Posted on 04/15/2006 2:42:14 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
The black men I know best are all hard-working, accomplished professionals. They include my brother, a physician, and my buddies — lawyers, college professors, political consultants, journalists. I live in an insular world of middle-class affluence, rarely stumbling into the troubled universe of marginalized underachievers.
Until recently. After a contractor walked off the job, I was assigned the task of helping my mother find laborers to help complete her new house in my hometown, Monroeville, Ala., a small place with a declining textiles industry. The assignment led me into an alternative universe of black men without jobs or prospects or enthusiasm for hard labor.
My younger sister, an architect, appointed her Mexican-born father-in-law, an experienced carpenter (and American citizen), the new general contractor. I was to find men willing to help him paint, lift, scrape, fill, dig. The pay was hardly exorbitant — $6 an hour. But it seemed reasonable for unskilled labor. So I looked among unemployed high school classmates, members of my mother's church and men standing on nearby street corners.
The experience brought me face to face with every unappealing behavior that I'd heard attributed to idle black men but dismissed as stereotype. One man worked a couple of days and never came back. One young man worked 30 minutes before he deserted. Others promised to come to work but never did.
This story is hardly an academic overview. The evidence is anecdotal. But it jibes with the treatises I've read that portray a permanent underclass of black men with criminal records and low educational attainment, with multiple children and little cash.
These are men who can no longer count the military as an option because it doesn't want them. The armed forces seek high school graduates with decent reading and math skills to operate high-tech gizmos. By some estimates, the unemployment rate among black male high school dropouts in their 20s is 72 percent, while the comparable rate among young, uneducated white men is 34 percent, and among Latinos, 19 percent.
How did this happen? I cannot remember seeing such large numbers of idle black men when I was growing up. (Indeed, the unemployment rate in my hometown is higher than it used to be.) Is this the consequence of a dying manufacturing base that has stranded men who otherwise would have had jobs with decent wages and good benefits? And does the wave of illegal immigrants further marginalize uneducated black men?
Go to any construction site and count the black men among the menial laborers. You won't see many. Dig a little deeper and you'll find a web of stereotypes knotted up with some thorny truths. Among other things, employers in the building trades frequently brush aside black men in favor of Latinos — believing that immigrant labor is more reliable and certainly more docile. And every time a black man fails a drug test or disappears after a few days of work, he reinforces the stereotype, making it less likely that the employer will hire other black men. They are not judged as individuals. (I've heard the "I prefer Mexicans" excuse from black contractors as well as white ones.)
Some economists say that native-born laborers — black, white and brown — are simply discouraged by the low wages that so many employers can get away with paying to illegal workers. George Borjas and Lawrence Katz of Harvard University estimate that U.S. high school dropouts would earn as much as 8 percent more if it weren't for Mexican immigration. Of course, 8 percent of not much is still not much.
What if my mother had been offering $20 an hour? Would she have found more willing workers? Probably. But globalization has taught us that the less complex the task, the lower the wage it will attract in a global marketplace. That's especially true if labor is willing to move around. Besides, in my mother's case, the work simply would not have been available. She wouldn't have paid $20 an hour; she couldn't afford it.
My mother's house is finally finished, and she's planning a house-warming party. My sister's father-in-law worked from dawn to dusk, and he found enough willing workers to get the job done. So that part of the tale has a happy ending.
But I'm stuck with a sense of deep unease and frustration over the prospects of so many young black men who are being pushed further and further out to the margins — so far from the mainstream that they no longer identify with the rest of us. That story simply cannot end well.
Stereotypes weren't just hatched out of nothing. Just as a good joke contains a kernal of truth, so too does a stereotype.
When I was a child growing up in rural Virginia, there was an area that we frequently had to drive through to go downtown. The whole area was virtually littered, day or night, with "idle black men". This was in stark contrast to those who lived in our immediate vicinity who were diligent workers who provided for their families and held to same high moral standards prevalent in our own community. Some were college students.
Even though I grew up where there was a lot of racial prejudice, most white folks made a clear distinction between the two classes of "coloreds." One was treated with civility and a certain degree of respect. The other with utter disdain. There was also a difference in how they were spoke of. The former were simply "colored." The latter were "niggers."
For what it's worth, worthless, lazy white trash was just about as ill thought of.
We need to push aside the unions and the bleeding-heart liberals, and go back to the days where even a minor crime got a significant prison term, which was actually served, and during which hard labor was not optional. This huge population of non-working black men is subsisting on a combination of street crime (especially drug sales) and criminal welfare fraud, and there are no penalties for this which they find more unpleasant than doing honest work.
Used to be that if you didn't work, you didn't eat.
Here is a great link.
http://media.wiley.com/product_data/excerpt/74/07879722/0787972274.pdf
You'll need Adobe Acrobat to read it.
Could you define what is a "minor" crime, and which is not?
I don't know about you but I don't want to be locked up forever for say, Freeping politicians.
Thank you for the LINK.
"If sitting next to a white person were a necessity for learing to take place, it'd be a problem of global proportions. There aren't enough white people to go around."
Raise the pay and you will find these men suddenly much less "lazy." For 6 bucks an hour for such work she was lucky she found anyone for any length of time.
This example isn't about a black man, but rather a Hispanic man, but the sociological phenomenon is much the same. Remember little Nixmary Brown, whose stepfather beat her to death, after viciously abusing her for years? Well, he committed a "minor crime" and barely got a slap on the wrist. He was apparently working as a messenger, and an Asian man who was working in some similar capacity accidentally bumped into him or brushed up against him as they were both visiting the same office building. The rage-prone stepfather (whose name I have blissfully forgotten) then followed the Asian man out of the building, assaulted him, punching him and inflicted minor cuts on him with a knife or boxcutter.
Now if people who behaved like this were locked up promptly, and not let out until 1) they'd been in long enough to get the message that this sort of thing is a Big Deal and simply not an option, and 2) been subjected to competent psychiatric examination to determine if they have the basic capacity to control themselves, then innocent little kids like Nixmary wouldn't suffer years of torture and sometimes death, and innocent people walking down the street wouldn't be subject to lethal or maiming muggings, etc. So what was the stepfather's punishment for attacking this Asian man? Well, on paper it was a $50 fine and one day of "community service" -- he didn't pay the fine, and didn't do the service, and the court system never went after him.
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