Black Lives Should Matter Long Before They're Lost
It's easier to rally people with an injustice and a clear and appealing villain to point to than with prescriptive measures that are likely to help others avoid similar terrible outcomes.
This is especially true when prescriptive measures involve advising people to take responsibility and to take a hard look at problems in a community that could be changed, in part, with more responsible behaviors.
I've blogged previously about the problem of out-of-wedlock births and single motherhood in the black community.
Jason L. Riley at the WSJ takes a different tack, but is still looking at the framework of society for a lot of black people with the question in the subhead of his piece -- "why not focus on bad schools and job-killing regulations?"
On a certain level, the decision by BLM activists to single out policing as a major obstacle to black advancement has always defied comprehension. Police shootings have fallen dramatically in recent decades. In New York City, for example, cops shot 314 people in 1971, 93 of them fatally. In 2015, New York police shot 23 people, killing eight. Which means that police shootings and fatalities in the nation's most populous city have declined by more than 90% over the past 4½ decades.A 2016 paper released by Harvard economist Roland Fryer examined the use of force by police since 2000 in some of the country's largest urban areas and found that "blacks are 23.8 percent less likely to be shot at by police relative to whites."
In theory, there is no reason these activists couldn't play a more useful role in helping blacks overcome obstacles and take advantage of opportunities that were unavailable to previous generations. But that would mean abandoning nonsensical narratives that scapegoat law enforcement for high black crime rates and instead picking more substantive fights with fellow progressives.
Why not side with the hundreds of thousands of black children nationwide who linger on waiting lists for charter schools that have a proven record of narrowing the achievement gap? Why side with progressive politicians who stunt the growth of charters out of deference to powerful teachers unions that oppose school choice?
...Of course, improving educational and employment prospects for the black underclass would lower black crime rates and thus go a long way toward reducing encounters with police, the goal that is so near and dear to the Black Lives Matter movement. It's a win-win, but first the activists have to decide whether the real goal is to help black people or to help themselves.
Important point there at the end -- one I think few people consider (thanks to how race issues are now the third rail of discussion and debate today). I sometimes get hundreds of retweets and shares of a blog post, but never those about race. At least a few of those must be at least a little interesting to people, but again, major no-go area.
Oh, and on the job-killing regulations, consider how the government is trying to put moms who earn money caring for others' children in their homes out of business. As I blogged previously:
Mothers have taken care of other mothers' children throughout human history, usually without death or horrible things happening. There should be no reason why a mother cannot be the judge of whether the person she wishes to leave her child with is a safe bet, rather than having the state intervene.This regulation also keeps poor women who are mothers from having an income by taking in children and caring for them. Again, women have done this throughout human history. Yes, there's always a chance a child will be injured -- maybe in the parent's own home. But a child can still be injured in that *perfectly regulated* hothouse of government regulation. Regulation is mostly keeping the childcare "industry" safe from those who'd like to enter without going to college and jumping through 26 hoops.
Well, here we go again. You want to make money, start a business. It's dishonest to compare past with current practice because watching the neighbor kids was not done for money decades ago.
It doesn't matter what you do with schools when a culture thinks learning is "acting white" and thus contemptible, although many offer endless excuses.
Radwaste at June 29, 2017 11:08 PM
Only racists think people can be personally respobible
lujlp at June 30, 2017 12:36 AM
Regulations fall most heavily on the poorest. The big example being discussed is things like hair braiding or cutting hair or doing nails--why do such things require a cosmetology license when you can rise in business (my friend is a VP in an international corp with only a high school degree), real estate, or politics without any degree or license. While well-intentioned, minimum wage laws and detailed regs for opening a business make it impossible for a poor person to get started on their own. Set up free enterprise zones in the poor parts of town, where you allow decrepit store fronts, dirty restaurants, and unlicensed businesses. As these prosper, they will become cleaner, nicer looking, safer, but currently they can't even get started. The regs for opening a restaurant are insane. I personally am willing to eat in a dirty restaurant because I never get food poisoning--if you are paranoid just don't eat there.
cc at June 30, 2017 8:35 AM
In Freakinomics, they compare they results if kids who had the opportunity to go to a successful charter school with those that were stuck in a failing inner city school. There were not enough spots in the charter school so they held a lottery. Half the kids attended the charter school and they were very successful. They went to college and became successful. That was no surprise.
The failing school was still a failing school but the students who were left behind were still successful. They were still able to go to college just like the kids at the charter school.
Could their success be because they were willing to go the extra mile to drive their kids across town and they valued education? Is it because the only people able to even get in the lottery were already successful?
Jen at June 30, 2017 4:40 PM
The problem is that too many young black men (and, in some cases, women) have not invested themselves into civilization and society. Whether through righteous anger or parental neglect, they've decided that violence (either gang or civil disobedience) is the pathway to power and riches for them.
Family breakdown is a major component of this problem, leaving them with a "family" and social structure all too willing to nurture their anger and discontent, further isolating them from civilization and society.
This may not be correctable. In Zimbabwe, we saw disgruntled blacks giving up on the system and taking land from whites, and destroying what had been Africa's most productive farmland. We may be on the verge of seeing a similar explosion of rage here. The rage of BLM and other movements here may not be justified in the eyes of those who benefit from civilization, but in their eyes, it is.
It wasn't always so.
The NAACP filed hundreds of lawsuits before finally getting Brown v. Board of Education to the Supreme Court and, with it, destroying "separate but equal." They believed in the system, that the system would come down on the side of right. Today's BLM-inspired movements no longer believe in the system and seek to tear it down.
Studying and advancing in school is derided as "acting white." Young black men and women once did study and further themselves within the system. In fact, they founded entire universities to further their educational opportunities when the established colleges and universities would not let them.
The question then is how do we win the disaffected black youth back to the side of civilization?
Conan the Grammarian at June 30, 2017 8:15 PM
"Set up free enterprise zones in the poor parts of town, where you allow decrepit store fronts, dirty restaurants, and unlicensed businesses. As these prosper, they will become cleaner, nicer looking, safer, but currently they can't even get started."
Apparently, you have not noticed the trillions of dollars spent already, nor have you spoken to a single advocate of assistance programs for "inner-city" people - meaning blacks. They will not say that urban blacks CAN make it on their own, no matter the program, because, as a class, they HAVEN'T.
Radwaste at June 30, 2017 10:31 PM
Segregation was absolute bullshit - but Harlem had their own banks and businesses then.
Gog_Magog_Carpet_Reclaimers at July 1, 2017 6:00 PM
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