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Now that Black History Month is over, can we continue in this all too sedentary vein of mediocrity? How should we comport ourselves in order to celebrate our rich heritage with dignity? How will history view this era of educated blacks? We hold a generation of potential leaders, but what will this legacy be 100 years from now?
What will we evolve into? Will we continue to refer to each as nigger, dog, and the like for another 20 or more years? Will young, black soon-to-be men continue to walk around campus holding up their oversized pants, showing their multi-colored, sometimes psychedelic panties, trying to approach some phony coolness?
Surely, there is much excellence to celebrate at N.C. Carolina Central University. There is plenty of genuine talent here in all disciplines of study at NCCU. But who among us is going to step up and become the standard leaders for this generation?
Where else should we be looking other than university campuses to find the quality leaders we deserve? But if educated blacks continue to dumb themselves down to be hep and then retain their ghetto-speak, what will be the criterion to judge academic excellence?
I am talking about college students who show no discernable difference between their speech and a high school dropout's faulty grammar. On a campus such as this, in times such as these, how can we continue to exist without a steep increase in intellectual curiosity that goes beyond mediocrity?
Nevermore was I so distressed as when I attended a seminar here at NCCU, the same seminar to encourage junior college graduates from Durham Tech to further their education at this institution.
To demonstrate what, I don't know, the junior college attendants at that seminar were regaled with a step show. With all the talent on NCCU's campus, why could we only come up with a step show to demonstrate to those potential students a reason to attend NCCU?
How could that demonstrate the academic excellence we should be striving to instill future students? Let us stop fooling ourselves. It is not that many are talking with ghetto-speak semantics because that's the way our friends talk. It is because many don't know any better
Over and over, and I cringe when I hear it, a college student saying supposedly to another college student on the "celly": "You is crazy" or "Where you at?" or "Where is you?" or "Where you been at?" And the worst I've heard: "I haven't seen't him."
We talked about this in class, and a few students tried to justify these ghetto-phonics as mere conversation between familiars or "my homies." But I'd bet money that, if challenged, these same speakers would be unable to shed their customary ghetto-phonics in favor of a speech pattern indicative of the higher learning, which they claim to be seeking.
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