Queens keeps on faking it

It's funny, I've heard the story of how Roxanne Shante forced Wonder Bros. to pay for her Ph.D from Cornell referred to as the feel good story of the summer, but it didn't become the feel good story of the summer to me until I found out it was a buncha bullshit.

Now it might be the feel good story of the year. I haven't felt this good since my last trip over to the east side, in which, oddly enough, I probably helped put some girls through school.

I've been fascinated with the idea of hoodrats getting fake college degrees ever since I read a story in the Riverfront Times about an institution known as the St. Louis College of Health Careers. Dedicated, life long haters might remember when I mentioned it in my review of Jim Jones' On My Way to Church. This was around the time when I graduated from college, after five years, and I was shocked to learn that I could have just as easily showed up to some building down by 40 and Kingshighway with a check for a few thousand dollars.

You know girls who go to these schools advertised on TV during Judge Judy and other such hoodrat afternoon fare probably get jobs making way more money than I've ever made. One of the girls in the RFT story had been working at a White Castle, where I was working at the time, and where I earned a post-graduate certificate in food safety, when she decided to "go back to school." I may have even considered it myself, except I happen to know a lot of those lower end medical jobs involve rubbing lotion on an old white man's balls, like Malcolm X used to do before he joined the Nation of Islam.

But I digress.

Anyway, I wouldn't be surprised if these hoodrat medical schools played a role in Roxanne Shante deciding to lie about having a Ph.D from Cornell. The project she lives in must be full of women with certificates on the wall saying they're qualified to practice some form of medicine they can hardly pronounce, and Roxanne Shante must have felt left out. She's been famous since she was like 12 years old, and you know how when you get a taste of the limelight at such a young age, you'll do anything to get it back, even if it takes lying to some rube from the New York Daily News about your education.

As a matter of fact, I know, because I read it in Bill Cosby's book Come On People: The Nick Manning Story, or whatever it's called (which I found in the clearance aisle at Barnes & Noble, not too far from where I found the book by the Smoking Gun, with the graphic description of the Kobe Bryant date rape), that there's something like twice (or was it eight times?) as many black women in college as black men - and I bet those numbers would draw a lot closer to equal, if you didn't count schools where all of the degree programs involve either the word "assistant," or "technician." Someone with the tools and the talent (i.e. either Slate of the Smoking Gun) might need to conduct an investigation.

Roxanne Shante had probably been telling people she's a doctor since back in the '90s. I remember hearing about it when she mentioned it on that Beef DVD, back when I was still in college, but I didn't think anything of it. In a country where Star Jones is a lawyer, of course Roxanne Shante has a Ph.D in psychology from an Ivy League school. The dumbass who did the story in the New York Daily News must have seen the Beef DVD on Fuse, where they've been rerunning it ad nauseum, and thought it would make for a heartwarming story. Heartless bastard that I am, I never would have guessed. Even when I saw the story in the New York Daily News I didn't think anything of it. Then I saw Axis of PC ringleader Jay Smooth plugging it on Twitter as if it was the greatest story ever told. Which in a way it is!