required: response to executive summary
A lot of the things I thought about when I read the executive summary have already been written, in a much-more thought-through (and probably better-written) entry by a colleague of mine.
The Executive Summary is the kind of statistical research report that I enjoy reading on pretty much ANY topic other than how awful Mississippi, and the Delta, is in comparison to the rest of the country. It would have made for fascinating reading 3 years ago (oh, I would have eaten it up and found it incredible), but now it just depresses me. I put off this blog until the last day or so because I just didn't even want to read it.
Yes, Mississippi has a lot of problems. Yes, the Delta is an incredibly depressing place. Yes, Mississippi, and more specifically, the Delta, has the worst of all the good things you can think of (graduation rates, incomes, education, industry, life expectancy, "human development", health, hope, etc ) and the best of all the worst things (teen pregnancy, poverty, unemployment, crime, segregation, idiocy, laziness, etc).
No matter how many times we can repeat, quanitify, publish, diagram, color-in-the-map, or research them, it is still going to turn out the same. Research like this may be thought-provoking for outsiders, and a call-to-arms for Mississippians who believe in in the power of optimism and progress and prosperity, but I am feeling more and more pessimistic about the Delta. This place is stuck in a hole. There is no solution. Nothing will fix the myriad problems in this particular "county grouping", as the summary calls it.
The two-map comparison in the summary is one of the more depressing things -- the MEDIAN income for blacks in my county is between 13,000 and 15,000 dollars. The median income for whites in my county is 30,000 to 38,000. There's not much to say about that, other than I don't understand why every single one of my students isn't working their little behind off to get out of this place, with that kind of future looking at them.
But then I realize, the reason the median is so low, and the reason that many of my kids don't try in my class, is that many of the African Americans in our community AREN'T working. Here are the two maps I created:
their laziness.
Like I said, articles like this only make me more depressed, and much, much more pessimistic about the future of Mississippi, and more specifically, the Delta.
