Black Men: Plights

Hey you guys, I am going to post two articles from the same writer. It is in regard to the "plight" of the black man. As most of you know, I dab into politics and social issues, with the goals of breaking into the political field. And, all of you know, I do support lower taxes, less government involvement in our personal lives, education accountability with the use vouchers, military, and lessening the welfare state.

The articles are interesting because the writer is asking, "Hey, where the black men at?" The funny thing is that he answers his own question and really didn't need to ask "where" but "why." If you ask anyone on the street, Where are the black men? I'm pretty sure the answer you'll get and probably the answer you'll give is: prison or in the cemetary. The one thing that stood out was that black men are in the military, as if that was a bad thing, "prison, cemetary or military?" If a man is voluntarily serving in the military, doesn't that mean he IS doing something for himself and if he has a family SOMETHING for his family. But this is not what I wanted to show. I wanted you all to see where "racism" is listed on the possibility of why black men are joining the whales and the California condor as an endangered species.

First Article:

Black Men: Missing
By Salim Muwakkil
As we limp into the 21st century, a gender gap is rending the fabric of the entire African-American community.
The overwhelming absence of Black men has always been one of the most distressing facts about life in America’s public housing developments. In Chicago, for example, black women are the vast majority of lease holders in the Chicago Housing Authority; men are like ghosts in the projects.
Besieged by poverty, disease, violence and mass incarceration, African-American men are conspicuously missing in action. At one time, this gender imbalance afflicted mostly lower-income neighborhoods. But as we limp into the 21st century, that gender gap is rending the fabric of the entire African-American community.
“Where have all the Black men gone?” asked the headline on a story by Jonathan Tilove for The Star Ledger in Newark, N.J. The article examined the New Jersey city of East Orange, where there are 37 percent more adult women than men. Tilove wrote that most of the missing men are dead, and many others are locked up or in the military.
“Worst yet,” he wrote, “the gender imbalance in East Orange is not some grotesque anomaly. It’s a vivid snapshot of a very troubling reality in black America.” Tilove noted that nationwide adult black women outnumber black men by 2 million. With nearly another million black men in prison or the military, the reality in most black communities across the country is an even greater imbalance—a gap of 2.8 million, or 26 percent, according to Census Bureau figures for 2002. The comparable disparity for whites was 8 percent.
In some cities the gap is even higher. There are more than 30 percent more black women than men in Baltimore, New Orleans, Chicago and Cleveland. In New York City the number is 36 percent and in Philadelphia, 37 percent. As the black population ages, the gap widens. “By the time people reach their 60s in East Orange, there are 47 percent more black women than men,” Tilove wrote.
This growing gender gap has enormously negative implications for the future of black America. And there are nuances in the statistics that make the prognosis even bleaker. For example, among well-educated, professional black women—a group that is growing rapidly—the gap is a chasm. Surely, that progress for black women is good news that shouldn’t be overlooked. However, as black women advance, black men are falling even further behind.
In fact, the more successful a black woman becomes, the more likely she will end up alone, Walter Farrell, a University of North Carolina professor, said in a March 2002 Washington Monthly article. As a result, professional black women are having fewer children, meaning that a growing percentage of black children are being born into less educated, less affluent families.
The recent edition of the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education warns that “a large and growing gender gap in African-American higher education has become a troublesome trend casting a shadow on overall black education progress.” The Journal reports that in 2001, there were 1,095,000 black women enrolled in institutions of higher education and only 604,000 black men. The gap, which is even wider at professional schools, has increased since 2001.
It’s also important to note that despite unprecedented gains, black women are the fastest growing group of inmates in the nation’s prisons. And they still bear the brunt of urban poverty as single parents in the commercial wastelands that too often are their neighborhoods.
Unless we make some dramatic changes in the way our society tracks black men, all of these conditions will worsen, with increasingly nightmarish consequences. The primary culprit is the tracking of black men into a criminal justice system that a growing number of critics have dubbed the “prison-industrial complex.” Many are there because of the so-called war on drugs and its accompanying mandatory minimum sentences.
The tracking process begins in elementary school, where African-American males routinely are assumed to be academically deficient and then demonized for their angry reactions to those biased assumptions. Resentful of a system that blithely dismisses their potential, many black boys eventually become alienated from scholastic activity. A recent study found that only 38 percent of Chicago’s black males have graduated from high school since 1995.
These uneducated youth are the raw material of the prison-industrial complex. Lacking marketable skills, they flock to the ruthless underground economy of drug commerce where they are easily siphoned into the “injustice” system—victims of the drug war. Some also become victims of lethal gun violence—homicide remains the leading cause of death for young black men.
Unless we strenuously intervene to better the prospects of African-American men, who incidentally comprise about one-eighth of the earth’s entire population of prison inmates, we may just be accomplices to a process of genocide in our own country.

Second Article by same writer:
Black Men: The Crisis Continues
By Salim Muwakkil
A confluence of ills has long conspired to marginalize black men and track them into a trajectory of failure.
According to the New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh, the Bush administration seems poised to bomb Iran and drag us further into the pit of international infamy. Bush has admitted he declassified data to damn critics and that he’s wiretapping Americans at his own discretion.
Thousands, perhaps millions, of Latinos demonstrated in the streets of America this spring, forcing this nation to take note of an awakening giant. Even as war drums rumble in the oil-rich Middle East, oil-rich Nigeria is rising as the new focus of U.S. belligerence. My mouth waters at the prospect of tackling some of those issues. But that will have to wait.
Instead, I must return to a subject that is depressingly familiar: African Americans are in the midst of a social crisis that threatens the very viability of the black community. The core of this crisis is the deepening plight of black men.
Although black men are conspicuously successful in many arenas of American life, they are facing a social emergency. Throughout America, but especially in the inner cities, African-American men are disproportionately surrounded by poverty, violence, mass incarceration and disease. A confluence of ills has long conspired to marginalize black men and track them into a trajectory of failure.
But a flurry of recent studies reveal that their decline in socio-economic status is more rapid than previously thought, and prompted the New York Times to publish a front page story in late March on their deepening plight. “Black men in the United States face a far more dire situation than is portrayed by common employment and education statistics,” reads the lead sentence.
The problems afflicting black men have been well-charted both in academia and in the streets, so this information is not exactly new. In fact, African-American activists have long quipped that black men were an endangered species. As these new studies reveal, we still have failed to summon adequate concern for the wide scope of these problems, which I believe have now reached emergency status.
The Times quoted Ronald B. Mincy, professor of social work at Columbia University, who said, “There’s something very different happening with young black men, and it’s something we can no longer ignore.” Mincy is also the editor of Black Males Left Behind, a 2006 book that attempts to quantify the extent of their decline. “Over the last two decades, the economy did great,” he told the Times, “and low-skilled women, helped by public policy, latched onto it. But young black men were falling farther back.”
Mincy favors increased public investment into the education of black men as the most promising strategy. But because of the current political climate, he has few hopes the government will implement such a policy.
The various studies outlined in the Times piece reached sobering conclusions about how we’ve previously understated the extent of black men’s problems. Among other things, the new studies found:
More than half of all black men in the nation’s inner cities drop out of high school.
More than 70 percent of black male high school dropouts in their 20s were out of work in 2004.
By their mid-30s, 60 percent of high school dropouts have served time in jail.
The scholars cite many reasons for this deterioration. Primary among them are bad schools, absent parents, racism, structural changes in the economy and a subculture that glorifies gangsterism.
The Times piece is just the latest in several articles that have brought attention to this growing crisis and its many implications. Perhaps the most distressing implication is the growing gender imbalance between black men and black women.
The toll of inner-city life is serving to de-populate many black communities of its men. I wrote about this problem last year in a column, “Black Men: Missing,” that examined these gender imbalances. Homicidal violence, life-style morbidity, environmental hazards and mass incarceration are depleting the ranks of African-American males at an alarming rate, I wrote. This gap threatens to destabilize the black community in ways no outside force has managed to in the entire history of African Americans, most of whom are the progeny of enslaved Africans.
In most of America’s cities, black women outnumber black men by large margins and the gap grows wider as women become more educated. But even as they prosper, black women still withstand the worst of urban poverty as single parents in their disinvested neighborhoods.
I’d like to focus on other subjects, but the ramifications of the current crisis are too broad and deep, with ominous implications for the nation at large.