The Curious Disappearance of Cursive Writing

 I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but...

...why exactly did schools decide cursive was the skill that had to go?

I'm told it's because we needed more time for technology. Fair enough. Kids should know how to use a keyboard. But somehow they can spend hours learning standardized test strategies and social media trends, yet fifteen minutes a day teaching handwriting became too much?

Call me crazy, but three thoughts cross my mind.

First, if nobody can read cursive anymore, fewer people can read old letters, journals, family records, and even parts of our own history without someone translating it for us. That's an odd way to preserve the past. It means that someone else (the government) will have to recreate those documents and translate for younger generations. Think about the things that will probably be "lost in translation".

Second, it seems that the less we write by hand, the more dependent we become on devices. Every note, reminder, and idea now belongs to a phone, tablet, or cloud server somewhere instead of on a piece of paper. No more analog thoughts. Only digital ones that can be tracked and somehow monetized with ads. Funny how independence quietly became inconvenience.

Third, signatures are slowly becoming meaningless. Today's kids are growing up in a world where a fingerprint or face scan matters more than their own handwriting. Maybe that's progress. Maybe it's just one more thing we're handing over to technology.

Do I actually believe there's a secret meeting where people plotted the downfall of cursive? Maybe. Maybe not.

But I do think we've become a little too eager to throw away simple skills because they're "old-fashioned." Not everything from the past deserves to stay there.

Sometimes common sense isn't asking if something is old. It's asking whether replacing it actually made us better.

Why Do We Need A Blackout Day?

Okay, so I talked to a friend of mine named TeAndra a while back and she brought something up in our conversation that I hadn't thought about before.  Why do we have to have designated days to support black-owned business?

I think back to stories from the 50's and 60's that my father shared with me years ago.  He said that every weekend, black people would frequent a spot in Jackson, MS in an area now known as the Farish Street District.  Farish Street was a black community and there were a lot of black shops and restaurants in that area.  That area thrived from the black dollars that went into it. 

Fast forward to after the Civil Rights Era.  No more colored water fountains.  No more colored-only entrances.  All of that stuff abolished.  And that was the origin of the collapsing of black businesses in the Jackson area.  Black people started taking their business to white establishments and ultimately stopped patronizing their own.  That area of Jackson has been struggling ever since it can't seem to come close to recapturing what it once had.  

Now, if you fast forward to present day, we have what some people call "black out days".  We use black businesses so infrequently now that we have to remind the world to take a day to patronize a black-owned business.

How sad is that?  Why do we not support our own.  And don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that black people should not support people of other races, I'm just trying to figure out why we appear to be the only race of people who don't keep our dollars within our communities.

We approach black businesses in one or two ways: 1) we want some sort of hook up or discount.  And 2) we have a zero tolerance for anything that we interpret as bad customer service.

C'mon, people.  Let's stop being stuck on stupid.  There's a reason why you've heard of different parts of major cities devoted to certain ethnic groups.  You've heard of Chinatown, Little Italy, and things of that nature.  Why isn't there a well-known community in every major city predominantly serviced by black-owned businesses?  I ain't never heard of Blacktown.  

Well, that might be offensive to some, but the point I'm trying to make is: stop being on a short fuse when it come to black-owned businesses.  There are a lot of professional people out here who just want to make a living like everyone else, but they can't do it because your expectations of them is unreasonable.  Give them the same level of patience you give the rest of the world.

We still go to fast food restaurant chains regularly and put up with bad attitudes from the moment we place our orders.  We still go to big box superstores with 20 registers and only 2 of them are open and will sit in line long enough to play out all of your Candy Crush lives.  But let a black-owned business be 1 minute late or forget to take the tomatoes off of your hamburger order and it's, "man, I can't stand black folks.  They don't do anything right!  I ain't ever coming back!"

Is that how you really feel?  SMH.

Pick A Bale Of Cotton

Sometimes these blog posts just writes themselves.  An Arkansas senator named Tom Cotton said that slavery was a "necessary evil".  Well, unlike our American History books, to put things into context, he said that, "As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil on which the union was built."

This conversation came up during an interview about how slavery should be taught in schools.  Cotton wants to cut funding for schools who use curriculum from the "1619 Project".

You don't have to be a history major to know that a lot of foul stuff was happening to black people in the 1600's.  That project was created to help students understand how this country was built on the backs of slaves.  It's a painful story to tell, but it does help to enlighten those who know very little about how this country came to be what it is today.  In no way, shape, or form is murdering, beating, and raping a group of people a "necessary evil".  It's evil, but it's very unnecessary.  I don't care in what context you attempt to use it.  However, he later said on Twitter that he wasn't endorsing the Founding Fathers stance on slavery.  Blah, blah, blah.  Cotton also made quotes that insinuated that despite America being a flawed country, it is a great country and he doesn't want it portrayed as being formed by a bunch of greedy, racists crooks.

And this is a huge problem that I have with American History school books.  They are incomplete.  They don't tell the real story of how this country came to be.  The treatment received by minorities would bring about a ton of shame onto a lot of prominent people.  Especially if names were mentioned.

Case in point, Senator Cotton is a descendant of slave owners.  There are documents floating around online now that show a will from his great-great-great-great (I'm unsure of how many "greats") grandfather leaving slaves to an heir.  So, I'm guessing that having to explain that part of history is not something he's wanting to get into.  In fact, I'm sure that a lot of surnames of prominent people would come up if we did a deep dive into the origin of slave owners.  There are a lot of rich people in this country who had wealth passed down to them from those who made it off of the backs of treacherous acts.

It's ironic that a man with the last name of "Cotton" has a problem with how slavery is taught in schools.  History should be no longer "white-washed" to tell "his story".  It should be told in its entirety so that people can begin to understand how "The Greatest Country in the World" has a lumpy carpet from the things being swept under the rug.

Why Was "Hidden Figures" Not in My History Books?

I finally took the opportunity to watch the movie "Hidden Figures".  It's a movie, based on a true story, that follows the lives of three women, who lived in Virginia, who were key components in the success of the NASA space program in the 60's.  Not only was working in prominent roles at NASA a rarity for women, these women were also black, which makes it even more of a phenomenon for the early 60's.  As I watched this movie, my heart swelled with pride to see these black women blaze the trail for many others to come.

Well, maybe they blazed a trail locally.  Because I don't recall ever hearing these ladies mentioned in my history books.  12 years of school and NASA's space program didn't mention one woman until Sally Ride.  Where were the names of Katherine G. Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson?  These women were part of the reason we ever got an American into space at all and they can't get any love in history books?

What would it have meant to thousands of young, black kids, especially girls, across the country to know the accomplishments of these three ladies?  Let me retract that.  There were actually as many as 30 black women who worked for NASA during the first orbit around Earth.  They were referred to as "computers" because of the type of work that they did.  Either the state of Virginia has a surplus of super-intelligent black women or the school system has done us a disservice of informing us of minority accomplishments.  I'll go with the latter.

This movie showed how black people were able to overcome the mistreatment that they received while still outperforming their white counterparts.  Something that a lot of us still deal with today.  We've all heard the phrase, "you have to work twice as hard to get half of what they got."  This movie is a prime example of that.

I would encourage anyone to watch this movie.  It doesn't matter your race or gender.  It's something that everyone can get something out of.  What these ladies did should have been celebrated since the launch and should be a part of American History and not just NASA's history.  Yet it took 44 years of my life to even hear about this story.

And it makes me wonder how many Native Americans, Asians, Latinos, etc. have been left out of the history books, too.  I guess we'll never truly know, but thanks to director, Theodore Melfi, for telling this story.  It's a shame that only one of the three ladies involved was actually alive to see it.

Katherine G. Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson.