The Roots of African-American Social Problems in the US and How to Fix Them - Political Forum

Sebelius for VP, not Hillary · 03-19-2007, 12:02 AM

I pose a question: What is the source(s) of problems for the African-American Community? I encourage others to answer it and I will try to do so myself. By problems, I mean all the problems that most Americans know of, and a lot of the problems African-Americans know of. This includes: isolation and entrapment in racial ghettos, unemployment, crime, lower test scores, poorer schools, and the collapse of the black family to name the main problems.

I seek to find the source or sources for those problems, and then to suggest generally how they can be solved. The greatest part of my answer is going to be to look back in history to how African-Americans got to where they are today. I will then offer some of my own ideas and also provide copies of several famous articles which offer analysis that I agree with.

Part 1: Cycle of Poverty Within the Ghetto, No African-American Identity

The reason for problems within the black community come from many sources. To sum this answer up briefly: the main problem comes from a history of racism in the United States that have buried African Americans in a poverty trapped ghetto, and have gutted the African-American identity. The ghetto assumes a life of its own, by outright denial of equal access to employment and education and by fostering the growth of social pathologies such as crime, single-parent families and gangster rap. The ghetto is the abandonoment of blacks by whites and the sealing up of the former by the latter. Those left in the ghetto have insufficient resources to compete with those outside the ghetto and thus cannot escape. They are left to languish in it and grow weaker and further unable to compete.

The problems of the black ghetto, and black America can be traced back to the history of racism in the United States. The uplifting of millions of blacks from Africa, making them slaves, forbidding them to read or write, enforcing white names, religion and language upon them and abolishing their African culture.

Sebelius for VP, not Hillary · 03-19-2007, 12:04 AM

Part 2 - History of Racism Prevents Economic Differentiation and Expansion of Blacks

Given that this country was divided for such a long period of time between those violently opposed to African-American equality and those who wanted to grant major reforms to make them equal, black assimilation was delayed until it became so hard to accomplish the issue that opposition to formal African-American equality stopped. Earlier I gave a brief history on African-American history, opportunity and equality. I resubmit that (with some minor modifications) here.

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The early settlers of the present-day United States first began settling colonies in the 1600's. Blacks arrived here in those colonies and have been slaves for some 2 and 1/2 centuries till 1865. Slavery perservered in the post-Civil War era. Blacks were free by the the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments but were still slaves by the interpretations of the Supreme Court, Southern local and state laws and Southern local violence. There were Jim Cro laws, political disenfranchisement, violence, economic exploitation by a racist custom of not selling blacks land and charging them exorbitant prices as well as outright fraud in being paid for the goods they produced and no legal recourse for victimized blacks to turn to. This went on for at least a century till about the time of the Second World War. At this point, blacks were no longer needed for farming the land and could be replaced by machines. Throughout that time the blacks accumulated no education and no wealth due to said enslavement. At this point their southern slavers told them to pack up and get the hell off their lands.

Blacks were rapidly uprooted from their traditional agricultural livelihood and thrown into the free-market. This has been done before in other cultures (see the Enclosure Act of England) where the slack had been taken up by the manufacturing industry. This happened again in the USA as there was a massive black exodus to the Midwest and the North. Unfortunately for the blacks that within a generation of that shift, jobs requiring the low-skills (which they possessed) were being outsourced abroad and the American manufacturing sector quickly became a thing of the past. Most likely, blacks were the last one’s hired and the first one’s fired, making their employment less positively affected by boom times in the economy and more heavily hurt by bust times.

The massive departure of jobs overseas left blacks with no skills and no means to support themselves. I believe that this is the greatest cause of the present-day situation. This is not my idea but that of William Julius Wilson (The Truly Disadvantaged) a book I would highly recommend.

Aside from these problems blacks were not given an equal opportunity at education as the last desegrageted school ended that policy ~1969. But that is only de jure segregation. De facto segregation continued as whites fled indiscriminantly wherever blacks moved into northern communities. This exacerbated the low education and skills black brought with them and declining employment that was later in effect. The bottom line: school funding is paid locally, blacks arrived with little education, and soon after they got there, their jobs started disappearing, increasing unemployment and decreasing the resources available for education.

Sebelius for VP, not Hillary · 03-19-2007, 12:04 AM

Part 3 - Roots of Modern Day Segregation - White Flight

Excerpts from "ORIGINS OF WHITE FLIGHT: Ruling accelerated exodus Whites in Richmond traded the city for the suburbs after the Brown decision"

by BY BILL MCKELWAY, TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER
May 9, 2004

TimesDispatch.com | ORIGINS OF WHITE FLIGHT: Ruling accelerated exodus

Quote:

This was Richmond in 1950. Banks, most of them locally owned, shimmered with wealth. Downtown department stores swelled with patrons. Metal and tobacco production hummed. Industrial wages had surpassed those in New Orleans and were achingly close to those in Houston and Atlanta. In just a half-century, the city's population had tripled to 230,000. For two-thirds of that population, living the American dream was more reality than aspiration....

May 17, 1954, promised to change all that. In a case called Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the U.S. Supreme Court that day issued its unanimous decision that blacks could not be denied the opportunity to share classrooms with whites....

Whites, especially in Richmond, were caught in a clash of political and moral will that reached into every home. And in huge numbers, for different reasons, many white people sought refuge from a law and a race of people that seemed totally foreign to them. More than white flight, there was white abdication - not so much of the segregationist past as of a city and its left-behind populace...

"I remember how startled I was that a few of the families on my newspaper route were black. They were just beginning to move into our neighborhood." To Hobbs, almost 75 now and still working part time, "if you saw a black person around who wasn't doing service work, the first thing that came to mind, I'll be honest about it, was that something had gone wrong. You'd think, 'Well, there goes the neighborhood.'"...

From the end of World War II in 1945 to 1952, two years before Brown, 12,000 new families had settled in Henrico County. For many whites, the prospect of a black neighbor, or black classmates for their children, rushed the decision to leave. The suburbs offered space, new homes at low interest rates with modern appliances, shops and quick access to the city and work. The region's first new shopping center, Willow Lawn, opened not in the city but just over the line on Broad Street in Henrico....

Throughout the 1950s, blacks were filling the void left by whites in Richmond's cramped, aging neighborhoods, even as blacks saw their communities in Randolph and Jackson Ward ravaged by construction of an interstate highway and expressway. Before Brown and for years after, black schools wanted for space, teachers and books. In a 1957 interview with Times-Dispatch reporters, City Manager Horace Edwards said, "The people better able to pay taxes are leaving, while those least able to pay are staying."...

News stories then, citing vague references to studies and unnamed officials, harped on the theme of education and race relations in chaos and sourly predicted that rising birth rates among low-income blacks would lead to neighborhood blight, higher crime rates and a more powerful black electorate. In Virginia, the looming prospect of desegregation so clearly spelled out in Brown hardly elicited public alarm. Not at first.....

As the months and years passed, Kilpatrick at The News Leader and an assortment of unnamed editorial writers at The Times-Dispatch waged a fierce, relentless campaign of Massive Resistance - the phrase coined by Virginia's segregationist Sen. Harry F. Byrd Sr. - that was unmatched elsewhere in the South. It played heavily on fears of mixed-race marriage, disorder and judicial tyranny.

Dusting off the doctrine of interposition that held that the states were empowered to interpose their rights to fend off the tyranny of unconstitutional law, Kilpatrick wrote: "By every lawful means that can be devised, this tyranny must be resisted, step by step and inch by inch, if the vitality of Southern civilization is to be preserved, and all that is best and finest in our culture is not be to lost in the indolence and degradation of a mixed race."....

For many whites, working things out meant leaving the city.

Sebelius for VP, not Hillary · 03-19-2007, 12:08 AM

Part 4 - Containing Blacks in the Ghetto

Please refer to the below interactive website to see how this was done with:

Restrictive Covenants (agreements not to sell homes to any blacks in a white neighborhood)
Housing Discrimination
Violence
Racist Bank Policies
White Flight
Racial Prejudice

A detailed illustration is provided in the following link: Causes of Segregation

Hold your cursor over the above terms for a brief explanation and more elaboration.

Sebelius for VP, not Hillary · 03-19-2007, 12:16 AM

Part 5: Inequality in school funding prevents African Americans from escaping the ghetto

Schools attended by blacks are under funded between a range of 25-100%, compared to suburban schools populated by whites. Another source puts funding per student in Harlem between a debated range of $2,000 - $4,810, presumably after adjusting for differences in prices between cities and states. But even by the higher number, this is markedly lower than the national average of $7,500.*

Opinion: Money would help school the poor

Quote:

New York is the worst offender. According to the study by the Education Trust, a nonprofit group which represents the interests of poor, urban schools, New York spends $2,152 more per student in low-poverty districts than in those where poverty is highest. Illinois isn't far behind with a per-student disparity of $2,060. That means, each classroom of 25 students in a pricey New York suburb will receive $53,800 more in state and local funds than the equivalent class in Harlem.

Police Yes, Education No - Urban Agenda - Community Service Society of New York

Quote:

The rest of the state spends on average twice per student what the city spends on school library books. In Mott Haven and Morrisania in the South Bronx, in Bedford Stuyvesant and Crown Heights in Brooklyn, and in East Harlem, each student has access to less than two library books. Barely one-half of city schools have functioning libraries and less than 25% have certified librarians.

The following article provides an excellent account of this: Inequality in funding of public education raises justice issues: quality often depends on where students live - Cover Story National Catholic Reporter - Find Articles

Citation 1: Rockford Register Star - Rockford's Newspaper and Website - Local & State News

Sebelius for VP, not Hillary · 03-19-2007, 12:23 AM

Part 5b: Negative Macroeconomic Impacts which created the Ghetto, and Government Programs which help to Improve Conditions in the Ghetto

The following is some history on the decline in the US manufacturing center, and its impact on the ghetto, as well as some programs that the government has implement that has had some success in reducing poverty and educational gaps in the ghetto.

Quote:

Education Policies

Several educational policies have also had positive consequences for black and low-income students and their families. Since it was established as a War on Poverty program in 1964, Head Start has provided a comprehensive array of child development services to children aged 3-5 from low-income families. Unlike most programs for economically disadvantaged students, Head Start has been able to obtain the active participation of parents as volunteers and paid staff. Follow-up studies of this program continually document its outstanding success. Children who had been in Head Start were found to have higher rates of high school completion, college enrollment, and employment, and lower rates of arrests and welfare dependency than children not exposed to such preschool programs (Levitan, 1985), Unfortunately, because of funding constraints, the 450,000 children served by Head Start in fiscal year 1985 accounted for only one-fourth of the low-income children eligible for those services.

Prior to the budget cuts of the early 1980’s, about half of all black college students received Pell grants, leaving only one-tenth having to rely on Guaranteed Student Loans. However, the disproportionate cuts in scholarships have forced many black students either to increase their future indebtedness or to forego college (Jones, 1981). In fact, while the percentage of white high school graduates going on to college rose from 51% to 59% between 1975 and 1985, the percentage of black high school graduates going on to college fell from 46% to 42% (Gibbs, 1988)

Employment policies

Many government trade policies have had adverse effects on black workers and their families. Several studies have revealed that the industries with the largest job losses due to imports have a higher representation of black workers that those industries with the largest job gains due to exports. Thus black men have been disproportionately displaced by imports in the auto, steel and rubber industries and black women have been disproportionately displaced by imports in the apparel and textile industries.

While blacks comprise only 7% of the work force in the 20 manufacturing industries that gained the largest number of jobs due to exports between 1964 and 1975, blacks accounted for 11% of the work force in the 20 manufacturing industries that lost the largest number of jobs due to imports. Moreover, while blacks gained 229,000 jobs through exports in 1970, the lost 287,000 jobs because of imports – for a net loss of 58,000 jobs (National Commission for Employment Policy, 1978)

Between January 1979 and January 1984, 11.5 million workers lost jobs because of plant closings or relocations, abolition of positions or shifts, or slack work. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has defined the 5.1 million workers who lost jobs held for at least three years as “displaced.” Blacks, who accounted for 600,000 (or 12%) of the 5.1 million displaced workers, were much less likely than whites to be reemployed. While three out of five (63%) displaced white workers were employed by January 1984, only two out of five (42%) displaced black workers were employed. Moreover, black workers (42%) were twice as likely as white workers (23%) to be unemployed by January 1984. Furthermore, about half of all reemployed workers earned less than their income from previous jobs (Flaim & Sehgal, 1985).

According to Bluestone and Harrison (1982), private disinvestment policies related to plant closings in inner cities can also structurally discriminate against wage-earners in black families:

Blacks are especially hard-hit because they are increasingly concentrated within central cities and in those regions of the country where plant closings and economic dislocation have been most pronounced. Moreover, as the number of jobs grew rapidly in the South, whites moved in to take the overwhelming majority of them. How capital mobility can have a discriminatory impact, intentionally or not, is shown clearly. When a laundry is located in St. Louis began to decentralize in 1964, its workforce was 75% black. By 1975 after it had opened up 13 suburban facilities and reduced its downtown operation, its black work force was down to five percent. (pp. 54-55)

Sebelius for VP, not Hillary · 03-19-2007, 12:28 AM

Part 6: New Problems: The Collapse of the Black Family and the Lack of a Black Identity

The following are two articles which address the cultural problems of many African-Americans.

Quote:

"Hard Truths"
by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Everyone knows there are two nations in this country, white and Black, right? That’s what the Kerner Commission Report said in 1968, and that’s what the title of Andrew Hacker’s bestselling sequel to that report says today. And for good reason. Track the statistics for public health, educational attainment, and income, and they all seem to point to the same thing: that African Americans are the ultimate unassimilables of the American mix, the pebble in the ethnic soup.

Peer a little closer, though, and this familiar image splits again. Even as the ranks of the underclass expand, a second nation-within-a-nation has formed. The fact is, Afro-America’s affluent elite is larger than it has ever been—a legacy of the post—civil rights era and just the kind of corporate and governmental programs of intervention that have fallen into such disfavor of late.

Now, most of the Black communities’ leaders, self-appointed or otherwise, are loath to acknowledge the existence of this class. They take it as part of their role to publicize the dire condition afflicting so much of Black America. Why distract from the real problem? But here’s the rub. Opponents of these post-civil rights era programs can then flatly declare that they have failed.

How to explain the complicated truth that for Black America, these are the worst of times…and the best of times?

Today many Black Americans enjoy a measure of economic security beyond any we have known in the history of Black America. But if they remain in a nasty blue funk, it’s because their very existence seems an affront to the swelling ranks of the poor. Nor have Black intellectuals ever quite made peace with the concept of the Black bourgeoisie, a group that is typically seen as devoid of cultural authenticity, doomed to mimicry and pallid assimilation. I once gave a talk before an audience of Black academics and educators, in the course of which I referred to the Black middle-class culture. Afterward, one of the academics in the audience, deeply affronted, had a question for me. “Professor Gates,” he asked rhetorically, his voice dripping with sarcasm, “what is Black middle-class culture?” I suggested that if he really wanted to know, he need only look around the room. But perhaps I should just have handed him a mirror; for just as nothing is more American than anti-Americanism, nothing is more characteristic of the Black bourgeoisie than the sense of shame and denial that the identity inspires. What did we do to be so black and blue? You may well ask.

The truth is that Black America has always been uncomfortable with the fact of its divisions, and none more so than the members of its middle class.

What do we do about this? What do we not do? First of all, it’s time for the Black middle class to stop feeling guilty about its own success while fellow Blacks languish in the inner city of despair. Black prosperity does not derive from Black poverty. Those who succeed are those whose community, whose families, prepared them to be successful. As Stanly Crouch and others remind us, the familiar exhortation in those days was to “get all the education that you can” – and we did. When I left home for Yale, virtually my whole hometown celebrated. “The community,” as we put it, however sentimentally, wished us to succeed. Talking Black, walking Black, wearing kente cloth, listening to Black music, and filling our walls with Black art—as desirable as these things can be in and of themselves—are not essential to “being Black”. You can love Mozart, Picasso, and ice hockey and still be as Black as the ace of spades.

Second, we don’t have to fail in order to be Black. As crazy as this sounds, recent surveys of young Black kids reveal a distressing pattern. Far too many say that succeeding is “white,” education is “white,” aspiring and dreaming are “white,” believing that you can make it is “white.” Had any of us said this sort of thing when we were growing up, our families and friends would have checked us into a mental institution. We need more success individually and collectively, not less.

Third, we don’t have to pretend any longer that 30 million people can ever possibly be members of the same social class. After all, the entire population of Canada is 26 million. Canadians are not all members of one economic class. Nor do they speak with one single voice of one single leader. We have never been members of a single social or economic class, and never will be.

How do we “fight the power” in a post)civil rights world in which Bull Connors and George Wallace are no longer the easy targets that white racists used to be? A world in which the rhetoric of the civil rights era sound tired and empty? (If someone had turned up at the Million Family March and handed over a check for $500 billion to heal the ills of the inner city, I wonder if anyone there would have known what to do with it.)

The time has come for honesty within the Black community. The causes of poverty within the Black community are both structural and behavioral, as scholars as diverse as philosopher Cornel West and sociologist William Julius Wilson have insisted, and as most polemicists still shy from acknowledging. A generation of well-meaning social scientists has made the notion of the culture of poverty taboo, correctly observing that the concept as originally introduced ignored the economic and structural dimensions of the problem. But having acknowledged those dimensions, it’s time to concede that, yes; there is a culture of poverty. How could there not be? How could you that think that culture matters and deny its relation to economic success? In general, a household made up of a sixteen-year–old mother, a thirty-two-year-old grandmother, and a forty-eight-year-old great grand mother is not a site for hope and optimism. It’s also true that not everyone in any society wants to work, that not all people are equally motivated.

There! Was that so hard to say?

Our task, it seems to me, is to lobby for those social programs that have been demonstrated to make a difference for those sufficiently motivated to seize these expanded opportunities. More important, we have to demand a structural change in this country. We have to take people off welfare and train them for occupations relevant to a twenty-first-century economy. And while I’m sympathetic to such incentives as tax breaks to generate new investment in inner cities, youth apprenticeships with corporations, expanded tax credits for earned income, and tenant ownership of inner-city property, I believe we will have to face a reality. The reality is that our inner cities are not going to become oases of economic prosperity and corporate investment, and we should probably think about moving Black inner-city workers to the jobs rather than wait for new factories to resettle in the inner city.

To continue to repeat the same old stale formulas—to blame, in exactly the same way, “the man” for oppressing us all, to scapegoat Koreans, Jews, or even Haitians for seizing local entrepreneurial opportunities that have for whatever reason, eluded us—is to fail to accept moral leadership. Not to demand that each member of the Black community accept individual responsibility for their behavior—whether that behavior assumes the form of gang violence, unprotected sexual activity, you name it—is another way of selling out a beleaguered community. It is to surrender to the temptation to act as ethnic cheerleaders “selling wolf tickets”—engaging in hollow rhetoric—from the suburbs instead of speaking the hard truths that may be unpopular with our fellows. Du Bois dared to speak an uncomfortable truth when he addressed the responsibilities of the Black elite. For them, the challenge awaits of healing the rift within Black America, and the larger nation as well.

Sebelius for VP, not Hillary · 03-19-2007, 12:29 AM

“Making Black America Better Through Self-Knowledge” by Na’im Akbar, Ph.d

Quote:

The ultimate effectiveness (power) of any group of people is the degree to which they have an awareness of who they are and respect for themselves. One of the major deficiencies of the African American community is the persistence of a fundamental lack of self-awareness and a debilitating deficit of self-esteem. These characteristics are not new for the African American community, but are deeply rooted in a tradition that was devised to sabotage our collective and personal efficacy and make us into a permanent servant class in America. All of those cultural and institutional devices that are usually employed to ensure that people will develop an effective self-awareness were systematically uprooted and/or prohibited. The consequence is that African Americans are badly handicapped in competition with other groups of people who are equipped with these fundamental qualities of self-awareness and self-respect.

Beginning with the slavery system and continuing through the post-slavery practices of oppression and discrimination. African-Americans were prohibited from engaging in those activities that would ensure the acquisition of basic self-knowledge. As a group, we were systematically degraded by the broader culture in such a way that self-respect was certainly extremely difficult to develop. The instruments that generally facilitate the development of self-knowledge are education, cultural images, and celebrations that build a shared aesthetic, role models, and the projection of cultural heroes and heroines.

How to make Black Americans better? We must make a priority of developing cultural and educational institutions that are geared toward developing African American self-knowledge. It is important for us to realize that we cannot engage in economic and political cooperation, resolving our wide array of social problems or competing with other cultural groups on the planet for resources, until we have a clear sense of who we are. This self-knowledge that should lead to self-respect and self-determination is a prerequisite for the achievement of those objectives of self-enhancement that all people hold for themselves and their future generations.

Educators with a deliberate agenda of cultivating the self-knowledge of African Americans must concentrate on developing learning centers and materials that further this objective. The poorly supported efforts of many Afrocentric schools represent a pioneering effort in this regard. Unfortunately, these efforts have often been dismissed as reversed segregation or other degrading characterizations that have minimized the significance and the broader objective of such educational efforts. The existing educational curriculum for every learning system in America adopts a Eurocentric perspective that facilitates the self-knowledge of European-American learners. We should not European-Americans the right to maximize the potential of their children and their communities. Our children should also have exposure to a wide range of information about other cultural groups and their accomplishments. The focus of our educational system should be reflective of ourselves, but not to the exclusion of those marginal or minority members who may be present in our learning environment. When there is a limited number of African-American students and/or personnel with the skills to address them that prohibits proper educational instruction, then we must develop alternative educational systems that supplement the dominant one. Because of usual distortions of this objective, it is important to emphasize that this does not represent the need of “dumbing down” the learning process. In fact, because of the peculiarity of “double consciousness” that results from being African and American, I am suggesting the need of “gearing up” our educational experience. Not only should we master the rudiments of “American” self-knowledge but develop an awareness of our unique experiences that equip us to draw upon our special resources.

The handicap that creates people who participate in the self-destruction of our communities is the deficit in their self-knowledge. It is important to make a conscious and deliberate commitment to ensure that the educational experiences of our people further and enhance our ability to know who we are. We must unapologetically create a learning environment that empowers us to be as effective as other communities in the world. We must get away from the imposed analysis that suggests that such an objective is “anti-anyone” or inflates into fantasy the facts of who we are. This is not simply a crash course in Black history, but it must be an integrated experience that transmits to us a form of thinking that generates a commitment and expectation of excellence in every arena of human endeavor. It simply does for us what every other people’s educational system does for them.

In addition to the effective educational system that sets as one of its priorities the cultivation of self-knowledge, the whole array of cultural devices for image development and transmission must foster the process of self-awareness. Certainly, the arts, the media, and the literature of a people focus on creating ideals and images that constitute a people’s aesthetic and their aspiration. In every arena of human activity we must take on the role of becoming conscious and deliberate image-makers. Whether musical artists, playrights, actors, journalists, scientists, corporate executives, or technology engineers, we must structure our agenda and activities toward the creation of images that transmit an enhanced awareness of who we are. We must affirm our cultural identity, lift up values of our collective freedom, and project images of our excellence in all arenas of life. We need street names, monuments, museums, documentaries, libraries, archives, genealogical societies, and any other mechanism that permits us to engage in exploration and discovery of who we are. We even need fantasy heroes and heroines, cartoons and myths that transmit an appreciation for our unique human potential. We cannot overstate how incredibly important are the images of those on whose shoulders we stand. Every cultural groups creates in huge and captivating form ongoing reminders of those who personify the best examples of commitment to the collective good.

We can make Black people better by recognizing the importance of cultivating the knowledge of who we are. Then we must make a conscious decision to create the mechanisms and institutions that research and transmit this knowledge. This self-awareness process should be the criterion and the objective of the expression of our art, the development of our intellects, the creation of our financial and civic institutions, and even the worship of our God. By developing the same kind of respect and love for ourselves that other people hold for themselves we can diminish the plague of self-destructive behaviors that threaten to complete what the genocidal attempt of African enslavement in America did not accomplish.

Sebelius for VP, not Hillary · 03-19-2007, 12:29 AM

By way of Conclusion.....

Under construction.

FRYandBENDER · 03-19-2007, 05:31 PM

Wow, you've been busy today. I'll come back and re-read and reply when I get off work.