If we’re really serous about reducing the crime rate that has disproportionally impacted Philadelphia’s black community, the first thing we have to do is stop “Feeding the Dragon.”
Regrettably, “Feeding the Dragon” is precisely what our business and political leaders just accomplished last week, when they had an opportunity to break the cycle of racial exclusion at the City’s construction worksites, but “caved” in to pressure from the Building Trades.
The “Dragon” is how I’ve begun to refer to the systemic way that Philadelphia has worked to crush the potential of African-American males, especially since the early 1970’s. It’s the deadly combination of poor education, lack of job opportunity, exposure to drugs and handguns, glaring disparities in rates of incarceration, and prison systems whose primary purpose is to create economic opportunity for rural white communities.
I refer to the “Dragon” as systemic because you see the tracks of the “Beast” in virtually every major city in the country, although Philadelphia ranks as a worst-case example, by virtually every standard.
According to a 2006 report by the EPC Research Center, Philadelphia public schools, with a 70 percent African-American student population, had a graduation rate of 55.5 percent ─ better than New York City, New Orleans, Chicago, Houston, Denver, Dallas, Los Angeles and Detroit, but still 55.5 percent. Interestingly, the 2000 Census also reported that high school “dropouts” nationwide had a 52 percent employment rate in 1999. Another related report indicated that “dropouts” represent nearly 50 percent of the country’s prison population, and that 30 percent of African-American “dropouts” between 18 and 24 are incarcerated or on parole.
It’s interesting to note that, according to a report by the University of Wisconsin, these incarceration rates are a direct result of “policies implemented since the mid-1970’s, which created exponential growth in incarceration between 1975 and 2000. This growth was not due to growing crime rates, but to greater use of incarceration for lesser offenses and drug offenses.”
Once illegal drugs are introduced to black communities, there are significant disparities in how black and white users and sellers are apprehended and sentenced. In fact, in 1998, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services disclosed that 72.5 percent of all illicit drug users were white and that only 15 percent were black. Nevertheless, blacks, as early as 1988, were arrested on drug charges at five times the rate of whites. Nationwide, blacks, who represented 13 percent of the national population, constitute 37 percent of all drug arrests and 53 percent of such arrests in large urban areas.
That pattern of disparities in black/white incarceration rates is seen very clearly in Philadelphia and across the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
According to a 2001 report by the Justice Policy Institute, Pennsylvania incarcerates a larger percentage of its minority population than any other state. In fact, blacks comprise 9.2 percent of Pennsylvania’s population, but represent 57.3 percent of its prison population. In Pennsylvania, blacks are imprisoned at a rate 14 times that of whites and Philadelphia has placed the largest number and the highest concentration of black defendants on death row of any major city.
Perhaps the “Dragon’s” most cynical feature is the robust growth, since the 1980’s, of a national network of rural-situated federal and state prisons where predominantly black prison populations are housed, all to the decided economic benefit of rural white communities.
According to a recent article in the New York Times,…”as rural economies across the country crumbled in the 1980’s and the population of prison inmates swelled, largely because of tougher drug laws, states pushed prison construction as the economic escape route of sorts. Throughout the 1960’s and 70’s, an average of four prisons were built each year in rural America. The rate quadrupled in the 1980’s and reached 24 a year in the 1990’s. Depressed rural communities came to rely on the prisons as a source of jobs, economic sustenance and services with little effort devoted to attracting other viable businesses.”
That abusive pattern holds up extremely well in Pennsylvania, which ranks second in the U.S. with 9 federal prisons, but also maintains 28 state prisons. As is the case in New York, Pennsylvania’s state prisons are situated primarily in rural areas and 40 percent of their inmates originate from Philadelphia. Conveniently, the incarceration rates for Philadelphians stands at three times the state average.
The economic dependence on prisons extends far beyond jobs in these rural communities. According to the Times, small businesses in upstate New York, for example, have “staked their survival on the prison workers who patronize their stores. Local governments and churches, meanwhile, have come to depend on inmate work crews to clear snow from fire hydrants, maintain parks and hiking trails, mow the lawns at cemeteries and unload trucks at food pantries.”
As Mary Ellen Keith, town supervisor in Franklin, N.Y., explained to a Times reporter, “All those services, when you put that into dollars, there’s no way we’d be able to hire people to perform them.”
By the way, Mary Ellen, where I come from, that kind of arrangement is simply called what it is ─ “Slavery.”
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3 comments:
This issue breaks my heart. I publish "Medical Journal of Therapeutics Africa" which celebrates achievements of health and pharmaceutical industry professionals of African descent in the US and Africa, mjota.org. We published an article on Dr John Rich last year, http://emeraldpademelonpress.com/images/InterviewJohnARichMD.pdf. Dr Rich is a Macarthur Fellow, a physician who works with young men who are at risk for and who have suffered from street violence. And he is right here in Philadelphia, at Drexel University.
There is a great difference in sentencing because of the higher level of violence, & murder in black communities due to drugs, and because blacks tend to deal in more higly addictive substances. It is too bad you can't get that through your thick skulls already which you just seem to use as a receptacle for your flapping tounges. Boo hoo! Whitey this, whitey that! Philadelphia has been run by blacks and democrats since 1956 and still you complain.
If blacks want to lift themselves out of the social and cultural sewer they are in, there are a few things blacks must do.
Number one is stop living in the past and complaining. The next step would be for strong, upstanding black men to form business coalitions where they all contribute (no pastors or rabble rousers, only businessmen and people who provide palpable, meaningful services), and who prohibit the taking of welfare / WIC/section 8 housing, or other handouts by their people. Black men need to take responsibility and be in control of their families, their communities and and not just the minority of them whom blacks think are acting 'white'. Help should come from within your community and only go to people who are responsible, and practice reciprocity. Stop raising evil, self centered, selfish children who have no regard for anyone else.
Second, the young black men who will not behave would be made to dissapear permanently by your own people, and black women would have to have some sort of restraint in their reproductive behavior. At some point you blacks need to understand that conservative white people are not the cause of your problems, but liberal whites and jewish leaders who have stripped you of your collective dignity, sense of restraint and adulthood.
All good things come from avoiding instant gratification, and it seems that is a major problem with your culture (70-80% of kids born out of wedlock, the commission of 50+% of all violent crimes in America, and 60+% of all AIDS cases because your women have lost their way and look to their sugar daddy Uncle Sam for handouts).
You need to take care of one another and don't allow the scum of your race to bubble up to the top. Look at yourself and ask what kind of people allows pimps (who are not cool, but slavers who profit off of women's bodies) to become a fixture in your community and a role model for your kids?
And don't get mad at me, you people (yes you blacks) make yourself look like fools for acting like whining, violent, spoiled children, whose communities are run by women, and who can't even compete with mexicans who arrived 3 months ago and who don't speak English.
Lasty, for God's sake learn to make some good music again. You guys have been producing garbage for like 30+ years now.
Thank you for your recent post. I especially appreciate your “suggestions” about how we African Americans might lift ourselves “out of the social and cultural sewer,” in Philadelphia and across the country. You mentioned, among other things, that “strong, upstanding black men” should form business coalitions.
Well, Anonymous, you might be delighted to learn that black men (and women), here in Philadelphia, have formed business coalitions, despite great resistance from mainstream public and private sector business decisionmakers, since the latter part of the 18th Century, as soon as slavery had officially ended, in the state, in 1780.
In fact, in 1789, according to a writer of that era, blacks were “keeping small shops and doing moderately well, though handicapped on account of their inability to borrow money.” In addition, by 1838, just 58 years after Pennsylvania freed its slaves, Philadelphia’s first African-American business directory was published, “A Register of Trades of Colored People in the City of Philadelphia and Districts.” That register included 656 black persons engaged in 57 different lines of business. That was 170 years ago, Mr. Anonymous.
Continuing on that theme, fifteen years ago, black Philadelphians formed the African American Chamber of Commerce and its membership quickly grew to 650 businessowners. Today, according to Census data, African-Americans own 10,576 (or 15%), of the city’s 67,000 businesses.
Regrettably, according to reports commissioned by the city of Philadelphia, African-American businesses, as recently as 2004, were receiving just .7 percent, less than one percent, of the billions of dollars the City spends for goods and services each year. This still happens, of course, in a city wherein African Americans comprise more than 45 percent of the population.
You accuse African Americans of “living in the past and complaining.” The fact is that the race-based disparities that our city and country must address, in employment, poverty levels, healthcare, and incarceration rates, are happening right now – not in 1865.
Here’s another thing…despite the fact that 56 percent of single-parent households in the U.S. are headed by people of European descent, you admonish only black men about lack of responsibility toward their families. You also come down very harshly on black women for relying on Uncle Sam as “their sugar daddy.” All of that is straight out of the mid-20th Century “race-baiters handbook,” and we should know better than to even discuss such hateful stereotypes, today, in 2008.
While none of that language by you comes as a surprise, what does surprise and concern me is your dangerous and mis-spelled suggestion that “young black men who will not behave would be made to dissapear (sic) permanently.”
Come on, Anonymous; now you’re talking genocide. That really is the kind of history to which neither one of us should want to return.
No matter your current confusion about all of this, with just a little thought, you’d certainly realize that it would be better for you and for the entire country, if the greater part of this nation’s 40 million black people were no longer discouraged from making their full contribution to society.
Maybe if such contributions were encouraged, we’d be better able, together, to compete with the emerging nations that are “eating our economic lunch” every day and threatening the very existence of the “American way of life.”
Whether you like it or not, Anonymous, we are in this together – for better or worse. Get over it.
By the way, when was the last time that “you guys” made some “good music?” Was it Frank Sinatra? The Beatles? That’s another race-based stereotype you seem unable to let go of: The whole idea that we have some responsibility to entertain you. Hey, Anonymous, when slavery ended, we put down the “fiddles.” Those days are over. Entertaining you is no longer a part of our job description.
Have A Nice Day.
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