The Real Problem With America’s Inner Cities
NYT May 10, 2015
CAMBRIDGE,
Mass. — THE recent unrest in Baltimore raises complex and confounding
questions, and in response many people have attempted to define the
problem solely in terms of insurgent American racism and violent police
behavior.
But
that is a gross oversimplification. America is not reverting to earlier
racist patterns, and calling for a national conversation on race is a
cliché that evades the real problem we now face: on one hand, a vicious
tangle of concentrated poverty, disconnected youth and a culture of
violence among a small but destructive minority in the inner cities;
and, on the other hand, of out-of-control law-enforcement practices
abetted by a police culture that prioritizes racial profiling and
violent constraint.
First,
we need a more realistic understanding of America’s inner cities. They
are socially and culturally heterogeneous, and a great majority of
residents are law-abiding, God-fearing and often socially conservative.
According
to recent surveys, between 20 and 25 percent of their permanent
residents are middle class; roughly 60 percent are solidly working class
or working poor who labor incredibly hard, advocate fundamental
American values and aspire to the American dream for their children.
Their youth share their parents’ values, expend considerable social
energy avoiding the violence around them and consume far fewer drugs
than their white working- and middle-class counterparts, despite their
disproportionate arrest and incarceration rates.
In
all inner-city neighborhoods, however, there is a problem minority that
varies between about 12.1 percent (in San Diego, for example) and 28
percent (in Phoenix) that comes largely from the disconnected youth
between ages 16 and 24. Most are not in school and are chronically out
of work, though their numbers are supplemented by working- and
middle-class dropouts. With few skills and a contempt for low-wage jobs,
they subsist through the underground economy of illicit trading and
crime. Many belong to gangs.
Their
street or thug culture is real, with a configuration of norms, values
and habits that are, disturbingly, rooted in a ghetto brand of core
American mainstream values: hypermasculinity, the aggressive assertion
and defense of respect, extreme individualism, materialism and a
reverence for the gun, all inflected with a threatening vision of
blackness openly embraced as the thug life.
Such
street culture is simply the black urban version of one of America’s
most iconic traditions: the Wild West. America’s first gangsta thugs
were Billy the Kid and Jesse James. In the youth thug cultures of both
the Wild West and the inner cities, America sees inverted images of its
own most iconic values, one through rose-tinted glass, the other through
a glass, darkly.
While
there is some continuity between the old Western and thug cultures
learned through extensive exposure to the media, that of the urban
streets originated more in reaction to the long centuries of
institutionalized violence against blacks during slavery and Jim Crow.
The historian Roger Lane has traced the roots of Philadelphia’s black
“criminal subculture” all the way back to the mid-1800s; W. E. B. Du
Bois found it thoroughly entrenched in his own study of Philadelphia in
the 1890s.
This
culture is reinforced by contemporary conditions like poverty, racial
discrimination, chronic unemployment, single parenting and a chemically
toxic, neurologically injurious environment, like the lead paint that
poisoned Freddie Gray.
Its
intersection with overly aggressive law enforcement was not random or
inevitable, but rooted in a historical irony. As the political scientist
Michael Javen Fortner documents in his forthcoming work “Black Silent
Majority,” when Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York introduced
draconian new drug laws in the early 1970s to combat the increasingly
violent street life of New York City, he did so with the full support of
black leaders, who felt they had no choice — their lives and
communities were being destroyed by the minority street gangs and drug
addicts.
But
it was not long before the dark side of this intervention emerged: Soon
all black youth, not just the delinquent minority, were being profiled
as criminals, all ghetto residents were being viewed and treated with
disrespect and, increasingly, police tactics relied on the use of
violence as a first resort.
And
yet it didn’t work, at least in one important respect: Although the
black homicide rate has declined substantially, it still remains
catastrophic, with blacks being murdered at eight times the national
rate — and, among teens, it has been rising again since 2002.
In
tackling the present crisis, it is thus a clear mistake to focus only
on police brutality, and it is fatuous to attribute it all to white
racism. Black policemen were involved in both the South Carolina and
Baltimore killings. Coming from the inner-city majority terrorized by
the thug culture minority, they are, sadly, as likely to be brutal in
their policing as white officers.
We
see this in stark detail in the chronic violence of New York’s Rikers
Island correction officers, the leadership and majority of whom are
black. We see it also in the maternal rage of Toya Graham, the Baltimore
single mom whose abusive reprimand of her son, a video of which quickly
went viral, reflects both her fear of losing him to the street and her
desperate, though counterproductive, mode of rearing her fatherless son.
WHAT
is to be done? On the police side of the crisis, there should be
immediate implementation of the sensible recommendations of President
Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing,
including more community policing; making the use of violence a last
resort; greater transparency and independent investigation of all police
killings; an end to racial profiling; the use of body cameras; reduced
use of the police in school disputes; and fundamental changes in officer
training aimed at greater knowledge of, and respect for, inner-city
neighborhoods.
Accompanying
this should be a drastic reduction in the youth incarceration rate,
which President Obama can make a dent in immediately by pardoning the
many thousands of nonviolent youths who have been unfairly imprisoned
and whose incarceration merely increases their likelihood of becoming
violent.
In
regard to black youth, the government must begin the chemical
detoxification of ghetto neighborhoods in light of the now
well-documented relation between toxic exposure and youth criminality.
Further, there should be an immediate scaling up of the many federal and
state programs for children and youth that have been shown to work:
child care from the prenatal to pre-K stages, such as Head Start and the
nurse-family partnership program; after-school programs to keep boys
from the lure of the street and to provide educational enrichment as
well as badly needed male role models; community-based programs that
focus on enhancing life skills and providing short-term, entry-level
employment; and continued expansion of successful charter school
systems.
And
finally, there is one long-term, fundamental change that can come only
from within the black community: a reduction in the number of kids born
to single, usually poor, women, which now stands at 72 percent. Its
consequences are grim: greatly increased risk of prolonged poverty,
child abuse, educational failure and youth delinquency and violence,
especially among boys, whose main reason for joining gangs is to find a
family and male role models.
As
one gang member told an interviewer working for the sociologist Deanna
Wilkinson: “I grew up as looking for somebody to love me in the streets.
You know, my mother was always working, my father used to be doing his
thing. So I was by myself. I’m here looking for some love. I ain’t got
nobody to give me love, so I went to the streets to find love.”
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