What’s Our Biggest Problem?
The big brains over at Blackprof have been kicking around a question that’s been nagging at me for the past several weeks: what is/are the most significant problem/s facing African-Americans today? Shavar Jeffries astutely observes that affirmative action as currently implemented at the occupational and higher-ed levels simply isn’t that relevant for most blacks anymore, and as a political issue it’s sucking up more time, money, and effort than it’s worth. Spencer Overton offers up a helpful set of criteria to help determine which community-relevant issues should receive the lion’s share of resources and which should be deprecated. Below the fold, I’ll talk a bit about what I see as our most pressing challenge.
Some of our contributors may disagree with me, but I’d argue that in the aggregate (I hate using the term “the black community”), our most serious problems are cultural. The “culture” umbrella is both comprehensive and convenient, as it covers everything from black homophobia to the hypertrophied male ego implicit in the concept of “realness” to progress-retarding essentialisms to the infamous hair/exercise paradox . . . and so the list continues. A lot of this stuff has roots in the days of slavery and Jim Crow; some of it we introduced ourselves. But the ills of which I speak all have one thing in common: they are largely perpetuated by us with little outside assistance (although we do receive plenty of reinforcement from the media, I would argue that this influence is not decisive in most cases).
Some scholars from the critical/cultural studies tradition are uncomfortable with the “blame the culture” approach on the grounds that it indicts a populace relegated to the bottom rungs of the American socioeconomic ladder. In other words, it “blames the victims” of racism and economic oppression for their problems. I freely admit that this criticism addresses an unavoidable weakness in my position; however, I argue that emphasizing external problems such as racism and the structure of the American economy is impractical at best and counterproductive at worst. Racism has long been observed to exert what’s called an interaction effect with economic status; that means that as blacks’ annual incomes decrease, instances of racism tend to increase, e.g. police brutality, environmental racism, food deserts, etc. disproportionately affect poor people of color. Thus, closing the income gap between blacks and white should address racism’s most egregious incarnations. But anti-capitalist critiques won’t get us there (regardless of their validity), for the simple reason that most Americans rather prefer capitalism to its alternatives, and anyone arguing against it tends to get shut out of any meaningful conversation pretty quickly.
So we find ourselves back at culture as culprit. Some whites celebrate this line of thinking because they think it lets them off the hook, but if you think about it, there’s no reason it has to. Off-color comments, suspicious stares, skittering to the other side of the street when one of us comes up, race-based assumptions that leak into behavior—all of this has to end before whites can wash their hands of the problem, because it reinforces the cultural defects that lay us all low. But the same goes for us as well. We must walk that troublesome tightrope of acknowledging the ugly statistics on crime, poverty, unemployment, and so forth without making unfair assumptions about the individuals we meet. Recalibrating an entire culture is a tough job, but we can start by finding ways to exalt the values we want our young people to adopt, because in too many cases they’re not getting that positive reinforcement from their black peers. Ratcheting up mentoring programs on a massive scale would be an excellent start, as more money for the schools won’t do much until kids start thinking of success outside the entertainment industry as a viable and attractive option.
None of this is new. What I’ve said may strike you as a bit Cosbyesque, and perhaps some of it is. I speak from my own socioeconomic background, which I shared with my siblings: upper-middle-class, integrationist parents who value education, plenty of books in the house, private school, the works. I’m doing my best to argue from the aggregate evidence as I see it; I certainly have no interest in making things more difficult for people who lead lives of greater desperation than I could ever imagine. But as Foucault said on many an occasion, power is perpetuated through many channels other than a nation’s political and social pinnacles, and I believe we ought to start down the road to recovery by fixing those channels which are most accessible to us.
Published on December 7, 2006 at 6:54 am.
7 Comments.
Filed under news/politics, academia, black culture.
