Friday, March 31, 2006

African-American dilemmas...

Two articles on the state of the African-American society have appeared in the press recently:

This one in NYT, A Poverty of the Mind by Orlando Patterson seemed to me very dismissive in its tone of conventional studies and explanations of black male maladjustment...but takes the bull by the horns by offering a non-traditional explanation...I was amused to read the manner in which Patterson rules out the methodology employed by others. Seems a bit high-handed, very prefessorial (but, direct and forthright)...I wonder what it is like attending his classes at Harvard. :-)

The question the NYT article aims to answer is posed right at the beginning of the article:

SEVERAL recent studies have garnered wide attention for reconfirming the tragic disconnection of millions of black youths from the American mainstream.


Patterson feels that most studies thus far have avoided using "cultural factors and conditionings" to seek an answer.

This is all standard explanatory fare. And, as usual, it fails to answer the important questions. Why are young black men doing so poorly in school that they lack basic literacy and math skills? These scholars must know that countless studies by educational experts, going all the way back to the landmark report by James Coleman of Johns Hopkins University in 1966, have found that poor schools, per se, do not explain why after 10 years of education a young man remains illiterate.
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First is the pervasive idea that cultural explanations inherently blame the victim; that they focus on internal behavioral factors and, as such, hold people responsible for their poverty, rather than putting the onus on their deprived environment. (It hasn't helped that many conservatives do actually put forth this view.)

But this argument is utterly bogus. To hold someone responsible for his behavior is not to exclude any recognition of the environmental factors that may have induced the problematic behavior in the first place. Many victims of child abuse end up behaving in self-destructive ways; to point out the link between their behavior and the destructive acts is in no way to deny the causal role of their earlier victimization and the need to address it.


His conclusion:

So what are some of the cultural factors that explain the sorry state of young black men? They aren't always obvious...
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the "cool-pose culture" of young black men was simply too gratifying to give up. For these young men, it was almost like a drug, hanging out on the street after school, shopping and dressing sharply, sexual conquests, party drugs, hip-hop music and culture, the fact that almost all the superstar athletes and a great many of the nation's best entertainers were black.

Not only was living this subculture immensely fulfilling, the boys said, it also brought them a great deal of respect from white youths.

...For young black men, however, that culture is all there is — or so they think. Sadly, their complete engagement in this part of the American cultural mainstream, which they created and which feeds their pride and self-respect, is a major factor in their disconnection from the socioeconomic mainstream.

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The second article, from the Washington Post dwells on the dilemma of the young African-American woman:

Sex, love and childbearing have become a la carte choices rather than a package deal that comes with marriage. Moreover, in an era of brothers on the "down low," the spread of sexually transmitted diseases and the decline of the stable blue-collar jobs that black men used to hold, linking one's fate to a man makes marriage a risky business for a black woman.

...
My observation is that black women in their twenties and early thirties want to marry and commit at a time when black men their age are more likely to enjoy playing the field.

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This seems to be in sync with what Patterson asks:

And why do so many young unemployed black men have children — several of them — which they have no resources or intention to support?


It is really good to see a society (or a people) engaging in reflection and a critical assessment of where it is at. It seems quite surprising to me that a people so culturally rich, so able, so genuinely warm and human as the African-Americans should indulge in such "self-destructive" behavior.

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