Michael Brown death illustrates need to rescue urban youth
Updated 7:50 pm, Friday, August 15, 2014
One of the major factors contributing to the stressful environment for young black males (and other minority youth) continues to be the persistent pattern of police harassment, misconduct and brutality toward these youth. As Michelle Alexander has noted in her recent book, "The New Jim Crow," the United States has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world; this seems to be a deliberate strategy to deal with black males who are frequently viewed as a threat to the social order.
In 1988, I published the book, "Young, Black and Male in America: An Endangered Species," delineating and analyzing the multiple social problems of black youth in American society: high rates of school dropouts, unemployment, delinquency, drug use and incarceration.
These problems were then, as now, exacerbated by single-parent families, poor schools, inferior housing and lack of access to social services and health care. During the past 25 years, these socio-environmental factors and related social problems have shown very little improvement, despite sporadic, short-term intervention efforts.
The tragic death of Michael Brown, a college-bound black male in Ferguson, Mo., is just the latest example in the past 25 years of brutal beatings and killings of unarmed black males by the police, from the highly publicized cases of Rodney King in Los Angeles, Amadou Diallo and Abner Louima in New York City in the 1990s to the more recent killings of Eric Garner on Staten Island and Ezell Ford, a mentally impaired 25-year-old in Los Angeles on Monday.
In the first three cases, predominantly white juries were unwilling to convict the police despite overwhelming evidence of excessive force and intentional culpability to harm these victims. Each incident had its unique set of circumstances, yet it is important to examine the phenomenon of violent confrontations between the police and young black males in a broader sociohistorical context.
As these black youth grow up in a society where they are targeted from birth with low expectations for success in schools, negative stereotypes in the community, and differential treatment by representatives of all major social institutions, much of their behavior can be understood as a fairly rational response to these recurrent social messages.
By the time they reach early adolescence, many have experienced failure in school, problems with social agencies, rejection by adults in authority roles, and harassment by police for "stop and frisk." It should not be surprising that they begin to react externally with anger and hostility to these frequent negative social interactions, thus inevitably provoking confrontations with parents, teachers, social workers and the police.
However, internally, many of these youth develop feelings of frustration, hopelessness and despair, leading them to seek alternative identities and illegitimate sources of income, such as gang membership, drug dealing or illegal gambling. If they can't gain recognition and succeed in the regular economy, they will gravitate to the "underground economy," setting themselves up for a lifetime of skirmishes with the police and cycles of incarceration.
Given this vicious cycle of deprivation, despair, confrontation with police, and incarceration, what are the remedies? Demographic trends indicate that minority youth (African American, Asian, Latino and Native American) will constitute a majority of all youth in the United States by 2018; the total minority population will become the majority of the nation by 2043.
As the majority white population ages and declines in the next 30 years, the implications of these demographic trends are quite significant. If our society does not change course rather quickly to develop long-term solutions to these problems, there will not be a well-educated and well-trained labor force to fill the increasingly technological jobs of the future.
Many experts have advocated for a Marshall Plan for America's inner cities in order to rebuild their infrastructure, improve the schools, create sustainable jobs, build affordable housing, and provide an array of social, health and recreational services.
However, the politicians have routinely complained that these programs would be too costly and voters don't want to pay higher taxes for such ambitious social programs. Yet it is very ironic that in the past decade our government has spent billions of dollars on unsuccessful wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we are currently spending millions to rescue tribal minorities in Iraq, sending medical aid to Ebola patients in Africa, and supporting military conflicts throughout the Middle East and Eastern Europe. It is past time that we rescue our own urban areas from poverty, blight and dysfunction.
I would suggest that it is not only a political and moral imperative to invest in our inner cities in order to improve life options for black and other minority youth and their families, but it is also an economic imperative to reverse the deteriorating cycle for these youth.
If America hopes to remain the most vibrant and innovative nation in the world, our political, business and educational leaders must collaborate in building a national consensus to transform the rhetoric of equal opportunity and equal justice for all into realistic possibilities, policies and programs for these youth to succeed and enter the mainstream of American society.