Another Day in the Death of America

by Gary Younge

  Reflecting on Stanley’s short life, she stops answering my questions at a certain point and starts unconsciously defending herself against the pervasive assumption—never explicitly leveled against her, but implicit in all criticism of black parenting in these circumstances—that, somehow, she was at fault for her own son’s death. “I tried so hard with my child,” she says, affirming her struggle to set Stanley on a different path and protect him from the streets. Her tone is melancholic—resigned, defeated, but insistent. “I tried,” she repeats, abrupt sentences emphasizing the battles fought, lost, unnamed, and unrecognized. “I mean I . . . tried. I tried to keep him home. Locked doors. I tried to move. I tried. So I don’t know. There’s nothing you can do. I tried everything . . . to keep him home. I told him, ‘Everybody’s not your friend. They will shoot you down and not think nothing about it.’ But they’re thinking about having fun, hanging out with their friends, going to parties, you can’t tell ’em anything. . . . I tried.”

  The challenges of parenting in the environments in which many black youth grow up are not the kind that get showcased on Supernanny. Criticisms of parenting in these contexts must first acknowledge what it takes to be an effective parent in an area where schools are bad, gangs are rife, drugs and guns are easily available, resources are scarce, and policing is harsh. The stakes are higher, the dangers more prevalent, and therefore the margin of error far narrower. Doriane Miller, a primary-care physician on the South Side of Chicago who also works at the University of Chicago, recalls having lunch with a successful, quiet, young black man who was doing an internship at the university. Explaining how he kept out of trouble, he told her, “I live in this really quiet community where there are a lot of old people. . . . My mom says it’s a way for me to be safe. So I go to school, I go home, I do my homework, and I don’t go out.”

  Miller, whom I met at a cafe in Chicago’s Hyde Park, not far from where the Obamas used to live, explained that Black parents in low-income neighborhoods go to extreme lengths to keep their children safe. It is not simply a matter of setting boundaries, establishing curfews, and making sure they get their homework done. It is about hermetically sealing them from their immediate environment, where the risks are too great to leave anything to chance. “For him, it was that cocoon world,” says Miller, referring to the young intern. “I have a lot of parents and also grandparents who create cocoons for these young people. They transport them everywhere. They don’t get on public transportation. They don’t go out and hang out in the parks. Because it’s just too dangerous.”

  Raising children in America either in or around poverty is very hard. In his 2007 book, Come On, People, entertainer Bill Cosby, whose reputation had not yet been damaged by widespread allegations of sexual misconduct, exhorts black parents to step up and provide the kind of nurturing conditions for their children to thrive. His recommendations are detailed and plentiful: “As soon as a young woman in your care misses a period, remind her to check with a doctor to see if she is pregnant,” he writes. “If you are a substance abuser, think of the children and get help”; “Get the kids out for a walk or a bike ride. Play catch with them. Take them to the playground”; “As the children get older, introduce them to healthy meals with non-fried food, whole grains, lean meat, fish, chicken, and lots of fruits and vegetables”; “If you suspect that your child has ADHD, get that boy or girl to see a mental health professional pronto.” And, “For some kids today, the ‘great outdoors’ is that small space between the car door and the front door. It shouldn’t be that way. The beautiful thing about nature is that it doesn’t care what color you are. Fish don’t discriminate—they don’t want to be caught by anyone.”13

  But these children are not being raised in a society with free medical care, adequate social services, accessible supermarkets selling cheap organic produce, and parents with the time, energy, and wherewithal to make all that happen. It’s hard work being poor, whether you have a job or not. The African proverb “It takes a village to raise a child” became very popular in the United States in the nineties. But most African Americans don’t live in villages. Many live in impoverished, isolated urban communities, and few Americans, it seems, really want to talk honestly and practically about what it takes to “raise a child” in those conditions.

  After a sixteen-year-old was shot dead in Dallas on the day profiled in this book, the first comment at the bottom of an online story came from Marg Bargas, who said, “I have two adult kiddos and there’s no way they would’ve been out walking streets after dark, AND I always knew where they were. I do not blame the victims but all parents could do better.” The boy in question was accompanying his friend on the short walk home to his grandmother’s house after a family night of drinking cocoa, playing Uno, and watching a movie with his mom, friend, and sister. His mother, a loving and attentive parent we’ll meet later in the book, knew exactly where he was; she just couldn’t save him.

  Parks, youth clubs, and other facilities in these areas are either of poor quality or nonexistent. Schools are often of a low standard and either unsafe or policed like prisons—neither of which are conducive to good learning. If a family doesn’t have a car, the museums and other facilities located downtown or in the suburbs are difficult to get to. And even if a family does have a car, such attractions are expensive. On top of all that, parents are often stressed by trying to keep it together in a low-wage economy. I once interviewed a family in Los Angeles with three sons, each of whom had spent time in jail and two of whom were in for life. When I asked the mother where she thought it all went wrong, she said she’d had no idea they’d been involved in crime from an early age because she was holding down two jobs just to feed them.

  Toshiba was not entirely on her own. Mario did his best with Stanley, as did another elementary school teacher she remembered, Ms. Hepfinger. “She would come get him and take him places,” she said. “She really came through.” Toshiba felt she had done everything in her power to keep Stanley out of trouble since he was very young. “Stanley was a handful,” she says. “He just always kept me going. Always kept me busy. I’m always in school. Always everywhere.” Her task sounded like a blend of Sisyphean and Herculean: a relentless, uphill battle of overwhelming scale. “I tried,” she says, her eyes welling and voice cracking.

  A QUOTE ATTRIBUTED VARIOUSLY to Bertolt Brecht and to Harold Coffin says, “Youth is when you blame your troubles on your parents; maturity is when you learn that everything is the fault of the younger generation.” It is a rare generation, of any race or era, that believes their children are more moral, respectful, or diligent than themselves. Legendary anchor Tom Brokaw hailed those who grew up during the Depression and then went on to fight the Second World War as “The Greatest Generation.”14 But I doubt their parents, who were raised at the turn of the century, regarded their offspring as such.

  In this respect, African Americans are no different from anyone else. On May 17, 2004, to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruling that banned segregation, Bill Cosby delivered a speech at an award ceremony for the nation’s oldest civil rights organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Cosby used his address to berate working-class black Americans for their fecklessness in the face of the opportunities made available by the civil rights movement. “Ladies and gentlemen, these people, they opened the doors, they gave us the right, and today . . . in our cities and public schools we have fifty percent drop out. . . . Ladies and gentlemen, the lower economic and lower middle economic people are not holding their end in this deal.”15

  To great applause, he lambasted poor parenting. “I’m talking about these people who cry when their son is standing there in an orange suit. Where were you when he was two? Where were you when he was twelve? Where were you when he was eighteen, and how come you don’t know he had a pistol? . . . These people are not parenting. They’re buying things for the kid. $500 sneakers, for what? They won’t
buy or spend $250 on Hooked on Phonics.”16

  In what became known as the “pound cake speech” he ridiculed a victim mentality that slams police brutality without first addressing personal responsibility. “Looking at the incarcerated, these are not political criminals. . . . People getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of pound cake! Then we all run out and are outraged, ‘The cops shouldn’t have shot him.’ What the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his hand?”17

  His speech was greeted with a standing ovation by his immediate audience but sparked controversy elsewhere. Some praised him for his candor and for using his platform to pry open a conversation that either was not taking place or was taking place behind closed doors. Others condemned him for pouring scorn and ridicule on society’s poorest and most embattled.

  His most strident critic was academic Michael Eric Dyson, who responded with a book, Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?, in which he slammed Cosby for spinning a “thin descriptive web” of “flawed logic.”18 As part of his breathless polemic, Dyson unearthed a study, Morals and Manners Among Negro Americans in 1914, that illustrates how the thrust of Cosby’s observations have remained consistent over time even as the generations have changed. One respondent from Arkansas, almost a century earlier, was quoted in the study as saying, “There is a tendency to permit children to have too many liberties before they are really able to see for themselves or really know what are the consequences that result from too early taking upon themselves the responsibility which belongs to mature years and I believe the parent is wholly in error.” Another from Georgia claims, “I do not think that parents are quite as strict with their children as they were when I was a child.” During the interwar years, a columnist in the Amsterdam News, New York’s principal black newspaper, opined that young blacks who insisted that racism gave them no chance to get ahead should “deport [themselves] with greater decorum and decency on street cars” and stop behaving “like so many jungle apes.”

  Dyson concludes, “The themes that occupy black life now—how well we’re attending to our children, how much of pop culture they should consume, the role of religion in their values education, the training that poor parents need to succeed, the economic and social barriers that prevent their flourishing—have been a consistent worry of black life for at least a couple of centuries.”19

  Toshiba certainly believes that opportunities for youth have declined since she was young. “When we were coming up, even though I stayed in the projects, we always had something to do,” she says. “We had a center to go to. We went to parties. Everybody got home safe. This generation has changed.” Most generations do. But statistics suggest that many such recollections owe more to nostalgia for the past or despair about the present than to what actually happened then or is happening now. The murder rate in Charlotte today, for example, is close to half of what it was when Mario was Stanley’s age.20 Rapes, robberies, assaults, burglaries, and car thefts have nosedived by a similar rate.21 In other words, it’s likely that fewer partygoers were getting home safe in Toshiba’s day than they are now.

  According to the Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Campaign of North Carolina, when Mario was Stanley’s age, the pregnancy rate for teens aged fifteen to nineteen in Mecklenburg County, which includes Charlotte, was more than double what it is now.22 Meanwhile, the rate of black teenage pregnancies in the county fell by 39 percent between 2007 and 2012 and continues to drop each year.23 Most of the ills associated with the most acute and calamitous moral declines—shootings, crime, teen pregnancy—are actually improving.

  It’s not difficult to see where people get the impression that trends are heading in the opposite direction. Many of the assumptions that inform public commentary about black life are, in fact, misinformed. Take just two examples. It’s widely assumed that African Americans are more likely to take drugs than any other racial group. That’s not true. According to the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, whites are considerably more likely than blacks to have ever used cocaine, hallucinogens, marijuana, LSD, stimulants like crystal meth, and pain relievers like oxycontin. While African-Americans were more likely to have used some of those drugs in the last 30 days, the only drug African Americans were more likely to have ever tried was crack.24

  It’s also widely assumed that black men routinely abandon their children. That’s also not true. Black people are less likely to marry than whites, and black men are less likely to live with their partners. But according to the National Center for Health Statistics, when children are under age five, black fathers are more likely to feed or eat meals with them, bathe, diaper, or dress them, and read to them daily than fathers in any other racial group, whether they live with their kids or not. As their children get older, black fathers are more likely to take children to and from activities daily, talk to them about their day, and help them with their homework. Black men are also disproportionately more likely to be single parents than dads from other racial groups.25

  The one aspect of black life that has changed dramatically since Toshiba and Mario were Stanley’s age is incarceration rates. But that has less to do with a change in behavior (over a generation crime has gone down) than a change in policy (during that same time span prison numbers have shot up).26

  These faulty assumptions matter because they feed into the notion that it is deficiencies in black culture in general and black parenting in particular that are responsible for the shootings, that on some level the shootings reflect the collective death wish of a community incapable of and unwilling to care for its young. So pervasive and ingrained are these views that the truth ceases to matter—they become scripts that many Americans repeat reflexively, and often uncritically, with all the confidence endowed by fact. The scripts are so ingrained that the very people denigrated by them recite them as if by rote.

  OF THE TEN CHILDREN covered in this book, seven were black, two were Hispanic, and one was white. All were working class and male. For now, if only to lighten the load on Toshiba’s shoulders, let us focus on two key facets of American society.

  First, America is not a meritocracy. “Belief in America’s essential fairness, that we live in a land of equal opportunity, helps bind us together,” writes Joseph Stiglitz in The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future. “That, at least, is the American myth, powerful and enduring. Increasingly, it is just that—a myth. Of course, there are exceptions, but for economists and sociologists what matters are not the few success stories but what happens to most of those at the bottom and in the middle.”27

  Indeed, with each passing year, America is becoming more class-ridden and plutocratic. The gap between rich and poor grows, and the likelihood that the poor will become rich diminishes. Those who do move up expend great energy and money and don’t get very far. Poor kids who work hard and go to college still fare worse than rich kids who did badly in school.

  Second, America is racist. Not all Americans. But America—its judiciary, economy, and social fabric. How could it not be? It’s only been fifty years since it ascended from an essentially apartheid state and African Americans secured the vote and their civil rights. Much has changed since then. Mixed-race relationships are at an all-time high,28 black voter turnout is on a par with white,29 and, of course, there is a black president.

  But racism is a hardy virus that mutates to adapt to the body politic in which it is embedded. For all the ways in which America imagines itself color-blind, the statistics suggest otherwise. African Americans are six times more likely to be incarcerated, twice as likely to be unemployed, and almost three times more likely to live in poverty than whites.30 The discrepancy between black and white wealth and income is greater now than it was at the time of the March on Washington in 1963,31 and schools in the South are more segregated now than they have been in forty years.32

  Michael Harrington, author of The Other America, argues that once the poor are born to the w
rong parents, in the wrong part of the country, and in the wrong racial group, all but a few are doomed. “Once that mistake has been made,” he writes, “they could be paragons of will and morality, but most of them would never even have had a chance to get out of the other America.”33

  America is not unique in this regard. Virtually every Western nation has racial and class hierarchies, and in much of the world inequalities are widening. But there are few countries where class distinctions are regarded as anathema to the nation’s core belief system and where racial disparities are simultaneously so brazenly displayed and denied.

  BEFORE CONTINUING, IT IS necessary to stop and frisk one last straw man who inevitably prowls any argument about structural inequality: personal responsibility. I have never heard anyone claim that individuals should not take responsibility for what they do. But lest there be any confusion: We all have free will. We all have agency. We all must take responsibility for what we do. Our life trajectories are not predetermined. These are essential tenets of our basic humanity. The fact that someone is poor or black or both does not give him free license to behave in a certain way or relieve her from the consequences of her actions. I was raised black and poor (though in England, where race and class interact differently), and I have two black American children. I was raised to take responsibility for what I do, and that’s the way I raise my kids.