Great Whitlock Column

Wait, you mean Whitlock might be full of shit?

Get out.

 

I'm just glad he cited that stupid ass "super man dat ho" song...

Anybody else sick of everyone in the bar doing a fucking line dance to that song?

 

I thought about that phrase the moment I saw the first picture of one of the kids arrested ... and noticed he was Hispanic.

 

i didn't get a chance to see the other three. did you?

 

You make a valid point in citing these stats. What we don't know, however, is how much more the black-on-black rate of violence could have dropped sans the hip-hop influence. Maybe the answer is zero, but we just don't know.

 

Photo gallery from Miami Herald

 

Tell me some of you really aren't naive enough to think if there were no hip-hop, there would be no black-on-black crime?

This issue has been in play for nearly three decades, long before "superman dat ho" ever was a reality. Clearly, the biggest issue here is economic disenfranchisement, not what's on a 50 Cent record. If you don't have a job, aren't going to school, aren't from a stable home and dwell in a bad neighborhood, crime becomes an appealing career path. These are young men, who for a multitude of reasons, were never put in positions of success. The crack epidemic, dwindling manufacturing industries, teen pregnancy...you name it.

Hip hop certainly isn't blameless, of course. But I know plenty of people -- myself included -- who grew up listening to Dre, NWA, 'Pac, Biggie, 2 Live Crew, and came out just fine. Where hip hop has its most dangerous influence is on those who don't have more sound realities to counter-balance what they're hearing in a song or on television.

As food for thought, here's an article that was passed around the NABJ Sports Task force listserve that I felt was especially accurate and appropriate in the discussion.

Class, wealth divide
African-Americans

Some prosper, others do not; history suggests some reasons

Henry Louis Gates Jr .

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Last week, the Pew Research Center published the astonishing finding that 37
percent of African-Americans polled felt that "blacks today can no longer be thought of as a single
race because of a widening class divide.

From Frederick Douglass to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., perhaps the most fundamental
assumption in the history of the black community has been that Americans of African descent,
the descendants of the slaves, either because of shared culture or shared oppression, constitute "a mighty race," as Marcus Garvey often put it.

"By a ratio of 2 to 1," the report says, "blacks say that the values of poor and middle-class blacks
have grown more dissimilar over the past decade. In contrast, most blacks say that the values of
blacks and whites have grown more alike."

A prediction unheeded

The message here is that it is time to examine the differences between black families on either
side of the divide for clues about how to address an increasingly entrenched inequality. We can't
afford to wait any longer to address the causes of persistent poverty among most black families.


This class divide was predicted long ago, and nobody wanted to listen. At a conference marking
the 40th anniversary of Daniel Patrick Moynihan's infamous report on the problems of the black
family, I asked the conservative scholar James Q. Wilson and the liberal scholar William Julius
Wilson if ours was the generation presiding over an irreversible, self-perpetuating class divide
within the African-American community.

"I have to believe that this is not the case," the liberal Wilson responded with willed optimism.
"Why go on with this work otherwise?" The conservative Wilson nodded. Yet, no one could imagine how to close the gap.

In 1965, when Moynihan published his report, suggesting that the out-of-wedlock birthrate and the number of families headed by single mothers, both about 24 percent, pointed to dissolution of the social fabric of the black community, black scholars and liberals dismissed it. They attacked its author as a right-wing bigot.

Now we'd give just about anything to have those statistics back. Today, 69 percent of black babies are born out of wedlock, while 45 percent of black households with children are headed by women.

How did this happen? As many theories flourish as pundits -- from slavery and segregation to the decline of factory jobs, crack cocaine, draconian drug laws and outsourcing. But nobody knows for sure.


Property ownership is key

I have been studying the family trees of 20 successful African-Americans, people in fields ranging from entertainment and sports (Oprah Winfrey, the track star Jackie Joyner-Kersee) to space travel and medicine (the astronaut Mae Jemison and Ben Carson, a pediatric neurosurgeon).

And I've seen an astonishing pattern: 15 of the 20 descend from at least one line of former slaves who managed to obtain property by 1920 -- a time when only 25 percent of all African-American families owned property.

Ten years after slavery ended, Constantine Winfrey, Oprah's great-grandfather, bartered eight bales of cleaned cotton (4,000 pounds) that he picked on his own time for 80 acres of prime bottomland in Mississippi.

(He also learned to read and write while picking all that cotton.)


Sometimes the government h e l p e d : W h o o p i G o l d b e r g' s great-great-grandparents received
their land through the Southern Homestead Act.

"So my family got its 40 acres and a mule," she exclaimed when I showed her the deed, referring
to the rumor that freed slaves would receive land that had been owned by their masters.


Well, perhaps not the mule, but 104 acres in Florida. If there is a meaningful correlation between
the success of accomplished African-Americans today and their ancestors' property ownership, we can only imagine how different black-white relations would be had -- 40 acres and a mule -- really been official government policy in the Reconstruction South.

Ending poverty


The historical basis for the gap between the black middle class and underclass shows that ending
discrimination, by itself, would not eradicate black poverty and dysfunction. We also need intervention to promulgate a middle-class ethic of success among the poor, while expanding opportunities for economic
betterment.

Perhaps Margaret Thatcher, of all people, suggested a program that might help. In the 1980s, she turned 1.5 million residents of public housing projects in Britain into homeowners. It was certainly the most liberal thing
Thatcher did.

Perhaps progressives should borrow a leaf from her playbook.

The telltale fact is that the biggest gap in black prosperity isn't in income, but in wealth. According
to a study by the economist Edward N. Wolff, the median net worth of non-Hispanic black households in 2004 was only $11,800 -- less than 10 percent that of non-Hispanic white households, $118,300.


Perhaps a bold and innovative approach to the problem of black poverty -- one floated during the Civil War but never fully put into practice -- would be to look at ways to turn tenants into homeowners.

Sadly, in the wake of the subprime mortgage debacle, an enormous number of houses are being repossessed. But for the black poor, real progress may come only once they have an ownership stake in American society.

People who own property feel a sense of ownership in their future and their society. They study, save, work, strive and vote. And people trapped in a culture of tenancy do not.


Hold a rally for reading

The sad truth is that the civil rights movement cannot be reborn until we identify the causes of black suffering, some of them self-inflicted.

Why can't black leaders organize rallies around responsible sexuality, birth within marriage, parents reading to their children and students staying in school and doing homework? Imagine Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson distributing free copies of Virginia Hamilton's collection of folktales "The People Could Fly"
or Dr. Seuss, and demanding that black parents sign pledges to read to their children.


What would it take to make inner-city schools havens of learning?

John Kenneth Galbraith once told me that the first step in reversing the economic inequalities that blacks face is greater voter participation, and I think he was right. Politicians will not put forth programs aimed at the
problems of poor blacks while their turnout remains so low.


If the correlation between land ownership and success of African-Americans argues that the chasm between classes in the black community is partly the result of social forces set in motion by the dismal failure of 40 acres and a mule, then we must act decisively.

If we do not, ours will be remembered as the generation that presided over a permanent class divide, a slow but inevitable process that began with the failure to give property to the people who had once been defined as
property.

 

Who on earth said THAT?

Pressmurphy asked how much lower the rate could have been without the hip-hop influence . . . and then added "maybe zero" (as in there would have been zero change, which is what you are saying).

Sometimes people come on here just looking for a fight or looking to be insulted.

 

Far be it from me to refute Gates Jr., but loss of the middle class, wealth divide isn't specific to African Americans and blacks. Loss of manufacturing and textile positions are not specific to African Americans and blacks. Are they factors, of course. Are they valid arguments, of course.
But, using historical anecdotes for argument support often veils the current issue.
I'm non-white. First-generation educated. Father worked a menial factory job for 33 years. Mother cleaned homes to make ends meet. I attended school on a baseball/academic scholarship and my brother a National Merit Scholar.
I would rather examine family structure rather than employment opportunity or education or music or neighborhood or the teachers or the schools.
I firmly believe, blame is easy until you happen upon a reflection.

 

Whitlock is a fat bitch fraud. Oprah's still trying to get her couch fixed.

 

fish --
Using historical anecdotes and using my-life-is-the-cosmos argumentation can be equally dangerous. What would have happened to your family if that factory job of your Dad's didn't exist? Or if none of the people whose houses your Mom cleaned -- was my grandmother's gig, too, BTW -- lived close enough for her to get to work there? Both are dynamics in play now that weren't in play when earlier generations were growing. The effect of generational poverty on family structure -- and the consequences of that breakdown -- are well known. Which came first is chicken-and-egg. Let's work on both.

 

Another take on the same issue:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/11/28/race_poll/