Black in America

This week I watched a CNN documentary called Black in America. Black in America carried the sobering message that 140 years after slavery has ended, 50 years after equal rights had been granted to blacks, they are still not equal with whites. This bothers me that so much has changed for society and at the same time so little is different. Many blacks are still working the minimal wage jobs of their parents. It would be hard for me to fully understand what the life of an inner city black man would be like. Since I am a middle class white male sexism and racism and class differences have never really affected me as much as they have affected others. I will not pretend that I am an expert, since I am not, however I will try to understand. My sense was that what this documentary was doing was portraying the vicious cycle of  having a generation of fatherless black kids who have rappers and gangsters as their role models the kid’s parents are not wealthy enough to provide for them. The kids drop out of school, join gangs, do drugs and end up in jail. This seems to be such a waste of those community’s youths whose lives potential is being thrown away. When I was having a discussion with some people about Obama and race in America (before I had watched this documentary) we got into a big dispute on why blacks are often times living at poverty level. I was disturbed when one of the kids said that the reason was that blacks were living off welfare and being lazy. The kid said that if a person wanted to get rich all he needed was to work hard and he would make it to the top. I was furious with this kid for suggesting that it was a collective laziness keeping blacks down. At the same time I felt guilty because it was white males like me that in the past have been the cause of most oppression. In fact I felt guilty because white males are the big fish in the food chain of oppression. What I learned from this documentary is an assortment of scary statistics on the state of life for black males in America, here are a few of them.

1/3 of black men have a criminal record

More than half of inner city blacks will drop out

17% of blacks will graduate

60% of blacks that dropout will end up behind bars

½ of ex cons end up behind bars again

60% of black children have no father in their home

Blacks hold 3% of management positions

Despite these horrible stats things are getting better

In 1960 20% of blacks graduated

In 2008 82% 0f blacks graduated

While these statistics are still bad it gives me hope that things will get better, it may not be easy but things will get better for black people in America.