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For a sense of how Kafka might have authored a single day's edition of a newspaper, take a look at the March 20, 2006 New
York Times.
Two of the lead stories evoke as poetically horrific an image of the moral free-fall of a nation's political leadership
as you are ever likely to see.
The first story:
New studies from Columbia, Princeton and Harvard show, with hard numbers, that young poor black American males, as a group,
are hardening at terrifying speed into a caste with little or no connection to mainstream American life. Or, if you prefer
the metaphor, they are becoming a separate country, like a black male Third-World territory whose presence within American
borders is strictly a matter of geography. Its separateness is, of course, an entirely American creation. But the starkness
of this separateness has now hit the front pages.
We have had years of warning about this in cities like mine, Baltimore, where studies going back more than 10 years, as
far as I can remember, have shown (and still do) that more than half of the city's young black males have either been in jail
or under the supervision of the criminal justice system. Walk or drive through parts of the city, and you don't need a study
to tell you what is happening.
But the national breadth and gravity of the studies in the Times story have now made this issue of the leper-ized black
male an Official Mainstream Shock. As it should be. To quote the Times:
"...the new studies... show that the huge pool of poorly educated black men are becoming ever more disconnected from
the mainstream society, and to a far greater degree than comparable white or Hispanic men. Especially in the country's inner
cities, the studies show, finishing high school is the exception, legal work is scarcer than ever and prison is almost routine,
with incarceration rates climbing for blacks even as urban crime rates have declined. Although the problems afflicting poor
black men have been known for decades, the new data paint a more extensive and sobering picture of the challenges they face.
"'There's something very different happening with young black men, and it's something we can no longer ignore,' said
Ronald B. Mincy, professor of social work at Columbia University and editor of 'Black Males Left Behind' (Urban Institute
Press, 2006).
"'Over the last two decades, the economy did great,' Mr. Mincy said, 'and low-skilled women, helped by public policy,
latched onto it. But young black men were falling farther back.'"
I can't quite get with Mincy's sunny assessment of the past 20 years of "the economy" -- a term that disguises
hugely disproportionate benefits for the wealthy -- and its alleged boon for poor black women. But a few statistics from the
new studies cited in the Times dramatize the kind of catastrophe we are talking about with young black men:
- In inner cities, more than 50 percent of black men drop out of high school.
- By 2004, 72 percent of black male high school dropouts in their 20s were unemployed (unable to find work, not looking,
or in jail), compared with 34 percent of white dropouts and 19 percent of Hispanic dropouts. Add in black high school graduates
and the unemployment rate was still 50 percent.
- By 2004, 21 percent of black men in their 20s who didn't go to college were incarcerated. By their mid-30s, 60 percent
of black high school dropouts had spent time in prison.
It does bear mentioning (although it is not in the Times story) that is there is one glinting link that does perennially
connect the mainstream with the culture of poor young black males: their music, currently hip-hop, which, like black musics
before it, is now the mainstay of American (and global) pop culture, and which provides the soundtrack for the social lives
of white suburban teen-agers who would, on any city street, run screaming from any actual in-the-flesh poor inner-city black
male.
But that's another story.
What the studies show, in any color, in any language, is that there is an ongoing disaster in the lives of young black
males. People who are in a position to know have been telling us for years what causes this: poverty, lack of access to a
job market that is fleeing to the suburbs, self-hatred due to failure to live up to a patriarchal society's ideals for males,
the appeal of drugs as an escape and as a high-paying employer, shredded families, boys with few healthy men to emulate. We
also know a lot about what it would take to solve these catastrophic problems: a huge public investment in urban jobs projects
(in effect, a modern WPA or CCC), a massive job training effort, funding for ample drug treatment and prevention, AIDS programs,
comprehensive and affordable health care, day care, family therapy, mentoring, well-resourced schools with well-paid teachers,
effective and well-funded programs to re-socialize ex-convicts to a free and legal life.
The total national cost to do this in every major American city? Anywhere from tens to hundreds of billions of dollars.
Which brings us to the second story in the March 20th edition of the Times:
In a two-minute statement to reporters outside the White House, a surreally optimistic President George W. Bush, in utter
denial of the shambles of his Iraq policy, talked cheerfully about how well the war is going and then went back inside with
his wife. Again, to quote the Times:
"On the third anniversary of a war that they once expected to be over by now, President Bush and senior officials
argued Sunday that their strategy was working despite escalating violence in Iraq, even as a former Iraqi prime minister once
favored by the White House declared that a civil war had already started."
The Times story goes on in awful detail: Bush speaking breezily of his being "encouraged by the progress" of
the war and evading reporters' questions about how this could be so; Dick "Five Draft Deferments" Cheney counseling
grit and patience for the war effort; Donald Rumsfeld prattling gamely (and insultingly) about the American mission in Iraq
being the equivalent of the Allied fight against Hitler.
Meanwhile, Iraq's once Bush-friendly former interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, told the BBC, according to the Times,
that Iraq was approaching a "'point of no return... It is unfortunate that we are in civil war. We are losing each day,
as an average, 50 to 60 people through the country, if not more... If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war
is.'"
So far, this explosively failed enterprise has killed 32,000 to 37,000 Iraqis and more than 2,300 Americans. There is
no end in sight.
The cost to date? $250 billion. A figure to keep in mind when considering our country's unattended domestic catastrophes.
If your hands shake and your jaw tightens as you write out your tax check to the IRS on April 15, I will understand.
All of which brings us back to Kafka, that merciless seer of the worst in human potential. For one day at least, the New
York Times seems to have caught his knack for nightmarish irony.
Perhaps soon we will be greeted by a page-one story about President Bush having awakened one morning in his bed, inexplicably,
as a giant insect.
It might bring an improvement, actually, in his skills in cooperating as a member of the teeming global community.
© 2006 Bruce A. Jacobs
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