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Dreams Over Despair
Before I begin citing the problems facing those born into Black America, let’s begin before birth. If you are potentially Black in America, but still have yet to take your first breath, you have about a 27% chance that you will never be born (according to a study by the American Journal of Public Health.) Other studies suggest that this statistic could be much higher, especially in NYC and other large cities. If you are lucky enough to take your first breath, you have about a 69% chance that you were born to an unwed mother. Other statistics suggest that you have a 33% chance that you will grow up in poverty. Even if you are not impoverished, you have a 46% chance you will be poor, that is your family’s annual resources comprise less than 2X the poverty rate. Note that 27% of low income Black families have no visible means of support at all, that is no one in the family is employed. If you live in a single parent household, you are almost certain to be impoverished.
There is some reasonably good news; if you are Black, you still have about a 79% chance that you will graduate from high school. However, the quality of your high school education may not prepare you for work or college. If you go to college, there is a 58% possibility that you will drop out before graduation. Though African Americans (self-identified in census data) make up just 12.6% of the US population, FBI arrest statistics indicate that Black Americans commit over 50% of the murders and robberies committed in the US. The victims of those crimes are nearly always Black as well. The incarceration rate for Black American males is over 4%, so babies unlucky enough to be born both Black and male face a 4% chance of becoming a prison inmate. Once in the system, you will likely remain there; 86% of Black prisoners are rearrested and sent back to prison (80% for Whites, alas.)
If you are Black and of working age, you are more than 2X as likely to be unemployed as a White person. This statistic is likely to be much higher in large urban areas (like 6.5X in Washington, DC.) These figures move with economic conditions though the ratios remain stable. The numbers are quite a bit worse for younger working-age Black Americans.
So what is at play here in America? Why is it so difficult to be successful in America if you are Black? Who stole Black America’s dreams and left them wallowing in despair? Is this evidence of White Privilege and Systemic Racism, or is something else at work here?
What is at work here is racial politics that encourage poor choices and bad outcomes. In pandering for the Black vote, politicians have allowed communities to be overrun with crime, drugs, and despair. Instead of encouraging good choices and pursuit of dreams, politicians have provided a desperate existence of state dependency, public or subsidized housing and unwed motherhood. Schools have been allowed to decline, achievement has been denigrated, and expectations have been serially lowered. Success is measured in how easily and readily one can game the system and score free benefits or hide under the table earnings. Property has no value to those who have none. Lives have no value to those who see no future. Politics and politicians become the means to continued subsidy. And worst of all, wanting more, wanting out, working to better oneself, is seen as despicable, as an affront, as disloyal. If you obviously try to seek a better life, you are a pariah. Despair, you see, must triumph over dreams.
So how to address these issues.
First and foremost, there is the problem of unwed mothers and unplanned pregnancies. This problem is not exclusively a Black American problem. The Hispanic and White illegitimacy rates have been rising for decades as well. And with illegitimacy comes poverty and state dependency. Two-parent and earner families have more stability and flexibility, can pursue opportunities where ever they arise, and are much less likely to remain mired in poverty. In better circumstances, children are more likely to thrive and achieve. Expectations are higher all around. So from a policy perspective, whatever we can do to encourage intact family formation and marriage, then the horrific outcomes that are unfortunately the rule in single-family households mired in poverty, can be averted. These initiatives should be entirely colorless but will impact the Black community most because illegitimacy disproportionately affects that community.
No doubt, education must also play a role here. We must improve schools in predominately black and other impoverished communities; this is obviously not just a funding problem. Some of the worst-performing schools in the nation (NYC, Boston, Baltimore) spend more than 2X the national average per student on education, and yet the schools in poor and declining neighborhoods are failing. Support for charter schools and voucher programs has proven to be an efficient and effective way to force public schools to perform and compete for students. A major effort must be made to encourage education and allow both parents and children to see educational achievement as a means to a better life. Everyone must understand that opportunities are unlimited if they strive for better, acquire skills, and achieve in the classroom.
Lastly, Black communities must be purged of all crime, drugs, and gangs. These corrosive influences destroy communities, place them under siege while leaving the neediest and impoverished, those who cannot leave, to be easy victims, stuck in a horrific situation. Drugs and dependency are always the wrong choices. Children who grow up in such a desperate environment, who cannot see any kind of better future for themselves, are recruited into lives of crime and drugs, of poverty and dependency.
Once crime is controlled, incentives can be used to bring back commerce, to renovate property and to rebuild communities.
In the meantime amid this horrific collective tantrum some call protests, we have to get the message out. We care about these communities. We want every American to achieve and make something better for themselves. We have no reason to wish anyone anything but contentment and success. And most of all, we want nothing but success and achievement for Black Americans, but it’s not something that they can take. Like every other American, they have to work for it, overcome obstacles, persevere, and achieve.
Published in General
When America is gone, there is no choice available for individual liberty. This is why the concept of globalism fostered by Soros and others must not succeed.
Regarding the education issue, it’s bad enough to see gross mismanagement and incompetence at the local level here in Oakland. Any further expansion of charter schools are kneecapped at the behest of the teachers unions. Pedagogical thuggery.
I’ve seen the consequences of this firsthand. I worked at a Title 1 foundation that stood up charter schools and would shepherd disadvantaged kids through college with little to no debt. I saw the flaming hoops they had to jump through at the city, county and state levels for approval to proceed with new schools. They cleared those. Then uncertainty over what changes in California policies meant influenced their decision to abandon plans for new schools.
Exactly. I like to repeat the phrase of a mother whose adult child is severely dysfunctional: “I didn’t break her and I can’t fix her.” Sometimes you have to lay down the struggle.
Whites are not blacks’ problem — white and black race hustling Democrats are. I have a dream that one day, blacks will figure that out. And I hope the comeuppance for the Left is epic.
Excellent piece @dougkimball!
Around 1950 , while Jim Crow and “separate but equal” were still alive and well, those terrible numbers were quite different. Black children were actually born into two parents home at a slightly higher rate than whites. Crimes committed by blacks were in line with their percentage of population. Under funded black schools educated kids. Black 20-something females were married at slightly higher rates than their white sisters. Black marriages and family structure had survived slavery , reconstruction and Jim Crow. So far they have not survived the progressive left.
Not only have we failed to foster a true understanding of the Declaration of Independence and our skillfully crafted Constitution, we have become mush-mouthed about the fundamental elements of Americanism and manhood.
In the last years I coached, I issued every player in my position group a copy of Frederick Douglass’ Self-Made Men speech and we started each daily meeting with a paragraph from it before any talk of coverages , assignments or fronts. Not all those young men were recruited from the inner city but most were black and most were below “middle class”. Of those who stayed for more than a season, there are few I have a apologize for. But that welfare culture is a breast to fight!
College basketball and football scholarships are affirmative action and always were. Also the old practice of legacy admissions. Also Daddy Warbucks putting up a building on campus and C. Student Warbucks getting in to the college. All of those except sports scholarships were about privately funded affirmative action for specific applicants, and even those were often that (“The alumni think we need a top running back, what’ll it take to get that kid from XXX?”) So was the recent admissions bribery scandal was about affirmative action.
That one sheds light on the increasing state monopoly on affirmative action; no private enterprise allowed. Don’t bribe to get your low SAT score kid in, change the SAT test altogether mandate taking other, more “holistic” factors into account in order to get the desired types/classes of students in to suit the social justice agenda. Also, the social justice wing of the federal bureaucracy has harsh punishments for institutions that don’t embrace the part line, so it’s not just federal dollars if you cooperate, it’s federal punishment if you don’t. Look at the Title IX guidance letter and its consequences.
That suits the academic branch of the regulatory state just fine and helps it grow.
Morning Doug,
From “Please Stop Helping Us”, Jason Riley, “Race and Economics”, Walter Williams, and “Race and Culture”,Thomas Sowell, Jason notes, “from every census taken between 1890 and 1940 show the black marriage rate exceeding the white rate.” Walter notes, “even during slavery, where marriage was forbidden, most blacks lived in biological two-parent families…In New York City, in 1925, 85% of kin-related black households we two-parent households. In fact, ‘Five in six children under the age of six lived with both parents.’ Walter goes onto compare the family structure of different racial groups “The percentages of nuclear families were: black (75.2), Irish (82.2), German (84.5), and native white Americans (73.); these comparisons come from the period of 1877 and 1917. Walter goes on to note the work of “historian Herbert Gutman (who) found in analyzing data of families in Harlem between 1905 and 1925, that only 3% of all families ‘were headed by a woman under thirty’” Marriage in the black community existed in much harsher conditions than exist now, men and women felt obligated to each other and their children and lived a life to fulfill those obligations to each other which meant sacrifice for the benefit of others even others at a later time. Many elements have damaged marriage and although the damage may have occurred in the black community first, these elements are damaging marriage in all the Western cultures.
Above all a people, a culture, a civilization can not exist without the solid foundation of marriage. No reconciliation at any level, man to woman, man to man, race to race will occur without the reconciliation of men to women in their commitment to their marriage. Jason points to Moynihan’s report predicting that children from single parent families would suffer life long difficulties. So if we want to seek reconciliation, we need to better understand marriage and reestablish the obligations that men and women had toward each other and toward their children.
IQ is not a simple diagnostic for understanding life success. I will comment later.
I won’t dispute what you’ve said here. What I was really saying is that the colleges don’t offer athletic scholarships to those of lesser athletic ability to balance sports participation for racial or ethnic diversity. Do they, I don’t know?
I agree with everything you write in this post. No single number can characterize anyone – IQ or any other number. Fortunately we aren’t limited to the options of “IQ means everything” and “IQ means nothing.”
He’s the unathletic goofy white guy at the end the bench who only gets in the game when the team is up by 30.
My brother-in-law was recruited less for his b-ball talent than for the fact that he would significantly raise the average SAT scores of the program.
And the image on the bench?
The common thread is admission to college of acadmically underqualified applicants primarily for the financial benefit of the institution
of acadmically underqualified applicants. The institution will rationalize it however it wants.George W. Bush: “And to the C students, I say you, too, can be president of the United States.”
Not a very self aware statement. Not all us C students have a dad who was POTUS. To be fair I was a C minus student.
Or down by 30. I was that guy in high school. Let me rephrase that. I wasn’t unathletic, I did well in football and OK in wrestling; I just sucked at basketball.
Yep. I swam butterfly one year in high school. My team had a guy who was a pretty good middle and long distance swimmer. I was our second entry in the 400 and longer freestyle races. In case the other team had somebody even slower than I was, I could pick up a point for the team.
I have spent 15 years teaching medical students, many of them black. Most of the black students I taught were either African or West Indian. They do not understand American blacks. The West Indians have a background of slavery but have grown up in a society largely ruled by fellow blacks and that may have something to do with it. I have also read accounts of American blacks moving back to the South to get away from the dysfunctional cities. The other day, I read an article by a Chicago black family moving to Alabama and being worried about racism until they were there. Then they were amazed to find white friends who gave no indication of racial prejudice. It is probably significant that they were church goers and middle class. It is no coincidence that Reverend Wright, the race coach of Barry Soetoro, chose to build his retirement home in the white suburb of Tinley Party IL. Rev Wright’s comfortable retirement was undoubtedly funded by his wealthy church congregation like Oprah Winfrey and others of the Chicago black upper class. The black race hatred we see on display last week was driven by race hustlers like Jesse Jackson, whose son represented the part of Chicago where I grew up until he was sent to prison. Al Sharpton is another race pimp who presided at the racism rally referred to as a funeral.
The African and West Indian students have no problem with racism and feel sorry for the American kids who are so dysfunctional as a result of the psychological damage they have suffered from the victim class hatred. These kids are not the 80 IQ rioters. They are above normal intelligence but poisoned with hate. It is sad.
That has been done ad nauseum. Trillions have been spent. The black race pimps are no better than the Palestinians who have also had trillions spent on them. I have met many African blacks, both medical students and applicants for the US military. Nobody spent a lot of money on them. They were just not poisoned psychologically.
Remember Moynihan’s “Benign Neglect?”
That’s why Reagan’s discussion of “welfare queens” was only denigrated by the social worker left.
I can’t agree with this enough.
Harvard is busy trying to correct this situation by discriminating against Asian applicants.
A movie called “Soul Man” made a try at ridiculing this but was roundly denounced for “racism.”
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091991/
It’s evil. What the Left does to people with its lies and distortions and anger is evil. Straight up.
There is an equally unmentionable genetic factor in black athletes in which fast twitch muscle fibers increase running ability.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25268477/?from_term=fast+twitch+muscle+and+race&from_pos=1
Jimmy the Greek got fired for mentioning this .
My grandson was struggling in math at 4th grade. His teacher told his mother that she could not do the math problems using Common Core either. She suggested my DiL, who runs a successful home based business, teach him herself using “traditional methods.” They moved him a charter school, and he is in high school now.
This should be the first order of business for any conservative parent — any parent, really! Get your kids out of regular public ed, whatever you have to do. Take a hit in your household income by one parent quitting and staying home in order to home school your kid if a classical charter isn’t available. Move to a location where classical charter schools are available. Pay for private (although those are heavily infected with leftism, too). Whatever. There’s nothing more important you will do for your child and for the country.
The UC system is going to do the same thing by eliminating the SATs and not creating a statistical paper trail that will highlight the discrimination. The need that not only to avoid a Harvard-styled lawsuit but California state law as well. Proposition 209 forbids racial factors in admission to UC. I recall listening to a woman testifying to the UC Regents at the time about how she was the mother of both “white” children and “mixed race” children. She wondered how she was going to explain to her children why siblings in the same household and economic circumstance will be treated differently by the UC system.
Touche’, @thelonious! But – Truman. McKinley.
A friend of mine, who was in practice with me for a while, is Cuban. He applied to UCSF medical school back in the 80s. He waited and waited to hear something and finally drove to San Francisco to inquire. He asked the admissions office what was happening and was told his application was in the “Hispanic Committee” for consideration. He asked if it could just be considered as non-Hispanic and got his acceptance a week later. He wondered what criteria were being considered in that committee.
He was born in Cuba and his parents got him out but were trapped themselves for years. He spent a few years in an orphanage until they were able to escape. That, of course does not count in the AA scheme of things.