congregants come and go on Sundays with little connection to the poor who now inhabit the neighborhoods from which they or their parents came...
...When he learned that Barbara was pregnant with Cedric, he insisted that she have yet another abortion, and when she refused, he left her...
...The prideful Cedric persevered, refusing to succumb to what Sus-kind, borrowing a term coined by urban educators, describes as the "crab-bucket syndrome": "When one crab tries to climb from the bucket, the others pull it back down...
...With or without prayers, however, 82 percent of kids who applied to the program were accepted, and no matter how hard Cedric worked, he simply couldn't cut it in advanced math...
...yelled, "I'm still your father...
...The boy's mother, Barbara, graduated from malt liquor, blond wigs, multiple abortions, and out-of-wedlock births to a low-paying government job, a black Pentecostal church, and a total commitment to her son's future...
...The teenager responded "Don't tell me about disrespect," about "what to do or not to do, like you've been around for me...
...The tale of Cedric Lavar Jennings, now finishing his junior year at Brown University by way of the District of Columbia's poorest and most crime-torn neighborhood, is no simple ghetto-to-glory story...
...It's about having him pretend, for the politically correct multicul-turalists, that he—the choir-singing loner-nerd who was every second-rate thug's favorite prey—now possesses "racial authenticity," "an arbiter of the fashions, tastes, and Contributing editor John J. Dilulio Jr...
...And he compromised his intellectual ambitions by taking an entire semester of pass-fail courses...
...But in part, too, it's about how that has not happened without alienating him from family and friends...
...And Barbara continued to call her son not after his father but by his second name, Lavar...
...I'll blow your f—ing brains out...
...But over time, the world of Brown University made it impossible for him to keep intact the views he had learned at Scripture Cathedral, even on such subjects as pornographic gay films...
...Catching the spirit, one student mentioned "anorexia," and another urged the group to "stretch for something distinctive" like "being a minority . . . being some sort of victim...
...Cedric had never seen the Ivy League Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island...
...At first, Cedric didn't "stretch"— thinking to himself that he was probably the only "true victim of circumstances in the room," and that being a victim was "the last thing he'd want to celebrate...
...habits of inner-city life...
...This is it...
...Cedric, call home...
...But he committed robbery, sold hard drugs, went to prison, violated parole, and ended up back behind bars...
...But then they weren't going to an Ivy League school like Brown...
...Still, he was admitted, and in the summer before going, he got a $7-an-hour internship through a national program that assists promising black kids—the kind of job that lots of older, uneducated, unemployed men in his neighborhood desperately wanted...
...In desperation," Suskind writes, "Barbara tried to keep a tight grip on just the basics: strong physical discipline and tight scheduling...
...His biggest fights were tiffs with teachers over grades and with the girls who were his only academic competition, cheated off his homework, or led others in taunting him: "Nerd...
...Through his mother, math, and an obsession with MIT, Cedric saw his first chance to crawl up and out...
...A Hope in the Unseen hints of a titanic struggle going on within black America...
...The black students had their own dorm, Harambe House...
...Once, during a visit to his father's apartment, the child stole some coins, and at the next visit, the boy "walked into an ambush...
...Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas had read Suskind's Wall Street Journal articles on Cedric and invited him to lunch...
...My life is about to change," he said, clutching the acceptance letter against his chest...
...The teacher drove off, parting tenderly with a "Well, God bless...
...How many will be saved depends upon how many paramedics of the civil society—philanthropy chiefs, media elites, government officials, corporate executives—bolster the effort, both financially and politically...
...And though its catalog promised a curriculum "uniquely loose and fluid," encouraging students to take classes pass-fail and proceed at their own speed, it had an average SAT score of 1290, while Cedric's best was 960: 590 in math and 380 in verbal (up from a low of 330...
...Sound advice, but the justice might as well have counseled the boy to avoid the law of gravity...
...Rather, as told in A Hope in the Unseen—originally reporter Ron Suskind's Pulitzer prize-winning series of articles in the Wall Street Journal, now expanded into a book— Cedric's is a cautionary tale...
...reflected on how different he was from Cedric Jr., a boy "all nerdy and faggy, a 'straight-A' momma's boy who gets no respect from any of the kids at school, least of all the tough kids...
...By any material measure, at least two-thirds of blacks have now made it...
...And it's about the failure to equip and encourage Cedric Lavar Jennings to feel morally obliged to help the many others who remain in the blighted urban places he used to call home...
...Over the next decade, the battle to save inner-city youth will be fought mainly as a mission of public and private triage involving community leaders, neighborhood churches, and adequate support from government at all levels...
...The man cursed and demanded that the boy show more "respect" for his elders...
...But he was not crushed or defeated...
...During his junior year, he applied to a summer program at MIT for minority students...
...The boy's father, Cedric Sr., had some education and several opportunities for legitimate jobs...
...Try to avoid them...
...Increasingly, inner-city black kids are denouncing sports stars and rappers who appeal to white teenagers (the main consumers of rap music by black artists) as sellouts...
...Geek...
...In part, it's about how a mix of mothers, mentors, ministers, and affirmative-action policies can in fact liberate an inner-city child from poverty, street violence, drug addiction, educational failure, welfare dependency, joblessness, and jail...
...Suskind records Cedric's worries about ending up as yet another "middle class wannabe . . . trying to keep up with doctors' kids from good high schools who also happen to be black...
...Hearing that Cedric was bound for Brown, Thomas warned him that "one thing you'll find when you get to a school like Brown is a lot of classes and orientation on race relations...
...And yet, nowadays as well, more and more young black professionals and a new generation of ministers are calling the black bourgeoisie and elite to account on everything from charitable giving to volunteer service, from the morality of abortion to the economy of suburbanization...
...Another big campus presence was "the LGBTQA, or the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Questioning Alliance...
...Neither is it the predictable paean to the noble adults—mothers, teachers, cops, coaches, and clergy— who protect inner-city boys from their predatory peers, administer daily doses of tough love, and inspire them to succeed through faith in the promise of Heaven or Harvard...
...When the assembled freshmen failed to name one-word "identities," the Rabbi offered "HIV-positive...
...Three-quarters in urban areas live in neighborhoods where most residents have crossed the poverty line into prosperity...
...In high school Cedric avoided receiving a hard-earned $180 award for academic excellence, in fear that (as had happened once before) a local thug would demand it at gunpoint...
...The Bible, he knew, promised rewards to "him who endureth...
...In the book's epilogue, Suskind notes that, despite all the changes, Cedric and his mother still talk regularly, spend holidays together, and "enjoy each other's company by ignoring long-standing issues of obligation and sacrifice...
...Whitey...
...is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute...
...It's about how he has been made to feel embarrassed by his religious roots...
...When his high-school teacher surprised him with a visit and gave the young man in whom he had invested so much a Bible-study magazine, Cedric "looked at it blankly" but promised to read it...
...Far worse, he learned to feel embarrassed when his churchgoing mother visited his new world, "looking right through her" and failing to give her the customary hug goodbye...
...His absentee father gave his unaborted namesake a ferocious whipping that ended only when a live-in girlfriend grabbed his arm and screamed for him to stop...
...He and his mother and their minister had prayed for this day...
...Years later, Cedric spoke to his father in jail...
...But there is no denying the coarse truth in what the father thought about his son's lack of street smarts and standing...
...Later, in his cell, Cedric Sr...
...Enraged, Cedric Sr...
...But maybe those issues are exactly the ones that he shouldn't avoid...
Vol. 3 • April 1998 • No. 32
