It is good to hear that was your experience, because it is disheartening to think that knowledge or education would be negatively stigmatized in any community.

It is good to hear that was your experience, because it is disheartening to think that knowledge or education would be negatively stigmatized in any community. Interestingly, Barack Obama is one of the big propagators of that idea. I think I heard from him first, and that's probably true of many others, when in his 2004 DNC speech (where many Americans heard him for the first time), he said, "Children can’t achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white.”