A few days ago, there was some agreement between CNN’s Don Lemon, Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, and conservative Crystal Wright. In a nutshell, Don Lemon mentioned that there are a host of issues taking place in the Black community and there are five things they should do:
· Stop wearing their pants off their butts
· Stop using the "N" word
· Stop throwing down trash in the neighborhood
· Get an education
· Stop having babies, just because it’s possible to have them
While these issues are very legitimate, Don, Bill, and Crystal all miss a few underlying issues. Blacks are disproportionately over-represented in lower class neighborhoods. Therefore, the schools have a greater probability of being highly understaffed with fewer resources, resulting in further school quality decline. It’s very easy to tell kids to “get an education” when many of the kids are not receiving quality early childhood education, which is compounded when they reach later grades. These are issues that are not usually felt in the more middle-to-upper class neighborhoods because those schools have exceedingly better resources.
Of course, I don’t want to pretend as though there is no personal responsibility in this. Some Blacks are making the intentional decision to forgo an education for an undesirable lifestyle. However, this is not the issue for the majority of inner-city impoverished Blacks. Clearly there are issues with the educational system if this is a fairly consistent issue in most inner-cities.
I agree with Don, Bill, and Crystal about wearing pants correctly, stop using the "N" word, no longer destroying the neighborhood with trash, and not having babies for the heck of it. As mentioned earlier, there is personal accountability in many of these issues. However, there is also a structural issue that extends to a system that is not designed for certain people to succeed. When was the last time you heard elected officials discuss the poor? You hear “middle-class,” “entrepreneurs,” “wealthy,” and those types of terms. You don’t hear anything about attempting to focus on problems felt by those living in poverty, where Don’s 5 points are disproportionately more likely to occur.
For instance, we have a welfare system that is designed to perpetuate the cycle of poverty, an educational system that systematically provides lower quality education to those in poverty, a lack of access to quality jobs to those in poverty, a revolving door to incarceration, etc. All of these factors are inter-related to Don Lemon’s 5 points. While I see the point that the three people mentioned were attempting to make, they ignore the structural societal issues that make it difficult to address multiple issues. The three of them take a very simplistic view to a complicated problem.
These problems were couched in a conversation of “Black-on-Black” crime, which is a foolish term. As a point of reference, most crime is intra-racial. In other words, people are more likely to commit offenses against others of the same race. Crime is usually committed in the areas in which people live, and given that many of our neighborhoods are dominated by a particular race, crime is mostly intra-racial. Therefore, “White-on-White” crime is an issue… “Hispanic-on-Hispanic” crime is an issue. Are you seeing the logic of the foolishness here?
Our “educated” talking heads and political pundits need to look deeper with their positions. The surface-level thinking is presenting an image that contributes to the negative portrayal of underprivileged groups, especially Blacks and Hispanics/Latinos. Before assigning individual blame, doesn’t it make sense for our society to remove the structural inequalities that are allowing these individual “choices” to take place?
