hey! hey-heeey! remember the Sixties?

The Village Voice: Features: Mushmouth Reconsidered by Ta-Nehisi Coates: "Mushmouth Reconsidered by Ta-Nehisi Coates
July 13th, 2004 11:00 AM"

For all their mean-spiritedness and elitism, Cosby's rantings have suffered from his unwillingness to allow facts and stats to get in the way of a good dig. "At any time you can pull stuff out the newspaper that sounds horrible, of any race and any people," says Mike Males, a senior research fellow for the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice. "I looked at all these measures that he's talking about, and I saw that none of them were any worse than they were in the past. In fact, many are better."

Males should know. After hearing Cosby grumble that the young were trampling over the work of the old, he went and crunched some numbers and came up with some shockers:

In 1970, among black females between 15 and 17 years old, there were 72 pregnancies per 1000. In 2002, there were 30.9 per 1000.

In 1970, the dropout rate was 28 percent among African Americans. In 2001, it was 11 percent.

In 1970, 15 percent of African Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 went to college. Today, that number stands at 31 percent.
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