Jillian. Thank you for your very clear response. (Why can't more people on this board be rational and civil?)
Awwwwwwwwwww.... shucks... backatcha. But you haven't seen me when I get angry. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry. *to paraphrase Clint Eastwood* ;o)
I would agree with a lot of what you say, including legalizing all drugs (although I would leave it to the free market to manufacture and advertise and sell them).
Well, I'm not much on the pharmaceutical companies that charge us through the nose for prescriptions while selling them cheaper elsewhere. I think perhaps under strict government controls, we might have a compromise. But any oversight agency would have to be well-funded and have adequate enforcement personnel to do their job.
Clearly, poverty is a "risk factor" for crime. And clearly, criminal behavior -- including violent crime -- is not confined to poor people, or to Blacks, by any means.
Agreed.
However, I don't think that "poverty" is much of an explanation, at least not by itself.
Also agreed.
Consider these examples:
(1) In the old South, lynchings of Blacks were not uncommon. And they were brutal, disgusting things -- burning people alive, cutting off their extremities and passing them around as souvenirs. Now ... was the bestial behavior of these whites caused by poverty? I don't think so, in any substantive sense. Poor whites in the North did not do such things, except perhaps during race riots when law and order broke down. But in the South, law and order condoned lynchings. Approval of lynching was part of the popular (white) culture. Giving more money to poor Southern whites would not have had any effect on their behavior towards Blacks. Or so it seems to me.
There you address the issue of culture of violence...something which surely exists in terms of black on black crime and gang culture. It also exists among hate groups who see violence against their preferred target(s) of hate as acceptable behavior as you illustrated.
Similarly, when we find brutal genocidal behavior around the world, I don't think it tells us much to say, "Well, it was the poverty ..." when Serbs massacre Muslims or when Croats massacred Serbs, when Hutus butchered Tutsis, etc.
Again... a culture of violence which de-humanizes the objects of their hatred. It's why the Neuremberg Laws designated Jews as verminskeit (I hope the spelling is correct). Once the target is de-humanized, it is much easier to justify violence.
Now you could say, poverty in these cases is a marker for a social system that is defective in some way or other. And so it would be, but there would be many other markers too.
Yes. But we were talking about black crime rates, which DOES seem to correlate with poverty. There may be increased rates of crime, but those tend to occur in impoverished areas, probably with greater frequency. One wouldn't find it among black gentry.
(2) Black crime has, I believe, gone up significantly in the last few decades, tracking the Black illegitimacy rate. But Black poverty has gone down. I don't have the figures to hand at the moment, unfortunately, but I can get them.
See above. I think this fits perfectly with the cycle of crime and poverty and the lack of male influence in much of poor black culture. That feeds into a lack of money, a lack of structure, girls getting pregnant because there are no strong parental controls. They then have no knowledge to pass on to THEIR children because they didn't learn any better from their own mothers.
What is amazing is that there are people who are able to overcome these deficits. They are able to break the cycle. I am not a sociologist, so can't say with any certainty WHY some people are able to do this. It does exist though.
I have also noted in conversation with others that poverty breeds strange role models. To a poor child, who doesn't see the value of education or effort, or thinks that no matter what he does, he will be discriminated against or have no opportunities, the role models are the people with money and girls. Who are those people? Drug dealers, gang members and criminals.
(3) There are other communities, racial minorities in fact, which have been very poor when they have arrived here. For instance, Vietnamese refugees, or Russian Jews at the turn of the century. We did not see violent crime from these groups, commensurate with their poverty.
But those groups have always been upwardly mobile. They came here TO BE upwardly mobile. That was already pre-programmed into the culture. There is always the sense of sacrifice so the next generation can do better. I don't like to play the slave card because I think at some point, people need to go beyond their history. However, it should be noted that blacks are the one group who didn't come here willingly and didn't benefit from the fruits of their labor when they did. Perhaps there is a part of black culture that stands in the way. As I said, though, there are so many who have overcome this, that it may be silly to make note of it. I do, however, think there is a lack of value placed on education and upward mobility in parts of the black community as well as a lack of knowledge about what it takes to BE upwardly mobile.
I'm not sure what we do about it. I think we do a disservice when we toss money at it because we create a culture of dependence. What I do believe is that it would be better for us as a society to fund job training programs, daycare for the kids of single moms so they can go to work and limits on welfare. We've already done much of this. We just haven't funded the training programs and daycare as we should.
(4) Consider this possibility: crime breeds poverty. If I want to start a factory which hires low-wage unskilled labor, and if I knew nothing about the Black crime rate, I might consider locating it in a Black area: rents would be low, and my workers would be nearby. But no one in their right mind would do such a thing as soon as they learned about the crime rate.
That's only partially true. Often, we find businesses NOT participating in poorer neighborhoods, leaving them ecomonically stagnant. For example, they just came out with a study showing that banks were not moving branches into minority communities. This is not because those communities have no working people. It's because the "big money" may be elsewhere. Again, it's a chicken and egg situation. The question is, where do we intervene and how do we break the cycle.
Again, I'd point out that most black crime is "black on black" and really shouldn't be an issue in terms of establishing economic development zones.
(5) There are plenty of jobs in America for unskilled workers. People risk arid death to cross the border deserts to get here to take those jobs; they seal themselves into containers and cross the Pacific Ocean to get those jobs. If you went to the most rabidly anti-American country in the world and offered free citizenship and transport to America, with only the right to hunt for a job once you got there, you would be trampled in the rush.
Well, yes... but Americans don't take those jobs. Perhaps if minimum wage were a living wage, there would be incentives to do so. As it is, assistance often lets people live better than those jobs. Hence my assertion that we should be elevating wages and training people better.
The problem is not the lack of jobs, it's the deep-seated self-destructive culture among Blacks, which sees teenager girls getting pregnant without a husband, and young men scorning the "chump change" of the many jobs which are available to them. (I agree that the insane drug laws play a large part here.)
I don't know that I'd call it self-destructive or deep-seated. I think given the great gentrification that's occurred in black communities, this isn't the case. There is no question, however, that the Rockefeller Drug Laws have done terrible things to minority communities and it's time for legislators to get the cojones to repeal them.
How do we change that culture? Beats me, but I suspect the change mainly has to come from within the Black community. Outside forces which try to change them will be as successful as they have been in bringing democratic culture to Iraq.
I see where you draw your analogy, but again, I disagree, in part,with your basic premise.
(6) There actually have been literally hundreds -- probably thousands -- of government programs aimed at combatting poverty. These run from simple second-chance educational schemes, to job-retraining, to lifeskill teaching ... none of them have much impact. They are similar to efforts to rehabilitate violent criminals in prison: you can find a little effect here and there, but when you control for the fact that the people who volunteer to take part in these schemes are a motivated minority, some of whom would have succeeded on their own, you are not left with much to be optimistic about. Of course, the social scientists who run these schemes don't like to trumpet these facts, for obvious reasons.
I'm not certain it's a "motivated minority" and not the majority. You are always going to hear the horror stories rather than the success stories. So, I don't know how much of that factors in here.
Even Head Start, which you mentioned (and which I was a teacher in, in Harlem in the mid-60s) has very, very modest results. The evidence for any lasting serious improvement, once the child has been out of the scheme for a year or two, is very weak. (I know there are some studies which show some small improvement, and others which show none. But the reality is, for the money and effort, you don't get much return at all.)
Perhaps the answer is tracking "at risk" students and making sure they don't end up "out of the scheme". I think part of what happens when kids are mainstreamed is that they succumb to peer pressure. Parents who are education oriented remove their children from the worst schools, leaving the rest to be surrounded by other kids for whom success is something to be ridiculed. Perhaps that is a good part of the problem... hence, we should maybe be more careful about not having social promotion and really weeding out the kids who have no business being in school.
I also think we need to go back to a concept of education which tracks academic and trade-oriented kids differently, like they did when my parents were kids. Not every child should go to college. But getting even a job as a federal express delivery person now requires a college degree. So perhaps we need to re-evaluate some of that and actually train kids who are never going to be research scientists for trades in which they can earn a living.
The billions spent on the so-called War on Poverty were money down the drain. In fact, they were billions spent to make things worse, due to the idiotic approach at the time of "empowering local communities of poor people," which just meant subsidizing agitators and outright criminals like the Black Panthers.
Well, I hate all that "war on..." garbage.. the war on drugs, the war on terrorism, the war on poverty, ... a bunch of sound and fury signifying nothing.. to quote Will Shakespeare. I think those are usually electioneering terms and have no real resonance and solve no real problems.
Now these are not facts to be happy about. I am sure even the most leather-hearted conservative could be convinced to support a tax hike to fund a government program to seriously reduce poverty and crime in America, if evidence could be produced showing that it would work.
I'd bet against that.
By the way, many conservatives really believe, secretly, that people can be easily motivated by money, and that human behavior is not difficult to change. This is why they supported cutting off welfare benefits for single mothers who kept having children while on welfare. But in fact, cutting off benefits made little difference. Peoples' behavior has complex, subtle causes, which we do not understand.
Yes... but the money used to motivate people to do good, has to be more than the money they can make doing bad. Hence my concept of getting rid of the whole illegal drug culture which is a financial windfall to the people on the sales end.
One thing which many conservatives would support would be a system of school choice for Black children's parents, so that the more ambitious can escape the dead hand of the state school system. Where this has tried it has had some success, although so far as I can see, the results have not been overwhelming. (As in the case of Head Start, or rehabilitation schemes, the evidence is mixed, and often the people conducting the research have an emotional and even financial stake in finding certain results. So I take the studies that have been done here, even those which support my side, with a grain of salt.)
I don't believe in school choice. I think we should make all our schools good enough where your kid goes to the school down the block like we used to. And I say this as a mother who drives her kid a mile away from his zoned school every day because the zoned school isn't as good. (Through a series of acts by a former mayor of ours that I won't go into right now).
I do know there are many members of the black community who have fought very hard to get funding for their local schools so the schools can offer more to their students than metal detectors and "mainstreaming" special ed kids with regular students. (which I think benefits neither, btw).
It would be wonderful if sensible liberals and non-ideologue conservatives could agree on some set of measures to address the problems of American Blacks. It is a pleasure to discuss this question with you.
It would be wonderful... I think it would certainly be worth the effort. But what do you think the chances are of it happening in this political climate?
Pleasure discussing this with you, too.
