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Decon Frost

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Could the black family—in free fall since the 1965 Moynihan report first warned of the threat of its disintegration—finally be ready for a turnaround? There's sure a lot of soul-searching on the subject. A 2001 survey by CBS News and BET.com, a website affiliated with the Black Entertainment Television network, found that 92 percent of African-American respondents agreed that absentee fathers are a serious problem. In black public discourse, personal responsibility talk, always encompassing family responsibility, has been crowding out the old orthodoxy of reparations and racism. Bill Cosby's much debated remarks in June at the Rainbow/Push conference, calling on parents to take charge of their kids and for men to "stop beating up your women because you can't find a job," set off an amen corner. Democratic National Convention keynote speaker Barack Obama, the black Illinois senatorial candidate, celebrated family, hard work, and the inner-city citizens who "know that parents have to parent." In a New York Times op-ed, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates added his blessing when he asked, "Are white racists forcing black teenagers to drop out of school or have babies?" Even the wily Reverend Al recently corrected one of the Times's most fervent PC watchdogs, Deborah Solomon, that, no, Cosby wasn't being racist, and that "we didn't go through the civil rights movement only to end up as thugs and hoodlums."

A few statistics even hint that a turnaround is already in motion. The Census Bureau reports that between 1996 and 2002, the number of black children living in two-parent families increased for the first time since the 1960s, from 35 to 39 percent. Black teen pregnancy rates have plummeted 32 percent in the last 15 years, well surpassing the decline among white and Hispanic adolescents. Thanks to the 1996 welfare reform bill, black mothers have been joining the workforce in record numbers and making enough money to pull more of their children out of poverty than we've seen since anyone's been keeping track of these things.

And the men—the much needed husbands and fathers? You can see a glimmer of hope here, too. People are talking about fathers—a lot. The New York Times Magazine captured the emerging dadism in Jason DeParle's recent profile of a 32-year-old former crack dealer, pimp, and convict trying to go straight, delivering pizzas by night, taking care of his two-year-old son by day.

But the grim fact is that bringing a reliable dad into the home of the 80 percent or so of inner-city children growing up with a single mother is a task of such psychological and sociological complexity as to rival democracy-building in Iraq. Pundits point to the staggering rates of black male unemployment and incarceration as the major reason that black men don't get married. Others cite the poisonous relations between the sexes that too often lead to domestic violence. What is little understood is that all of these—single fatherhood, domestic abuse, unemployment, crime, and incarceration—are in effect the same problem. They are all part of a destructive pattern of drift, of a tendency for men to stumble through life rather than try to tame it, a drift whose inevitable consequence is the deadbeat dad and fatherless children.

But let's start with the good news, because it is truly worth cheering. There's a fatherhood awakening under way in the inner city. According to many observers, more and more young fathers are "taking responsibility" or "stepping up" for their children. Now that post-welfare reform mothers are getting up early for the morning shift at a downtown nursing home or hotel kitchen, the men are often out there walking their kids to school, taking them to the park or to after-school programs. "You never used to see this," says D. J. Andrews, a communications consultant who has been working with inner-city fathers for five years. "People used to say, 'That's a woman's job.' " Columbia social-work professor Ron Mincy, an expert on the inner-city family, also sees a "sea change" in hip-hop culture: it's "no longer cool" to father a child and wave from a distance occasionally. In fact, some hip-hop icons are going all Ozzie, crooning their devotion and life lessons for their sons. "You a blessin' and I'll always guide you," sings rapper Ray Benzino, co-owner of Source Magazine and organizer of the publication's 2002 event "to reveal the nurturing side of rap artists as fathers and mentors."

Not that this celebration of fatherhood is universal in the ghetto. Andrews says that when he explains the poverty and psychological problems that fatherless children suffer at disproportionate rates, some young men say, "I never thought about that." Others listen suspiciously and counter, "I didn't have a father, and I came out okay"—that is, until Andrews points out that that's a prison record in their file, not an honor-roll certificate.

But indifference of this sort is going out of style, as ghetto dwellers have begun to take stock—in their high schools, housing projects, and streets—of the disastrous results of the previous decades of father absence. For the hip-hop generation that grew up at the height of the crack epidemic, when so many of their elders vanished into underclass hell, rage at deadbeat dads has become a kind of primal scream. In 2001, BET.com encouraged visitors to post Father's Day greetings. Organizers assumed that they would see a Hallmark fest of "I love you" or "I miss you." Instead they got a "venting session": "I hate you," "To all my deadbeat dads out there, I just want to say, thanks for nothing," and "That bastard forgot that I even existed," contributors railed.

Father loss is a recurrent theme in contemporary black music, chronicled by some of the baddest brothers: "What's buried under there?/Was a kid torn apart once his pop disappeared?/I went to school, got good grades, could behave when I wanted/But I had demons deep inside," raps Jay-Z, who was raised in Brooklyn's notorious Marcy Projects and usually sings of "hos and bitches." "Now all the teachers couldn't reach me/And my mom couldn't beat me/Hard enough to match the pain of my pops not seeing me." Not everyone reacts to father loss with thuggish rage, of course—as witness Luther Vandross's sentimental Grammy Award-winning "Dance with My Father": "Then up the stairs he would carry me/And I knew for sure I was loved. . . . How I'd love, love, love/To dance with my father again."

Fatherhood is also getting a boost from a social-services industry that had long been in dad-denial. For close to half a century, the welfare establishment viewed fatherlessness as poverty's unavoidable collateral damage. Federal and local governments spent billions on Mom's parenting and work skills, day care and Head Start, food stamps, after-school programs, and health care; but they didn't have much to say about—or to—Dad. Starting in the mid-1990s, reams of research began to convince even the most skeptical activists and policymakers of the importance of fathers and the two-parent family to children's life chances, and attention turned toward the missing dad. Today, programs that try to impress young single fathers with their importance in their kids' lives are spreading across the social-services world, with support from the federal and state governments. "There's a lot of buzz about this right now," D. J. Andrews says.

Can the buzz evolve into something more than talk? The answer may strike skeptics as too pat: not unless these fathers can become husbands. But take a close look at the tenuous, improvisational, and usually polygamous relationships that replace marriage in the inner city. They're a breeding ground for confusion, resentment, jealousy, and rage of the sort that swamps the best paternal intentions.

For a good example of the shaky promise of the black fatherhood programs that do not include marriage, consider Tyrell, a soft-spoken, dreadlocked 24-year-old I interviewed at a child support-work program at America Works, an employment agency for hard-to-place workers. "My generation grew up without fathers," Tyrell says. "I wanted my father—but the hell with that dude." He is determined to do better for his own 19-month-old son, spending hours each day with the boy and often joining up with friends who are also doing the dad thing. "My friends, all our kids hang together. I'm Uncle Tyrell." Not that the young father is content to be a friendly companion. With a smile he mentions that, when the child is acting up, the boy's mother turns to Tyrell to say, "Talk to your son!"

But even though Tyrell seems to be doing much of what fathers are supposed to do—providing discipline, sharing child care, and taking at least some financial responsibility—and even though he is determined to be the father he never had, his good intentions are slender reeds in the treacherous drift of street life. As he mentions casually, he no longer lives with his son's mother; he has a new girlfriend, and their baby is due in January.

Tyrell's haphazard approach to what social scientists call "family creation" is nothing unusual. People who work closely with the men-who-would-be-fathers describe it this way: a man and woman—or perhaps a boy and girl of 15 and 16—are having a sexual relationship. They're careful at first, but soon get careless. (The rate of contraceptive use at first intercourse has gone up among teen girls from 65 percent in 1988 to 76 percent in 1995, but after that, a third of these girls use contraception erratically.) Sure enough, she's pregnant. In some cases, he disappears on her, but more likely these days he recognizes, like Tyrell, that "he's got responsibilities." He goes to the prenatal appointments with her at the neighborhood clinic; he's there in the hospital when the baby arrives healthy and bawling, family members clap him on the back, and he's thinking, "Well, I may not have expected this, but it's pretty cool." It's what Leon Henry, head of the Maryland Regional Practitioner's Network for Fathers and Families, calls " 'the happy pappy syndrome': the baby comes, and it seems like everything's wonderful."

Of course, it's not. The Accidental Father is trying to build a family without a blueprint. For one thing, he has no idea what, aside from bringing over some Huggies and Similac, he is supposed to do. After all, there weren't any fathers around when he was a child. Some men say that they grew up not even being sure what to call these ghostly figures in their lives—Dad? Pops? George or Fred?—or what fathers say to their kids beyond "How ya doin'?" or "How's school?" "To me, fathers were somewhat of a luxury, an 'extra' parent of sorts," journalist Darrell Dawsey, who grew up in a single-parent household in inner-city Detroit, explains in his memoir Living to Tell About It. "My father had left when I was an infant, gone down that same road of abandonment most of my other friends' fathers had taken. His idea of parenting was to fly me every few years to wherever he was living at the time and, in the guise of offering wise counsel, harangue me about the way my mother was raising me." When Dawsey's own daughter was born, he was bewildered. "I loved my daughter, but I didn't know how or why I was supposed to be there for her. I just didn't know."

But by far the biggest obstacle for the Accidental Father—and fanning his uncertainty—is his fragile, vaguely defined relationship with his baby's mother and her family. The problems don't always appear right away. At first, many couples enjoy a surge of hope and good intentions. The Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study—following a birth cohort of nearly 4,000 children of unmarried, low-income, urban parents, as well as 1,200 married couples over five years—has found that some two-thirds of inner-city single women were still romantically involved with their babies' fathers at the time of birth. When asked, a majority of these couples say they are considering marriage, and many refer to each other as "husbands" and "wives."

Still, many of these relationships will end before the child can sit up in a high chair; most will be over before he can tie his shoes. Research conducted for Head Start found that while at birth over 80 percent of mothers and fathers are romantically involved, four years later that number has declined to 20 percent. The problem is most acute among African Americans; Fragile Families researchers found that Hispanics are two and a half times more likely to marry the year following nonmarital birth than African-American parents are.

Outsiders may find these facts troubling; young men like Tyrell do not. Having grown up in the crack-era inner city, few have ever seen a long-term partnership between a man and a woman raising children together. And without such a model, they are unlikely to see it as a goal worth pursuing. I asked Tyrell what he thought about the idea of having children with one woman with whom you stayed for good. He gave me a look of gentle condescension. "In this day and age, I don't see that happening . . . . You just do the best you can." What message would he give his own child about starting a family? "I would tell my son, 'Don't have a child until you're ready to have a child.' "

Several teens interviewed by Jason DeParle in his New York Times Magazine story scoff at the boring sameness of marriage, even while they yearn for fathers. "I need some little me's—children," one 16-year-old told DeParle, but, he continued, "I just can't see myself being with one woman." As another teen explained, "That'd be too plain—like you have to see the same woman every day." A young man with this attitude does not spend time "looking for Ms. Right" or "working on a relationship," or any of the other rituals of middle-class courtship. Like Tyrell, first he is with one woman, then he is with another; in all likelihood, there will be more in the future. Sex happens. And so do babies.

It's not at all uncommon to meet poor men who have left behind a winding trail of exes and their unanticipated progeny. One man I spoke with has five children by two women; another, apologizing for his shoddy birth control practices by explaining that he "likes it raw," has seven children by five women; he was 15 when the first was born. When asked about his offspring, an edgy Haitian, who owes the State of New York child support of $35,000, starts counting slowly on his fingers. He stops at four, but he doesn't seem to be joking; it's as if he's never thought of the products of his many affairs as a single group that could be labeled "my children."

Sometimes the couple is philosophical about their relationship's end. "When your woman wanna go, she's gonna go," shrugs Frank, the father of a two-year-old boy born to a mother he had lived with for five years. An amiable man, whose hardware-weight bling enhances his considerable bulk, Frank says that he either sees his child or phones him every day, despite his loss of interest in the boy's mother. "I don't hate my baby's mama. She's got a interest in somebody. I got a interest in somebody. . . . No use you being miserable, her being miserable. The child gonna be miserable. . . . My son right now still has a smile on his face. Daddy's gonna live his life." After all, he had "no problem" with the two fathers of the two children his ex already had when he moved in with her. "You know this woman. You know she picked you. She ain't gonna pick no creep."

A lot of ghetto women voice similarly friendly feelings toward the fathers of their children and are sympathetic to their efforts to come through for them. Though their child-support relationships are usually informal—unless they are on welfare, in which case the courts set the father's contribution—the men come by when they can with money, new clothes, and Christmas presents.

But usually, bitterness creeps into the relationship. The mother has special cause for resentment; she is raising a child either on her own or in a relationship with only vaguely defined obligations. One day, the father arrives at the apartment and walks into what some veteran dads refer to as "mama drama"—a litany of demands and accusations, some no doubt deserved: he is late, he didn't show up last week when he said he would, he hasn't delivered the money he promised for the high chair. His girlfriend's mother, understandably mistrustful of the cause of the wailing newcomer to an already chaotic apartment, adds an unfriendly greeting of her own: this is "grandma drama." "He's 18, she's 16. He drops by to see the baby. He's got some Pampers and formula," explains Neil Tift, director of training for the National Practitioners Network for Fathers and Families. "Grandma doesn't respect him. No matter how much he wants to see the child, how much abuse is he going to take?" "Many black men say to me that the sisters are just too much work," says Nick Chiles, co-author with his wife, Denene Millner, of numerous books on the relationships of African-American men and women. Once men find themselves getting in tangles with women they think of as girlfriends, not as wives, it's no wonder.

Not all men accept the game of musical families as inevitable. Some try to live up to a dimly remembered ideal of a husband-like partner. What are the chances they can succeed? They've stumbled into fatherhood with a woman they had not intentionally chosen to be the mother of their child; they face a future with someone with whom they share no hopes, aspirations, or trust. Ben, a handsome, serious 37-year-old dressed in a neat, blue plaid shirt, whom I also spoke with at America Works, is a poignant example of how decency and determination can be no match for the nearly insurmountable task that these men have set for themselves.

Seven years ago, Ben had what he saw as a casual affair with a Dominican woman he didn't know all that well. When she needed a place to stay, he gave her his key, and one thing led to another. "I didn't expect her to get pregnant. The relationship she and I had—we had no business having children," he says sternly. Staying with her after his son was born, he tried to transform his Accidental Family into something solid and permanent. After all, he had been taught to be responsible: "My mother told me, when you make a baby, you raise a baby." And the wound of his own fatherlessness was still raw; he says he suffered "temper disorders" and problems in school because he needed the man who was never there. He wanted to give his son a childhood he never had. "I get him toys," he tells me. "When I grew up I didn't have any toys."

Ben's good intentions were not enough. Though "I begged her not to have any more children," soon she was pregnant again, with a girl this time. They broke up, got back together, broke up again, and had yet another girl. So now Ben had fathered three children with a woman he refers to as his wife, though he never married her and no longer lives with her, and though he sees her as an obstacle to his children's future. He wants the kids to go to Boys' Club or karate; she rarely takes them anywhere. He wants them to succeed in school; she shows little interest even in learning to speak English or helping the kids get ahead. I ask him again, why did he keep having children with a woman he didn't care for, much less love, and whom he viewed as a poor mother? "There's nothing wrong with wanting to be a father," he answers. "Anyone raised decently would want a kid. I know about being a man."

This theme—what it means to be a man—recurs insistently in the musings of poor black men. It has a long history, of course, stretching back to slavery and Jim Crow, when whites called black men "boy." And in the post-segregation era, the indifference of the social-services establishment, policymakers, academics, and the media toward black men as fathers and husbands further undermined their sense of masculinity. Worse, enabled by welfare, women let the men know that they could manage without them; a poor black man's own children saw him as the "extra" parent, as Darrell Dawsey put it. With no role as a man of the family, he became a baffling, often threatening figure, especially to himself. In the past 15 years, books with titles like Speak My Name: Black Men on Masculinity; Are We Not Men?; and A Question of Manhood have poured off the presses. Even boys are grappling with the subject: 15-year-old Brian Johnson told Dawsey, "That's manhood. Unless you can support your family and respect a Black woman, you are not a man."

But supporting a family that you never chose and that you are not really part of is less a path to manhood than to still more confusion and bitterness. Men often complain that they feel used by their children's mothers, valued only for their not-so-deep pockets. "She doesn't see me as a man; she sees me as an ATM," Ben complains. And not living with the children, fathers have no idea whether the mother's demands make sense. She says the kids need new jackets: should he believe her? She's lied before. One man I spoke with has a child who was conceived two weeks after he met the mother four years ago. "This accident happened," he explained, and ever since she got pregnant, she's been demanding money. "With her, it's 'F you.' It's to the point that, every time we talk, it's 'I don't want to talk. Do you got some money? That's all I want.' "

In the improvised ghetto family, the mistrust goes both ways. Patricia, a young black woman who projects an odd mixture of warmth and street toughness, lives with her two-year-old son and his father, a man she alternately refers to as her fiancé and husband, who has also fathered an older daughter he no longer sees. To protect herself and her child, Patricia hides any money she earns. "You gotta play broke," she explains. "I work for me and my son, not for my husband." Despite their seeming intimacy—she says they are talking about marriage—the couple is nothing like a parental unit. "I get scraps," she says of the money her "husband" gives her. "He sees it as 'he's helping me.' " I ask whether they would ever think of pooling their money, and she guffaws. "He thinks that's 'the white way' "—that, if a man gives a woman the check, "he's an idiot." In fact, any time there's a problem and she wants to talk things over, he says, "You think you're white. Just leave it alone." She concludes about her possible husband, father of her little boy, "I think the fool is just like that. He's never going to change."

Adding to the mistrust and further threatening to isolate a father from his children, is the moment when the new woman, often pregnant, enters this domestic standoff. Maybe the new girlfriend is worried that he'll favor his children by his old girlfriend. As one mother of two explained, "If a man has more than one child, the first woman gets whatever she needs, and the second child gets what's left." Maybe the mother still carries a torch for her child's father and is jealous of his new woman. Or maybe she's worried that her child will "get scraps." Another America Works client, Randy, says that his three children's mother was so convinced that his new girlfriend was getting more than she was that she has turned their children against him. "Your father's no good, no motherfuckin' good!" she screams at them. Now, his nine-year-old calls him and curses him out, joining the spiteful "you're no good" chorus. Randy insists that he is providing child support. But, like many men, he complains that the money goes through the courts to the family; a father doesn't get to give it to his children with his own hands. If the mother is really determined to undermine her ex, she can (as in this case) tell their kids that he is a deadbeat.

Behind these struggles lurks the ever-present suspicion that men are lying, cheating, "low-down dogs." "Men weren't to be trusted," writes journalist Michael Datcher, author of Raising Fences: A Black Man's Love Story. "Even when our mothers didn't speak these words, their tired lives whispered the message." And hip-hoppers like "I-don't-love-'em;-I-fuck-'em" Jay-Z gleefully celebrate men's treachery. According to a number of observers, wariness about cheating men is the biggest reason that inner-city women don't want to marry. And no wonder. The Sexual Organization of the City, a recent University of Chicago study of sexual relations in various Chicago neighborhoods, finds "transactional" sexual relationships, infidelity, and domestic violence on the rise throughout the city, but things are worst in Southtown, the pseudonymous African-American neighborhood. Sixty percent of Southtown men interviewed had "concurrent partners"—as did 45 percent of women. The sociologist-authors conclude that polygamy is Southtown's "dominant structure."

Worse, the study's authors argue, infidelity often leads to violence. Close to 60 percent of Southtown respondents reported that at least one partner in their relationships engaged in physical violence in the previous year. The black writer bell hooks says that she often hears teenagers say, "There is no such thing as love." In a relationship dystopia like Southtown, they may be right.

This social and emotional reality casts real doubt on the prevailing theory about why so few black children are born to married parents. According to this thesis, there just aren't enough stably employed men in the ghetto for women to marry. First suggested by Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson, the theory had it that when "work disappears" from the inner city—Wilson was referring specifically to the decline of manufacturing jobs—men do not marry, since they can't support families. According to Wilson, employed, single black fathers aged 18 to 21 in Chicago's inner city are 18 times more likely to marry eventually than their jobless counterparts. More recently, pundits have updated Wilson's theory to take into account the many black men in prison. "Is there any mystery to the disintegration of the black family," Cynthia Tucker wrote not long ago in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "with so many young black fathers locked up?" Following Wilson, a recent paper from the Fragile Families Study supports what might be called "the marriage market theory." The researchers concluded that the reason that unwed black couples were less likely to marry than whites or Hispanics after having a baby was that there was an "undersupply" of employed African-American men.

The marriage market thesis makes sense as far as it goes: far too many poor black men seem like a risk not worth taking for marriage-minded women. As Northeastern University's Labor Market Studies found, in 2002 one of every four black men was idle all year long, a much greater number than whites and Hispanics—and this does not even include homeless or incarcerated men. There are only 46 employed African-American males per 100 females in the 20 cities that the Fragile Families Study observes, in contrast to 80 men with jobs in the Hispanic and white groups. Worse still, the Justice Department reports that close to 13 percent of black men are in jail, compared with under 2 percent of white men. Another estimate has it that 30 percent of non-institutionalized black men have criminal records. More black males get their GED in prison than graduate from high school. And the future does not look much better: 60 percent of incarcerated youth aged 18 and under are African-American.

But the marriage market thesis, by emphasizing marriage as an economic relationship, understates the centrality of cultural norms about love and the way that those norms organize young people's lives. Most American men take it for granted that not just marriage, but the pursuit of long-lasting love, is an essential life project. They spend a good deal of their adolescence and early adulthood trying to find "the one." And when they think that they have found that person, they have a predictable script in mind: they imagine and plan a life with her, one that usually involves children; they assume that both of them will be faithful; they take public vows to sanctify their shared life venture. Things far too often these days don't work out the way they're supposed to, but the very existence of an inherited script endows life with meaning and orders the otherwise disconnected existence of individual men, women, and children.

But poor black men have no script to guide their deeper emotions and aspirations. Neither searching for, nor expecting, durable companionship with the opposite sex, they settle for becoming Accidental Parents and Families. When co-authors Denene Millner and Nick Chiles speak to African-American audiences about their own marriage, Millner says that they are greeted with cries of cynicism: "You two don't count! You're Ozzie and Harriet in blackface! You're the Cosby show! It's a fantasy!"

Reduced to conflicted, tenuous relationships with women, poor black men are more likely to express sentiments like trust, loyalty, and lasting affection for their male friends. "With some friends, we've been friends ever since we were little. When he had trouble, I am there; when I am in trouble, he's there," one incarcerated 18-year-old from Omaha told Dawsey. "f I had trouble with my girlfriend and we end up breaking up, I can always get another girl, but . . . it's harder to break away from your friends." (This sentiment may explain why so many men view their relationships with their sons as more important than those with their daughters; they are used to relying on "the brothers.") But the angry cries of the ghetto's fatherless children prove that this solution to the human need for lasting bonds solves little. As Orlando Patterson has written in his essay "Broken Bloodlines: Gender Relations and the Crisis of Marriages and Families Among African-Americans," blacks are "the most unpartnered and isolated group of people in America and quite possibly in the world."

Michael Datcher's Raising Fences perfectly captures the starkness of the contrast between the love and marriage that are central to the mainstream life project, and the consequences of their absence in the ghetto. As a child during the 1970s, Datcher was bused from a poor, single-mother home in Long Beach, California, to a middle-class white school. He visited a classmate's middle-class home and was floored. "It was a feeling of stability, comfort, and safety that touched me," he recalls. "I wanted that feeling in my life." He was similarly astonished when his friend introduced him to his father. "My parental introductions had always begun and ended with the mama because the mamas were the daddies too," he says. "Not in this house. They had real fathers here. . . . I literally could not speak."

Transformed, Datcher becomes "obsessed" with "picket-fence dreams." When he finishes college and goes to graduate school, his life is on track, until he has a casual affair with a woman who becomes pregnant. Datcher is distraught at having a child with a woman he does not love, just "like every other nigga." But after another ugly twist in the story—it turns out that the child is not his—he is able to resume his search and find a woman with whom he believes he can share the "stability, comfort and safety that touched" him as a boy. Love, marriage, planning for the future: they are inextricably bound.

Then where do jobs fit into this script? The marriage market thesis has it that men who cannot find decent work in a job market that treats them so shabbily will inevitably seem inadequate marriage partners. But this argument confuses cause and correlation. What is clear from listening to men like Tyrell is that indifference toward marriage grows out of the same psychological soil as the inability to earn a decent living. Men do not get married because they have a steady job; they get married because they are the kind of person who can get and keep a steady job. As Datcher's story shows, the very task of looking for "the right woman" means projecting yourself into the future and taking a mindful approach to life.

One of the most striking things about talking to poor inner-city men is their sense of drift; life is something that happens to them. I asked several men where they would like to see themselves in ten years; all of them gave me a puzzled, I-never-really-thought-about-it look. Both marriage and vocation are part of the project that is the deliberate pursuit of a meaningful and connected life. To put it a little differently, to marry and to earn a steady living are to try to master life and shape it into a coherent narrative.

Ballasting this sense of drift is a hugely difficult cultural task that will take more than a generation and needs the participation of the whole culture, from Bill Cosby and the president down to the local school and church. We've known for some time that, on average, kids are better off in every way when they grow up with their married parents. The task now is to spread the word that marriage is also best for the many, many poor, black men who long to be fathers.
 
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Decon Frost: Great post Bro, though I doubt many will take the time to read it -- no pics and too many words. Thanks for posting.

Greed: Thanks for the link. I clicked on one of her essays and couldn't stop reading.

QueEx
 
Great read. Seems to me that we need better role models. We need brothers who are real husbands and fathers to be celebrated more in our culture.

But, I am distressed about one thing, though. When I was in high school, I was popular. Folks thought that I was the next big rap star and I was on my way out of the ghetto. In my Junior year, though, a female friend of mine told me some inside knowledge that was in the ladies' room: that there were women that was conspiring to have my baby. It was confirmed by some other girls that I knew.

See, the wisdom was that if they had my baby, regardless of how far I go in life, I couldn't go too far from them. And if I ever came into some money, she'll be set!

I felt like I was a stock certificate. Some chick will ride me and if I became a millionaire, she will get rich right along with me. Treacherous, but true. So out of plain old fear, I only had sex with girls that I had an agreement with. Many of them were in relationships with other guys, and I was their "cool friend from around the way."

But those girls I didn't know or my "girlfriends"? I did not want no one to hold me back.



tian
 
My grandson acts like me, talks like me, learns how to be a man from me ... I think it's really important for kids to have a live-in father figure or at least spend a lot of time with their fathers.
 
tian said:
Great read. Seems to me that we need better role models. We need brothers who are real husbands and fathers to be celebrated more in our culture.

But, I am distressed about one thing, though. When I was in high school, I was popular. Folks thought that I was the next big rap star and I was on my way out of the ghetto. In my Junior year, though, a female friend of mine told me some inside knowledge that was in the ladies' room: that there were women that was conspiring to have my baby. It was confirmed by some other girls that I knew.

See, the wisdom was that if they had my baby, regardless of how far I go in life, I couldn't go too far from them. And if I ever came into some money, she'll be set!

I felt like I was a stock certificate. Some chick will ride me and if I became a millionaire, she will get rich right along with me. Treacherous, but true. So out of plain old fear, I only had sex with girls that I had an agreement with. Many of them were in relationships with other guys, and I was their "cool friend from around the way."

But those girls I didn't know or my "girlfriends"? I did not want no one to hold me back.



tian
LMAO!!! I'm sorry Tian, but when I picture you, I just don't picture a rapper. I assume you were on a positive tip and not "gangsta".

As far as the essay goes, I don't really feel like posting it again, but I don't think a national movement will work as far as the black family or roll models go. We need local roll models. Cats like you and other cats that are doing well, yet still grounded need to go into these areas and have one on one contact with kids. A kid that sees an example (personally) of how to succeed and overcome will have a 100% better chance of achieving his goals than a kid that reads about or sees on TV examples of success. No politics, no religion, no philisophical stances, just a presence and a supportive word will do wonders. Hope is based on seeing others succeed and being able to say "My boy Tian did it and he ain't no smarter or better than I am, so why can't I do the same?", not words. And that doesn't only apply to kids, young men and women are receptive to it too (hell, even some adults). You'd be suprised how much life you have left at 30 or 40 if you start living it.
 
mttocs said:
My grandson acts like me, talks like me, learns how to be a man from me ... I think it's really important for kids to have a live-in father figure or at least spend a lot of time with their fathers.
I hope you mean acts like YOU and not your BGOL web personna.
 
Zero said:
LMAO!!! I'm sorry Tian, but when I picture you, I just don't picture a rapper. I assume you were on a positive tip and not "gangsta".

As far as the essay goes, I don't really feel like posting it again, but I don't think a national movement will work as far as the black family or roll models go. We need local roll models. Cats like you and other cats that are doing well, yet still grounded need to go into these areas and have one on one contact with kids. A kid that sees an example (personally) of how to succeed and overcome will have a 100% better chance of achieving his goals than a kid that reads about or sees on TV examples of success. No politics, no religion, no philisophical stances, just a presence and a supportive word will do wonders. Hope is based on seeing others succeed and being able to say "My boy Tian did it and he ain't no smarter or better than I am, so why can't I do the same?", not words. And that doesn't only apply to kids, young men and women are receptive to it too (hell, even some adults). You'd be suprised how much life you have left at 30 or 40 if you start living it.


First off, back in my teenage times, most rappers were Positive. Gangsta rap was just really getting off the ground. Public Enemy and BDP ran hip hop back then.

Secondly, I agree with you on local role models, but that is only one stage. If the images they digest via their entertainment is negative, it has the power to cancel out the positive local images.
For instance, when I was a really young child, I thought that everyone on earth lived like me. We were poor, but I didn't know it. Why? All around me were poor people. I cut on the TV and the big shows back then were "Good Times" and "Welcome Back Kotter." They were all poor. The only people that had big Cadillacs were preachers, pimps, and morticians. I didn't see them as having more money, but I thought it was just something they gave you after completing a certification of some kind.

Now, I lived in East St. Louis at that time. Across the river, though, was the big buildings, the big boats, and that big Gateway Arch. I had family, who just so happened to have a lot more money than we did , that lived over there. I equated living in St. Louis to the Heaven that we read in Scripture. I visited, but never stayed. It was wonderful, but unattainable. People only went there after they died. You could just imagine my fear when my mother told me that we were moving there.

Now, fast-forward to the 80's. I was a teenager living in St. Louis. We watched a very positive show called "The Cosby Show" (and totally lusted over Lisa Bonet.) Anyway, the world stopped a 7PM in the neighborhood, because every black family would gather together to watch the show. But, it was unrealistic because we didn't see others living that way.

In other words, our cultural expressions imitate our lives. Yes, art imitates life, but life imitates art. We can do ourselves a wonderful favor if we have positive local role models coupled with positive images permeating through our cultural expressions.



tian
 
tian said:
Great read. Seems to me that we need better role models. We need brothers who are real husbands and fathers to be celebrated more in our culture.

But, I am distressed about one thing, though. When I was in high school, I was popular. Folks thought that I was the next big rap star and I was on my way out of the ghetto. In my Junior year, though, a female friend of mine told me some inside knowledge that was in the ladies' room: that there were women that was conspiring to have my baby. It was confirmed by some other girls that I knew.

See, the wisdom was that if they had my baby, regardless of how far I go in life, I couldn't go too far from them. And if I ever came into some money, she'll be set!

I felt like I was a stock certificate. Some chick will ride me and if I became a millionaire, she will get rich right along with me. Treacherous, but true. So out of plain old fear, I only had sex with girls that I had an agreement with. Many of them were in relationships with other guys, and I was their "cool friend from around the way."

But those girls I didn't know or my "girlfriends"? I did not want no one to hold me back.



tian
isnt it the point of the article that role models arent good enough. isnt the article limiting the solution to we need fathers and husbands period.

i personally like that seemingly simple standard. in my mind that standard automatically counters any image of black people seen in the media because it can always be offset if negative and reinforced if positive by a live in role model, at least in theory.
 
Greed said:
isnt it the point of the article that role models arent good enough. isnt the article limiting the solution to we need fathers and husbands period.

i personally like that seemingly simple standard. in my mind that standard automatically counters any image of black people seen in the media because it can always be offset if negative and reinforced if positive by a live in role model, at least in theory.
Implicity, if not explicit, in more and better parenting are two parent households or, at a minimum, households with more and active participation by the non-live-in parent. If that leads to better raised children, as the evidence seems to show, then that should lead, as you said, to a more positive image of Black people in general.

Its been debated on and off this board whether WE need national leaders. It seems to me that debate really arises out of what many see as a lack of good leaders in our communities and at the national level. Since leaders tend to rise from the dust (as opposed to being elected to the exalted status), the better-parenting, father responsibility, better image, more responsible children equation should naturally give rise to a better generation of leaders - local/national role models.

The Black Family is the key to our <u>prosperous</u> survival.

QueEx
 
i was drawn to what i called the simple solution because i view it as more immediate and more powerful.

the lagtime involved in a leader/popular role model rising up/getting exposure, gaining credibility, coming up with a plan, implementing a solution, and having the results of that plan manifest itself into something positive is too long. and in my opinion isnt a strong enough medicine for what ails us.

i dont agree with spending one ounce of effort to build and support someone nationally or regionally before we put one hundred percent effort into convincing young men that having babies is synonymous with being a husband to the mother.

this response isnt 100% directed to you, but also to others in this thread. i view one way as totally essential and the other as great but optional and a very low priority.

it looks like we're all agreeing here on the fatherhood issue, but a different sense of urgency is applied to it.
 
No, I don't think we disagree over the urgency or the method. My comments simply extended what remedying the urgent short term would mean for the future. To make it simple, we <u>must</u> deal immediately with HOME. I think it just naturally follows that dealing with this in the near term will bear fruit in the long run.

QueEx
 
Greed said:
isnt it the point of the article that role models arent good enough. isnt the article limiting the solution to we need fathers and husbands period.

i personally like that seemingly simple standard. in my mind that standard automatically counters any image of black people seen in the media because it can always be offset if negative and reinforced if positive by a live in role model, at least in theory.

Yes, the point of the article is that we do need fathers and husbands, but not just for the immediacy of that particular family. Over and over again the article showed how the men had no one to show them HOW to father and HOW to husband. They are running without a road map.

If we had local fathers fathering, and local husbands husbanding, coupled with positive images of fathering and husbanding in our creative expressions, then we can break the vicious cycle of chronic Accidental Families, IMHO.

I think a litmus test of good parenting is when a child comes up to you and say that they want to be a husband and father when they grow up. That way you know that you have displayed a good role model to your kids. They aspire to be good fathers and husbands. And that would be one less one that desires to live out their harem fantasies in public.

This hints as to the importance that this is a porn board. There are many good looking, big booty women out there- showing it for all to see. But, would you really have sex with them? As for me... good to look at, too toxic to touch. I keep my sex at home.


tian


tian
 
Didn't take time to read the essay but I think Blacks should start discussing ways to organize the community and create institutional influence. In order for us to do this a new group of leaders with a different mindset will have to emerge and they should be intellectuals with backgrounds in government, global business and cyberspace instead of traditional leaders from the family and Church. I think Condi Rice would be perfect for the job because she has the skills, the stature, the education and the experience to lead an organization like that but unfortunately I doubt if she would be interested.
 
great essay. i think one of the other problems is that having sex so many partners makes it difficult to stay with one person. i think this nation as a whole has a promiscuity problem. doesnt make for stable marriages.
 
Please Read pt. 2

Chicago’s Real Crime Story
Why decades of community organizing haven’t stemmed the city’s youth violence
Heather Mac Donald
Winter 2010

Barack Obama has exploited his youthful stint as a Chicago community organizer at every stage of his political career. As someone who had worked for grassroots “change,” he said, he was a different kind of politician, one who could translate people’s hopes into reality. The media lapped up this conceit, presenting Obama’s organizing experience as a meaningful qualification for the Oval Office.

This past September, a cell-phone video of Chicago students beating a fellow teen to death coursed over the airwaves and across the Internet. None of the news outlets that had admiringly reported on Obama’s community-organizing efforts mentioned that the beating involved students from the very South Side neighborhoods where the president had once worked. Obama’s connection to the area was suddenly lost in the mists of time.

Yet a critical blindness links Obama’s activities on the South Side during the 1980s and the murder of Derrion Albert in 2009. Throughout his four years working for “change” in Chicago’s Roseland and Altgeld Gardens neighborhoods, Obama ignored the primary cause of their escalating dysfunction: the disappearance of the black two-parent family. Obama wasn’t the only activist to turn away from the problem of absent fathers, of course; decades of failed social policy, both before and after his time in Chicago, were just as blind. And that myopia continues today, guaranteeing that the current response to Chicago’s youth violence will prove as useless as Obama’s activities were 25 years ago.

One year out of college, Barack Obama took a job as a community organizer, hoping for an authentic black experience that would link him to the bygone era of civil rights protest. Few people know what a community organizer is—Obama didn’t when he decided to become one—yet the term seduces the liberal intelligentsia with its aura of class struggle and agitation against an unjust establishment. Saul Alinsky, the self-described radical who pioneered the idea in Chicago’s slaughterhouse district during the Depression, defined community organizing as creating “mass organizations to seize power and give it to the people.” Alinsky viewed poverty as a political condition: it stemmed from a lack of power, which society’s “haves” withhold from the “have-nots.” A community organizer would open the eyes of the disenfranchised to their aggrieved status, teaching them to demand redress from the illegitimate “power structure.”

Alinskyite empowerment suffered its worst scandal in 1960s Chicago. The architects of the federal War on Poverty created a taxpayer-funded version of a community-organizing entity, the so-called Community Action Agency, whose function was to agitate against big-city mayors for more welfare benefits and services for blacks. Washington poverty warriors, eager to demonstrate their radical bona fides, funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars into Chicago’s most notorious gangs, who were supposed to run job-training and tutoring programs under the auspices of a signature Alinskyite agency, the Woodlawn Organization. Instead, the gangbangers maintained their criminal ways—raping and murdering while on the government payroll, and embezzling federal funds to boot.

The disaster failed to dim the romance of community organizing. But by the time Obama arrived in Chicago in 1984, an Alinskyite diagnosis of South Side poverty was doubly irrelevant. Blacks had more political power in Chicago than ever before, yet that power had no impact on the tidal wave of dysfunction that was sweeping through the largest black community in the United States. Chicago had just elected Harold Washington, the city’s first black mayor; the heads of Chicago’s school system and public housing were black, as were most of their employees; black power broker Emil Jones, Jr. represented the South Side in the Illinois State Senate; Jesse Jackson would launch his 1984 presidential campaign from Chicago. The notion that blacks were disenfranchised struck even some of Obama’s potential organizees as ludicrous. “Why we need to be protesting and carrying on at our own people?” a prominent South Side minister asked Obama soon after he arrived in Chicago. “Anybody sitting around this table got a direct line to City Hall.”

Pace Alinsky, such political clout could not stop black Chicago’s social breakdown. Crime was exploding. Gangs ran the housing projects—their reign of thuggery aided by ACLU lawsuits, which had stripped the housing authority of its right to screen tenants. But the violence spread beyond the projects. In 1984, Obama’s first year in Chicago, gang members gunned down a teenage basketball star, Benjy Wilson.

The citywide outcry that followed was heartfelt but beside the point. None of the prominent voices calling for an end to youth violence—from Mayor Washington to Jesse Jackson to school administrators—noted that all of Wilson’s killers came from fatherless families (or that he had fathered an illegitimate child himself). Nor did the would-be reformers mention the all-important fact that a staggering 75 percent of Chicago’s black children were being born out of wedlock. The sky-high illegitimacy rate meant that black boys were growing up in a world in which it was normal to impregnate a girl and then take off. When a boy is raised without any social expectation that he will support his children and marry his children’s mother, he fails to learn the most fundamental lesson of personal responsibility. The high black crime rate was one result of a culture that fails to civilize men through marriage.

Obama offers fleeting glimpses of Chicago’s social breakdown in his autobiography, Dreams from My Father, but it’s as if he didn’t really see what he recorded. An Alinskyite group from the suburbs, the Calumet Community Religious Conference, had assigned him to the Roseland community on the far South Side, in the misguided hope of strong-arming industrial jobs back to the area. Roseland’s bungalows and two-story homes recalled an era of stable, two-parent families that had long since passed. Obama vividly describes children who “swaggered down the streets—loud congregations of teenage boys, teenage girls feeding potato chips to crying toddlers, the discarded wrappers tumbling down the block.” He observes two young boys casually firing a handgun at a third. He notes that the elementary school in the Altgeld Gardens housing project had a center for the teen mothers of its students, who had themselves been raised by teen mothers.

Most tellingly, Obama’s narrative is almost devoid of men. With the exception of the local ministers and the occasional semi-crazed black nationalist, Obama inhabits a female world. His organizing targets are almost all single mothers. He never wonders where and who the fathers of their children are. When Obama sees a group of boys vandalizing a building, he asks rhetorically: “Who will take care of them: the alderman, the social workers? The gangs?” The most appropriate candidate—“their fathers”—never occurs to him.

Surrounded with daily evidence of Roseland’s real problem, Obama was nevertheless at a loss for a cause to embrace. Alinskyism, after all, presupposes that the problems afflicting a poor community come from the outside. Obama had come to arouse Roseland’s residents to take on the power structure, not to persuade them to act more responsibly. So it was with great relief that he noticed that the Mayor’s Office of Employment and Training (MET), which offered job training, lacked a branch in Roseland: “ ‘This is it,’ I said. . . . ‘We just found ourselves an issue.’ ” So much for the fiction that the community organizer merely channels the preexisting will of the “community.”

Obama easily procured a local MET office. It had as much effect on the mounting disorder of the far South Side as his better-known accomplishment: getting the Chicago Housing Authority to test the Altgeld Gardens project for asbestos. In an area that buses wouldn’t serve at night because of fears that drivers would get robbed or hit by bricks, perhaps asbestos removal should have been a lower priority, compared with ending the anarchy choking off civilized life. In fact, “there is zero legacy from when Obama was here,” says Phillip Jackson, director of the Black Star Project, a community group dedicated to eliminating the academic-achievement gap. Jackson, like other local leaders, is reluctant to criticize Obama, however. “I won’t minimize what Obama was doing then,” he says.

In 1987, during Obama’s third year in Chicago, 57 children were killed in the city, reports Alex Kotlowitz in his book on Chicago’s deadly housing projects, There Are No Children Here. In 1988, Obama left Chicago, after four years spent helping “people in Altgeld . . . reclaim a power they had had all along,” as the future president put it in Dreams from My Father. And the carnage continued.

In 1994, two particularly savage youth murders drew the usual feckless hand-wringing. An 11-year-old Black Disciples member from Roseland, Robert “Yummy” Sandifer (so called for his sweet tooth, the only thing childlike about him), had unintentionally killed a girl while shooting at (and paralyzing) a rival gang member. Sandifer’s fellow Black Disciples then executed him to prevent him from implicating them in the killing. A month later, after five-year-old Eric Morse refused to steal candy for an 11-year-old and a ten-year-old, the two dropped him from a 14th-story window in a housing complex, killing him. Eric’s eight-year-old brother had grabbed him to keep him from falling, but lost his hold when one of the boys bit him on the arm. None of the perpetrators or victims in either case came from two-parent families.

A year after these widely publicized killings, and on the eve of Obama’s first political campaign, the aspiring state senator gave an interview to the Chicago Reader that epitomized the uselessness of Alinskyism in addressing black urban pathology—and that inaugurated the trope of community organizer as visionary politician. Obama attacks the Christian Right and the Republican Congress for “hijack[ing] the higher moral ground with this language of family values and moral responsibility.” Yeah, sure, family values are fine, he says, but what about “collective action . . . collective institutions and organizations”? Let’s take “these same values that are encouraged within our families,” he urges, “and apply them to a larger society.”

Even if this jump from “family values” to “collective action” were a promising strategy, Obama overlooks a crucial fact: there are almost no traditional families in inner-city neighborhoods. Fathers aren’t “encouraging” values “within our families”; fathers are nowhere in sight. Moving to “collective action” is futile without a core of personal responsibility on which to build. Nevertheless, Obama leapfrogs over concrete individual failure to alleged collective failure: “Right now we have a society that talks about the irresponsibility of teens getting pregnant,” he told the Reader, “not the irresponsibility of a society that fails to educate them to aspire for more.”

The same rhetorical leapfrogging governs the Obama administration’s and the Chicago political establishment’s response to current Chicago teen violence. Compared with the 1990s, that violence is way down—114 children under 17 were killed both in 1993 and in 1994, while 50 were in 2008. But the proportion of gang-related murders has gone up since the late 1980s and 1990s, when the Chicago police, working with federal law enforcement, locked up the leaders of Chicago’s most notorious gangs. Those strong leaders, it turns out, exercised some restraint on their members in order to protect drug profits. “Back then, you knew what the killings were about,” says Charles Winston, a former heroin dealer who made $50,000 a day in the early 1990s in the infamous Robert Taylor Homes. “Now, it’s just sporadic incidents of violence.” The Black Star Project’s Phillip Jackson compares the anarchy in Chicago’s gang territories to Somalia: “There are many factions,” he says, all fighting one another in unstable, shifting configurations.

In the early 2000s, the number of assaults reported in and around schools increased significantly, according to Northwestern University political scientist Wesley Skogan. School dismissal time in Chicago triggers a massive mobilization of security forces across the South and West Sides, to try to keep students from shooting one another or being shot by older gang members. Police officers in bulletproof vests ring the most violence-prone schools, and the Chicago Transit Authority rejiggers its bus schedules to try to make sure that students don’t have to walk even half a block before boarding a bus.

Each street in a neighborhood possesses a mystical significance to its juvenile residents. What defines their identities isn’t family, or academic accomplishments or interests, but ruthless fealty to small, otherwise indistinguishable, pieces of territory. Roseland’s 123rd Street is the 12-Treys’ turf, 119th Street belongs to the 11-9s, and 111th Street is in an area of Roseland called “the Ville.” Gang members from the Ville aren’t supposed to cross 119th Street; doing so will provoke a potentially lethal challenge. School-reform initiatives may have contributed to increasing tensions on the streets by shutting down failing schools and sending students into enemy territory; the demolition of Chicago’s high-rise housing projects in the 2000s likewise disrupted existing gang groupings.

In September 2009, that now-notorious cell-phone video gave the world a glimpse of Barack Obama’s former turf. Teenagers—some in an informal school uniform of khaki pants and polo shirts, others bare-chested—swarm across a desolate thoroughfare in Roseland; others congregate in the middle of it, indifferent to the SUVs that try to inch by, horns blaring. Against a background din of constant yelling, some boys lunge at one another and throw punches, while a few, in leisurely fashion, select victims to clobber on the torso and head with thick, eight-foot-long railroad ties. Derrion Albert is standing passively in the middle of a knot on the sidewalk when one boy whacks him on the head with a railroad tie and another punches him in the face. Albert falls to the ground unconscious, then comes to and tries to get up. A boy walking by gives him a desultory kick. Five more cluster around him as he lies curled up on the sidewalk; one hits him again with a railroad tie, and another stomps him on the head. Finally, workers from a nearby youth community center drag Albert inside. Throughout the video, a male companion of the videographer reacts with nervously admiring “damns.”

In the Alinskyite worldview, the school system was to blame, not the students who committed the violence. Several years before, Altgeld Gardens’s high school, Carver High, had been converted to a charter military academy. Students who didn’t want to attend were sent to Fenger High School in the Ville, several miles away. Students from Altgeld Gardens and from the Ville fought each other with knives and razors inside Fenger High and out, their territorial animosity intensified by minute class distinctions. Ville children whose mothers use federal Section Eight housing vouchers to rent homes look down upon housing-project residents like those from the Gardens. The morning of the Albert killing, someone fired a gun outside Fenger; during the school day, students sent one another text messages saying that something was likely to “jump” after school. When students from the Gardens, instead of immediately boarding a bus home, walked down 111th Street—the heart of Ville territory—the fighting started. Derrion Albert had a loose affiliation with Ville students; the students who killed him were from the Gardens.

South Side aldermen and the usual race claque accused the school bureaucracy of insensitivity and worse in expecting Altgeld Gardens and Ville children to coexist without violence. In a pathetic echo of 1950s civil rights protests, Jesse Jackson, cameras in tow, rode a school bus with Altgeld Gardens students from their homes to Fenger High, demanding that Carver be converted back to a neighborhood school. No one pointed out that the threat from which Jackson the Civil Rights Avenger was protecting black students came from other black students, not from hate-filled white politicians. Obama’s former organizing group, the Developing Communities Project, led noisy parent protests, demanding that Carver accept all comers from Altgeld Gardens and reduce its military component to a quarter of the school. James Meeks, a race-baiting South Side pastor and an Illinois state senator, staged his own well-photographed bus tour, taking suburban officials through Roseland and past Fenger to demonstrate the “adversity” that Fenger students faced compared with suburban kids—though the greatest adversity comes from the violence that students inflict on themselves.

Other protests sent an even more muddled message. After a day when a dozen fights in Fenger High School provoked a security clampdown and five arrests, a group of parents and students staged a two-day boycott of classes, complaining of excessive discipline and harsh treatment from the guards. “They put us on lockdown for two hours because of a little fight,” senior DeShunna Williams told the Chicago Sun-Times. “It was just an ordinary fight.” Schools can only restore safety by strict discipline and zero tolerance for violence, however. If parents and students protest whenever such discipline is enforced, they undercut their own call for greater safety.

Mayor Richard Daley initially rejected the protesters’ demands. “The day when the city of Chicago decides to divide schools by gang territory, that’s a day when we have given up the city,” he said. But the Chicago Public Schools soon promulgated a policy letting Fenger students transfer out of the school. Few mothers took advantage of the option for their children, despite the weeks of agitation for it. Meanwhile, the school system allocated millions of additional dollars to protect Fenger students from one another. Ten extra school buses now escort the 350 Altgeld teens to and from Fenger every day, and school administrators pressed the Chicago Transit Authority to add more public bus routes around Fenger so that students wouldn’t have to wait on the sidewalk for more than a few minutes.

Who wins the award for the most Alinskyite evasion of personal and parental responsibility after Albert’s death? Perhaps not the local protesters but the federal officials dispatched to Chicago for damage control. The videotaped murder, seen around the world, couldn’t have come at a worse time for the Obama administration—just over a week before the Olympic Committee was to decide on Chicago’s bid to host the 2016 games. On October 1, the day before Obama was to make his last-minute pitch to the Olympic Committee in Copenhagen, the White House announced that Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan would fly to Chicago to deliver a federal response to youth violence. The next day, Chicago lost its bid in the first round of votes, but Holder and Duncan continued to Chicago the following week.

Their message picked up exactly where Obama’s 1995 Chicago Reader interview left off. “I came here at the direction of the president, not to place blame on anyone, but to join with Chicago, with communities across America in taking responsibility for this death and the deaths of so many other young people over the years,” announced Duncan. Of course, the government has been “taking responsibility” for children for several decades now, at a cost of billions of dollars, without noticeable effect on inner-city dysfunction. The feds have funded countless programs in child and youth development, in antiviolence training, in poverty reduction. If “collective action,” as Obama put it in 1995, could compensate for the absence of fathers, the black violence problem would have ended years ago.

Holder’s remarks were just as irrelevant (though, to his credit, he did pledge $500,000 for beefed-up school security). “We have to ask hard questions, and we have to be prepared to face tough truths,” he said, and then proceeded to ignore the hard questions and duck the tough truths. “Youth violence is not a Chicago problem, any more than it is a black problem, a white problem, or a Hispanic problem,” he claimed. “It is something that affects communities big and small, and people of all races and all colors. It is an American problem.” Tough-truth quotient: maybe 20 percent. No, youth violence isn’t just a Chicago problem. Urban school districts across the country flood school areas with police officers at dismissal time. But youth violence is definitely correlated with race. Though rates of youth killings and shootings vary—Chicago children under the age of 17 are killed at four times the rate of New York children, for example—youth violence is disproportionately a “black problem” and, to a lesser extent, a Hispanic one. According to James Alan Fox and Marc Swatt of Northeastern University, the national rate of homicide commission for black males between the ages of 14 and 17 is ten times higher than that of “whites,” into which category the federal government puts the vast majority of Hispanics. Black juveniles accounted for 78 percent of all juvenile arrests between 2003 and 2008 in Chicago; Hispanics were 18 percent, and whites, 3.5 percent, of those arrests. Recognizing that tough truth is the only hope for coming up with a way to change it.

In Chicago, blacks, at least 35 percent of the population, commit 76 percent of all homicides; whites, about 28 percent of the population, commit 4 percent, and Hispanics, 30 percent of the population, commit 19 percent. The most significant difference between these demographic groups is family structure. In Cook County—which includes both Chicago and some of its suburbs and probably therefore contains a higher proportion of middle-class black families than the city proper—79 percent of all black children were born out of wedlock in 2003, compared with 15 percent of white children. Until that gap closes, the crime gap won’t close, either.

Official Chicago’s answer to youth violence also opts for collective, rather than paternal, responsibility. The Chicago school superintendent, Ron Huberman, has developed a whopping $60 million, two-year plan to combat youth violence. The wonky Huberman, who created highly regarded information-retrieval and accountability systems for the police department and the city’s emergency response center in previous city jobs, has now applied his passion for data analysis to Chicago’s violent kids. Using a profile of past shooting victims that includes such factors as school truancy rates and disciplinary records, he has identified several hundred teens as having a greater than 20 percent chance of getting shot over the next two years. The goal is to provide them with wraparound social services. (The profile of victim and perpetrator is indistinguishable, but targeting potential victims, rather than perpetrators, for such benefits as government-subsidized jobs is politically savvy.) The program will assign the 300 or so potential victims their own “advocates,” who will intercede on their behalf with government agencies and provide them with case management and counseling.

In some cities, it’s a police officer who visits a violence-prone teenager to warn him about staying out of trouble. Chicago sends a social worker. The Chicago police department has kept a low profile during the public debate over teen shootings, ceding primary accountability for the problem to the school system. This hierarchy of response may reflect Chicago’s less assertive police culture compared with, say, New York’s. “We’d marvel at how the NYPD was getting mayoral support” during New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s tenure, says a former Chicago deputy superintendent. “Mayor Daley is not a cop supporter; it’s no secret that he rules the police department with an iron fist.” The South Side’s black ministers, whom Daley does not want to alienate, also act as a check on more proactive policing. There have been few calls in Chicago for a more aggressive stop-and-frisk policy to get illegal guns off the street, and the police department hasn’t pushed to implement one.

Now, perhaps if Huberman’s proposed youth “advocates” provided their charges with opportunities to learn self-discipline and perseverance, fired their imaginations with manly virtues, and spoke to them about honesty, courtesy, and right and wrong—if they functioned, in other words, like Scoutmasters—they might make some progress in reversing the South Side’s social breakdown. But the outfit that Huberman has picked to provide “advocacy” to the teens, at a reported cost of $5 million a year, couldn’t be more mired in the assiduously nonjudgmental ethic of contemporary social work. “Some modalities used in this endeavor,” explains the newly hired Youth Advocates Program (YAP), “include: Assess the youth and his/her family to develop an Individualized Service Plan (ISP) to address the individual needs of each youth.” The Youth Advocates Program’s CEO tried further to clarify the advocates’ function: “If a family needs a new refrigerator or a father needs car insurance, it’s the advocate’s job to take care of it,” Jeff Fleischer told the Chicago Tribune. The reference to a “father” is presumably Fleischer’s little joke, since almost none of the Chicago victims-in-waiting will have their fathers at home. It’s not a lack of material goods that ails Chicago’s gun-toting kids, however, or their mothers’ lack of time to procure those goods. Providing their families with a government-funded gofer to carry out basic adult tasks like getting car insurance will not compensate for a lifetime of paternal absence.

The Youth Advocates Program represents the final stage of Alinskyism: its co-optation by the government-funded social-services industry.

Obama came to Roseland and Altgeld Gardens with the fanciful intention of organizing the “community” to demand benefits from a hostile power structure. But here’s that same power structure not just encouraging demands from below but providing the community with its own government-funded advocates to “broker and advocate for each youth and family,” as YAP puts it, thus ensuring constant pressure to increase government services.

Huberman’s plan for ending youth violence includes other counselors and social workers who will go to work in the most dangerous public high schools. He also wants to create a “culture of calm” in the schools by retraining security guards and by de-emphasizing suspensions and expulsion in favor of “peer mediation.” Nothing new there: in 1998, Chicago schools announced plans to train students to be peer mediators and to engage in conflict resolution. In fact, there is nothing in Huberman’s plan that hasn’t been tried before, to no apparent effect. You’d think that someone would ask: What’s lacking in these neighborhoods that we didn’t notice before? The correct answer would be: family structure.

Needless to say, everyone involved in the Albert beating came from a fatherless home. Defendant Eugene Riley hit Albert with a railroad tie as he lay unconscious on the ground in his final moments. According to 18-year-old Riley’s 35-year-old mother, Sherry Smith, “his father was not ready to be a strong black role model in his son’s life.” Nor was the different father of Riley’s younger brother, Vashion Bullock, ready to be involved in his son’s life. A bare-chested Bullock shows up in the video wielding a railroad tie in the middle of the street. As for Albert himself, his father “saw him the day he was born, and the next time when he was in a casket,” reports Bob Jackson, the worldly director of Roseland Ceasefire, an antiviolence project.

The absence of a traditional two-parent family leaves children uncertain about the scope of their blood ties. One teen who attends the Roseland Safety Net Works’s after-school program thinks that she has more than ten siblings by five different fathers, but since her mother lives in North Carolina, it’s hard to pin down the exact number. Eight of the ten boys enrolled in Kids Off the Block, another after-school program, don’t know their fathers. “The other two boys, if the father came around, they’d probably kill him,” says Diane Latiker, who runs the program. If children do report a remote acquaintance with their father, they don’t seem to know what he does for a living.

Though teen births have dropped among blacks since the 1990s, unwed pregnancy is still a pervasive reality in Chicago’s inner-city high schools. “Last year at Fenger, it was all you heard about—pregnancies or abortions,” reports the youth president at Roseland Safety Net Works. In autumn 2009, one in seven girls at Chicago’s Paul Robeson High School was either expecting or had already given birth to a child. It’s not hard to predict where Chicago’s future killers will come from.

A 15-year-old resident of Altgeld Gardens, for example, was sitting at home with her three-month-old boy during the week of Veterans Day this year, having been suspended for fighting. You’d never know it from her baby-doll voice, but this ninth-grade mother runs with a clique of girls at Fenger High “who have no problem taking you out,” says Bob Jackson. She lives with her 34-year-old mother, two brothers, and a sister; she sometimes sees her father when he’s in town but doesn’t know if he has a job. Her son’s father, still playing with toys, isn’t providing support. She was on her way to pick up free food from the federal WIC program when I spoke with her.

The next stage in black family disintegration may be on the horizon. According to several Chicago observers, black mothers are starting to disappear, too. “Children are bouncing around,” says a police officer in Altgeld Gardens. “The mother says: ‘I’m done. You go stay with your father.’ The ladies are selling drugs with their new boyfriend, and the kids are left on their own.” Albert’s mother lived four hours away; he was moving among different extended family members in Chicago. Even if a mother is still in the home, she may be incapable of providing any emotional or moral support to her children. “Kids will tell you: ‘I’m sleeping on the floor, there’s nothing in the fridge, my mother doesn’t care about me going to school,’ ” says Rogers Jones, the courtly founder of Roseland Safety Net Works. “Kids are traumatized before they even get to school.” Some mothers are indifferent when the physical and emotional abuses that they suffered as children recur with their own children. “We’ve had mothers say: ‘I was raped as a child, so it’s no big deal if my daughter is raped,’ ” reports Jackson.

The official silence about illegitimacy and its relation to youth violence remains as carefully preserved in today’s Chicago as it was during Obama’s organizing time there. A fleeting reference to “parental” responsibility for children is allowed, before the speaker quickly moves on to society’s more important role. But anything more specific about fathers is taboo. “I have not been in too many churches lately that say: ‘Mom, you need to find yourself a husband, this is not the norm,’ ” observes Jackson—an understandable, if lamentable, lacuna, he adds, since single heads of households constitute the vast majority of the congregation. Press coverage of teen shootings may mention a participant’s mother, but the shooter and victim may as well be the product of a virgin birth, for all the media’s curiosity about where their fathers are. I asked John Paul Jones of Obama’s old Alinskyite outfit, the Developing Communities Project, if anyone ever tries to track down the father of a teen accused of a shooting. The question threw him. “Does anyone ever ask: ‘Where are the fathers?’ ” he paraphrased me. A brief silence. “That’s a good point.”

Some members of Chicago’s Left will argue against holding fathers or mothers responsible for their children. “To blame it on the family is totally unfair,” says Gwen Rice, a board member of the Developing Communities Project. “I’m tired of blaming the parents. The services for the poor are paltry; it boggles the mind. Historically, you can’t expect a parent who can’t get a job to do something that someone with resources can do. These problems have histories; there are policies that have mitigated against black progress. What needs to happen is a change in corporate greed and insensitivity.” Rice corrects my use of the term “illegitimacy”: “There are no illegitimate births,” she says.

One activist, however, makes ending illegitimacy an explicit part of his work. “I tell people: ‘Unless you get married, you will perish,’ ” says the Black Star Project’s Phillip Jackson. An intense, wiry man who looks like a cross between Gandhi and Spike Lee, Jackson organizes events to make fathers visible and valued again, like “Take Your Child to School Day.” Yet Jackson is not immune from the Alinskyite tic of looking to government for solutions to problems of personal responsibility (nor does Jackson avoid launching groundless charges of racism). He has gathered a crate of petitions to President Obama regarding Chicago’s youth violence, some of whose signers are as young as four. “President Obama, please send help for the sake of these young people in Chicago,” reads the petition. Asked what he wants Obama to do, Jackson’s answers range from a trickle-up stimulus plan to jobs to leadership.

Jobs, whether government-created or not, aren’t likely to make much difference in the culture of illegitimacy. As journalist Nicholas Lemann observed over two decades ago in The Atlantic Monthly, the black illegitimacy rate has only a weak correlation to employment: “High illegitimacy has always been much more closely identified with blacks than with all poor people or all unemployed people.” An Alinskyite approach to the related problems of illegitimacy and crime is only a distraction. Seeking redress and salvation from the “power structure” just puts off the essential work of culture change.

Barack Obama started that work in a startling Father’s Day speech in Chicago while running for president. “If we are honest with ourselves,” he said in 2008, “we’ll admit that . . . too many fathers [are] missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. . . . We know the statistics—that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of school and 20 times more likely to end up in prison.”

But after implicitly drawing the connection between family breakdown and youth violence—“How many times in the last year has this city lost a child at the hands of another child?”—Obama reverted to Alinskyite bromides about school spending, preschool programs, visiting nurses, global warming, sexism, racial division, and income inequality. And he has continued to swerve from the hard truth of black family breakdown since his 2008 speech. The best thing that the president can do for Chicago’s embattled children is to confront head-on the disappearance of their fathers and the consequence in lost lives.

Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor of City Journal and the John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

http://www.city-journal.org/2010/20_1_chicago-crime.html
 
Blacks struggle with 72 percent unwed mothers rate

Blacks struggle with 72 percent unwed mothers rate
By JESSE WASHINGTON, AP National Writer – Sat Nov 6, 3:25 pm ET

HOUSTON – One recent day at Dr. Natalie Carroll's OB-GYN practice, located inside a low-income apartment complex tucked between a gas station and a freeway, 12 pregnant black women come for consultations. Some bring their children or their mothers. Only one brings a husband.

Things move slowly here. Women sit shoulder-to-shoulder in the narrow waiting room, sometimes for more than an hour. Carroll does not rush her mothers in and out. She wants her babies born as healthy as possible, so Carroll spends time talking to the mothers about how they should care for themselves, what she expects them to do — and why they need to get married.

Seventy-two percent of black babies are born to unmarried mothers today, according to government statistics. This number is inseparable from the work of Carroll, an obstetrician who has dedicated her 40-year career to helping black women.

"The girls don't think they have to get married. I tell them children deserve a mama and a daddy. They really do," Carroll says from behind the desk of her office, which has cushioned pink-and-green armchairs, bars on the windows, and a wooden "LOVE" carving between two African figurines. Diamonds circle Carroll's ring finger.

As the issue of black unwed parenthood inches into public discourse, Carroll is among the few speaking boldly about it. And as a black woman who has brought thousands of babies into the world, who has sacrificed income to serve Houston's poor, Carroll is among the few whom black women will actually listen to.

"A mama can't give it all. And neither can a daddy, not by themselves," Carroll says. "Part of the reason is because you can only give that which you have. A mother cannot give all that a man can give. A truly involved father figure offers more fullness to a child's life."

Statistics show just what that fullness means. Children of unmarried mothers of any race are more likely to perform poorly in school, go to prison, use drugs, be poor as adults, and have their own children out of wedlock.

The black community's 72 percent rate eclipses that of most other groups: 17 percent of Asians, 29 percent of whites, 53 percent of Hispanics and 66 percent of Native Americans were born to unwed mothers in 2008, the most recent year for which government figures are available. The rate for the overall U.S. population was 41 percent.

This issue entered the public consciousness in 1965, when a now famous government report by future senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan described a "tangle of pathology" among blacks that fed a 24 percent black "illegitimacy" rate. The white rate then was 4 percent.

Many accused Moynihan, who was white, of "blaming the victim:" of saying that black behavior, not racism, was the main cause of black problems. That dynamic persists. Most talk about the 72 percent has come from conservative circles; when influential blacks like Bill Cosby have spoken out about it, they have been all but shouted down by liberals saying that a lack of equal education and opportunity are the true root of the problem.

Even in black churches, "nobody talks about it," Carroll says. "It's like some big secret." But there are signs of change, of discussion and debate within and outside the black community on how to address the growing problem.

Research has increased into links between behavior and poverty, scholars say. Historically black Hampton University recently launched a National Center on African American Marriages and Parenting. There is a Marry Your Baby Daddy Day, founded by a black woman who was left at the altar, and a Black Marriage Day, which aims "to make healthy marriages the norm rather than the exception."

In September, Princeton University and the liberal Brookings Institution released a collection of "Fragile Families" reports on unwed parents. And an online movement called "No Wedding No Womb" ignited a fierce debate that included strong opposition from many black women.

"There are a lot of sides to this," Carroll says. "Part of our community has lost its way."
___
There are simple arguments for why so many black women have children without marriage.

The legacy of segregation, the logic goes, means blacks are more likely to attend inferior schools. This creates a high proportion of blacks unprepared to compete for jobs in today's economy, where middle-class industrial work for unskilled laborers has largely disappeared.

The drug epidemic sent disproportionate numbers of black men to prison, and crushed the job opportunities for those who served their time. Women don't want to marry men who can't provide for their families, and welfare laws created a financial incentive for poor mothers to stay single.

If you remove these inequalities, some say, the 72 percent will decrease.

"It's all connected. The question should be, how has the black family survived at all?" says Maria Kefalas, co-author of "Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage."

The book is based on interviews with 162 low-income single mothers. One of its conclusions is that these women see motherhood as one of life's most fulfilling roles — a rare opportunity for love and joy, husband or no husband.

Sitting in Carroll's waiting room, Sherhonda Mouton watches all the babies with the tender expression of a first-time mother, even though she's about to have her fourth child. Inside her purse is a datebook containing a handwritten ode to her children, titled "One and Only." It concludes:

"You make the hardest tasks seem light with everything you do.

"How blessed I am, how thankful for my one and only you."

Mouton, 30, works full time as a fast-food manager on the 3 p.m. to 1 a.m. shift. She's starting classes to become a food inspector.

"My children are what keep me going, every day," she says. "They give me a lot of hope and encouragement." Her plans for them? "College, college, college."

On Mouton's right shoulder, the name of her oldest child, Zanevia, is tattooed around a series of scars. When Zanevia was an infant, Mouton's drug-addled fiance came home one night and started shooting. Mouton was hit with six bullets; Zanevia took three and survived.

"This man was the love of my life," Mouton says. He's serving a 60-year sentence. Another man fathered her second and third children; Mouton doesn't have good things to say about him. The father of her unborn child? "He's around. He helps with all the kids."

She does not see marriage in her future.

"It's another obligation that I don't need," Mouton says. "A good man is hard to find nowadays."

Mouton thinks it's a good idea to encourage black women to wait for marriage to have children. However, "what's good for you might not be good for me." Yes, some women might need the extra help of a husband. "I might do a little better, but I'm doing fine now. I'm very happy because of my children."

"I woke up today at six o'clock," she says. "My son was rubbing my stomach, and my daughter was on the other side. They're my angels."
___
Christelyn Karazin has four angels of her own. She had the first with her boyfriend while she was in college; they never married. Her last three came after she married another man and became a writer and homemaker in an affluent Southern California suburb.

In September, Karazin, who is black, marshaled 100 other writers and activists for the online movement No Wedding No Womb, which she calls "a very simplified reduction of a very complicated issue."

"I just want better for us," Karazin says. "I have four kids to raise in this world. It's about what kind of world do we want."

"We've spent the last 40 years discussing the issues of how we got here. How much more discussion, how many more children have to be sacrificed while we still discuss?"

The reaction was swift and ferocious. She had many supporters, but hundreds of others attacked NWNW online as shallow, anti-feminist, lacking solutions, or a conservative tool. Something else about Karazin touched a nerve: She's married to a white man and has a book about mixed-race relationships coming out.

Blogger Tracy Clayton, who posted a vicious parody of NWNW's theme song, said the movement focuses on the symptom instead of the cause.

"It's trying to kill a tree by pulling leaves off the limbs. And it carries a message of shame," said Clayton, a black woman born to a single mother. "I came out fine. My brother is married with children. (NWNW) makes it seem like there's something immoral about you, like you're contributing to the ultimate downfall of the black race. My mom worked hard to raise me, so I do take it personally."

Demetria Lucas, relationships editor at Essence, the magazine for black women, declined an invitation for her award-winning personal blog to endorse NWNW. Lucas, author of the forthcoming book "A Belle in Brooklyn: Advice for Living Your Single Life & Enjoying Mr. Right Now," says plenty of black women want to be married but have a hard time finding suitable black husbands.

Lucas says 42 percent of all black women and 70 percent of professional black women are unmarried. "If you can't get a husband, who am I to tell you no, you can't be a mom?" she asks. "A lot of women resent the idea that you're telling me my chances of being married are like 1 in 2, it's a crapshoot right now, but whether I can have a family of my own is based on whether a guy asks me to marry him or not."

Much has been made of the lack of marriageable black men, Lucas says, which has created the message that "there's no real chance of me being married, but because some black men can't get their stuff together I got to let my whole world fall apart. That's what the logic is for some women."

That logic rings false to Amy Wax, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, whose book "Race, Wrongs and Remedies: Group Justice in the 21st Century" argues that even though discrimination caused blacks' present problems, only black action can cure them.

"The black community has fallen into this horribly dysfunctional equilibrium" with unwed mothers, Wax says in an interview. "It just doesn't work."

"Blacks as a group will never be equal while they have this situation going on, where the vast majority of children do not have fathers in the home married to their mother, involved in their lives, investing in them, investing in the next generation."

"The 21st century for the black community is about building human capital," says Wax, who is white. "That is the undone business. That is the unmet need. That is the completion of the civil rights mission."
___
All the patients are gone now from Carroll's office — the prison guard, the young married couple, the 24-year-old with a 10-year-old daughter and the father of her unborn child in jail. The final patient, an 18-year-old who dropped out of college to have her first child, departs by taxi, alone.

"I can't tell you that I feel deep sadness, because I don't," says Carroll, who has two grown children of her own. "And not because I'm not fully aware of what's happening to them. It's because I do all that I can to help them help themselves."

Carroll is on her second generation of patients now, delivering the babies of her babies. She does not intend to stop anytime soon. Her father, a general practitioner in Houston, worked right up until he died.

Each time she brings a child into this world, she thinks about what kind of life it will have.

"I tell the mothers, if you decide to have a baby, you decide to have a different kind of life because you owe them something. You owe them something better than you got."

"I ask them, what are you doing for your children? Do you want them to have a better life than you have? And if so, what are you going to do about it?"

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101106/ap_on_re_us/us_unwed_births72_percent
 
Re: Blacks struggle with 72 percent unwed mothers rate

Remember when talking about black issues was important on a black board?
 
The Plight of Young, Black Men Is Worse Than You Think

The Plight of Young, Black Men Is Worse Than You Think
By Peter Coy on September 28, 2012

The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate of any wealthy nation, with about 2.3 million people behind bars at any given moment. (That’s 730 out of 100,000, vs. just 154 for England and Wales.) There are more people in U.S. prisons than are in the country’s active-duty military. That much is well known. What’s less known is that people who are incarcerated are excluded from most surveys by U.S. statistical agencies. Since young, black men are disproportionately likely to be in jail or prison, the exclusion of penal institutions from the statistics makes the jobs situation of young, black men look better than it really is.

That’s the point of a new book, Invisible Men: Mass Incarceration and the Myth of Black Progress, by Becky Pettit, a professor of sociology at the University of Washington. Pettit spoke on Thursday in a telephone press conference.

On the day Barack Obama was inaugurated in 2009, Pettit said, “there was hope that perhaps the U.S. was becoming a post-racial society.” But it wasn’t true then, and it’s not true now. The gap between blacks and whites remains wide in employment, income, wealth, and health. And as Bloomberg’s David J. Lynch reported earlier this month: “The nation’s first African-American president hasn’t done much for African-Americans.”

The unemployment rate and the employment-to-population ratio reported by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics are based on a survey of households—people “who are not inmates of institutions (for example, penal and mental facilities and homes for the aged) and who are not on active duty in the Armed Forces.”

The reported figures are bad enough. The employment/population ratio for black males aged 16-24 was 33 percent in August, vs. 52 percent for white males of the same age group. But the black number is skewed upward by the exclusion of jail and prison inmates. The white number is also skewed upward, but less so because a smaller share of young white males are incarcerated.

“We’ve developed a distorted idea” of how young, black men are faring, Pettit told reporters on the call, which was hosted by the book’s publisher, the Russell Sage Foundation. The BLS methodology didn’t begin to distort the statistics until the mid-1970s, when the incarceration boom began.

I asked Pettit how this problem can be solved. The first thing she recommended was doing more to help young, black men get an education, since there is a strong link between failure in school and a life of crime and imprisonment.

A further idea is to reduce the penalties for nonviolent drug crimes, recommended another academic on the call, Ernest Drucker, who is a scholar in residence and senior research associate at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and adjunct professor of epidemiology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. Imprisoning people for drug offenses can damage their ability to earn a living for the rest of their lives, dooming them to a life of poverty and recidivism, said Drucker, author of A Plague of Prisons.

Inimai Chettiar, the third speaker on the conference call, would go a step further and decriminalize acts like “turnstile jumping”—i.e., getting into the subway system without paying. Chettiar is director of the Justice Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.

The popular “broken windows” theory of policing says that cracking down hard on minor crimes creates an atmosphere of law and order that helps prevent more serious crimes like robbery, rape, and murder. So Chettiar and others are fighting an uphill battle with their decriminalization argument.

There’s no question, though, that the plight of young, black men is even worse than the statistics generally show.

http://www.businessweek.com/article...ht-of-young-black-men-is-worse-than-you-think
 
Dr. Ben Carson’s thoughts on fatherhood

Dr. Ben Carson’s thoughts on fatherhood
From brain surgery to raising sons
By Betsy Stein | 06/01/09

Dr. Ben Carson is a Baltimore icon.

He rose from a disadvantaged childhood to become the director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital where he has performed thousands of intricate surgeries including the first separation of Siamese twins joined at the back of the head. He has authored several books including his autobiography “Gifted Hands,” which was recently made into a movie. And he has been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor granted to a civilian. He accomplished all of this and more while he and his wife, Candy, raised three boys — Murray, 25; Benjamin Jr., 23; and Rhoeyce, 22.

We caught up with Dr. Carson recently to ask him about fatherhood: What lessons on parenting he took from the single mother who raised him with little education of her own, how he found time in his busy schedule to parent his boys, and what a brilliant brain surgeon has learned from being a dad.

Q. You credit much of your success to your mother. Did you follow in her footsteps in how you went about parenting your sons?

Yes, most definitely, in the sense that there was not a lot of television and there was a lot of reading and a lot of family discussions in our home. I never let (my children) wallow in pity or feel like victims. Those were the key ingredients (in my home growing up). My mother made it clear that if you wanted something, you needed to work for it.

Q. How were you able to make time for your family while balancing such a demanding career?

That was probably one of the most challenging things. I always say, “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.” If you really want to do it, you will do it – even though you are doing 500 operations a year, traveling all over and doing a million other things.

I discovered that if I required people to provide for my family where ever I went, they would, and it worked out beautifully. My three boys, my mother, my wife and I went all over the world. My boys even had frequent flier miles. It was great. We spent a lot of time together. Otherwise, they would have grown up not knowing who I was. I would have been a phantom to them. It was not a big problem when they were small. In middle and high school, we would just take weekends or take a day off of school.

We also made a point of always taking family vacations every year. We went to different places like Zion National Park, various resorts, Europe vacations and Egypt.

Q. Your mother raised you and your brother alone. How did that effect the role you, as a father, took in your boys lives?

I obviously wanted to make sure they didn’t have to face that. They have a strong father figure in their lives and know what a father should be — someone to provide all the support the family needs; financial, emotional, set an example and also provide the fun times. It is also very important, since I had three sons, that they see how you are suppose to treat your wife. Boys tend to model what they see.

Q. Since your boys had a more privileged childhood, did you expect more of them?

Not necessarily. In fact, I frequently tell them that I think they were more disadvantaged than I was.
They grew up never needing anything. They knew nothing of hardship. We even tried to create hardships to toughen them up. I believe that’s important. If they wanted something, they had to work for it. If they didn’t have certain things done they had to do, there were consequences.

They need to learn to not be willing to give up in the face of adversity. Sometimes people growing up in a privileged environment don’t get that. I am probably one of the few voices out there who says that a disadvantaged life is not necessarily a disadvantage.

Q. Do you think it was intimidating for your sons to have such a successful man as a father? Where are they now and what are they doing?

Yes, I’m sure it had an effect because everyone has such huge expectations. You can’t be normal. My middle son went to college and told everyone his name was Sol (his middle name was Solomon) because he was Ben Carson. But it didn’t take long before everyone figured out who he was.

I always made it clear that the only thing I wanted from them was to be successful and productive members of society. What they went into didn’t matter to me. I think on their own they concluded that I worked too hard, so they all decided to go into something else. Murray is an engineer with Lockheed Martin, B.J. is a wealth management advisor with Warner Co. and Rhoeyce is an accountant with Rolls Accounting Firm. They all live locally.

Q. What is the most important lesson you learned as a father?

You have to demonstrate the life lessons you want to teach your children. You can’t just preach. Kids have a built-in hypocrisy antennae. As soon as you say one thing and do something else, it comes out and blocks what you have to say.

The other thing is that all parents worry about their kids, but those early years are your best time to impart values and principles in them. If you wait until the teenage years, it’s too late.

And let me make one societal comment. I think fathers are incredibly important for the development of well-rounded children — boys and girls. I do have a little disagreement with the forces of political correctness that say they aren’t important. By the same token, fathers themselves need to recognize when they have created a baby, they have a responsibility. Don’t just leave it with the girl and say it was just a good time.

http://www.marylandfamilymagazine.com/2009/06/01/dr-ben-carsons-thoughts-on-fatherhood/
 
Marriage Makes Our Children Richer—Here's Why

Marriage Makes Our Children Richer—Here's Why
Young people from less-privileged homes are more likely to graduate from college and earn more if raised by two married parents.
W. BRADFORD WILCOX
OCT 29 2013, 9:29 AM ET

The United States' reputation as "the land of opportunity" is a cruel bit of false advertising.

Americans are less likely to experience relative economic mobility than our peers in countries like Canada, Denmark, and Sweden. Children born to poor and working-class parents are considerably less likely to reach the highest rungs of the economic ladder than their richer classmates.
But why? One of the most promising new groups working to answer this question is Opportunity Nation, a group committed to working across partisan and ideological lines “to expand economic opportunity and close the opportunity gap in America.” Their newly released Opportunity Index includes 16 indicators, from high-school graduation to income inequality. But not one indicator relates to the family.

In fact, the opportunity story begins with our families—in particularly, with our parents. As the Nobel-prize-winning economist James Heckman recently noted, “the family into which a child is born plays a powerful role in determining lifetime opportunities.” My own research using individual-level data from the Add Health dataset for the Home Economics Project, a new joint initiative between the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for Family Studies, indicates that adolescents raised in intact, married homes are significantly more likely to succeed educationally and financially. The benefits are greatest for less privileged homes—that is, where their mother did not have a college degree.

As the next graph indicates, young men and women who hail from intact, married homes are much more likely to graduate from college. More precisely, young adults are at least 44 percent more likely to have graduated from college if they were raised by their married parents. This is important because a college degree is associated with better work opportunities, lower odds of unemployment, and a substantial wage premium.

The marriage bump is strongest among families where the parents didn’t go to college (the left half of the graph above). Among less-educated families, the children of married parents earn about $4,000 more than their peers from non-intact families, as the next chart shows. The association between intact families and income is not significant for children of college-educated parents.

Adolescent family structure also has important implications for family formation among young adults. The next graph indicates that men and women who hail from intact families are about 40 percent less likely to father or bear a child outside of wedlock. This is important because nonmarital childbearing reduces your odds of successfully getting and staying married down the road, maximizing your income, and of providing a stable home to your children.

Marriage might even have economic benefits at the citywide level. A recent study from Harvard and UC-Berkeley found that the most important predictor of economic mobility was the low share of single moms in a community. Mobility for poor kids was highest in the Salt Lake City metro area, which also happens to have one of the lowest rates of single motherhood of any major metro area in the country.

The idea that marriages have such strong spillover effects strikes some as a spurious correlation. But there is evidence of a causal relationship, too. MIT economist John Gruber, studying the effect of divorce on later incomes, found that adults "exposed to unilateral divorce regulations as children are less well educated, have lower family incomes, marry earlier but separate more often, and have higher odds of suicide.” Indiana psychologist Brian D’Onofrio, relying on a study of twins, also found that young adults from divorced homes did worse than their cousins from intact homes (the cousins had parents who were twins) when it came to substance abuse and behavioral problems.

The intact, two-parent family seems to be particularly important for children hailing from less privileged homes and a powerful force for economic mobility when it's the family norm at the community level. Policymakers who feel more comfortable talking about metrics than marriages need to understand that marriage could be one of the most important metrics.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business...e-makes-our-children-richer-heres-why/280930/
 
How Single Motherhood Hurts Kid

How Single Motherhood Hurts Kids
By KAY S. HYMOWITZ
FEBRUARY 8, 2014, 2:30 PM

The last few weeks have brought an unusual convergence of voices from both the center and the left about a topic that is typically part of conservative rhetorical territory: poverty and single-parent families. Just as some conservatives have started talking seriously about rising inequality and stagnant incomes, some liberals have finally begun to admit that our stubbornly high rates of poverty and social and economic immobility are closely entwined with the rise of single motherhood.

But that’s where agreement ends. Consistent with its belief in self-sufficiency, the right wants to see more married-couple families. For the left, widespread single motherhood is a fact of modern life that has to be met with vigorously expanded government support. Liberals point out, correctly, that poverty rates for single-parent households are lower in most other advanced economies, where the welfare state is more generous.

That argument ignores a troubling truth: Single-parent families are not the same in the United States as elsewhere. Simply put, unmarried parents here are more likely to enter into parenthood in ways guaranteed to create turmoil in their children’s lives. The typical American single mother is younger than her counterpart in other developed nations. She is also more likely to live in a community where single motherhood is the norm rather than an alternative life choice.

The sociologist Kathryn Edin has shown that unlike their more educated peers, these younger, low-income women tend to stop using contraception several weeks or months after starting a sexual relationship. The pregnancy — not lasting affection and mutual decision-making — that often follows is the impetus for announcing that they are a couple. Unsurprisingly, by the time the thrill of sleepless nights and colicky days has worn off, two relative strangers who have drifted into becoming parents together notice they’re just not that into each other. Hence, the high breakup rates among low-income couples: Only a third of unmarried parents are still together by the time their children reach age 5.

Also complicating low-income single parenthood in America is what the experts call “multipartner fertility.” Both divorced and never-married Americans are more likely to repartner and start “second families” than Europeans, but the trend is far more common among unmarried parents. According to data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study at Princeton and Columbia Universities, over 60 percent of low-income babies will have at least one half sibling when they are born; by the time they are 5, the proportion will have climbed to over 70 percent.

All of this would be of merely passing interest if it weren’t for the evidence that this kind of domestic churn is really bad news for kids. The more “transitions” experienced by a child — the arrival of a stepparent, a parental boyfriend or girlfriend, or a step- or half sibling — the more children are likely to have either emotional or academic problems, or both. (My own research indicates that boys, especially, suffer from these transitions.)

Part of the problem is that a nonresident father tends to fade out of his children’s lives if there’s a new man in his ex’s house or if he has children with a new partner. For logistical, emotional and financial reasons, his loyalty to his previous children slackens once he has a child with a new girlfriend or wife. Nor is it likely, from the overlooked child’s point of view, that a mother’s new boyfriend or husband can fill the gap. There’s substantial research showing that stepfathers are sometimes worse than none at all.

These realities help explain the meager results of government marriage promotion programs. It doesn’t make much sense to encourage, much less pressure, a couple with no shared history, interests or deep affection to marry. At any rate, given the prevalence of multipartner fertility it’s not clear, as one scholar asked in a paper, “who should marry whom.”

But those same realities raise serious doubts about the accept-and-prop-up response to single-parent families. Increasing government largess could actually incentivize, or at least enable, parental choices that everyone admits are damaging to kids. The United States aside, scholars have found a connection between the size of a welfare state and rates of both nonmarital births and divorce. Even if you believe that enlarging the infrastructure of support for single-parent families shows compassion for today’s children, it’s not at all obvious that it shows much concern for tomorrow’s.

Most surprising, given the likely feminist sympathies of liberal advocates for single mothers, is their fatalism toward men. While it’s a safe bet that most in this camp wouldn’t hesitate to scold married “bastards on the couch” for not pulling their weight at home, they seem more than willing to write off unmarried fathers. Not only does this merely accept the personal loss suffered by millions of children living without their fathers; it also virtually guarantees a permanent gender gap — single mothers are inevitably competing in the labor market with one hand tied behind their backs — and entrenched inequality.

So where does that leave us, policy-wise? Liberal critics of marriage promotion are probably correct that there are only limited steps government can take to change the way low-income couples meet and mate. But that doesn’t mean the status quo is the way things have to be. Not so long ago, the rise of teenage motherhood seemed unstoppable. Instead, over the past two decades adolescent births have declined to record lows. Researchers believe the decline was caused by a combination of better contraceptive use and delayed sexual activity. Both were grounded in a growing consensus — including by the policy makers, educators, the public and teenagers themselves — that having a baby when you are 16 is just a really bad idea.

It’s not impossible that Americans could reach a similarly robust consensus about having children outside of a committed relationship, which in the United States, at least, tends to mean marriage. But despite the growing list of center-left writers willing to admit that single motherhood is complicit in our high levels of poverty and inequality, that consensus still seems a long way off.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.co...s/?_php=true&_type=blogs&ref=todayspaper&_r=0
 
Finding our fathers

Finding our fathers
Bringing dads back to their sons is the only honest answer to the crisis of young black men
BY RON HOWELL NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Sunday, July 27, 2014, 4:30 AM

For millions of black Americans, Barack Obama's legacy is not going to be Obamacare, nor his decision to move troops out of Iraq, nor what he does about immigration.

No, it will be the image of him as a black father - of him, for example, standing at the White House and declaring, after the 2012 racially charged killing of black teenager Trayvon Martin, "this could have been my son."

For all the accusations that Obama waffles and wavers when it comes to controversial issues affecting African Americans, there is a widespread perception of him as the model of black fatherhood. It is a view of him that I share, and it means a lot to me, because I know in personal ways the difference that the presence, or absence, of a dad can make in a young black man's life.

So much of my writing over the years has been about the disrespect and even viciousness with which police officers treat black and Latino men. The brutality against Eric Garner, who died 10 days ago after a white officer placed him in what seems to have been a chokehold, is just the latest case.

But I have to say - and this isn't easy, because tough love never is - that our collective shortcomings as African-American fathers also cause me great distress. Unlike the beatings, chokings and shootings our black youngsters are too frequently victims of - from the police, yes, but often from other black males - the pain of paternal abandonment is a dull ache in the heart that, in the end, can do as much damage as a bullet.

Just this past Monday, Obama met with dozens of young males at a public school in Washington, D.C. - black ones but also others of color - and spoke with them about the value of fatherhood and its responsibilities.

"If you're African American, there's about a one-in-two chance you grow up without a father in your house - one in two," the President said with somber plaintiveness.

As for me, I don't need data to convince me of the importance of black fatherhood. I have my own family story.

In 1997, I wrote an article for Essence Magazine titled "A Father's Longing," reflecting on the death of my father, a gifted and educated man who fell victim to alcohol and left me and my mother when I was a child, and mom was crippled with polio.

Later in his life, thanks to Alcoholics Anonymous, dad gave up the bottle and, though I never lived with him, we developed a late-in-life father-son relationship, and I shared its joys and pains with readers of Essence.

The reaction was extraordinary, with many black people recognizing me from the photo accompanying the article, and engaging me about the topic.

But the truly stunning result was a phone call I received a year later from a woman in Detroit who identified herself as Linda, the wife of my father's brother, my Uncle Charles, who in the early 1960s had abandoned New York City and his 11 children. We had thought he was dead.

Linda told me that Uncle Charles had died the night before, and that she had known of my relationship to him because she had read the article and had made astute deductions about the familial relationship. But, deferring to Uncle Charles's desires, she had put off calling me until his death.

Now here are the details that rush to the core the story: Of the 11 children (from two households) that Uncle Charles left behind, two were boys - my only male first cousins on my father's side.

The older one, Charles III, nicknamed Tibby, was beaten to death 30 years ago on the streets of Brownsville by a person or persons never identified. His sisters and mother were of course devastated by the unsolved crime, which only intensified the excruciating hurt caused by their father's disappearance decades previously.

Uncle Charles's younger son, Henri, became addicted to heroin, and his whereabouts, if indeed he is alive, are not known to me or any other family members with whom I was able to speak. I had long conversations about ten years ago with Henri's mother, who told me in painful detail how the absconding of the father had devastated Henri in ways that were as emotionally crushing as they were immediate, although the girls were largely able to put themselves on track to productive, professional lives.

Tibby's oldest sister, Elizabeth (Lizzie) Howell Greggs, 70, said she has come to understand profoundly the importance of fatherhood to young men in Brownsville, a community in which she was raised and in which she still lives.

Boys need fathers as role models, said Lizzie, who until her retirement earlier this month had spent 40 years teaching kids in the Brownsville Police Athletic League's Head Start program. "There's so much anger," Lizzie said of young men living around her. She added that the pitiful delinquency of her own dad made her more committed to helping young men understand the importance of being involved in the lives of their offspring. As for her home life, she speaks fondly of her deceased husband, a career military man, and is proud of their four adult children. One of them, a son, I've had conversations with and he is a hard-working and disciplined young man, a role model.

Let's not mince words. The crisis of New York City, and to a large extent of America, is the crisis of the black male. You see it in our schools, on our streets, in our economy, in our prisons.

Obama seems determined to strengthen his male-focused My Brother's Keeper Initiative, and on Monday he announced further investments of millions of dollars. My Brother's Keeper is patterned on New York City's Young Men's Initiative, which was organized three years ago by former Mayor Michael Bloomberg. (Yes, the same Michael Bloomberg who allowed police to stop and frisk hundreds of thousands of innocent black and Latino males annually.)

We should all be grateful for these efforts. Taken together, they suggest a philosophy once articulated by Hillary Clinton - that "it takes a village to raise a child," that if young men of color are to be able to (quite literally) survive, various sectors of society (educators, social service administrators and even entrepreneurs) will have to play respective roles.

As an educator myself, I should be in a special position to help. But consider this: In my five years of teaching journalism at Brooklyn College, I don't believe I've had more than 10 black males among the several hundred students in my classes.

I noted this paucity even at predominantly black Medgar Evers College, where 15 years ago I taught a writing workshop. There were about a dozen students in the class. All were black. But only one was a male. According to U.S. News & World Report's latest college report, the gender breakdown at Medgar Evers College is 73% female and 27% male.

For black males, there is a stark tie-in between the education and criminal justice systems, both of which have been failing them miserably. Speaking to MSNBC on Monday, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, who grew up in Queens, said that having a father saved him from the horrid fates that befall so many young men of color.

"I grew up in a lower middle class neighborhood in Queens, New York, and I think of all the advantages I had by having a dad there," Holder said. He noted the vast difference in outcomes between him and other young men who did not have it so good. Other "guys who grew up with me on the block" ended up "in fundamentally different places . . . Drug problems. Time in jail," Holder added.

As for me, I survived and accomplished all that I have - Ivy League degrees, comfort in three languages, prize-winning news articles - not because of talents far beyond those of others.

No, when my father left us, mom and I were given shelter by her parents in their brownstone in the Bedford Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, and it is to my grandfather that I owe so much.

My granddad, Bertram L. Baker, was the first black person ever elected to office in Brooklyn (elected to the state Assembly in 1948). He was a fearsome man and an operator. After I, at the age of 13, had been rejected by Brooklyn Preparatory High School, he interceded with the Jesuits there to have me admitted and I went on to excel in academics and in track and field.

There came a time as a young adult that I disappointed my grandfather. In college, I ran for a stretch with gun-toting, self-styled revolutionaries, and smoked and drank more herb and liquor than I should have. Soon after my graduation, after he learned that I possessed a shotgun, my granddad told me to get the hell out of his house.

But we reconciled before he died in 1985, and to this day I live much of my life in honor of him. Three years ago I worked to have the street where he lived (Jefferson Ave. between Tompkins and Throop Aves. in Bed-Stuy) co-named after him. I especially appreciated that, in the seven years before his death, my grandfather gave so much attention to my only child, my son Damani, who today is an orthopedic surgeon with two children of his own, both boys, on whom he showers attention.

There is so much about Brooklyn these days that touches my spirit. In a mystical way, I associate myself with guys I knew in old Bed-Stuy, who died young, many of them from broken homes. I see them as I glimpse the young men of today, pants hanging down, and I see them in the countless black and Latino boys who have been stopped and frisked.

But there is hope. Hope was, after all, a principal message conveyed by Obama in his climb up the political ladder. As cynical as I am about politicians, I accept his exhortations about the need to expect the best as we strive against odds.

Few things give me more comfort than seeing a young black man walking the sidewalks with a woman seeming to be his wife, one or more youngsters toddling alongside them. If close enough, I smile, in a gesture that is more gratitude that approval, and I maybe hold up a hand or extend a friendly fist, or touch my chest.

Of course there are occasions when the objects of my gratitude don't see me, given their attention on their young ones. But more often than not, there is a return smile. And every time that happens I am certain they know everything on my mind.

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/finding-fathers-article-1.1880572
 
Child poverty among African-Americans steady, falls for others: study

Child poverty among African-Americans steady, falls for others: study
July 14, 2015 1:20 PM

(Reuters) - More than 38 percent of African-American children live in poverty and that rate has held roughly steady since 2010, while the U.S. economy has improved and the country's overall child poverty rate fallen slightly to 20 percent, a Pew study said on Tuesday.

The Pew Research Center study, which was based on U.S. Census figures until 2013, found child poverty rates have fallen among whites, Hispanics and Asian-Americans.

African-Americans have had the highest rate of child poverty among ethnic groups in the United States since 1997 when they were about even with Hispanics, according to figures from Pew.

Twenty percent of children in the United States lived in poverty in 2013, compared with 22 percent in 2010, the study said. That improvement coincided with U.S. economic recovery since the 2007-2009 recession.

The total number of children in poverty in the country was 14.7 million in 2013.

Poverty was defined as living in a household with an annual income below $23,624 for a family of four, the Pew Research Center said.

https://news.yahoo.com/child-poverty-among-african-americans-steady-falls-others-172030057.html
 
Re: Child poverty among African-Americans steady, falls for others: study

10-year anniversary of the most important BGOL thread that no one gives a shit about.

Good post Decon Frost.
 
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