[Dean's World] Dave Price: How To Create And Perpetuate An Underclass

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Posted by Dave Price:
How To Create And Perpetuate An Underclass
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1185218869.shtml


   A [1]great piece at City Journal by Myron Magnet. Some fascinating
   snippets (amphases added):

     The legacy of slavery and racism isnât the reason, economist Thomas
     Sowell has long argued. That legacy didnât stop blacks from raising
     themselves up after Emancipation. By World War I, Sowellâs data
     show, northern blacks scored higher on armed-forces tests than
     southern whites. After World War II and the GI Bill, black
     education and income levels rose sharply. It was only in the
     mid-1960s that a century of black progress seemed to make a sudden
     U-turn, a reversal that long-past events didnât cause. Beginning
     around 1964, the rates of black high school graduation, workforce
     participation, crime, illegitimacy, and drug use all turned sharply
     in the wrong direction. While many blacks continued to move
     forward, a sizable minority solidified into an underclass, defined
     by self-destructive behavior that all but guaranteed failure.
     ...
     And what results? Over 16 percent of black men have been in prison
     (and 22.4 percent of those between 38 and 42 years old), blacks
     account for about 40 percent of the nationâs entire prison and jail
     population, and, extrapolating from its 2001 numbers, the Bureau of
     Justice Statistics estimates that nearly a third of black men will
     go to prison during their lifetimes. In New York, home of the
     nationâs largest African-American community, blacks commit 68.5
     percent of all the violent crime, Heather Mac Donald calculates,
     even though they compose only 24 percent of the population. Itâs
     hard to argue that poverty explains these numbers, since blacks, 12
     percent of the U.S. population, committed 48.5 percent of the
     nationâs rapes and sexual assaults in 2005.
     ...
     In ghetto neighborhoods, part of underclass culture is an
     anti-âsnitchingâ code that stigmatizes any cooperation with the
     police, even to help them find the murderer of your friend. Rapper
     Camâron told 60 Minutes that he wouldnât inform the cops if he knew
     that his next-door neighbor was a serial killer, and in fact he
     refused to cooperate with police after he himself had been shot and
     wounded. It would violate his code of ethics, he says, and hurt his
     business. Even a group of earnest, well-behaved young teens in
     parochial-school uniforms solemnly told BET that theyâd never
     snitch. Consequently, a criminologist told 60 Minutes, while the
     national rate for solving murders is 60 percent, itâs in the single
     digits in many inner-city neighborhoods, in some of which, he says,
     âwe are on the verge ofâor maybe we have already lostâthe rule of
     law.â

   This isn't really a racial issue; there's nothing in any race's genes
   that grants them any significant advantage or disadvantage, or
   controls their behavior to any real extent. It's a question of
   culture. Racists of every race try to conflate the two, for their own
   self-serving reasons, but the reality is we can all choose how to
   behave and whom to emulate -- and public policies can provide strong
   incentives or disincentives which influence decisions about whether we
   behave in beneficial or harmful ways.

References

   1. http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_3_black_america.html