BALTIMORE Black men in the United States face a far more dire situation than is portrayed by common employment and education statistics, a flurry of new scholarly studies warn, and it has worsened in recent years even as an economic boom and a welfare overhaul have brought gains to black women and other groups.
Ryan Donnell for The New York Times
Curtis E. Brannon of Baltimore with Curtis Jr., one of the four children he has fathered with three mothers. "I was with the street life," Mr. Brannon said, "but now I feel like I've got to get myself together."
Focusing more closely than ever on the life patterns of young black men, the new studies, by experts at Columbia, Princeton, Harvard and other institutions, show that the huge pool of poorly educated black men are becoming ever more disconnected from the mainstream society, and to a far greater degree than comparable white or Hispanic men.
Especially in the country's inner cities, the studies show, finishing high school is the exception, legal work is scarcer than ever and prison is almost routine, with incarceration rates climbing for blacks even as urban crime rates have declined.
Although the problems afflicting poor black men have been known for decades, the new data paint a more extensive and sobering picture of the challenges they face.
"There's something very different happening with young black men, and it's something we can no longer ignore," said Ronald B. Mincy, professor of social work at Columbia University and editor of "Black Males Left Behind" (Urban Institute Press, 2006).
"Over the last two decades, the economy did great," Mr. Mincy said, "and low-skilled women, helped by public policy, latched onto it. But young black men were falling farther back."
Many of the new studies go beyond the traditional approaches to looking at the plight of black men, especially when it comes to determining the scope of joblessness. For example, official unemployment rates can be misleading because they do not include those not seeking work or incarcerated.
"If you look at the numbers, the 1990's was a bad decade for young black men, even though it had the best labor market in 30 years," said Harry J. Holzer, an economist at Georgetown University and co-author, with Peter Edelman and Paul Offner, of "Reconnecting Disadvantaged Young Men" (Urban Institute Press, 2006).
In response to the worsening situation for young black men, a growing number of programs are placing as much importance on teaching life skills like parenting, conflict resolution and character building as they are on teaching job skills.
These were among the recent findings:
The share of young black men without jobs has climbed relentlessly, with only a slight pause during the economic peak of the late 1990's. In 2000, 65 percent of black male high school dropouts in their 20's were jobless that is, unable to find work, not seeking it or incarcerated. By 2004, the share had grown to 72 percent, compared with 34 percent of white and 19 percent of Hispanic dropouts. Even when high school graduates were included, half of black men in their 20's were jobless in 2004, up from 46 percent in 2000.
Incarceration rates climbed in the 1990's and reached historic highs in the past few years. In 1995, 16 percent of black men in their 20's who did not attend college were in jail or prison; by 2004, 21 percent were incarcerated. By their mid-30's, 6 in 10 black men who had dropped out of school had spent time in prison.
In the inner cities, more than half of all black men do not finish high school.
None of the litany of problems that young black men face was news to a group of men from the airless neighborhoods of Baltimore who recently described their experiences.
One of them, Curtis E. Brannon, told a story so commonplace it hardly bears notice here. He quit school in 10th grade to sell drugs, fathered four children with three mothers, and spent several stretches in jail for drug possession, parole violations and other crimes.
"I was with the street life, but now I feel like I've got to get myself together," Mr. Brannon said recently in the row-house flat he shares with his girlfriend and four children. "You get tired of incarceration."
Mr. Brannon, 28, said he planned to look for work, perhaps as a mover, and he noted optimistically that he had not been locked up in six months.
A group of men, including Mr. Brannon, gathered at the Center for Fathers, Families and Workforce Development, one of several private agencies trying to help men build character along with workplace skills.
The clients readily admit to their own bad choices but say they also fight a pervasive sense of hopelessness.
"It hurts to get that boot in the face all the time," said Steve Diggs, 34. "I've had a lot of charges but only a few convictions," he said of his criminal record.
Mr. Diggs is now trying to strike out on his own, developing a party space for rentals, but he needs help with business skills.
"I don't understand," said William Baker, 47. "If a man wants to change, why won't society give him a chance to prove he's a changed person?" Mr. Baker has a lot of record to overcome, he admits, not least his recent 15-year stay in the state penitentiary for armed robbery.
Mr. Baker led a visitor down the Pennsylvania Avenue strip he wants to escape past idlers, addicts and hustlers, storefront churches and fortresslike liquor stores and described a life that seemed inevitable.
He sold marijuana for his parents, he said, left school in the sixth grade and later dealt heroin and cocaine. He was for decades addicted to heroin, he said, easily keeping the habit during three terms in prison. But during his last long stay, he also studied hard to get a G.E.D. and an associate's degree.
Now out for 18 months, Mr. Baker is living in a home for recovering drug addicts. He is working a $10-an-hour warehouse job while he ponders how to make a living from his real passion, drawing and graphic arts.
"I don't want to be a criminal at 50," Mr. Baker said.
According to census data, there are about five million black men ages 20 to 39 in the United States.
Terrible schools, absent parents, racism, the decline in blue collar jobs and a subculture that glorifies swagger over work have all been cited as causes of the deepening ruin of black youths. Scholars and the young men themselves agree that all of these issues must be addressed.
Joseph T. Jones, director of the fatherhood and work skills center here, puts the breakdown of families at the core.
"Many of these men grew up fatherless, and they never had good role models," said Mr. Jones, who overcame addiction and prison time. "No one around them knows how to navigate the mainstream society."
All the negative trends are associated with poor schooling, studies have shown, and progress has been slight in recent years. Federal data tend to understate dropout rates among the poor, in part because imprisoned youths are not counted.
Closer studies reveal that in inner cities across the country, more than half of all black men still do not finish high school, said Gary Orfield, an education expert at Harvard and editor of "Dropouts in America" (Harvard Education Press, 2004).
"We're pumping out boys with no honest alternative," Mr. Orfield said in an interview, "and of course their neighborhoods offer many other alternatives."
Dropout rates for Hispanic youths are as bad or worse but are not associated with nearly as much unemployment or crime, the data show.
With the shift from factory jobs, unskilled workers of all races have lost ground, but none more so than blacks. By 2004, 50 percent of black men in their 20's who lacked a college education were jobless, as were 72 percent of high school dropouts, according to data compiled by Bruce Western, a sociologist at Princeton and author of the forthcoming book "Punishment and Inequality in America" (Russell Sage Press). These are more than double the rates for white and Hispanic men.
Mr. Holzer of Georgetown and his co-authors cite two factors that have curbed black employment in particular.
First, the high rate of incarceration and attendant flood of former offenders into neighborhoods have become major impediments. Men with criminal records tend to be shunned by employers, and young blacks with clean records suffer by association, studies have found.
Arrests of black men climbed steeply during the crack epidemic of the 1980's, but since then the political shift toward harsher punishments, more than any trends in crime, has accounted for the continued growth in the prison population, Mr. Western said.
By their mid-30's, 30 percent of black men with no more than a high school education have served time in prison, and 60 percent of dropouts have, Mr. Western said.
Among black dropouts in their late 20's, more are in prison on a given day 34 percent than are working 30 percent according to an analysis of 2000 census data by Steven Raphael of the University of California, Berkeley.
The second special factor is related to an otherwise successful policy: the stricter enforcement of child support. Improved collection of money from absent fathers has been a pillar of welfare overhaul. But the system can leave young men feeling overwhelmed with debt and deter them from seeking legal work, since a large share of any earnings could be seized.
About half of all black men in their late 20's and early 30's who did not go to college are noncustodial fathers, according to Mr. Holzer. From the fathers' viewpoint, support obligations "amount to a tax on earnings," he said.
Some fathers give up, while others find casual work. "The work is sporadic, not the kind that leads to advancement or provides unemployment insurance," Mr. Holzer said. "It's nothing like having a real job."
The recent studies identified a range of government programs and experiments, especially education and training efforts like the Job Corps, that had shown success and could be scaled up.
Scholars call for intensive new efforts to give children a better start, including support for parents and extra schooling for children.
They call for teaching skills to prisoners and helping them re-enter society more productively, and for less automatic incarceration of minor offenders.
In a society where higher education is vital to economic success, Mr. Mincy of Columbia said, programs to help more men enter and succeed in college may hold promise. But he lamented the dearth of policies and resources to aid single men.
"We spent $50 billion in efforts that produced the turnaround for poor women," Mr. Mincy said. "We are not even beginning to think about the men's problem on similar orders of magnitude."
Posted: Mon 20 Mar 2006 20:24 Post subject: Plight Deepens for Black Men, Studies Warn
These studies almost never specify what kind of black men they are talking about: unskilled, middle class, working class, poor and jobless. All black men are presumed to be in some monolithic group undifferentiated by class, level of education, location, etc.
Also, these studies rarely address the effect low-skilled immigration-both legal and especially illegal-has on driving down wages for these "black men" and other low-skilled native-born Americans, as well as the crowding out of these men from low-skilled jobs by the aforementioned group.
It's apparent from this article that policies like affirmative action have had no impact on the lives of these black men.
These studies almost never specify what kind of black men they are talking about: unskilled, middle class, working class, poor and jobless. All black men are presumed to be in some monolithic group undifferentiated by class, level of education, location, etc.
Also, these studies rarely address the effect low-skilled immigration-both legal and especially illegal-has on driving down wages for these "black men" and other low-skilled native-born Americans, as well as the crowding out of these men from low-skilled jobs by the aforementioned group.
It's apparent from this article that policies like affirmative action have had no impact on the lives of these black men.
Article in response to this New York Times article...
F--k what you heard about Black males from the NY Times
Steal this article!
by Omowale Adewale
Police drag student activist Shareef Aleem out of a Colorado University Board of Regents meeting. Police look for "the slightest reason to throw us in jail and extract labor and inject despair," Omowale Adewale asserts.
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I heard y'all bombarding my email with the New York Times' article on the plight of the Black male and your own analysis and your friends' analysis and, frankly, it bothered me. I'm good though. I'm straight. I just wanted to enter into the discussion.
Joined: 02 May 2006 {Posts: 363 } Location: Ξle-de-France
Posted: Thu 04 May 2006 18:00 Post subject:
It has become very clear to me that black men are in serious trouble in this country. A recent federal drug cases in my area serves as a good example:
Police arrest a young black man, a young father. He is indicted in federal court, because the local US attorney's office has recently recived a grant to hire seven new assistant US attorneys for drug prosecutions, and the local prosecutor's office is overworked. The cops know this, so they pick and choose which cases go state and which go to federal authorites. It just so happens that crack cases seem to end up in federal court. And these defendant seem to be black. This 23 year old man is sentenced to 7 years in federal prison, no possibility of parole, for $500 worth of cocaine.
There are many things that are damaging black men in this country, but one of the most vicious is the war on drugs.
During prohibition, alcohol use declined drastically. Violent crime shot up. A crack head is no more dangerous to a community than is an alcoholic. Yet the liquor store owner gets rich, while the 20 year old black man selling crack rots in prison while his children grow up without a father.
The United States locks up a greater percentage of its population than any other country in the world. More than 1 out of 10 black men age 25-29 are currently locked up in prison or jail, compared to less than 1 out of every 50 white men in that age group.
It is time to see the drug war for what it is. It is a war whose main casualties are young black men .sons, brothers, fathers and husbands. It is the drug war, not drugs, that is destroying the black community.
Joined: 27 Nov 2004 {Posts: 1466 } Location: Hudson Valley, NY
Posted: Thu 04 May 2006 22:42 Post subject:
LOL! People like me think of the Times as a Left wing rag!!! This guy is insinuating that it is a white racist rag:
I think this writer has a PH.D in Victimology.
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The New York Times, "the best daily paper in the country, in the world ... urbane, sophisticated, liberal on certain civil liberties and civil rights questions," their mask slipped on Feb. 22, 1964. This is how they described our Honorable Brother Malcolm X, our beloved Black Prince, on the day after he was shot.
I suppose the editor didn't catch this error. Malcolm X was assinated in February 1965, not 1964.
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The best tactic the government and media ever used - and I mean they did spend billions of dollars on hundreds of agencies and organizations to complete its strategy - is making young brothers feel like they are responsible for their current conditions. 50 Cent hasn't been out more than five years in the media, and we think he created the Black villain in New York.
Maybe he and his ilk (and youngsters) think that 50 Cent created the Black villain in New York, but knowledgable people know otherwise. So the objective of the Welfare State was a conspiracy by white racists to make "young brothers" feel repsonsible for their current conditions???
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Yes, Black males are heading to prisons at astronomical rates and unemployment among Black men is through the roof. However, I don't buy the ivy-league's solutions or conclusions or the New York Times story because they inexplicably and cautiously relate the reason for Black males' crisis to the fault of Black men themselves.
Then who the hell's fault is it?? Are these men puppets whose strings are pulled by racist whites who want to see them in prison???
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"In response to the worsening situation for young Black men, a growing number of programs are placing as much importance on teaching life skills - like parenting, conflict resolution and character building - as they are on teaching job skills."
This quote in the Times article clearly suggests Blacks are messed up because we are bad parents, are irrational people, can't get jobs because we don't know anything - and we are just plainly bad people.
No, I can't believe I'm defending the Times here. What this quote is saying that a lot of these skills are lacking in the inner city Black communities. And it was the Welfare State that did this. The same Welfare State that Blacks like Jesse Jackson, and the Congressional Black Caucus champion as a help to the poor Black communities.
In my town, I can drive through and see a lot of Black men hanging out during the day. At the same time I see Mexicans working in landscape, construction, restaurants, and car washes. The Times quote by no means suggests that Blacks are "just plainly bad people". This is a tactic that these sorts of people use to shift the blame away from the source to someone else. To insinuate that something was said, that was not.
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Am I supposed to believe after 300 years of slavery and 46 years of Jim Crow that now I am responsible for 1 million Black males being locked up? Am I supposed to think that the reason young Black males are mad as hell and selling drugs is because we don't mentor enough Black children?
300 years of slavery, hardly. Not in the US. Maybe he was thinking Brazil??? Let's see, officially slavery went from around 1619 to 1865. But even in 1619, Africans were Indentured Servents, like many of the poor English and Irish that came over. Wow, I don't know what kind of math and history this guy had in school, but 46 years of Jim Crow??? Jim Crow ended in 1964/65 or so, so it started in 1916?? I don't think so. Granted, the situations for blacks after 1865 were by no means desirable. But let's deal with factual timelines here. Nobody is saying that you are responsible for 1 million black males being locked up. They are responsible. You can do something or you don't do it. Most people by the age of 10 or so, know the difference between right and wrong. People like this guy want to treat that these men in prison are political prisoners of a white racist society. That is pure rubbish. These same prisoners would be dealt more harshly in African countries in the same situation.
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Black men are not in poor shape in America because of natural conditions, bad habits or fatherlessness, because some are stuck on a sixth grade reading level or because they are helpless recidivists or even because the U.S. government doesn't intervene effectively.
We are facing these very issues because America's imperialism requires young Black males' incarceration. It requires the petty bourgeois Black males to offer up solutions that point to the government as the problem-solvers and the Black working class and poor peasantry as the problem-makers.
Ok, I wish he would explain exactly how America's imperialism requires that young Black males be incarcerated, as oppossed to just stating it as a mater of fact. But I agree with the "petty bourgeois Black males" sentence. To whom is he referring to?? It sounds to me like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton who go around the country championing the government as the solution. I would blame the government more for the situation today for the poor Black condition. But I feel it is the Welfare State that created this condition. The same Welfare State that is defended by the party that Blacks support the most, the Democrat Party.
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What they didn't know that some employees are clear on is that you better act white and change your tone when you speak.
Yup, so if you want to be successful, then you must act "white". See the quotes from Thomas Sowell below.
Here's some of my agreement with him:
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I was shocked and embarrassed by my own shock that several Black men were OVERpaying child support that sometimes never reached the mother. In most cases, like mine, the Child Support Enforcement agency are never on the same page as Family Court, so you are regarded as a deadbeat and end up further in arrears.
I totally agree with this assessment. The system is BROKEN. While I have not personally been through this, I know several who have, and they are white. The government will try and get over on anyone they can. They do not care what colour or ethnicity. It is up to us to take this back.
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There is a very real and material obstacle preventing Black men from becoming Marcus Garveys, Malcolms and Hueys. The reason Black men suffer is that the U.S. government DOES intervene in our community.
I agree that the government is more the problem than the solution. But just do not blame the U.S. government. It is also the state and local governments as well. Cities which have a political Black majority are no better off for Blacks as cities that do not have a Black majority. This is because government corruption in bureaucracies exist no matter who runs them. But why does he not slam the Black political left like Jackson, Cynthia McKinney, Barak Obama, and others, who want more government programs in inner city Black communities. This ultimately translates into more government intrusion. So it isn't the "White power" structure per se, but people who think they are helping the Black community. I guess in his mind, they are doing the White power structures work, as he would think I am doing.
Here are some different opinions as to why Black urban culture is the way it is:
Thoms Sowell wrote:
Lazy, lawless, and sexually immoral - that's how Northern employers and cops regarded poor Southern "rednecks" as late as the 1940s and 1950s. Many Southern blacks, Thomas Sowell explains, picked up the same habits. But while both white and black Southerners have moved up in class and affluence, Sowell notes that ghettos are still filled with "black rednecks" who have never escaped these self-destructive patterns. Why not? Their attempt to escape, as Sowell demonstrates in Black Rednecks and White Liberals, has been consistently and repeatedly hampered by white liberals. The Left, says Sowell, has turned dysfunctional "black redneck" culture into "a sacrosanct symbol of racial identity."
Thomas Sowell wrote:
Slavery also cannot explain the difference between American blacks and West Indian blacks living in the United States because the ancestors of both were enslaved. When race, racism, and slavery all fail the empirical test, what is left?
Culture is left.
The culture of the people who were called "rednecks" and "crackers" before they ever got on the boats to cross the Atlantic was a culture that produced far lower levels of intellectual and economic achievement, as well as far higher levels of violence and sexual promiscuity. That culture had its own way of talking, not only in the pronunciation of particular words but also in a loud, dramatic style of oratory with vivid imagery, repetitive phrases and repetitive cadences.
Although that style originated on the other side of the Atlantic in centuries past, it became for generations the style of both religious oratory and political oratory among Southern whites and among Southern blacks--not only in the South but in the Northern ghettos in which Southern blacks settled. It was a style used by Southern white politicians in the era of Jim Crow and later by black civil rights leaders fighting Jim Crow. Martin Luther King's famous speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 was a classic example of that style.
While a third of the white population of the U.S. lived within the redneck culture, more than 90% of the black population did. Although that culture eroded away over the generations, it did so at different rates in different places and among different people. It eroded away much faster in Britain than in the U.S. and somewhat faster among Southern whites than among Southern blacks, who had fewer opportunities for education or for the rewards that came with escape from that counterproductive culture.
Nevertheless the process took a long time. As late as the First World War, white soldiers from Georgia, Arkansas, Kentucky and Mississippi scored lower on mental tests than black soldiers from Ohio, Illinois, New York and Pennsylvania. Again, neither race nor racism can explain that--and neither can slavery.
The redneck culture proved to be a major handicap for both whites and blacks who absorbed it. Today, the last remnants of that culture can still be found in the worst of the black ghettos, whether in the North or the South, for the ghettos of the North were settled by blacks from the South. The counterproductive and self-destructive culture of black rednecks in today's ghettos is regarded by many as the only "authentic" black culture--and, for that reason, something not to be tampered with. Their talk, their attitudes, and their behavior are regarded as sacrosanct.
The people who take this view may think of themselves as friends of blacks. But they are the kinds of friends who can do more harm than enemies.
Yes I know that Dr. Sowell is not well regarded in the traditional Black community. He is the target of many racist personal attacks from both White liberals and Blacks. But yet the facts speak for themselves. Just as Bill Cosby got into trouble last year for making factual comments on the state of the inner city Black community.
I am not tying to be mean or nasty. But if we would like to fix the problems, we first must admit the truth. Like an alcoholic must first admit they have a problem before that problem can even begin the rectified. The same thing exists here.
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