Kimstu, please read the rest of that excerpt as well. Despite the optimistic opening the authors hardly believe that the concern is “out of date”. No, they instead believe that “reintegration of nurturing black fathers into the homes and therefore the lives of their children is the prime goal, the umbrella priority, under which all the others fit.”
I would also differ with the belief that one can only act on solutions after one has a clear understanding of the causes. Let’s say that I am walking down a street and I am shot. Now it would be nice to know who shot me and why, from what location, and so on. But none of that informs my immediate future action to save my own life as knowing that I need to get out of potential additional shots and get immediate medical attention. My being shot might turn out to be the fault of a sniper or an angry business associate or a stray bullet, but the responsibility of saving my life is mine. I need to know that I am bleeding and what can be done to fix it. I need to stop additional harm and get help. I can talk about getting justice later, maybe, for now I do not want to die.
So Black America has been metaphorically shot and the result is a high rate of intergenerational poverty. And instead of figuring out how to stop additional harm and to stop the bleeding, we have been mired in whether or not to blame society or to blame the victim, in trying to figure out who pulled the trigger. There may be time for that later, and they are not unimportant questions, but I’d rather see all aspects of society doing what needs to be done to avoid additional harm and to stop the bleeding.
Clearly this action means addressing those aspects of societal systems that have racist effects, giving educators in the inner city the resources to meet the challenge of teaching in an urban poor environment, allowing for equitable access to healthcare resources, and so on and on. But it also entails a blunt analysis of how particular cultural patterns foster intergenerational poverty and expecting that those who can influence those patterns will do so.
Going in and attempting to change cultural patterns has never been successful. It’s been tried over and over again- Native Americans, Australian Aborigenes, the Sentinal Islanders, Tibet…dominent cultures always want to “civilize” the other cultures within their reach. It nearly always ends up throwing all of their social structures out of balance and leads to dependency and second-class citizenship. People don’t act irrationally. If they are having children without fathers present, there is a reason for it.
Can you name a time when one culture trying to convert another culture to their prefered family structures has ever been beneficial?
even, you do actually read the threads that you post in, don’t you? From my first post my position has been that “The solution to this situation, if there is to be one, cannot come from pale-complected people like me; it must come from within the Black American community itself.” The original question was to our Black Dopers: do they percieve this as a problem, and if so what do they think should be done about it?
But people do not act irrationally? Like Hell we don’t.
What does it matter if they are available but they spend all their time sippin 40s and smoking crack?
I don’t think it’s rocket science. Without positive role models to teach them acceptible ways to behave, children do not grow up. They continue to behave like children - they indulge their whims and don’t consider the consequences. And that behavior generally lands you in jail.
The problem is that there are few positive role models in the poor black community. Their friends parents aren’t lawyers, doctors and accountants living in nice homes and driving Audis. They live in these government housing projects where the only male role models are retards hanging around in the middle of the afternoon. The only “successful” black men in their world are rappers and athletes on TV who’s loud, violent alpha-male behavior is cartoonish at best and anti-social at worst.
Without the postive role models to show them how to be a good father, employee and human being they run around like animals fucking, drinking and fighting until they end up dead or in jail leaving illegitimate offspring to continue the cycle.
It’s not something that’s inherent to being black. I know plenty of black people who raised in positive environments, are as normal as the rest of us. It’s inherent to the “gheto” culture that isolates many black poor from the rest of society and creates a cycle of poverty.
They don’t? Must be some new species of “people” I am unaware of.
I agree that a solution can’t be imposed on poor black culture. The only think we can provide is tools and knowledge and hope they make the right decisions. But you can’t help someone who doesn’t want to be helped. My town spends some of the highest amounts of money per student in the state. Our schools still have terrible graduation rates. It’s only the poor kids that go to them. The wealthy people send their kids to private school.
I agree that positive role models would be useful. If successful familes that often go to the suburbs stick around, their lifestyle could provide an example of the benefits of the two parent family. The thing is, I’m not sure what percentage of women know that a child would be better off with a stable father, and how many believe that they can do a great job filling both roles on their own.
I don’t think many people would say that these rates are not a problem. I don’t see any large changes coming about anytime soon though.
That’s my culture and I’ve advised students who were being pressured into marriage by their families. I realize the thread is generally about poor blacks, but since we’re a big comparison point…
In Hispanic families (Catholic and Evangelic are the main denominations), marriage goes first, babies second and many families still don’t see college as important. My students had long-standing boyfriends who weren’t going to college; the families were pressuring them to drop out of college, get married and have two or three babies… “you will have time for that college thing once your kids are in school” and “he can provide well for you and a few kids, so why don’t you want to get married” were two of the arguments mentioned. Sex is supposed to go between marriage and baby (but it can be common law marriage).
A point that’s made in the link provided by astro and in other reports I’ve seen, and which I have experienced firsthand, is that many young Black women don’t see a need for a father. To them, the answer I once gave to my grandma (“if I ever have kids I want them to get a father, not a stallion”) simply doesn’t apply. I have met black women like this. To a Hispanic’s way of thinking that’s an i/o error - you’re looking for a father, not a stud.
Some of the unmarried Hispanic women (less in the US than in other countries) are actually in common-law marriages. Lower-income Hispanics tend to have zero understanding of paperwork. My cousin spent several years working with lower-income people in Venezuela, helping them with paperwork, and she’d hear things like “my great-grandmother was a bastard, so we can’t get married” (uhnnng); also, some latin americans make a point of being “galleros”, keeping mistresses. While I lived in Miami I rejected two offers to become the Miami public relations assistant for two Latin businessmen from different countries; a PR from Spain is seen as an ultimate achievement. The “contracts” rejected included “I won’t loan you to my friends” and “of course, I’ll take care of any children”. Statistics see a recognized mistress as unmarried - Hispanics mark a difference between “unmarried parents” and “absent father”. Stories of husbands bringing their illegitimate offspring home for the wife to raise are not unknown.
A point that may or may not be related to culture:
I see a big difference between “getting married at 18 and immediately getting pregnant” (which is considered a desirable thing by many Hispanics in the US and elsewhere); “getting knocked up at 14 and getting married immediately” and “getting pregnant at 18, no known father”. Yet, all those show in statistics as “teen pregnancies”.
I grew up in the projects. My role models were not “retards hanging around in the middle of the afternoon”. The were people like my friend’s aunt, working hard and raising three kids- two that wern’t her own- while dying of cancer. They were people like my mom, who was not “fucking like an animal”, but was looking to educate herself and help her community. Being a layer or driving an Audi doesn’t come anywhere close to making you a good person.
I’ve never met anyone that has as much actual hatred of the poor as you. The poor are people. They have hopes and dreams and lives. They arn’t animals. They arn’t children. As long as people like you keep treating them like such, they arn’t going to want to be a part of your lawyer-Audi society. I can’t believe you expect people to “intergrate” with your society while at the same time calling them retards and cartoons. Don’t you see where their rage comes from?
Let me put it this way. Black people don’t act irrationally (getting knocked up) while white people do (getting married). We all make the choice we think is best in the circumstances.
Well you won’t re-enslave Blacks to make them marry the way you want them to. Isn’t that sweet of you.
I don’t hate anyone. I hate it when people make bad or irresponsible decisions and then expect the rest of us to pick up the tab for them.
And I’m not talking about all poor people. There are plenty of poor people who work hard and live modest lives raising their children the best they can.
I’m talking about the characters I see hanging out on the streets at 3 in the afternoon drinking and not working. When I was a kid, I would wake up in the morning to see my dad and the rest of the neighborhood off on their way to work. Are you going to tell me that a child with no father who sees adult men hanging out in the middle of the day is not going to grow up thinking that’s just the way? Or even worse, think that the only way to achieve any kind of financial success is selling drugs?
I understand that it isn’t easy growing up poor. But part of the problem is if you don’t have someone to guide you out of poverty, college and a professional “lawyer-Audi society” is just some unobtainable lifestyle for “other people”.
Sorry, but I think you are absolutely wrong that getting knocked up is a rational and legitimate choice. It is either the result of an accident or of poor decision making. A rational person does not have children they are unable to provide for.
It’s because I’m not a white devil honkey muthafucka.
Bad analogy. If you know you were shot, then you already understand the cause of your injury, and you know the solution to gunshot injuries. Namely, as you say, getting the hell out of there and getting to the ER.
A better analogy would be coming down with some mysterious disease. You know the bug is making you feel bad and you know you want to try to cure it, but since you don’t understand what causes the disease or how it’s working, you need to find out more about it before you can find effective solutions for it.
But to analyze or influence such patterns, you have to understand how they work. Without that, you’re just preaching moral homilies and reiterating the obvious. “Unstable families contribute to intergenerational poverty”—well, pretty much duh, right?
You want a solution? Here it is: Dispersal. Crime, single-parent families, and related social problems are not caused by poverty, they are caused by concentrations of poverty. We need to build an America where there are plenty of black people everywhere and no black neighborhoods anywhere. Likewise, no poor neighborhoods anywhere. Let all the slums be gentrified, and let subsidized low-income housing built for those displaced – but built here and there and everywhere. Instead of massive public-housing projects for warehousing the poor by the thousands, we should have a lot of small public-housing buildings – no more than a dozen apartments – scattered all over every metro area, including the affluent neighborhoods and the suburbs. Their residents can then enjoy better civic amenities and schools, better job opportunities, and better cultural role-models for their children. Also, there would be less temptation to commit crimes because they’re harder to get away with. A kid in the 'hood can snatch a lady’s purse and just melt into the background, but try that in suburbia – in a neighborhood where all the local cops know every resident of those one or two project-buildings by name and by sight.
That will do more to help poor African-Americans and other poor Americans move up the socioeconomic ladder than all the preaching you could throw at their absent dads.
And I’m sure saying the above publicly would boil the blood of a lot of black activists.
How would you keep the people wealthy enough to have a choice of where they want to live from moving out of the neighborhoods that included poor or black people? Historically, that’s what happened to cause some of the concentrations of poor people in neighborhoods.
Times and attitudes have changed (somewhat). Besides, most of the developable area surrounding major cities has already been developed. No place for new suburbs to go, unless you don’t mind a two-hour commute.
Besides, my plan is to build one or two project buildings in every established neighborhood. If you want to move out of the neighborhood because of that – you won’t find any neighborhood you can move to that does not have any project buildings.
I assume this is not a serious proposal because it is so ridiculous.
You are still warehousing the poor into ghetos and segregating them from the rest of the community. The only difference is you are dispursing them all over the place.
The fundamental question is do poor people live in run-down, dirty, crime ridden and violent neighborhoods because they can’t afford to live anywhere else or because they make the neighborhood that way? Does the environment make people the way they are or do the people make the environment they live in?
msmith, scattered site housing, which is what Brain is promoting an extreme variant of, is generally considered as a response against the segregation of the poor from the rest of society. When poor live concentrated against each other poverty is more likely to persist. The main argument against scattered site is the NIMBY reaction. Not in my backyard. Hard to imagine that you can scatter public housing so far and wide and in a manner so imune from poitical influence, that no neighborhoods’ backyards would be immune. Few Black activists have boiled their blood over it, even though a few residents get upset when they are, without a say in the matter, displaced from what they have known as home, and told, “Trust me, we’ll be moving you to a better place, just not near any of the people or places you currently know.” Large public housing projects are widely accepted to have been a major mistake.
Look up about the Gautreaux ruling http://www.bpichicago.org/pht/gautreaux.html or google up Cabrini Green and scattered site housing to see how these issues have played out in the Chicago area. No “flight” that I know of. The current incarnation focuses on mixed income buildings with rent assistance more than on moving people out to the Burbs. A good idea and part of the solution, methinks, but just part.
BrainGlutton, your plan is right on. For too long new developments and older upper-class neighborhood have been able to pay off city officials to not take their share of public housing, halfway houses, continuation schools, welfare offices, etc. My own hometown became a dumping ground for the nearby large city, and whenever a fancy new suburb was built, we got their share of the bad stuff. The place went downhill very fast. My hometown was able to incorporate, force the city to deal with it’s own problems, and quickly became a nice place again.
Make no mistake- urban planning makes ghetto, not people. And urban planning can fix ghettos. When you have things like job-rich areas protesting transit lines through their neighborhood (might bring in a 'bad" element) and school district outsourceing their own bad students to poor school districts (happened in my town) you have an urban planning problem.
When you’ve got one school, one police department, one business community, trying to deal with all of the poverty, of course they will have trouble coping. And of course a poverty-based subculture emerges. And of course (perhaps most essentially) the economic oppertunities go away as business interests move elsewhere. And when the jobs just arn’t there- the poor keep being poor.
Dude, he called them animals and retards. Not cool. Everyone else here is being reasonable, but you can nearly hear the loathing dripping in msmith’s voice. Time and time again he has posited that poverty is a personality flaw or pathology. It makes honest debate difficult.
It seems to me that you’re shooting yourself in the foot here. Our culture has a perfectly viable model in place to ensure that people have the maximum opportunity to escape poverty and crime: Marriage, children within wedlock and traditional families. All of your posts in this thread up to this point have been advocating changing our culture to accomidate people who do not want to or chose not to follow that generally successful route, yet here you post that “attempting to change cultural patterns has never been successful”. Which is it?
You can’t change people’s beliefs and behavoirs. Or, more accurately, when you attempt to change people’s beliefs and behavoirs, the outcome is so unpredictable and unlikely to turn out well that it’s not a worthwhile activity. The very situation Black Americans are in now is in part from a time when White America decided to screw with the Black family “for their own good”- which at the time was dissolving their familial ties and severing their relationship with African culture.
You can change the structures of society to better suit its people. You can change schools, workplaces, etc. to make being a single parent be not that bad. And, in a society where single parenthood seems to be a commonly chosen option, we have an obligation to do so. We can’t spend our lives chasing a nuclear family utopia that never really existed (the concept of the nuclear family is less than a hundred years old). We need to listen to the actual preferences of the people in our society and adapt to them. Otherwise the same thing will happen, but it will be a much longer and more traumatic process.
A 12-apartment building is not a ghetto, and its residents are not segregated from the community where it is located. It’s right out the door, and they can enjoy the nice publicly-subsidized landscaping and send their kids to better and safer public schools than they could before.
It works both ways. But plant just a few poor people in a good neighborhood and it will have a good effect on them, while any bad effect they have on the neighborhood will be negigible.