The problem has gotten worse for decades, in good economic times and bad. Others benefited from the tight labor markets of the 1990s. African American men did not. By 2004, more than half of all black men in their 20s were unemployed. And the size of this problem gets consistently underestimated, since employment figures exclude the incarcerated. A problem that seems insoluble is thus rendered invisible.So why, after decades of government subsidies to the black community and numerous efforts, at great expense, to lift the poor out of poverty, is the situation growing worse? Gerson lists several factors which receive blame:
Social scientists debate which are the greatest causes of these problems, but they generally agree on the list. Declining blue-collar employment opportunities. Failing schools. Lingering racism. Absent parents (just 37 percent of black children are raised in two-parent families). The growth of an “oppositional culture” that undermines achievement. Child-support policies that unintentionally penalize honest work (up to half of black males are involved in the child-support system). An incarceration boom that has made ex-offenders less employable.
Some of these trends gather a disturbing momentum. More than 50 percent of prison inmates are parents with minor children — and those children are significantly more likely to be suspended or expelled from school. Issues of economics and values are often impossible to disentangle. “As relative rewards to mainstream legal work of less-educated young black men have declined,” argues Holzer, “so have their own attachment to the mainstream worlds of school and work and to mainstream behaviors and values more broadly.”
Social scientists debate which are the greatest causes of these problems, but they generally agree on the list. Declining blue-collar employment opportunities. Failing schools. Lingering racism. Absent parents (just 37 percent of black children are raised in two-parent families). The growth of an “oppositional culture” that undermines achievement. Child-support policies that unintentionally penalize honest work (up to half of black males are involved in the child-support system). An incarceration boom that has made ex-offenders less employable.Yet none of this sounds quite right. Times were a lot harder for blacks prior to the civil rights era and yet the dysfunctions we see in the black community today did not exist on nearly the scale then that they do now. Urban schools today receive far more aid than they did during the 1930s and 40s. College, food, medical care, and housing are all much more available today than for their great grandparents. Black kids have far more opportunities to succeed today than ever before.
What's different is the welfare culture which has devastated the black family over the last sixty years. Welfare subsidies given to poor young mothers make husbands superfluous and as a result illegitimacy is the norm in poor black (and white) communities. Poverty will never be overcome when entire generations of young males are growing up with no father figure, no positive male role model in their lives to teach them self-discipline, a strong work ethic, respect for women, and love of family.
With no father available to impose behavioral standards and expectations young men gravitate to the street where all the lessons they learn - lessons about manhood, the value of women, the importance of work - are all socially and personally destructive.
When you subsidize something you simply get more of it, and family breakdown and its attendant dysfunctions is what the entitlement culture subsidizes. Little wonder we're getting more of it.