Enslaving Minority Children

In March 2003, the Goldwater Institutes Policy Report on Race and Disability: Racial Bias in Arizona Special Education, reported that, Of both low-income and African-American fourth graders tested, 60% scored below basic on the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress Examination.

Also, while African American students account for only 16% of the U.S. student population, they represent nearly a third (32%) of all students in programs for mild mental retardation. African American students are also three times more likely than White students to be labeled as mentally retarded.

A 1993 U.S. News and World Report article revealed that in 39 states blacks were over-represented in special education programs.

Special Education is a conduit for hooking millions of children onto mind-altering psychiatric drugs by labeling them with learning disabilities at a cost of $28 billion a year.

According to the Goldwater Institute, The sheer number of students mislabeled is staggering. Even worse, in predominantly White school districts, minority students are classified as learning disabled at significantly higher rates.

The scientific rationale used to justify these travesties is the psychiatric diagnostic system called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).

Professor Herb Kutchins, co-author of Making Us Crazy, says the DSM is an unreliable classification system. Defenders of slavery, proponents of racial segregationhave consistently attempted to justify oppression by inventing new mental illnesses and reporting higher rates of abnormality among African Americans or other minorities.

Using the DSM, psychiatrists can fraudulently diagnose any child as suffering Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). The symptoms include has difficulty playing quietly, often talks excessively, often loses things, fails to complete schoolwork, chores, or other duties... and often fidgets with hands or feet or squirms in seat. In other words, just behaving like a child is a mental disease.

Psychiatrists claim that such disorders are the result of a chemical imbalance in the brain. This is a lie. Dr. Mary Ann Block, author of No More ADHD, points out that The psychiatrist does not do any testing. The psychiatrist listens to the history and then prescribes a drug.

There are numerous side effects and risks with the drugs for so-called ADHD. A short list of these follows:

• Methylphenidate, the main drug prescribed, is more potent than cocaine and classified by drug agencies as being as abusive and potentially addictive as morphine and opium.
• The side effects of methylphenidate include blood pressure and pulse changes, angina (heart irregularity), weight loss and toxic (poisonous) psychosis. Suicide is a risk during withdrawal.¹¹
• Children who take amphetamine-type or other prescribed psychotropic drugs do not perform better academically. They fail just as many courses, and drop out of school, just as often as children who do not take the drugs.¹²
• In June 2003, the UK government banned the use of an antidepressant, Seroxat (Paxil) on under 18-year-olds, citing suicidal tendencies caused by the drug. American and Canadian drug approval agencies also warned against Paxils use in children.
• Many of the school shootings in the U.S. have been committed by teenagers who had been prescribed psychiatric drugs and/or were undergoing some sort of psychological anger management programs.

According to Isaac Hayes, Children are the hope of our culture, whether black, Hispanic, Native American, or any race. Do inner-city youth, antagonized by poverty, substandard inner-city education, unemployment and broken families, need drugs that will turn them violent? This battle is about mental slavery.

In 2003, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in the U.S., unanimously passed a resolution supporting federal legislation that protects children from being forced onto psychiatric drugs in schools.

Fred Shaw, a former L.A. Sheriff who owns and manages a group home for boys as an alternative to juvenile hall adds: I deal with African American teenagers who have been labeled as inferior, been given substandard education and are told there is something wrong with their brains which requires powerful, mind-altering medication. They have no hope and see no future. Its a recipe for crime and suicide.

Fred Shaw says, The solution is not to further label children, or to give them psychological or psychiatric services, but to provide them with effective literacy programs and empower them with knowledge and the ability to live responsibly.

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