The Crisis in America's Ghettos

From CounterPunch:

In case you didn't know it, what's called a "recession" in White America is called a "depression" in Black America. During much of last year white unemployment held steady at around 8.8 percent. Down the block, though, it was about 12 per cent for Latinos and in Afro neighborhoods across town it averaged 16 per cent. And as unemployment spiked at 24 percent for white teens last year it hit 45 percent for black teens, according to the Kirwan Institute at Ohio State University.

And

Year after year, decade after decade, Washington has cheated black communities out of economic opportunity. Instead of investing in a framework to help blacks advance by their own initiative, the Federal government has flushed billions down the toilets of friendly foreign strongmen such as Egypt's Hosni Mubarek. Black neighborhoods have been the last to get public services from flower gardens to tot lots to street lamps to garbage collection to low-rent housing. They've been the first to have their children pulled off to fill the beds of privatized prisons and fill the ranks that march off to fight Washington's wars of aggression. Their children have gone to the most run-down schools and have been expected to learn to read from raggedy books. The story of dilapidated housing is also well known. As one child in a Washington, D.C., slum not far from the White House told me, "The rats come runnin' through here like express trains."

Back in 1962, the Urban League's Whitney Young pleaded for a "domestic Marshall Plan" that would revitalize the nation's ghettos. But Washington preferred to spend its money on military hardware in Viet Nam. A half century has gone by and not that much has changed. Marc Morial, the UL's president, is hard at work pushing childhood education, trying to stop home foreclosures, and canvassing employers to provide jobs for minorities. The change is that instead of fighting in Viet Nam, Washington is fighting in the Middle East. Same difference.

More here.

The unemployment figures cited above are the official ones, which do not include part time workers who wish that they were working full time, workers working for less than their skill set would earn if the right jobs were available, and workers who have been so demoralized that they have given up looking for work. Throw those groups in and you have much higher figures. Of course, the figures are much much much higher in black ghettos.

Yesterday, I posted about President Obama's apparent impotence on, or utter disinterest in, doing something about the fact that the socioeconomic fates of African-Americans have plunged dramatically during his tenure in the White House. I thought it would be a good idea to follow up with a post showing just how badly most black people have been doing lately, and let me tell you, it's looking pretty bad.

Conservatives, and lots of moderates, like to look at this ongoing crisis from the individual's perspective: all black people have to do is get an education, or start a business, or save their money, get off the drugs, stop having children out of wedlock, act like responsible men, and on and on and on. And because conservatives and moderates control the public discourse, that's what the conversation is about, essentially how black people are lazy and stupid.

Without addressing the racism inherent in this notion, it is obvious to honest observers that chronic poverty and social dysfunction exist within a social context, and totally ignoring that context in order to focus on individual behavior makes for a truly warped understanding of the situation. That is, when you go to shitty schools in crime infested neighborhoods with absolutely no prospects for a career or economic advancement in sight, when your parents have endured the same situation, and their parents before them, and their parents before them, well, that's your lot in life, and bland platitudes such as "go to college" tend to look like total bullshit--indeed, when you're in the ghetto, a life of drugs and crime doesn't seem half bad when compared to spending your entire life working at Burger King.

The only way to break this cycle is with some intense and hardcore social intervention, the likes of which haven't even been discussed since the 60s. Obama's obviously not going to do this.

So who is?

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$