Pubdate: Wed, 22 Mar 2006
Source: Chicago Tribune (IL)
Copyright: 2006 Chicago Tribune Company
Contact:  http://www.chicagotribune.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/82
Author: Clarence Page
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/youth.htm (Youth)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/racial.htm (Racial Issues)

DISCONNECTED BLACK YOUTH PLIGHT WORSENS

WASHINGTON --  In an ideal world the rising tide of economic recovery 
would lift everyone's boat, as John F. Kennedy used to say. 
Unfortunately, we live in the real world, where the boom that began a 
decade ago has left one demographic group, in particular, stuck on 
the bottom of the economic lake: undereducated black males.

So says a body of new studies by poverty experts from Harvard, 
Princeton, Columbia and other major universities and think tanks. The 
experts have taken a closer look at the condition of those who are 
the least connected to attentive parenting, neighborhood role models 
and good schools that most of us take for granted.

Among the findings: The percentage of young, jobless black males 
increased over the past two decades, with only slight upticks during 
economic peaks.

By including those who were jailed or not actively seeking work, two 
groups normally left out of federal unemployment statistics, 
researchers found the real jobless rate for black male high school 
dropouts in their 20s soared to 65 percent in 2000. Four years later, 
that portion jumped to 72 percent, compared with only 34 percent of 
white dropouts and 19 percent of Hispanic dropouts.

Incarceration rates for poorly educated blacks also climbed to 
historic highs in the 1990s, filling up the nation's boom in newly 
constructed prisons, despite the decade's declines in crime rates.

Among black dropouts in their late 20s, for example, Steven Raphael 
of the University of California at Berkeley, writing in "Black Males 
Left Behind," found more in prison on a given day (34 percent) in 
2000 than working (30 percent).

He and other researchers in that book, edited by Ronald B. Mincy, a 
Columbia University professor of social work, found contributing 
factors include employers' preferences for immigrants over 
native-born workers, especially black males, a lack of available jobs 
and welfare reforms that put more undereducated black women than 
their black male counterparts into the workforce.

Even America's increasingly high-tech military is shutting its doors 
to high school dropouts, Hugh Price, former head of the National 
Urban League, observes in his introduction to another new book, 
"Reconnecting Disadvantaged Young Men," by Peter Edelman, a former 
poverty adviser to President Bill Clinton; Harry J. Holtzer, a 
Georgetown University public policy professor; and the late Senate 
welfare adviser Paul Offner.

"Reconnecting" is the key word here. It describes an alienation that 
distinguishes many poorly educated black youths from earlier 
urban-poor generations. Too many once-thriving black neighborhoods 
now are less likely than comparable white or Latino neighborhoods to 
offer jobs, intact families or older men who have jobs.

Gone too are many of the adult role models who were able and willing 
to plant the visions of hope, discipline, academic achievement and 
self-reliance in hungry minds.

"We're pumping out boys with no honest alternative," Gary Orfield, an 
education expert at Harvard and editor of "Dropouts in America," said 
in an interview with The New York Times, "and of course their 
neighborhoods offer many other alternatives."

Those "other" alternatives include a gangster culture, reinforced by 
the worst aspects of popular hip-hop culture, that channels the 
ambitions of too many youngsters into the criminal world.

What can be done? A lot. And as one conservative reformer, Ron 
Haskins, a former welfare policy adviser to President Bush, observes 
in "Black Males Left Behind," you don't have to be a bleeding-heart 
liberal to believe that government has an important role to play in 
helping the disadvantaged, in partnership with the private sector and 
armies of concerned volunteers. "One reason for maintaining optimism 
is that so few serious attempts to help poor fathers have been made," 
Haskins writes.

Unfortunately, as the authors of "Reconnecting Disadvantaged Young 
Men" observe, "young black men are the least popular group in America 
with politicians." Until the winds of political concern for the poor 
change for the better, the work of reconnecting disadvantaged youths 
to "honest alternatives" is left largely to unsung heroes who donate 
their time and money to mentoring programs and other local efforts.

As an organizer of one group, the National Organization of Concerned 
Black Men, founded by five black Philadelphia police officers in the 
1970s, told me last year, "Our kids have a lot of critics. What they 
really need are role models."

True. They also need some national leaders who are as eager to 
provide honest alternatives as they have been to build prisons.