Ta-Nehisi Coates's Blog, page 33

The Killing of Jonathan Ferrell

I have strong doubts about any efforts towards prosecution in the death of Jonathan Ferrell. A former FAMU student, Ferrell crashed his car, crawled out the back window looking for help, and then knocked on the door of the first house he saw. A woman, thinking it was her husband knocking, answered. When she saw Ferrell she shut the door, hit her alarm and called the police. What happened once the police arrive is not clear. There evidently is dashcam video, but it hasn't been released. Lawyers have seen it and I think this reaction is important: "(Ferrell) advanced toward the officers. His hands were not in the air," said George Laughrun, attorney for Officer Randall Kerrick, speaking to reporters about what he saw in footage from a police cruiser's dashboard camera. "You see one of his hands partially behind his back, concealed as he ... continued to advance. He was given three commands to 'Get on the ground. Get on the ground.' He did not. And Officer Kerrick backed up and then felt the need to deploy his service weapon." Later in the story the police chief makes the obvious point that not complying is not a good reason to try and kill someone. People do not comply for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes they mean harm. But they also might not clearly hear you. They might be mentally disabled. Or--having just emerged from a car crash--they might be totally disoriented. Having said that, it's important to understand that, in America, it is broadly believed that police can--and perhaps should--kill people who do not comply with them. Roy Middleton was shot in his own driveway after a neighbor called the police on him, thinking he was a burglar breaking into a car. The car was Middleton's. When the police arrived, they claim to have given Middleton orders to which he did not comply. Middleton thought it was neighbors playing a joke. The police claim he "lunged" at them."It was like a firing squad," Middleton told PNJ from his bed at Baptist Hospital. "Bullets were flying everywhere." The local sheriff doesn't believe the police did anything wrong. There's been some rage directed at the woman who called the police. I think this is wrong. You may believe racism is an actual force in our interactions--I certainly do--but you don't know whether it was an actual force in this one. It's important to recognize that this is both a woman and an individual. You might speculate about what she thinks of black people. I might speculate about whether she'd been a victim of sexual assault, or any other kind of violence. That also happens in America. But it would be better to speculate about nothing, since all we actually know is that this was a woman who was home with a young child, opened the door in the middle of the night, and found a dude standing outside. Her reaction may not have been your reaction. But this woman is not paid by the State to keep the peace. Police officers are trained to deal with situations like this. In too many cases that training does not emphasize de-escalation, but killing people who make them jumpy. Miscommunication is not an excuse. Mental illness is not an excuse. Confusion is not an excuse. If the officer believes you are a threat to their life, they have the right to shoot you--and anyone standing near you.

       

The Killing Of Jonathan Ferrell

I have strong doubts about any efforts towards prosecution in the death of Jonathan Ferrell A former FAMU student, Ferrell crashed his car, crawled out the back window looking for help, and then knocked on the door of the first house he saw. A woman, thinking it was her husband knocking, answered. When she saw Ferrell she shut the door, hit her alarm and called the police. What happened once the police arrive is not clear. There evidently is dashcam video, but it hasn't been released. Lawyers have seen it and I think this reaction is important:"(Ferrell) advanced toward the officers. His hands were not in the air," said George Laughrun, attorney for Officer Randall Kerrick, speaking to reporters about what he saw in footage from a police cruiser's dashboard camera. "You see one of his hands partially behind his back, concealed as he ... continued to advance. He was given three commands to 'Get on the ground. Get on the ground.' He did not. And Officer Kerrick backed up and then felt the need to deploy his service weapon."Later in the story the police chief makes the obvious point that not complying is not a good reason to try and kill someone. People do not comply for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes they mean harm. But they also might not clearly hear you. They might be mentally disabled. Or--having just emerged from a car crash--they might be totally disoriented.Having said that, it's important to understand that, in America, it is broadly believed that police can--and perhaps should--kill people who do not comply with them. Roy Middleton was shot in his own driveway after a neighbor called the police on him, thinking he was burglar breaking into car. The car was Middleton's. When the police arrived, they claim to have given Middleton orders to which he did not comply. Middleton thought it was neighbors playing a joke. The police claim he "lunged" at them."It was like a firing squad," Middleton told PNJ from his bed at Baptist Hospital. "Bullets were flying everywhere."  The local sheriff doesn't believe the police did anything wrong. There's been some rage directed at the woman who called the police. I think this is wrong. You may believe racism is an actual force in our interactions--I certainly do--but you don't know whether it was an actual force in this one. It's important to recognize that this is both a woman and an individual. You might speculate about what she thinks of black people. I might speculate about whether she'd been a victim of sexual assault, or any other kind of violence. That also happens in America. But it would be better to speculate about nothing, since all we actually know is that this was a woman who was home with a young child, opened the door in the middle of the night, and found a dude standing outside. Her reaction may not have been your reaction. But this woman is not paid by the State to keep the peace. Police officers are trained to deal with situations like this. In too many cases that training does not emphasize de-escalation, but killing people who make them jumpy. Miscommunication is not an excuse. Mental illness is not an excuse. Confusion is not an excuse. If the officer believes you are a threat to their life, they have the right to shoot you--and anyone standing near you. 

       

Brad Paisley and the Politics of Offense and Offense-Taking

AP

New York's Jody Rosen has an interview up with Brad Paisley that's worth checking out. When Paisley released "Accidental Racist" earlier this year I got into some conversations on to twitter (I used to live there) with some of his fans. They defended him as a singular figure in the country music scene willing to push borders and challenge all manner of convention. You see that guy on display in Rosen's interview. Usually people who end up on the business end of the barrage Paisley endure come out sounding scornful. Paisley sounds more like he's grappling. We should all be so lucky. 

I'd like to focus in on something:

Some Southerners got very mad it me: "I'm done with you. How dare you apologize for the Confederate flag." But the majority of my fans said, "We know you, we love you -- and we don't understand the controversy, we don't get why everyone is so mad." Which tells you all you need to know, right there.

There is a gulf of understanding that I was trying to address. The most surprising and upsetting thing was being thought of by some as a racist. I have no interest in offending anyone -- especially anyone in the African-American community. That song was absolutely, earnestly supposed to be a healing song. One hundred percent.

I don't really doubt that Paisley wasn't trying to be offensive, nor that he really, earnestly was trying to do some good. But I don't think he really gets what bothers black people about the Confederate Flag. It is not simply that the flag is offensive. It is that it is the chosen symbol of slaveholders and those who wanted to live in a republic rooted in slaveholding.

This warrants clarification. In 1836, cotton from the South accounted for 59 percent of this country's exports. Effectively, in the run up to the Civil War, our leading export was produced by slave labor. This cotton enriched our country financially and powered us into the modern world. "Whoever says industrial revolution," wrote the historian Eric Hobsbawm, "must say cotton." 

The men and women who grew this cotton not only enriched through their labor, but through their very flesh. At the onset of the Civil War enslaved black people were valued at $3 billion, more than all the factories, railroads, and the productive capacity of America combined. This wealth was traded throughout the South regularly, and that trade enriched America even further.

In Soul By Soul, an awesome history of the antebellum slave trade, the historian Walter Johnson takes the measure of the system:

As those people passed through the trade, representing something close to half a billion dollars in property, they spread wealth wherever they went. Much of the capital that funded the traders' speculations had been borrowed from banks and had to be repaid with interest, and all of it had to be moved through commission-taking factorage houses and bills of exchange back and forth between the eastern seaboard and the emerging Southwest. 

And the slaves in whose bodies that money congealed as it moved south had to be transported, housed, clothed, fed, and cared for during the one to three months it took to sell them. Some of them were insured in transit, some few others covered by life insurance. Their sales had to be notarized and their sellers taxed. Those hundreds of thousands of people were revenue to the cities and states where they were sold, and profits in the pockets of landlords, provisioners, physicians, and insurance agents long before they were sold. The most recent estimate of the size of this ancillary economy is 13.5 percent of the price per person-tens of millions of dollars over the course of the antebellum period.

Natchez, Mississippi, a major slave-trading hub, was home to more millionaires per capita than any city in the country. But behind the numbers were the wrecked lives of black men and women. A slave stood roughly a 30 percent chance of being sold away. "Of the two thirds of a million interstate sales made by the traders in the decades before the Civil War," writes Johnson, "twenty-five percent involved the destruction of a first marriage and fifty percent destroyed a nuclear family." 

I think of Henry "Box" Brown, saying farewell to the family that was sold from him.

The next day, I stationed myself by the side of the road, along which the slaves, amounting to three hundred and fifty, were to pass. The purchaser of my wife was a Methodist minister, who was about starting for North Carolina. Pretty soon five waggon-loads of little children passed, and looking at the foremost one, what should I see but a little child, pointing its tiny hand towards me, exclaiming, "There's my father; I knew he would come and bid me good-bye."

It was Brown's oldest child. Henry Brown never saw his son or his wife again. In antebellum America, slavery was the enriching of white people through the legalized destruction of black families. And that is the cause of the men who raised the Confederate flag:

Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.

If you accept that the Confederacy fought to preserve and expand slavery, then you might begin to understand how the descendants of the enslaved might regard symbols of that era. And you might also begin to understand that "offense" doesn't even begin to cover it. Reading Penthouse while having Christmas dinner with your grandmother is offensive. Donning the symbols of those who fought for right to sell Henry Brown's wife and child is immoral. 

It is important to speak this way. Nothing is changed by banishing the Confederate Flag out of a desire to be impolite or desire to be inoffensive. The Confederate Flag should not die because black people have come to feel a certain way about their country, it should die when white people come to feel a certain way about themselves. It can't be for me. It has to be for you.

       

A Rising Tide Lifts Mostly Yachts

Doubling down on our conversation over Patrick Sharkey's work from yesterday, what you have here is chart of real median income over the past forty years or so. You can't really make a hard black and white comparison before the early 70s, because "White"--as has always been the case--is a category in flux. At some point in the early 70s we started tracking Hispanics as either white or nonwhite. At any rate, this study from the Census tells us what we already know about the black-white income gap--that very little has changed:Comparing the 2011 income of nonHispanic-White households to that of other households shows that the ratio of Asian to non-Hispanic-White income was 1.18, the ratio of Black to nonHispanic-White income was 0.58, and the ratio of Hispanic to non-HispanicWhite income was 0.70. Between 1972 and 2011, the change in the Black-to-non-Hispanic-White income ratio was not statistically significant.11 Over the same period, the Hispanicto-non-Hispanic-White income ratio declined from 0.74 to 0.70. Income data for the Asian population was first available in 1987. The 2011 Asian to-non-Hispanic-White income ratio was not statistically different from the 1987 ratio.Again, consider that this stunning lack of change enjoys the black drop of record declines in teen pregnancy and declines in the murder rate in black communities. Also, you should view even small progress in black income with some skepticism.  From the great social scientist Douglass Massey we have this useful perspective, pointed out to me yesterday in comments:People in Jail and prison are excluded from the data sources used to compare income and unemployment ... mass imprisonment thus renders America's most vulnerable citizens, quite literally, "invisible" to policymakers and the public... Roughly two-thirds of prison inmates were employed at the time of their incarceration, and at the time they entered prison these workers earned systematically lower wages than their non-incarcerated counterparts. After adjusting for the selective exclusion of these poorly paid workers from the labor force because of rising imprisonment, Western (2006, 100-1) fount that the apparent improvement in black wages all but disappeared. Relative black wages rose in government statistics during the late 1980s and 1990s not because African American workers were earning higher wages relative to whites, but because those earning the lowest wages were systematically being removed from the labor force and put behind bars.So yeah, I think I'll go bake another angel food cake. Or something.

       

More Baguettes and Black Families

The other day I wrote this: The root of all of this is not really the fight against racism and white supremacy. My expectation is that racism and white supremacy will win--and take this country down with it. Indeed I expect the worst of everyone to win--and take humanity down with them. This bothered some folks and I tried to clarify what I meant in comments. For the past few months I've turned into an amateur sociologist. There's some really revealing work out there on racism, segregation and ghettoization being done by people like Patrick Sharkey, Douglass Massey and Robert Sampson. I also would recommend Robert Lieberman's book Shifting The Color Line, for those who are interested in the effects of white supremacy on the shape of social safety net. A lot of this work follows the research of William Julius Wilson, and much of it is very depressing. I keep thinking of Edmund Morgan who persuasively argued that white supremacy did not stand in opposition to American democracy, it made it possible. "The most ardent republicans were Virginians," writes Morgan. "And their ardor was unrelated to their power of the men and women they held in bondage." At the end of his masterful tome American Slavery, American Freedom, Morgan starts to wonder: Was the vision of a nation of equals flawed at the source by contempt for both the poor and the black. Is America still colonial Virginia writ large? More than a century after Appomattox the questions linger. Morgan died while I was away. I keep wondering what he would have our transition from slavery to debt-peonage to mass incarceration, a transition so seamless that one could be forgiven for seeing the hand of an Author. Of course the Author is us. We are a congenitally racist country. We can improve around the margins. We can even progress. And perhaps we can some day learn to live with ourselves. But on some level, I suspect, we will always obey our terrible prime directives. Today's exhibit of the prime directive comes courtesy of Patrick Sharkey and his deeply disturbing book, Stuck In Place. Here is a chilling thought: Over the past half-century or so, violent crime has spiked and declined in black communities. Teen pregnancies have spiked and declined. The out of wedlock birthrate spiked and then declined. The teen pregnancy rate is as low as its been since sometime in the 40s. One thing has remained stable--the woeful economic status of the African-American community. As you can see from the data, a greater share of black America lives in the lowest quintile of income than in any other region. This was true in 1970 and it is true today. I suspect, given our recent economic crisis, the numbers in five years will look worse, not better. We aren't even beginning to talk about the yawning wealth gap between black and white America. So yeah, if I seem a bit pessimistic about us ever closing this gap, forgive me. I hope I'm wrong. When I hear the president say that things are getting so much better, I know what he means. But these numbers just hit me like a punch in the gut. If you'd like to be more depressed you can read this earlier post I did on Sharkey's work. In other news, I found that Côte Du Rhone I loved so much. $10.99 at Whole Foods. Not so bad. But then yesterday my wife and I tried to make an angel's food cake. The whole thing fell and stuck to the pan. Clearly, racism.

       

More Baguettes And Black Families

The other day I wrote this:The root of all of this is not really the fight against racism and white supremacy. My expectation is that racism and white supremacy will win--and take this country down with it. Indeed I expect the worst of everyone to win--and take humanity down with them. This bothered some folks and I tried to clarify what I meant in comments. For the past few months I've turned into an amateur sociologist. There's some really revealing work out there on racism, segregation and ghettoization being done by people like Patrick Sharkey, Douglass Massey and Robert Sampson. I also would recommend Robert Lieberman's book Shifting The Color Line, for those who are interested in the effects of white supremacy on the shape of social safety net.A lot of this work flows the research of William Julius WIlson, and much of it is very depressing. I keep thinking of Edmund Morgan who persuasively argued that white supremacy did not stand in opposition to American democracy, it made it possible. "The most ardent republicans were Virginians," writes Morgan. "And their ardor was unrelated to their power of the men and women they held in bondage." At the end of his masterful tome American Slavery, American Freedom, Morgan starts to wonder: Was the vision of a nation of equals flawed at the source by contempt for both the poor and the black. Is America still colonial Virginia writ large? More than a century after Appomattox the questions linger. Morgan died while I was away. I keep wondering what he would have our transition from slavery to debt-peonage to mass incarceration, a transition so seamless that one could be forgiven for seeing the hand of an Author. Of course the Author is us. We are a congenitally racist country. We can improve around the margins. We can even progress. And perhaps we can some day learn to live with ourselves. But on some level, I suspect, we will always obey our terrible prime directives.Today's exhibit of the prime directive comes courtesy of Patrick Sharkey and his deeply disturbing book, Stuck In Place. Here is a chilling thought: Over the past half-century or so, violent crime has spiked and declined in black communities. Teen pregnancies have spiked and declined. The out of wedlock birthrate spiked and then declined. The teen pregnancy rate is as low as its been since sometime in the 40s. One thing has remained stable--the woeful economic status of the African-American community. As you can see from the data, a greater share of black America lives in the lowest quintile of income than in any other region. This was true in 1970  and it is true today. I suspect, given our recent economic crisis, the numbers in five years will look worse, not better. We aren't even beginning to talk about the yawning wealth gap between black and white America. So yeah, if I seem a bit pessimistic about us ever closing this gap, forgive me. I hope I'm wrong. When I hear the president say that things are getting so much better, I know what he means. But these numbers just hit me like a punch in the gut. If you'd like to be more depressed you can read this earlier post I did on Sharkey's work. In other news, I found that Côte Du Rhone I loved so much. $10.99 at Whole Foods. Not so bad. But then yesterday my wife and I tried to make an angel's food cake. The whole thing fell and stuck to the pan. Clearly, racism.

       

Trayvon Martin Was a Victim of Black-on-Black Crime

TMZ It was nice to be some thousands of miles away when the verdict in the George Zimmerman trial came down. I confess to being about as skeptical of a guilty verdict as I was of the predictions of mass violence in response. But being back and having thought about this a bit, I think something needs to be pointed out. There is this horrible idea out there that we should bracket off murder; that Trayvon Martin was a victim of racism but Derrion Albert and Hadiya Pendleton were not. The thinking holds that black people are concerned about the violence done to them by people who aren't black, and forgiving of violence done to them by people who are. But Derrion Albert and Hadiya Pendleton are no less victims of racism than Trayvon Martin. The neighborhoods in which these two young people were killed are a model of segregation funded and implemented by private citizens, realtors, business interests, the city of Chicago, the state of Illinois and the federal government. This segregation is not a mistake but the desired outcome of racist social engineering. Beryl Satter's Family Properties helps us here: Restrictive covenants were introduced in the 1920s. By the 1940s, Chicago led the nation in their use. Racial deed restrictions covered approximately half of the city's residential neighborhoods. Together, the bombings, "neighborhood improvement associations," realtors' sales policies, and restrictive covenants helped create Chicago's first all-black ghetto on the city's South Side. As historian Allan H. Spear explains, the ghettoization of Chicago's blacks "was not the result chiefly of poverty; nor did Negroes cluster out of choice. The ghetto was primarily the product of white hostility..." The FHA embraced these biases. It collected detailed maps of the present and likely future location of African Americans, and used them to determine which neighborhoods would be denied mortgage insurance. Since banks and savings and loan institutions often relied upon FHA rating maps when deciding where to grant their mortgages, the FHA's appraisal policies meant that blacks were excluded by definition from most mortgage loans. The FHA's Underwriting Manual also praised restrictive covenants as "the surest protection against undesirable encroachment" of "inharmonious racial groups." The FHA did not simply recommend the use of restrictive covenants but often insisted upon them as a condition for granting mortgage insurance. Those black families that somehow overcame state-mandated segregation and attempted to leave the ghetto were greeted by "Improvement" organizations founded to resist "the invasion of white residence districts by the Negroes." The tactics endorsed by these improvement associations were nonviolent--until they weren't. Airport Homes, Cicero, Fernwood all testify to the fact that the borders of the ghetto were patrolled not just by government policy but by the willingness of individual white citizens to resort to violence. Policies have consequences. The hands that forged the American ghettoes are ours--and they are blood-stained. To claim that the ghettoes of Chicago, and all the violent deaths that flow from them, are the creation of white racism is not to make an overheated charge. It is to cite the historical record. It's not even history. Arnold Hirsch's Making The Second Ghetto opens with this chilling quote: Something is happening to lives and spirits that will never show up in the geat housing shortage of the late 40s. Something is happening to the children which migh not show up in our social record until 1970. Or 1975. That was the year that the term "black-on-black" crime was born. The phrase is a deceptive restating of basic truth--people tend to kill the people they live around. Black people are among the most hyper-segregated group in the country. The fact that black killers tend to kill other black people is not refutation of American racism, but the ultimate statement of American racism. Like so many other lost black boys, Trayvon Martin was killed close to home. He was killed by someone whom he lived around. His hoodie marked him, as surely as any gang color ever marked anyone. He was watched by George Zimmerman in the exact same way that I, and all my friends, were watched when we strayed into some other neighborhood. Indeed, one thinks of George Zimmerman's attitude and can't help but hear the moans of Kendrick Lamar ("Where your grandma stay, huh, my nigga?") And finally Martin was killed in a way that is very familiar to a lot of us: a sucker goes looking for trouble, finds it, and shoots his way out of an ass-kicking. There are no fair ones in America. Recent events have born this out. Here is George Zimmerman speeding through town. Here is George Zimmerman touring the company that allowed him to take your son's life. Smile for the cameras, George. Here is George Zimmerman menacing his wife and then smashing the evidence. George Zimmerman claims his wife's father attacked him. Someone is always attacking George Zimmerman. Black people see the relationship here. Jesse Jackson marched for Trayvon Martin--and then he marched for Hadiya Pendleton. It's worth listening to Hadiya Pendleton's mother, Cleopatra Cowley-Pendleton: "I have a son that I am raising in this environment, under these circumstances. So now I have a youth that is not at risk because I'm raising him with certain value systems, but he is at risk of being viewed a certain kind of way," Cowley-Pendleton told MSNBC during an anti-gun violence summit in Chicago on Friday, sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus. "I have to do things and be boisterous to protect him before he gets to where he's going to go independently, walking down a street on his own with certain privileges and being misidentified as someone else. Right now he's 11. The Martins have already suffered and that's an awareness for the rest of us." That would be Trayvon Martin's parents. The story was written by Trymaine Lee, a black man, and a stellar journalist, who reported on Trayvon Martin and Hadiya Pendleton. There's no separation for us. We can't afford it. We've been talking about the plague of modern gun violence since the days of "Self-Destruction." People who are late to this, who do not know this, or who ignore this, are not filled with a sudden concern for Hadiya Pendleton so much as a sudden need to change the subject.

       

Of Baguettes and Black Families

I don't like to reward threadjacking, but I was asked the following question the other day in the thread about French food: I have a question from a previous post where the comments closed on me. You made a claim that you held slavery/racism as responsible for the breakdown of the black family. How do you reconcile that with data showing that the the black out of wedlock birth rate only started surging in the 1960's and that the black marriage rate was on par with the white marriage rate well into the 20th century? In other words how do you make the claim that racism is linked to the destruction of the black family when the black family was in fact strongest during time periods when racism was substantially more prevalent than today? So I was annoyed by this. First because I've never claimed that "slavery is responsible for the breakdown of the black family." I don't consider the black family to be "broken down." I'm not even sure what that means. Moreover, if by "black" we mean "African-American," the "black" family was invented in slavery. There is no African-American family before slavery. We were born there, and proceed accordingly. But I was more annoyed because I'm really interested in baguettes right now. I was on my break--and now I am called to pick up the sword again. But as much as I'd like to blame white folks, the fact is I love this stuff. I answered the question, but I wasn't totally satisfied with my own answer. The root of all of this is not really the fight against racism and white supremacy. My expectation is that racism and white supremacy will win--and take this country down with it. Indeed I expect the worst of everyone to win--and take humanity down with them. I get sad about that sometimes, but I am mostly resolved. So the root of this, for me, isn't altruism but curiosity. Even if you know how the story ends, you still want to know how we got there. So here's some math for you. Before we get to it, let's look at some historiography courtesy of University of Minnesota professor Steven Ruggles and his article "The Origins of the African-American Family Structure." Ruggles alludes to some of the earlier data and what I suspect were Thomas Sowell's sources: The controversy over the Moynihan report stimulated a spate of revisionist historical investigations into African-American family structure. These studies asserted that black families in the late nineteenth century were overwhelmingly male-headed and nuclear in structure. Although some authors acknowledged minor differences in family structure between blacks and whites, they all maintained that in practical terms black families were essentially similar to white families (Agresti 1978; Bigham 1981; Carlson 1988; Furstenberg, Hershberg, and Modell 1975; Gutman 1975, 1976; Harris 1976; Krech 1982; Lammermeir 1973; Pleck 1972; Riley 1975; Shifflett 1975). The revisionists thus implied that the distinctive African-American family pattern is of recent origin, and this reinforced the now widespread view that economic disadvantages faced by blacks in the recent past are responsible (Brewer 1988; Wilson 1987). This actually helps me because I've long wondered why sociological work on black families seemed so ahistorical. There's a strong bias toward looking at black people through the lens of the 1960s--as though black America begins with the Long Hot Summers. I suspect part of that is that we just didn't have great data on black families, and the data we had indicated that something had gone drastically "wrong" around 1960. But while it's true that you see a dramatic increase in single-family homes in 1960, the gap is about as old as our data. Ruggles was able to get ahold of census micro-data and basically concluded as much. If you look at the report you can see on Table 2 that as early as 1880 there were roughly double the percentage of black children born to single mothers as to whites (13.1 to 5.9.) Ruggles concludes: ...[T]he finding of recent studies that the high incidence of single parenthood and children residing without parents among blacks is not new. The pattern is clearly evident as far back as 1850 among free blacks. From 1880 through 1960, the percentage of black children with at least one absent parent was fairly stable and about two-and-one-half times greater than the percentage among whites. Recently, the percentages of both black children and white children with absent parents have risen dramatically... Race differences in family structure have expanded throughout the twentieth century, especially over the past three decades. But the fundamental differences in the percentage of children residing without parents began well over a century ago. The critical question remains: What is the source of this distinctive African-American pattern of single parenthood? Recent economic changes can be invoked to explain the growing differential between black family structure and white family structure, but they cannot explain why blacks started from a higher base. Again, you see a big shift in 1960. But that's true for both black and white families, and it's a shift that has been oft-commented upon. The change in marriage is not a "black" problem, and I am not even convinced that it is a "problem." People who want us to go back to 1880 should have the intellectual courage to advocate for the entirety of their vision, not just the parts they like. It is not simply a question of "Is marriage good for kids?" It's "Are shotgun marriages good for kids?" "Should marriage be valued at all costs, including enduring abuse or ill-treatment?" "Should women marry men regardless of their employment prospects and their contact with the correctional system?" My sense is democratic. I think that human beings are pretty logical and generally savvy about identifying their interests. Despite what we've heard, women tend to be human beings and if they are less likely to marry today, it is probable that they have decided that marriage doesn't advance their interests as much as it once did. It's worth noting that it is not simply women with children who aren't marrying, but women period. Indeed, black women today who are unmarried are having fewer kids than at any point in our recorded history. Mouthing platitudes about culture is fun if you want to be right. But if you really want to know, it's a little harder. And on that note I'll say peace to Dalton Conley and Andrew Cherlin for the assistance. And keeping it 100, I will add that I had an excellent Côte Du Rhone with my lunch today. And to keep it hood I'll note that the Camembert from Whole Foods is really incredible. (I almost felt like I was home.) And finally, to make it extra hood I'll say I'm looking forward to going out with my wife, my homegirl Chana, and her dude tonight. We plan to drink some wine and do all we can to ruin the good name of the black family and further discredit the entire race. Holler if you so happen to hear me.

       

Of Baguettes And Black Families

I don't like to reward threadjacking, but I was asked the following question the other day in the thread about French food: I have a question from a previous post where the comments closed on me. You made a claim that you held slavery/racism as responsible for the breakdown of the black family. How do you reconcile that with data showing that the the black out of wedlock birth rate only started surging in the 1960's and that the black marriage rate was on par with the white marriage rate well into the 20th century? In other words how do you make the claim that racism is linked to the destruction of the black family when the black family was in fact strongest during time periods when racism was substantially more prevalent than today? So I was annoyed by this. First because I've never claimed that "slavery is responsible for the breakdown of the black family." I don't consider the black family to be "broken down." I'm not even sure what that means. Moreover, if by "black" we mean "African-American," the "black" family was invented in slavery. There is no African-American family before slavery. We were born there, and proceed accordingly. But I was more annoyed because I'm really interested in baguettes right now. I was on my break--and now I am called to pick up the sword again. But as much as I'd like to blame white folks, the fact is I love this stuff. I answered the question, but I wasn't totally satisfied with my own answer. The root of all of this is not really the fight against racism and white supremacy. My expectation is that racism and white supremacy will win--and take this country down with it. Indeed I expect the worst of everyone to win--and take humanity down with them. I get sad about that sometimes, but I am mostly resolved. So the root of this, for me, isn't altruism but curiosity. Even if you know how the story ends, you still want to know how we got there. So here's some math for you. Before we get to it, let's look at some historiography courtesy of University of Minnesota professor Steven Ruggles and his article "The Origins of the African-American Family Structure." Ruggles alludes to some of the earlier data and what I suspect were Thomas Sowell's sources:The controversy over the Moynihan report stimulated a spate of revisionist historical investigations into African-American family structure. These studies asserted that black families in the late nineteenth century were overwhelmingly male-headed and nuclear in structure. Although some authors acknowledged minor differences in family structure between blacks and whites, they all maintained that in practical terms black families were essentially similar to white families (Agresti1978; Bigham 1981; Carlson 1988; Furstenberg, Hershberg, and Modell 1975; Gutman 1975, 1976; Harris 1976; Krech 1982; Lammermeir 1973; Pleck 1972; Riley 1975; Shifflett 1975). The revisionists thus implied that the distinctive African-American family pattern is of recent origin, and this reinforced the now widespread view that economic disadvantages faced by blacks in the recent past are responsible (Brewer 1988; Wilson 1987). This actually helps me because I've long wondered why sociological work on black families seemed so ahistorical. There's a strong bias toward looking at black people through the lens of the 1960s--as though black America begins with the Long Hot Summers. I suspect part of that is that we just didn't have great data on black families, and the data we had indicated that something had gone drastically "wrong" around 1960. But while it's true that you see a dramatic increase in single-family homes in 1960, the gap is about as old as our data. Ruggles was able to get ahold of census micro-data and basically concluded as much. If you look at the report you can see on Table 2 that as early as 1880 there were roughly double the percentage of black children born to single mothers as to whites (13.1 to 5.9.) Ruggles concludes:...[T]he finding of recent studies that the high incidence of single parenthood and children residing without parents among blacks is not new. The pattern is clearly evident as far back as 1850 among free blacks. From 1880 through 1960, the percentage of black children with at least one absent parent was fairly stable and about two-and-one-half times greater than the percentage among whites. Recently, the percentages of both black children and white children with absent parents have risen dramatically... Race differences in family structure have expanded throughout the twentieth century, especially over the past three decades. But the fundamental differences in the percentage of children residing without parents began well over a century ago. The critical question remains: What is the source of this distinctive African-American pattern of single parenthood? Recent economic changes can be invoked to explain the growing differential between black family structure and white family structure, but they cannot explain why blacks started from a higher base.Again, you see a big shift in 1960. But that's true for both black and white families, and it's a shift that has been oft-commented upon. The change in marriage is not a "black" problem, and I am not even convinced that it is a "problem." People who want us to go back to 1880 should have the intellectual courage to advocate for the entirety of their vision, not just the parts they like. It is not simply a question of "Is marriage good for kids?" It's "Are shotgun marriages good for kids?" "Should marriage be valued at all costs, including enduring abuse or ill-treatment?" "Should women marry men regardless of their employment prospects and their contact with the correctional system?" My sense is democratic. I think that human beings are pretty logical and generally savvy about identifying their interests. Despite what we've heard, women tend to be human beings and if they are less likely to marry today, it is probable that they have decided that marriage doesn't advance their interests as much as it once did. It's worth noting that it is not simply women with children who aren't marrying, but women period. Indeed, black women today who are unmarried are having fewer kids than at any point in our recorded history. Mouthing platitudes about culture is fun if you want to be right. But if you really want to know, it's a little harder. And on that note I'll say peace to Dalton Conley and Andrew Cherlin for the assistance. And keeping it 100, I will add that I had an excellent Côte Du Rhone with my lunch today. And to keep it hood I'll note that the Camembert from Whole Foods is really incredible. (I almost felt like I was home.) And finally, to make it extra hood I'll say I'm looking forward to going out with my wife, my homegirl Chana, and her dude tonight. We plan to drink some wine and do all we can to ruin the good name of the black family and further discredit the entire race.  Holler if you so happen to hear me.

       

How to Become a Foodie

So I've been missing Paris a lot. My current playlist is pitiful—I alternate Distant Lover and Cette Année-la. I keep waiting to walk out my door and see the women in the long dresses and big hats riding the Velib. No dice. I've had some small victories. Kenyatta found us a cheap, decent Sauvignon-Blanc. I found some good, stinky Camembert. I've been walking a lot more, and running a lot less. I like how much you see when you take it slow. Prenez le temps, mon fils. Don't let it all pass you by. Think about your life. All of that's been nice, but I've been frustrated by my inability to find a good baguette. I'd tried the local bakery nearby, which was reputed to have one of the best baguettes in New York. It was too big, too dense, too bland, and (ultimately) too expensive. What I remember about the baguettes in Paris is that they were cheap and I never had a desire to put anything on them. They are a meal onto themselves. And I also suspect they were laced with narcotics. I get high off the plainest things. I joke a lot about oatmeal here, but a good bowl of rolled oats, with a little brown sugar, cranberries and raisins really smooths me out. It's a different feeling than eating something really sweet or salty. There's a kind of evenness that just takes over you. I just feel mellow. But yesterday I took my walk and on the loop back stopped at Whole Foods to buy some oatmeal. They were selling baguettes for two bucks. I figured I'd take the gamble. It's fashionable to talk shit about Whole Foods. But the baguette I got there was almost—almost—as good as my daily special from Eric Kayser. I brought it home, sat up with my wife and my kid and we all got high. When I was leaving Paris, I wrote about how the things I valued seemed to be valued over there. High on that list are things you stuff into your body. And when I thought about what I stuffed into my body, while in Paris, I didn't feel like a foodie. I didn't feel special. I felt like I was learning French. But I guess I am a foodie now. I'll take that. There aren't many moments of peace and bliss. I can't drink like I did when I was young. My life doesn't really allow for marijuana. But I need a separate space. Dinner seems like a good place to draw the line. Now for the saucisson and boudin noir...