African Americans have always maintained the optomistic belief that they can uplift themselves as a peoples but even after decades of social welfare programs designed to equalize the socioeconomic divide including free and subsidized housing, food, education, healthcare and other support designed to uplift the poor and uneducated we find that a vast portion of the African American community has not been able to utilize these unprecedented in order to decrease or even erase the socioeconomic divide. There is a growing conscienceness among intellectuals and hard working folks that it may be time to make a departure from this all inclusive pholosophy and leave those who do not strive behind. Now, I said to uplift those who, in spite of their socioeconomic present or past truly demonstrate the instinct and desire to strive! How do we measure this? How do we or how can we differentiate who these strivers are or may be? More ironically, how do we determine who they are not? That is the most difficult question because to deny assistance to those in need is and has never been part of the humanitrian and American psyche and in my opinion should never be. We must always aid those in need and those who strive!
Yes I am touching on very sensitive ground here. But we have to face these realities they will not solve themselves! We have three tiers of education and reform to focus on; first our children and second our incarcerated women and men. Thirdly, a whole population of general citizens who are either illiterate or profoundly uneducated. We must both prepare our children to become productive, responsible and ethical citizens and rehabilitate adults who have somehow missed out on the process, this includes those who have been imprisoned. Admittedly, it is a large task but we have allowed it to become a monster and now it is time for restorative action on a massive scale. This is a task that, once given proper attention is obtainable but it is a community effort and must be undertaken in small part by everyone in order to be sucessfull. The common phrase, "conscienceness must be raised," is a gross understatement but it is also a theme. One those who have followed the saga from slavery to the present know well...
The African American community, or its remnants, is assaulted continually by the eroding effects of ignorance, crime and apathy from which it cannot seem to recover. Some say that its due to a constant influx of criminals into our community but not all criminals who have been released return to our communities to victimize them. However, the constanct recidivism in our community does have an adverse affect on our ability to keep the stigma of criminalism away from our youth who often see this as an alternative to mainstream professionalism. This self-destructive cycle must be reversed. Remember that there are thousands of men and women who upon being released from prisons become model citizens and it is these men and women who we so much need to, "Preach the Word" to our youth before they make decisions which will take them from us. We have to talk about what to do with those who fall through the cracks... uncomfortable as it may seem. Let us focus on those who have pulled themselves up from their bootstraps rather than those who have returned to lives of crime.
The current social trend of penalizing ex-convicts by refusing to hire them based on crimes they have paid for in full is a serious offense to the American way of life! We must allow everyone a chance... a second... a third... a fourth... whatever it takes.... We are obligated to provide meaningful employment to those whom we have detained if we are telling the public that they are now ready to join society! Longer sentences for recidivists who have been given proper training and support but returned to criminal activity would ensure that those who had no desire to reform themselves would not victimize our communities again. Permanant sentences, when applicable to the crime, would allow generations of poor and honest citizens to take a breath and heal.
And what about our inner city schools? These school systems have struggled for over 3 decades to educate within a climate of growing disdanin for education. From the 1970's on, sitcom and hollywood classrooms were portrayed more as vaudevillian reviews than places of serious and meaningful learning where casts of rude and rebellious students turned the classroom into a comedy show demeaning and undermining the roles of the teachers and school administrators. Having taught in public schools for many years I personally experienced the results of this media hype come to full fruition. Striving but poor inner city parents cannot trust public schools to educate their young because they have largely become overrun by undisciplined students who significantly exhaust the system with disciplinary problems. When I was in school there may have been one or two rowdy students but today there will be at least 5 to 10 or more per class period. This number is not manageable within a 45 minute class period. We cannot blame children because adults have allowed them to overrun the schools. We cannot blame teachers because inept administrators have failed to address the growing anarchy within their halls. Teachers cannot teach because they are policing the classrooms in order to survive the savvy of dissident students. Public Schools lie to taxpayers rather than admit that schools dont work and that they are fearful of challenging the very children they are payed to shape into responsible citizens, that they have horribly failed at this task.
A large population of African Americans do not seem to value education as much as they say and romanticise a lifestyle of crime, homicide, sex and gangsterism. The entertainment industry which hevily influences our young and which enjoys immense profit from our community perpetuates negative images and pholosophies that erode our efforts at creating a civilized one. Not enough money is spent on rehabilitation of incarcirated men and women including teaching skills and providing meaningful employment. Taxpayers must pay to train and employ ex-cons, they cannot simply push them out of jail and expect a miracle to happen. Parents must learn to spend their hard earned money to support reputable media that does not undermine the parental respect they wish to instill in their children. Giving money to institutions that promote ideas that undermine the tradition of respect for responsible parents, adults, and figures of authority is like feeding a monster you know will ultimately consume you...
The phenomenon commonly refferred to as "Ghetto Culture" has created toxic communities besiged by ignorance and apathy. Criminals who use their own neighborhoods as their places of business have fostered a culture of fear and terrorism where citizens are afraid to challenge and remove bad seeds. They have created bastions of crime, impenetrable to forces of good. By involving the community in the financial rewards of contraband they earn fealty or threaten those who refuse to join in. The American right to free speech has been reduced to, No-Snitiching. In this twisted ghetto hell a good ethically stable citizen is labeled as a snitch. How did this come to be? Easy answer... the citizens of these communities who chose not to resist have created them by allowing them to exist unchallenged! Our police system cannot truly be effective if they do not have cooperation from the community, they share many of the same frustrations as inner city teachers.
No wonder middle class and working class African Americans and other groups who are revising the urban fabric are laying quiet while the ghettos are being moved out of their cities, a late 20th and early 21st century phenomenon and reaction to the suburban flight of the 70's and 80's during the height of the crack era. The African American Community needs to come up for air. They want to come home to clean, quiet and safe neighborhoods after a hard days work. They are tired of their children being victimized by ignorance and fear unable to get a valuable education in public schools their tax dollars finance. Gentrification is clearly not the holistic solution to the issue of the socioeconomic divide, it is a strong-arm approach to force out the poor. The problem still exists...
The African American community has to become really serious about education and not just offer lip service! This means we must take prison reform seriously so that when people are released back into citizenry they will have marketable skills, a work ethic and jobs to earn a living wage. No man or woman that is released from prison shoud be denied employment because of their past record if the state has deemed they have payed their debt to society and duly reformed! This means we must elevate education to the highest of priorities in our communities... closing the socioeconomic divide that has haunted the African American community since the bullwhip days!
While you have illustrated the current state of affairs, you have largely ignored their root causes, which involve decades of structural changes - economic, political, and social paradigm shifts - that have begotten years of poverty and pathology for not only African-Americans but most minorities living in America.
ReplyDeleteNeither "ignorance, crime and apathy" nor "romanticising a lifestyle of crime, homicide, sex and gangsterism," are the exclusive or native territory of African-Americans. Many individuals from specific but various racial/ethnic backgrounds have found themselves economically and socially marginalized because the reduced spending power associated with American currency coupled with stagnant wage increases, the extinction of manufacturing and low-skilled jobs, and of course, racism. In their attempt to survive given the changed terrain, such marginalized people become criminal, begin to devalue education, and ultimately their feelings collectively crystallize into nihilism. As much as pundits claim African-Americans devalue education, one ought to know that the current economy devalues education far more. Lower-skilled workers are more likely to find work in the current global economic environment then higher-skilled workers as profit-maximizing firms seek to minimize the cost of labor. While I have only touched the surface of this issue, hopefully I have piqued your interest in the social, economic, and political phenomena that generated this unprecedented cycle of pathological poverty enough for you to pursue further study and consider revising your perspective.
Until Americans take the proverbial long, hard look at what got us to where we are, no one can devise an effective strategy to get us where we need to be.
I encourage you to review the work of Prof. William Julius Wilson for an in-depth analysis of structural transformation and its impact on the look and feel of American urban poverty over the past 50 years.
@ SSC, Unfortunately you are only at the first level of understanding of this phenomenon. The first level is understanding the history of the phenomenon. African Americans have discussed and regurgitated this saga for years but simply tracing the history is not enough. Brotha... the second phase is synthesizing the data we all know and developing a solution... a stratey for positive healing and forward progression. Well let me update that chronology. The first phase is denial, blaming our sad conditon on, "The White Man". Unfortunately, this phase is about denial and absolves the blamer from any responsibility for solving the probmem. Phase two is identifying the problem; this is achieved by systematically studying the history of disfunction and struggle but it is only a first step towards true solutions based thinking and strategy. The third phase is putting together a strategy for arresting the problem. Whats done is done! Harping on the past and blaming others for our misfortunes will not produce any solutions. Remember both whites and blacks strove together to achieve emancipation and equal rights
ReplyDeleteIn conclusion I must again advise you to do the following:
1. Stop blaming others for the shortcomings of African Americans. Be a man and take full ownership of the state of our people.
2. Pull all you know of our struggle together so that you can see clearly the many proplems and obstacles to unity and sucess that have been overlooked.
3. With all of your cretive energy develop strategies for success... solutions to the problems you identified in your research and assessment of the historical struggle of African Americans.
4. Work to develop a grass roots implementation of your solutions. Share and discuss them with others and refine your solutions by including others in their explication and in the implementation of the solutions.
5. Constantly go back and rethink and revise your assessment, assess the success of your solutions and if they do not seem effective abandon them and develop new strategies. Never marry an idea... never try to force an idea to work...it either works or it doesnt...and who wants to marry a bad idea... be humble and know that others may have better ideas than yours...implement them compromise with them...work it out and make it work...
Touche Big Daddy Blues. My point, which you briefly touched on, is that the problems you described in your initial post, while not entirely new, are fairly recent; the pathological, nihilistic lifestyle associated with American ghetto poverty emerged in the 1940s. But poverty itself has existed in America since the nation's very beginning.
ReplyDeleteWhat changed? Joblessness increasingly became the cause of poverty; the working poor always have more stability than the jobless poor. Racially segregated but socioeconomically diverse communities saw an outmigration of the upwardly mobile, leaving them devoid of stabilizing populations and what some of termed "role models." Poverty became concentrated in these neighborhoods. That concentration of poverty begat the cycle of social dislocation and behavioral pathologies that you initially referenced. The root cause of the problem is structural change. Thus, any effective solution(s) must address the structural changes. No part of my argument involves blaming any specific person or group; I simply explain the mechanics of what has occured because one must be cognizant of the policy and economic forces at work to eliminate the problems.