Black victimology: divided we fall

Last Saturday, Baltimore celebrated the 2016 African-American festival. As the celebration continued, I began to reminisce on the conditions of the black family in America. My conclusion was that while we may claim that discrimination still exists in America, the blacks contribute a lot to their current problems. Hence, it is not always smart to blame the whites or the police each time a black person trips over a banana peel. For instance, if Freddie Gray had stayed away from crime, he will still be alive today.

Each time people talk about the situation of the black Americans(or African-Americans), words like ‘poverty’, ‘single mothers’, ‘drugs’, ‘crime’ ‘racism’, ‘white supremacy’ and ‘discrimination’ pop up. After celebrating the 2016 African-American festival last weekend, it is time for blacks (for your information, I am black too) to realize that they have a big problem, which is that their ‘entitlement’ mindset (I have the right to this or the right to that, and so on), their dependency culture and the breakdown of the black family is at the heart of the terrible conditions they face in America. As soon as they start to realize that their destiny lies entirely in their own hands, their situation will begin to change.

This does not mean that blacks in America do not encounter institutional challenges in their lives. Far from it! For instance, the Baltimore riots of 2015 were sparked by the death of Freddie Gray, a black man in police custody.¹ However, the underlying cause of the riots was more complex than that: it is a built-up hostility against the establishment who, the blacks believed, have betrayed them.

Broadly speaking, many Americans feel a confused sense of guilt each time media reports and activists make public the problems of poor black neighborhoods in America. This is because they are unsure whether the persistence of crime and poverty in these black neighborhoods is in some way their fault or the fault of the residents of the affected neighborhoods. For instance, it is true that the police are sometimes racist. On the other hand, there are cases of tensions between blacks and cops even in cities with black mayors, black police chiefs, and a mostly non-white police force, such as Baltimore City. This proved that the police and government functionaries are not always racists.  As a matter of fact, shortly after last year’s Baltimore riots, six police officers were indicted for abusing Freddie Gray and on charges that include second-degree murder. Of these, three were black officers.²

About fifty-one years ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a former bureaucrat in the U.S. Department of Labor, made a bold and controversial attempt to explain what has gone wrong in America’s inner cities, which are mainly occupied by the black Americans. In his report at the time, popularly known as “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action”, Moynihan argued that the lingering effects of two centuries of slavery had significantly weakened and destabilized the black family in America. At the time of the release of the Moynihan report, about 25 percent of black babies were born to unmarried mothers. According to him, family instability was the main cause of many other problems faced by black families, from crime to poverty.³

Fifty-one years after the publication of the report, there is still little improvement in the situations faced by black Americans. When viewed in the light of the predictors of success in America(such as education, employment, life expectancy, the general standard of living, and so on), black Americans still fares badly. Basically, if African-American’s black community and neighborhoods were a separate country, it would have a higher proportion of its citizens behind bars than anywhere on earth, a worse life expectancy than Mexico, and a worse homicide rate than Ivory Coast.⁴ In spite of this overall America still has the richest and the most successful populations of blacks of African descent in the world.

Not only that: today, America is not as racist as it was during Moynihan’s day, when interracial marriage was illegal in 19 states of the country. America also has as a black president – Barack Obama. And it is a known fact that President Obama won the largest share of white support of any Democrat in any two-man race since 1976.⁵ The type of census forms we have in America today allows people to identify themselves as white and black too. About 2 million people did so in 2010, which is a significant improvement compared to what we have in the segregation era.

Yet an updated Moynihan report will definitely acknowledge the fact that the conditions of white Americans is still better than that of the blacks. More than four decades after the publication of his report in 1965, the proportion of African-American babies born outside marriage has exceeded 72 percent.⁶ According to the FBI, while the crime rate in America has fallen in the past two decades(a situation that cast some doubt on Moynihan’s claim on the link between single-parenting and disorder), black Americans are still eight times more likely to be murdered than whites. Also, black Americans are seven times more likely to commit murder than whites.⁷ A large number of black men in their 30s (about one-third of them) have been in prison. In addition, blacks are less socially mobile than whites, and they are also less likely to graduate from college.⁸

In the past, historians disagreed with Moynihan’s claim that linked slavery with the fragility of the black family; but many of them now believe in this theory. There is documentary evidence that every black population in Americas today has low rates of two-parent families.⁹ Certainly, we do not expect a race or  a group  that have many generations in which they are not permitted to have a relationship, in which they have no custodial rights to their children or spouse and their family members can be sold away, not to disintegrate? Yet what happened in the 19^th century alone cannot provide the most reliable explanation of why the modern-day black families have become so fragmented since the 1960s; nor why the proportion of white children born out of wedlock has grown as high as the black ones. This means that in as much as slavery may have started the dissolution of the black family, something else must have worsened the problem.

Some argue that welfare should be blamed for the disintegration of the black family, simply because the nationwide decline in marriage in America began at around the same time as Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs.  Social conservatives lament that for many American families, the welfare check(cheque) has replaced the male breadwinners, making them unneeded and irrelevant members of the family. To make things worse, even those single mothers who chose to tie the knot with their men are often penalized by the welfare department, since the addition of a father’s income to the household total income may cause their welfare benefits to be withdrawn.  Some studies, however, had looked at how marriage varies between states with different rules on eligibility for Medicaid – one of the largest welfare programs in America. These studies failed to find a link between welfare and the disintegration of black families in America.¹⁰ This does not mean that welfare played no role in dissolving America’s black families. Indeed, welfare does have some effects, but it’s not the main thing.

Fragmentation nation

Some experts argue that the collapse of the black family is largely caused by the slumping wages earned by unskilled black men. Since the wages of the unskilled black men are low, they are less attractive as mates to the ladies. The problem with this argument is that, like the previous one, it can only be a partial explanation. Generally speaking, Americans of all stripes are more likely to get married if their incomes rise.  But, even among the high income and middle-class Americans, in terms of marriage and staying married, black families look different from white ones. The percentage of black women with advanced degrees that are single mothers is higher than the percentage of single white women with advanced degrees.  To put this in perspective, the percentage of single black women with advanced degrees is approximately equivalent to that of single white women with a high school diploma. According to the available published evidence,  when black families income rises above $200,000 per year, the gap between them and the white families disappears.¹¹ However, only a tiny minority of the black population reaches that income level.

Low marriage rate among African-Americans can also be explained by another important factor: the black men are basically ‘missing in action.’ By this, I mean that many of them have either died early(almost every night, our news media carry breaking news of shootouts involving mainly black men and or black gangs) or are in prison. According to the New York Times, for every 100 non-incarcerated African-American women aged 25-54, there are only about 83 black men. This is a sharp contrast of what we have for the white population, which hardly has any gap at all: for every 100 non-incarcerated white women, there are 99 white men.¹²

A study of inner-city single mothers by Kathy Edin, a sociologist at John Hopkins University revealed some astonishing results. Many of the single mothers she interviewed during the study told her that having a baby helped them to hold on to a boyfriend and to have a purpose in life. The men he spoke to during the study told her that fatherhood can be a source of pride.¹³ That may be scant comfort for the children of such unions.

It is only a slight exaggeration to say that growing up in a single-parent family is not a good experience for most children. Researchers at Princeton and Columbia universities run a program known as the ‘Fragile Families’ study.¹⁴ Under this program, they examined how children born to single mothers fare. According to their recent analysis, about 30 percent of the children born to single mothers have had two or more father figures in their homes by the time they are five years old. At a 40 percent poverty rate, the households headed by single mothers are poorer than that headed by two-parent, where the poverty rate is only 9 percent. If we consider the type of neighborhoods where most black families live, it is only natural to assume that the percentages will be higher for the black population.

It is worth bearing in mind that most of the black Americans who live below the poverty line are the left-behinds of two great internal migrations. The first internal migration, in which a large number of blacks moved from the south to the north occurred in the early 20^th century. The migrating black population left behind people in the Mississippi Delta, and to this day, that part of America has remained the poorest region in the country. More recently, a second migration is going on. Lots of people are moving from the northern cities to the southern ones. Georgia, for instance, has attracted more black migrants than any other state in the past two decades. With this small exodus of blacks, many blacks are left behind in highly segregated northern cities. A good example of the areas with a significant population of the left-behinds is West Baltimore, where 96 percent of blacks live.¹⁵ The surprising thing is that of all the ethnic groups in America, the African-Americans are the least likely to move even though a large number of them live in the most benighted places in the country.

Other left-behind neighborhoods can be found in New York, Milwaukee, Chicago, Washington DC, Philadelphia, and Detroit, among others. These places have an interesting history: black migrants were funneled into them in the mid-20^th century under racist housing policies. The first city to formalize residential segregation by race was Baltimore. After Baltimore, the other cities soon followed.

In 1942, about 84 percent of white Americans told pollsters the Negros should be placed in separate sections of major cities. The fact that that was a period when black GIS are preparing to go to war did not change their opinion in that regard. De jure racial segregation is now old news in America, and since 1970 de facto segregation has declined. However, the rate of decline varies from city to city. For instance, on a scale where "0" means blacks are evenly distributed and "100" means they live completely separately(and anything above 60 is high), Chicago scores 76, New York 78 and Milwaukee 82.¹⁶

A Baltimore native(an African-American) who asked not to be named in this article grew up in one of the affected neighborhoods. He basically grew up in a house passed down by his grandmother to his mother. According to him, his neighborhood is one of those localities where gunfire began as soon as the sunset. His was the type of neighborhood in Baltimore City where people throw big parties when someone gets out of jail, but do nothing when a resident graduates from college. He recalls one particular night of terror: that night he started hearing shots in the street outside but did not bother to look outside, only to discover the next morning that his best friend’s cousin had been killed. Another friend of his was also shot to death in a nearby basketball court for no clear reason. Fortunately, he was among the lucky ones: he graduated from college with a bachelor’s degree in education and is now one of the best teachers in Baltimore city.

Life stories such as his are not common. As was reported in The Economist, Karl Alexander and his colleagues at John Hopkins University conducted a study in which they followed 790 six-year-olds who entered Baltimore public schools in 1982 for 22 years. The results of their study were lamentable: only about 4 percent of the kids in low-income families where the parents had a combined total of ten years’ schooling graduated from college.¹⁷

The house which the Baltimore native I mentioned earlier inherited from his mother now has more than ten boarded-up properties for neighbors. In some areas such as West Baltimore, whole blocks have gone. Not only that, a large number of houses is worth nothing, particularly those which the owners owe property taxes. Overall, the crime rate in Baltimore City, where the blacks comprised of 62.9 percent of the population,²⁰ is high. According to the Baltimore Sun, by the end of 2015, the homicide rate in Baltimore City topped 30-40 per month.²¹ Most of the homicides occurred in West Baltimore, where the majority of the residents(about 44,000) were black.²²

The gap between the incomes of black and white families is large enough. However, the wealth gap is even larger. I will use the median income of these two groups as an illustration: According to the data published by the Pew Research Center, a think tank,  the median white families has net assets of about $141,900 in 2013; while the median black family has a paltry $11,000.²³ It should be noted here that wealth gaps are nearly always bigger than income gaps, for obvious reasons: people who earn more can save more. For the black families, this problem is often worsened by the absence of fathers. Generally speaking, a one-parent family with the same income as a two-parent family often spends more of its extra income on child care.

Under such circumstances, saving money is extremely hard. This explains why it is harder for black families to buy a house than white families of the same income. It also explains why black university students rack up larger debts than their white counterparts. Only about 40 percent of black students who enrolled in colleges complete a four-year degree in six years. For whites, the proportion is 63 percent.²⁴ In some cases, some black students need to look after a sibling or work to support their families. In others, they cannot afford the books or the bus fare to attend classes. One black lady I know said it all: she started off wanting to be a nurse. But now all she’s concerned about is how to eat the next day.

Make a new plan, Shawntae

This highlights a deeper question: suppose the black Americans in the worst neighborhoods were given a chance to move out? How about if they are provided with more opportunities to better their lives? The answer is that these have already been done in many places. In my life, I have never seen a country that has as many generous social programs for helping the poor as America. Just think of food stamps, cash assistance, grants for college education, housing programs for the poor, and so on, and you will begin to see my point. For instance, after they were taken to court in 1966 for building all its public housing in areas that were wholly black, the Chicago city government decided to do something to compensate the affected population: it provided vouchers for about 7,500 families to move to nicer (and whiter) neighborhoods of the city and its suburbs. The state of the beneficiary families was studied 15-20 years later, with good results: the families affected still live in their new neighborhoods. Not only that, their children were attending better schools and doing much  better when compared to the children of those families who stayed behind.²⁵

The federal government tried to copy this scheme in other cities after the Los Angeles riots of 1992. The results were mixed: those who moved out of public housing in crime-infested neighborhoods showed lower rates of diabetes than those who remained. In addition, the mothers who moved showed an increase in happiness that can be compared to the effects of the antidepressant called Prozac. However, after moving, their children’s performance was not better than that of those whose mothers stayed behind, and the mothers did not get better jobs.²⁶

I do not believe that it is the duty of the government to put broken black families together. Of course, the families need government support to stay together, but the bulk of the work must be done by the families themselves. To be frank, the white folk did not make the black people to have babies when they were still teenagers and could barely wash their school uniforms; they also did not force the black folks to drop out of school or to engage in criminal activities. This means that a lot of the problems the blacks are facing today are the results of the decision-making they are responsible for. In my view, black families are stronger and made a lot more progress during the segregation era than they have in this age of modern liberalism. Just think of it: it is during that time that strong and well-respected black people like Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Booker T. Washington, and Jesse Jackson, among many others, emerged. Also, the black culture of that time was nowhere near as self-destructive as it is today. This simple fact alone belies the claims being made by many black people I spoke to that white supremacy, the government or even discrimination is the root cause of their current problems.

It is true: the whites may bear the burden of oppressing the blacks over the years through slavery and institutionalized racism(and shame to them for doing that) but the whites deserves some credits for ending such practices as well. I said this because many whites also fought, editorialized, protested, organized, and even voted to end these practices in America. Thus, fairness compels me to admit that the whites or the government did not cause the decline of the good black culture, and hence the whites or the government cannot fix it. In other words, it is the duty of the black people to decide where they want to be, decide the steps they need to take to get there, and then get to work. Blaming all their problems and ills on the whites or the government, to me, is nothing more than a way to avoid accepting responsibility for their own actions and decisions. One thing is for certain: they can change their collective fate if they take those three simple steps. In contrast, their current circumstances will not change if they don’t take those simple steps. It is as simple as that. All the wailing and blaming of the white people or the government, or even the police won’t make any difference in their lives.

References

¹Black America: The Fire and the Fuel. (2015, May 9). The Economist.  Retrieved June 29, 2016 from http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21650533-what-dead-white-man-can-teach-america-about-inner-city-decay-fire-and-fuel

²Ibid, p.23

³Moynihan, D. P. (1997). The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (1965). African American Male Research.

⁴Black America: The Fire and the Fuel, op. cit., p.23

⁵Kuhn, D.P.(2008). Exit Polls: How Obama Won. Politico. Retrieved June 29, 2016 from http://www.politico.com/story/2008/11/exit-polls-how-obama-won-015297

⁶Jacobson L.(2013). CNN’s Don Lemon Says More Than 72 Percent of African-American Births Are Out of Wedluck. Politifact. Retrieved June 29, 2016 from http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/jul/29/don-lemon/cnns-don-lemon-says-more-72-percent-african-americ/

⁷Saxena V. (2015). Fact: Blacks Murder More Whites Than Whites Murder Blacks. Downtrend. Retrieved June 29, 2016 from http://downtrend.com/vsaxena/blacks-murder-more-whites-than-whites-murder-blacks

⁸Black America: The Fire and the Fuel, op. cit., p.24

⁹Williams, W.E. (2015). The True Black Tragedy: Illegitimacy Rate of Nearly 75%. CNS News. Retrieved June 30, 2016 from http://www.cnsnews.com/commentary/walter-e-williams/true-black-tragedy-illegitimacy-rate-nearly-75

¹⁰Black America: The Fire and the Fuel, op. cit., p.24-26

¹¹Ibid

¹²Wolfers J., Leonhardt D., & Quealy K.  (2015, April 20). The Upshort: 1.5 Million Missing Black Men. New York Times. Retrieved July 7, 2016 from http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/20/upshot/missing-black-men.html?_r=0

¹³Black America: The Fire and the Fuel, op. cit., p.24-26

¹⁴Ibid

¹⁵Ibid

¹⁶Ibid

¹⁷Ibid

²⁰Baltimore City, Maryland (2015). Quick Facts. U.S. Census Bureau. Retrieved July 4, 2016 from https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/table/PST045215/24510

²¹Rector, K. (2016, January 1). Deadliest Year in Baltimore History Ends With 344 Homicides. Baltimore Sun. Retrieved July 4, 2016 from http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-city/bs-md-ci-deadliest-year-20160101-story.html

²²City Data (2016). West Baltimore Neighborhood in Baltimore, Maryland: 21223, 21216 and 21217 Detailed Profile. Retrieved July 4, 2016 from http://www.city-data.com/neighborhood/West-Baltimore-Baltimore-MD.html

²³Kochhar R. & Fry R. (2014). Fact Tank: News in the Numbers. Pew Research Center. Retrieved July 4, 2016 from http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/12/12/racial-wealth-gaps-great-recession/

²⁴Black America: The Fire and the Fuel, op. cit., p.24-26

²⁵Ibid

²⁶Ibid