In high school, African-American boys drop out at nearly twice the rate of white boys, and their SAT scores are on average 104 points lower. Black mothers have a higher infant mortality rate and black children are twice as likely as whites to live in a home where no parent has a job. And to these dire figures we must add the fact that nearly six hundred thousand blacks have the AIDS virus, with their rate of death two and a half times that of whites who have been infected.Ī report published last November by the Council of the Great City Schools, entitled “A Call for Change,” states that “the nation’s young black males are in a state of crisis” and describes their condition as “a national catastrophe.” This report shows thatīlack boys on average fall behind from their earliest years. In 2008, the black male high school graduation rate in Baltimore, Maryland, dropped to 25 percent, was 50 percent in Chicago, and in California ten thousand black students (42 percent) quit school. While black people represented 13 percent of the US population in 2005, they were the victims of 49 percent of all murders, 15 percent of rapes, assaults, and other violent crimes nationwide, and most of the black murder victims-93 percent-were killed by other black people. One in nine black men between the ages of twenty and thirty-four is in prison. In America’s prisons, where on average the 2.25 million persons incarcerated in 2006 had fewer than eleven years of schooling, about half are black. 71 percent of black babies are born out of wedlock and over half of black children (56 percent) are fatherless. That percentage in 2011 may become even higher after what we call the Great Recession, which pushed members of the fragile black middle class into the ranks of the poor. (Beyonce Knowles last December gave her husband, Jay-Z, whose fortune is worth $450 million, the most expensive car in the world, a Bugatti Veyron Grand Sport priced at $2 million a month later Oprah Winfrey premiered her own network, appropriately named OWN and Kanye West just spent $180,000 for a watch in his own image, which is only slightly less than the $250,000 that rapper Usher paid a New York luxury watch company to create a timepiece with his face on it.) But in a different, grim, and depressing portrait, 25 percent of black Americans live in poverty. They are millionaires, even billionaires, having earned their wealth in business, sports, and entertainment. In one profile, black Americans appear in every walk of life and profession. Like the narrator of Charles Dickens’s novel A Tale of Two Cities, many black Americans today possibly feel “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” The reason is because, as Eugene Robinson explained in an April 4, 2008, article in the Washington Post, there are actually two very culturally different black Americas as this new millennium begins. Let me try to explain what I mean by that. Rather, I see it as a matter of life and death for black Americans. These issues are matters that I’ve spent a lifetime thinking about, but for me this is not merely an academic discussion. And it is only by practice, by an uphill spiritual struggle, that happiness in life either present or future, as well as the goal of Nibbāna, can possibly be attained.” For this conference, I was asked to discuss some of the implications of this ethical philosophy for black America, and also ways it might relate to the civil rights movement. In his 1970 work, Buddhist Ethics, Hammalawa Saddhatissa writes in the preface, “Strictly speaking, Buddhism is not a religion in the generally accepted sense of the word, and it would be more accurate to describe it as an ethico-philosophy to be practiced by each follower.
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