Blog Readings 3 & 4 -- Race and Class in the States

Plight deepens for Black Men

Some quotes and comments from the article:

“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.”

This is strange, it’s really foreign to the experience of life in the suburbs, where it seems like all people have this erroneous perception that education is free and easy for all people everywhere and that drop outs are somehow “defective” “rebellious” or even “dangerous”…

"Many of these men grew up fatherless, and they never had good

role models," said Mr. Jones, who overcame addiction and prison

time. "No one around them knows how to navigate the mainstream

society." --

Even more remote to my experience! What does it mean to not know how to navigate the mainstream society? I think I’ve so much been steeped in “mainstream society” via media and middle class surroundings that I don’t directly experience what it is to be outside of that… one thought I had about what it means to not “know how to navigate…” would be a tendency / habit of returning to underground culture, and so I wonder if this statement isn’t a polished way of saying that Black men are time and again turning to drug dealing, gangs, and other kinds of criminalized “non-mainstream society.”

“The second special factor is related to an otherwise successful

policy: the stricter enforcement of child support. Improved

collection of money from absent fathers has been a pillar of welfare

overhaul. But the system can leave young men feeling overwhelmed

with debt and deter them from seeking legal work, since a large

share of any earnings could be seized.”

Another way that the author has packed up the same “non mainstream society” stuff? Hrm… this was definitely an interesting article!

As far as the “Minority population pattern changes” article is concerned, I felt it didn’t exactly speak to the discourse of racial hegemony and inner city experience that I was hoping it might elicit. While demographic are always interesting from a Sociological perspective, analysis of implications (and contributing factors) was a bit lacking in this article. I found the most interesting part of the article to be the last paragraph, though it seemed like an afterthought of the general article. I wondered why, as the article portrays, Washington has one of the highest rates of urban immigration across ethnic lines. The closing sentence aroused my curiosity: “Unlike many diverse areas, the Washington region gained enough whites to rank 10th for numerical increase.” This made me reflect on a conversation I had recently, someone was describing how the building of nice apartment buildings and shopping areas in otherwise ‘bad parts’ of DC was creating a renovation of many parts of the city, and encouraging middle class people to move back into the city, a contrast to the “white exodus” that many cities experienced when suburbs flourished under the influence of GI Bill in the 40s and 50s.