Ta-Nehisi Coates's Blog, page 44

The Unromantic Slaughter of the Civil War

The great Tony Horwitz has a good piece up at the site on the new movement among historians questioning the civil war as a good war:

"We've decided the Civil War is a 'good war' because it destroyed slavery," says Fitzhugh Brundage, a historian at the University of North Carolina. "I think it's an indictment of 19th century Americans that they had to slaughter each other to do that." Similar reservations were voiced by an earlier generation of historians known as revisionists. From the 1920s to 40s, they argued that the war was not an inevitable clash over irreconcilable issues. Rather, it was a "needless" bloodbath, the fault of "blundering" statesmen and "pious cranks," mainly abolitionists. Some revisionists, haunted by World War I, cast all war as irrational, even "psychopathic."

World War II undercut this anti-war stance. Nazism was an evil that had to be fought. So, too, was slavery, which revisionists -- many of them white Southerners--had cast as a relatively benign institution, and dismissed it as a genuine source of sectional conflict. Historians who came of age during the Civil Rights Movement placed slavery and emancipation at the center of the Civil War. This trend is now reflected in textbooks and popular culture. The Civil War today is generally seen as a necessary and ennobling sacrifice, redeemed by the liberation of four million slaves.

But cracks in this consensus are appearing with growing frequency, for example in studies like America Aflame, by historian David Goldfield. Goldfield states on the first page that the war was "America's greatest failure." He goes on to impeach politicians, extremists, and the influence of evangelical Christianity for polarizing the nation to the point where compromise or reasoned debate became impossible.

Unlike the revisionists of old, Goldfield sees slavery as the bedrock of the Southern cause and abolition as the war's great achievement. But he argues that white supremacy was so entrenched, North and South, that war and Reconstruction could never deliver true racial justice to freed slaves, who soon became subject to economic peonage, Black Codes, Jim Crow, and rampant lynching.

Nor did the war knit the nation back together. Instead, the South became a stagnant backwater, a resentful region that lagged and resisted the nation's progress. It would take a century and the Civil Rights struggle for blacks to achieve legal equality, and for the South to emerge from poverty and isolation. "Emancipation and reunion, the two great results of this war, were badly compromised," Goldfield says. Given these equivocal gains, and the immense toll in blood and treasure, he asks: "Was the war worth it? No."

One thing that World War II taught me is that there is no such thing as a "good war." It's true the North did not go to war free the slaves. It's also true that no nation in Europe went to war to save European Jews. It's true that white racism had infected the North and the South. It's also true that anti-Semitism had infected the European and American allies. Faced with the actual horrors of mass killing, I don't know that there is any war that can objectively said to be "worth it." But with that said, I think the idea that the Civil War reflects some unique failure of 19th-century Americans -- a failure equally born by Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee -- is quite wrong.

It should always be remembered that America did not "go to war" in 1860. America was attacked in 1860 by a formidable rebel faction seeking to protect the expansion of slavery. That faction did not simply want slavery to continue in America; they dreamed of a tropical empire of slavery encompassing Cuba, Nicaragua, and perhaps the whole of South America. This faction was not only explicitly pro-slavery but explicitly anti-democratic. The newly declared Confederacy attacked America not because it was being persecuted, but because it was unable to win a democratic election.

Understanding that, it is not enough to simply say the war was not "worth it" or to indict the failure of 19th-century Americans. A responsible thinker must offer a plausible alternative to the one Lincoln ultimately chose. Should Lincoln have allowed the South to depart? Should he have compromised with the South and vowed to support slavery's continuance and expansion? If the Civil War represents the failure of 19th-century Americans, what represents success? How -- specifically -- should that have been achieved?

It's very important to follow the logic of alternatives all the way through. If the Civil War was not "worth it," then the logical conclusion is that my ancestors should have remained enslaved and should have continued to be subject to having their wives, husbands, fathers, and children sold away until some undetermined point that was more convenient for white people.

The fact is that the Civil War didn't represent a failure of 19th-century Americans, but that the American slave society -- which was itself war -- represented a failure of humanity. That failure was the price America paid for its conception. The bill came due in 1860. No one knew this better than Lincoln himself:

If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through his appointed time, he now wills to remove, and that he gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to him? Fondly do we hope -- fervently do we pray -- that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, "The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

I am very sorry that white people began experiencing great violence in 1860. But for some of us, war did not begin 1860, but in 1660. The brutal culmination of that war may not have allowed us to ascend into a post-racial heaven. But here is something I always come back to: In 1859 legally selling someone's five-year-old child was big business. In 1866, it was not. American Slavery was a system of perpetual existential violence. The idea that it could have been -- or should have been -- ended, after two and a half centuries of practice, with a handshake and an ice-cream social strikes me as really wrong.

       

Revisiting the Moynihan Report, Cont.

There was some good conversation in comments yesterday about Daniel Patrick Moynihan's The Negro Family: A Call For National Action, on the black family, and some of the resulting pushback. Horde Legionnaire Socioprof offered this link to a 2009 issue of Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. In it, Moynihan's legacy is re-assessed from several perspectives. 

I am just beginning to go through the volume. But the first essay argues that Moynihan was unfairly tarred as a racist by people who had not read the report. Apparently portions of it were leaked early, many of them taken out of context. I have my own critiques of The Negro Family. I think the slavery portion doesn't hold up as well as some of the other portions of the report. I also think anyone considering its arguments about slavery should check out Herb Gutman's The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom.

But Moynihan's argument differs substantially from the kind of ahistorical shaming you see from people who attack black culture as the font of the race problem. The opening chapter is written by Douglass Massey and Robert Sampson. I'm not very familiar with Sampson, but I know Massey's work well. He is a pioneer in understanding the continuing effects of segregation and the piracy of black wealth that characterized mid-20th century domestic policy. Here are their thoughts on what Moynihan was actually trying to accomplish:

The key to arresting the alarming rise in family instability, he felt, was a dedicated federal effort to provide jobs for black men. He was, after all, assistant secretary in the Department of Labor, not in the Department Health, Education, and Welfare; his purview was the workforce and not the family. The crisis in the black family was his justification for a federal jobs program. Along with education, training, and apprenticeship programs that would enhance the employability of black men, he favored a major public works effort that would guarantee jobs to all able-bodied workers. If full employment for black males -- especially young black males -- could be achieved, he thought, then family stability could be restored and government would be in a better position to attack more entrenched problems such as discrimination and segregation.

I tend to think that it would be really hard to separate out segregation from employment and family stability. That's a subject worthy of debate. But Moynihan didn't get a debate. He got condemnation:

Perhaps a major effort to generate employment for low-income, minority workers was never in the cards. Even LBJ was skeptical of government work programs. But something else also transpired to seal the fate of Moynihan, his report, and its emphasis on federal employment programs. Immediately after the president's speech at Howard University, someone leaked the Moynihan Report to journalists, who naturally published the florid language and incendiary prose that was meant to stir passions within the administration while ignoring the more prosaic but critical structural analysis embedded in the report.

Soon, headlines blared that Moynihan was calling the black family pathological and blaming it for the problems of the ghetto, which suggested that he was laying the onus of black educational failure, joblessness, and criminality on female matriarchs. Moynihan-bashing quickly became a boom industry in the liberal press, led by the journalist William Ryan, who in The Nation coined the term "blaming the victim" to describe the report (Ryan 1971).

Moreover, in the context of an emergent black power movement, Moynihan s emphasis on humiliated black men could not have been less timely, and in the context of a coalescing feminist movement, his pairing of matriarchy and pathology could not have been less welcome. Young black militants and newly self-aware feminists joined in the rising tide of vilification, and Moynihan was widely pilloried not only as a racist, but a sexist to boot.

A great irony is that few of his vociferous critics had actually read Moynihan's report. It was still an internal document with a very limited number of copies. Most people had only read selective extracts published in columns and stories about the report, which when combined yielded a bowdlerized version of its arguments. One wonders, for example, whether critics who claimed Moynihan was racist had read even the first page of the report, where it was claimed that "the racist virus in the American blood stream still afflicts us." The report was not actually "published" and widely distributed until 1967, when Rainwater and Yancey included a facsimile in their analysis of "the politics of controversy."

By then, of course, it was too late; Moynihan's report had been consigned to the netherworld of the politically incorrect, where it would remain for decades. One can only imagine the even more vociferous reaction that would have ensued had the Moynihan Report been leaked in the technological world of today, with its capacity for instantaneous and frenzied distribution the world over.

Perhaps. There's also an argument that the Moynihan Report actually would have done better today -- a two-year lag-time in publication is unthinkable. Moreover, in 1967 the tools of publication were only in a few hands. Today they belong to anyone with an Internet connection.

But there would be no Moynihan report today. The liberal consensus has shifted too far to the right. And so we have people who were influenced by Moynihan's thoughts on the importance of family, neglecting to heed his lessons on how to solve those problems.*

Moynihan powerfully believed that government could actually fix "the race problem." He probably believed this because he knew that government had, at best, stood aside while the problem was created and, at its worse, actively contributed to the problem. This is not a line that liberals in politics generally advocate for today.

*Note that this pose is much less risky, politically. There's no real political cost to telling people to get married. (Everyone loves a wedding.) Telling them that there should be a jobs program that makes more men marriage-material is different.

       

Revisiting The Moynihan Report Cont.

There was some good conversation in comments yesterday about Daniel Patrick Moynihan's The Negro Family: A Call For National Action on the black family and some of the resulting pushback. Horde Legionnaire Socioprof offered this link to a 2009 issue of Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. In it, Moynihan's legacy is re-assessed from several perspectives. 

I am just beginning to go through the volume. But the first essay argues that Moynihan was unfairly tarred as a racist by people who had not read the report. Apparently portions of it were leaked early, many of them taken out of context. I have my own critiques of The Negro Family. I think the slavery portion doesn't hold up as well as some of the other portions of the report. I also think anyone considering its arguments about slavery should check out Herb Gutman's The Black Family In Slavery In Freedom.

But Moynihan's argument is differs substantially from the kind of ahistorical shaming you see from people who attack black culture as the font of the race problem.The opening chapter is written Douglass Massey and Robert Sampson. I'm not very familiar with Sampson, but I know Massey's work well. He is a pioneer in understanding the continuing effects of segregation and the piracy of black wealth that characterized mid-20th century domestic policy. Here are their thoughts on what Moynihan was actually trying to accomplish:

The key to arresting the alarming rise in family instability, he felt, was a dedi- cated federal effort to provide jobs for black men. He was, after all, assistant sec- retary in the Department of Labor, not in the Department Health, Education, and Welfare; his purview was the workforce and not the family. The crisis in the black family was his justification for a federal jobs program. Along with educa- tion, training, and apprenticeship programs that would enhance the employabil- ity of black men, he favored a major public works effort that would guarantee jobs to all able-bodied workers. If full employment for black males - especially young black males - could be achieved, he thought, then family stability could be restored and government would be in a better position to attack more entrenched problems such as discrimination and segregation.

I tend to think that it would be really hard to separate out segregation from employment and family stability. But that's a subject worthy of debate. But Moynihan didn't get a debate. He got condemnation:

Perhaps a major effort to generate employment for low-income, minority workers was never in the cards. Even LBJ was skeptical of government work pro- grams. But something else also transpired to seal the fate of Moynihan, his report, and its emphasis on federal employment programs. Immediately after the presidents speech at Howard University, someone leaked the Moynihan Report to journalists, who naturally published the florid language and incendiary prose that was meant to stir passions within the administration while ignoring the more prosaic but critical structural analysis embedded in the report.

Soon, headlines blared that Moynihan was calling the black family pathological and blaming it for the problems of the ghetto, which suggested that he was layingthe onus of black educational failure, joblessness, and criminality on female matri- archs. Moynihan-bashing quickly became a boom industry in the liberal press, led by the journalist William Ryan, who in The Nation coined the term "blaming the victim" to describe the report (Ryan 1971).

Moreover, in the context of an emer- gent black power movement, Moynihan s emphasis on humiliated black men could not have been less timely, and in the context of a coalescing feminist movement, his pairing of matriarchy and pathology could not have been less wel- come. Young black militants and newly self-aware feminists joined in the rising tide of vilification, and Moynihan was widely pilloried not only as a racist, but a sexist to boot.

A great irony is that few of his vociferous critics had actually read Moynihan s report. It was still an internal document with a very limited number of copies. Most people had only read selective extracts published in columns and stories about the report, which when combined yielded a bowdlerized version of its arguments. One wonders, for example, whether critics who claimed Moynihan was racist had read even the first page of the report, where it was claimed that "the racist virus in the American blood stream still afflicts us." The report was not actually "published" and widely distributed until 1967, when Rainwater and Yancey included a facsimile in their analysis of "the politics of controversy."

By then, of course, it was too late; Moynihan s report had been consigned to the netherworld of the politically incorrect, where it would remain for decades. One can only imagine the even more vociferous reaction that would have ensued had the Moynihan Report been leaked in the technological world of today, with its capacity for instantaneous and frenzied distribution the world over.

Perhaps. There's also an argument that Moynihan Report actually would have done better today--a two year lagtime in publication is unthinkable. Moreover, in 1967 the tools of publication were only in a few hands. Today they belong to anyone with an internet connection.

But there would be no Moynihan report today. The liberal consensus has shifted too far to the right. And so we have people who were influenced by Moynihan's thoughts on the importance of family, neglecting to heed his lessons on how to solve those problems.

Moynihan powerfully believed that government could actually fix "the race problem." He probably believed this because he knew that government had, at best, stood aside while the problem was created and, at its worse, actively contributed to the problem. This is not a line that liberals in politics generally advocate for today.

       

Revisiting the Moynihan Report

The Urban Institute revisits Daniel Moynihan's The Negro Family: The Case For National Action and finds that a lot has changed. Mostly for the worse:

These demographic trends are stunning. Five decades after Moynihan's work, white families exhibit the same rates of nonmarital childbearing and single parenting as black families did in the 1960s when Moynihan sounded his alarm. Meanwhile, the disintegration of the black nuclear family continued apace. That the decline of traditional families occurred across racial and ethnic groups indicates that factors driving the decline do not lie solely within the black community but in the larger social and economic context. Nevertheless, the consequences of these trends in family structure may be felt disproportionately among blacks as black children are far more likely to be born into and raised in father-absent families than are white children.

I've never really gotten the hubbub over the Moynihan Report. It seems pretty clear to me that in America, parenting is about resources. That families that can bring to bear two streams of resources have better outcomes, on balance, than those who only have one strikes me as logical and predictable. I don't say that as a black person, but as parent.

Moreover unlike people who believe that black people think reading makes you white, or think that blacks somehow like being poor, Moynihan was never confused about the root causes of the black communities predicament:

That the Negro American has survived at all is extraordinary -- a lesser people might simply have died out, as indeed others have. That the Negro community has not only survived, but in this political generation has entered national affairs as a moderate, humane, and constructive national force is the highest testament to the healing powers of the democratic ideal and the creative vitality of the Negro people. But it may not be supposed that the Negro American community has not paid a fearful price for the incredible mistreatment to which it has been subjected over the past three centuries.

Moynihan believed that the crisis of the black family was the result of having been "battered and harassed by discrimination, injustice and uprooting." Three centuries of injustice," wrote Moynihan, "have brought about deep-seated structural distortions in the life of the Negro American." In my experience people love to quote Moynihan's thoughts on the crisis of the black family. Quoting Moynihan on the how and why of the crisis? Not so much.

The Urban Institute's report demonstrates that the battering Moynihan highlights continues into the present. Last week, I argued that you can't really analogize the "black middle class" with the "white middle class" or the "black elite" with the "white elite" in any real meaningful sense. You can see why in this chart.

To summarize:

The historical segregation of neighborhoods along racial lines fueled the geographic concentration of poverty and the severe distress of very high-poverty neighborhoods. As Massey and Denton demonstrated in American Apartheid (1993), discriminatory policies and practices confining urban blacks--among whom the incidence of poverty was markedly higher than for whites--to a limited selection of city neighborhoods produced much higher poverty rates than in white neighborhoods. Subsequent job losses and rising unemployment pushed poverty in many black neighborhoods even higher.

Today, despite the significant decline in residential segregation, virtually all high-poverty neighborhoods (neighborhoods where more than 40 percent of the population is poor) are majority-minority, and blacks are over five times more likely than whites to live in high-poverty neighborhoods.4 Poor white households are much more geographically dispersed than poor black or Hispanic households. In fact, the average high-income black person lives in a neighborhood with a higher poverty rate than the average low-income white person.

It's worth considering the message a society sends to its citizens with data like this. If you are an African-American aspiring to affluence, you can expect to live in a neighborhood that is about as impoverished as the average poor white person.

       

Revisiting The Moynihan Report

The Urban Institute revisits Daniel Moynihan's The Negro Family: The Case For National Action and finds that a lot has changed. Mostly for the worse:

These demographic trends are stunning. Five decades after Moynihan's work, white families exhibit the same rates of nonmarital childbearing and single parenting as black families did in the 1960s when Moynihan sounded his alarm. Meanwhile, the disintegration of the black nuclear family continued apace. That the decline of traditional families occurred across racial and ethnic groups indicates that factors driving the decline do not lie solely within the black community but in the larger social and economic context. Nevertheless, the consequences of these trends in family structure may be felt disproportionately among blacks as black children are far more likely to be born into and raised in father-absent families than are white children.

I've never really gotten the hubbub over the Moynihan Report. It seems pretty clear to me that in America, parenting is about resources. That families that can bring to bear two streams of resources have better outcomes, on balance, than those who only have on strikes me as logical and predictable. I don't say that as a black person, but as parent.

Moreover unlike people who believe that black people argue that black people think reading makes you white, or somehow like being poor, Moynihan was never confused about the root causes of the black communities predicament:

That the Negro American has survived at all is extraordinary -- a lesser people might simply have died out, as indeed others have. That the Negro community has not only survived, but in this political generation has entered national affairs as a moderate, humane, and constructive national force is the highest testament to the healing powers of the democratic ideal and the creative vitality of the Negro people. But it may not be supposed that the Negro American community has not paid a fearful price for the incredible mistreatment to which it has been subjected over the past three centuries.

Moynihan believed that the crisis of the black family was the result of having been "battered and harassed by discrimination, injustice and uprooting." Three centuries of injustice," wrote Moynihan. "have brought about deep-seated structural distortions in the life of the Negro American." In my experience people love to quote Moynihan thoughts on the crisis of the black family. Quoting Moynihan on the how and why of the crisis? Not so much.

The Urban Institute's report demonstrates that the battering Moynihan highlights continues into the present. Last week I argued that you can't really analogize the "black middle class" with the "white middle class" or the "black elite" with the "white elite" in any real meaningful sense. You can see why in this chart.

To summarize:

The historical segregation of neighborhoods along racial lines fueled the geographic concentration of poverty and the severe distress of very high-poverty neighborhoods. As Massey and Denton demonstrated in American Apartheid (1993), discriminatory policies and practices confining urban blacks--among whom the incidence of poverty was markedly higher than for whites--to a limited selection of city neighborhoods produced much higher poverty rates than in white neighborhoods. Subsequent job losses and rising unemployment pushed poverty in many black neighborhoods even higher.

Today, despite the significant decline in residential segregation, virtually all high-poverty neighborhoods (neighborhoods where more than 40 percent of the population is poor) are majority-minority, and blacks are over five times more likely than whites to live in high-poverty neighborhoods.4 Poor white households are much more geographically dispersed than poor black or Hispanic households. In fact, the average high-income black person lives in a neighborhood with a higher poverty rate than the average low-income white person.

It's worth considering the message a society sends to its citizens with data like this. If you are an African-American aspiring to affluence you can expect to live in a neighborhood that is about as a impoverished as the average poor white person.

       

The Art of the College Lecture

I think I've said before that I like to boot up college lectures and listen while gaming. I'm still playing Civilization V (stuck on King) and so I generally use the Yale History Department's lectures (available through Open Yale) as background music. "Background music" is really disservice, if only because since I've started teaching I've been thinking about what lectures I enjoy and which ones I do not.

My favorite right now is John Merriman's "European Civilization 1648-1945." It obviously helps to be actually interested in what folks are lecturing on, and European history is basically my second love. I've long said that had I been born white, I would have been a medievalist. I don't read the material for the courses, or purchase the books, though I'm going to read Merriman's single volume history of modern Europe this summer. Still listening to these guys have helped me get a hold on what makes for a great lecture.

Merriman is a kind of a freestyle rapper. He is riffing off the material and doesn't really do "In this year this happened, and in that year that happened." Instead he just gives you anecdotes, quotes and observations about the periods. Merriman has this weird ability to inhabit the history--he'll do these really exaggerated accents or capture the tragicomedy of World War I by noting the obvious threat of the Germans "in Ostend eating moules frites."
Or he'll not the frightening absurdity of Austrian anti-Semitism by quoting Karl Leuger's assertion "I decide who is a Jew."*
Last week I was talking about how much of teaching is performance, and Merriman gives a show. This is not demeaning. So much of getting people to care about a subject is conveying your own passion. I imagine that it's a lot easier to convey passion at the University level, then at the elementary and secondary school level where teachers often must be passionate over a range of subjects, and passionate about a curriculum that may not be their own.
Anyway, I highly recommend Merriman if you like European history. He is not quite as focused as David Blight. And I wouldn't listen to get a strict "chronological" read of history. But there's something to be said for not presenting history as an orderly sequence of events. Rarely do people at the time see it things that way.
* I've thought a lot about that "I decide who is a Jew" quote. It really says a lot about how a ruling class uses race to conceal their power. Surely the Jews existed as a people with their own traditions, folkways and affinities. But when Leuger says "I decide who's a Jew" he is claiming the right to declare who is inferior by blood and who isn't. It is very similar to the way the colonial Virginians (and racists today) claimed the right to "decide who's a nigger." It is not enough to say "I have more guns than you, so I win." The "win" must be ordained by God. Or science--which to the racist, is just another word for "God." Beyond the task of justifying and reifying power, "race" has little meaning.
       

A Rising Tide Lifts All Yachts

I've spent the last couple of months looking at the roots of white supremacists' policy, and the limits of color-blind policy in addressing its damage. A few weeks back, while debating Andrew over IQ differentials, I cautioned against comparisons between blacks and whites which claim to control for income and even wealth:

This is not merely a problem for your local diversity and sensitivity workshop. It is a problem of wealth and power. When you create a situation in which a community has a disproportionate number of poor people, and then you hyper-segregate that community, you multiply the problems of poverty for the entire community -- poor or not. That is to say that black individuals are not simply poorer and less wealthy than white individuals. Because of segregation, black individuals and white individuals of the same income and same wealth do not live in communities of equal wealth.

I also pointed to sociologist John Logan's research which points out that, on average, affluent blacks tend to live in neighborhoods with poorer resources than most poor whites. To understand this you must get that African Americans are the most segregated group in American history. Right now, at this very moment, the dissimilarity index -- the means by which we measure segregation -- is at the lowest point it's been in a century. Despite that, African Americans are still highly segregated.
To understand the profound consequences of segregation, consider this study by sociologist Patrick Sharkey -- "Neighborhoods and The Mobility Gap" -- which looks at how children fare when exposed to poverty. The answer, of course, is not well. Instead of trying to do a one-to-one match of African Americans and whites via income or wealth, the study considers African Americans and whites within the neighborhoods in which they live. The conclusions are generally not surprising:

Among children born from 1955 through 1970, only 4 percent of whites were raised in neighborhoods with at least 20 percent poverty, compared to 62 percent of blacks. Three out of four white children were raised in neighborhoods with less than 10 percent poverty, compared to just 9 percent of blacks. Even more astonishingly, essentially no white children were raised in neighborhoods with at least 30 percent poverty, but three in ten blacks were.

And more shockingly still, almost half (49 percent) of black children with family income in the top three quintiles lived in neighborhoods with at least 20 percent poverty, compared to only one percent of white children in those quintiles. These figures reveal that black children born from the mid 1950s to 1970 were surrounded by poverty to a degree that was virtually nonexistent for whites.

This degree of racial inequality is not a remnant of the past. Two out of three black children born from 1985 through 2000 have been raised in neighborhoods with at least 20 percent poverty, compared to just 6 percent of whites. Only one out of ten blacks in the current generation has been raised in a neighborhood with less than 10 percent poverty, compared to six out of ten whites. Even today, thirty percent of black children experience a level of neighborhood poverty -- a rate of 30 percent or more -- unknown among white children.

When you take an even more holistic look at poverty, it gets much worse:

Previous research has used a measure of neighborhood disadvantage that incorporates not only poverty rates, but unemployment rates, rates of welfare receipt and families headed by a single mother, levels of racial segregation, and the age distribution in the neighborhood to capture the multiple dimensions of disadvantage that may characterize a neighborhood.

Figure 2 shows that using this more comprehensive measure broken down into categories representing low, medium, and high disadvantage, 84 percent of black children born from 1955 through 1970 were raised in "high" disadvantage neighborhoods, compared to just 5 percent of whites. Only 2 percent of blacks were raised in "low" disadvantage neighborhoods, compared to 45 percent of whites. The figures for contemporary children are similar.

By this broader measure, blacks and whites inhabit such different neighborhoods that it is not possible to compare the economic outcomes of black and white children who grow up in similarly disadvantaged neighborhoods. However, there is enough overlap in the childhood neighborhood poverty rates of blacks and whites to consider the effect of concentrated poverty on economic mobility.

I strongly urge you to read this report. But in case you don't -- to summarize -- "the effect of concentrated poverty on economic mobility" is very, very bad:

The main conclusion from these results is that neighborhood poverty appears to be an important part of the reason why blacks experience more downward relative economic mobility than whites, a finding that is consistent with the idea that the social environments surrounding African Americans may make it difficult for families to preserve their advantaged position in the income distribution and to transmit these advantages to their children.

When white families advance in the income distribution they are able to translate this economic advantage into spatial advantage in ways that African Americans are not, by buying into communities that provide quality schools and healthy environments for children. These results suggest that one consequence of this pattern is that middle-class status is particularly precarious for blacks, and downward mobility is more common as a result.

When you hear people claiming that "class" can somehow account for the damage of white supremacy, or making spurious comparisons between Appalachia and Harlem,  you should be skeptical. I have made those comparisons. But learning is the entire point of researching, writing, and reporting. I am learning that you can not simply wish the past away.

White-supremacist policy is older than this country. It begins with the slave codes in mid-17th-century colonial Virginia. It proceeds through the the 18th century, inscribing itself into our Constitution. It moves into the 19th century with such force that slaves alone were worth more than all the productive capacity of the country put together. War was waged to assure slavery's continuance. The war was lost. We had a chance to do the right thing. We didn't. So white supremacist policy endured. Even American liberalism's proudest moment -- the New Deal -- would be unimaginable without its aid. This era of policy did not close until the late 1960s, well within the living memory of many Americans.

In the face of this, liberals today are arguing that 300 years of immoral policy can be undone by changing the subject. If only we can fool white racists by helping black people under the guise of "class," maybe we can get out from under this. But the math says that black people are a class unto themselves. There is no "black and white" elite, no "black and white" middle class, no colorless poor. And when you consider that white supremacy is a dominant strain in our history, how could there be?

Almost twenty years ago, Deborah Malmud made a critique of class-based affirmative action (which is in vogue at the moment) which sticks with me:

Patterns of race-based class differentiation -- the fact that, in the aggregate, being the black child of a black lawyer means something different in the American social world from being the white child of a white lawyer -- are particularly problematic for the American vision of class mobility and racial equality. And a race-neutral program of class-based affirmative action will only submerge those patterns. In so doing, it will disserve the interests of the minority middle class.

I don't mean to be harsh or unsympathetic. It really is a terrible political problem. But you can't pretend it away. We are not going to trick the forces of history by appealing to color in our individual morality, and avoiding it when confronted with our national morality. Booker T. Washington already tried that. Red Summer was our reward.        

Kurt Vonnegut Is for the Kids

So I handed my copy of Slaughterhouse-Five off to my son. His thoughts thus far.1.) "Billy is stupid."
2.) "Wild Bob is life."
The zen of children. More thoughts coming.        

Kurt Vonnegut Is For The Kids

So I handed my copy of Slaughterhouse-Five off to my son. His thoughts thus far.
1.) "BIlly is stupid."
2.) "Wild Bob is life."
The zen of children. More thoughts coming.        

To Stop Being the Party of Stupid You Must Stop Being Stupid

My label-mate David Graham finds the GOP saying dumb things about women, pregnancy, and rape again:

"Before, when my friends on the left side of the aisle here tried to make rape and incest the subject -- because, you know, the incidence of rape resulting in pregnancy are very low," Franks said.
Franks continued: "But when you make that exception, there's usually a requirement to report the rape within 48 hours. And in this case that's impossible because this is in the sixth month of gestation. And that's what completely negates and vitiates the purpose of such an amendment."

In fact, as Garance Franke-Ruta has pointed out, the incidents of pregnancy from rape are not low:

STUDY DESIGN: A national probability sample of 4008 adult American women took part in a 3-year longitudinal survey that assessed the prevalence and incidence of rape and related physical and mental health outcomes. 
RESULTS: The national rape-related pregnancy rate is 5.0% per rape among victims of reproductive age (aged 12 to 45); among adult women an estimated 32,101 pregnancies result from rape each year. Among 34 cases of rape-related pregnancy, the majority occurred among adolescents and resulted from assault by a known, often related perpetrator. Only 11.7% of these victims received immediate medical attention after the assault, and 47.1% received no medical attention related to the rape. A total 32.4% of these victims did not discover they were pregnant until they had already entered the second trimester; 32.2% opted to keep the infant whereas 50% underwent abortion and 5.9% placed the infant for adoption; an additional 11.8% had spontaneous abortion. 
CONCLUSIONS: Rape-related pregnancy occurs with significant frequency. It is a cause of many unwanted pregnancies and is closely linked with family and domestic violence. As we address the epidemic of unintended pregnancies in the United States, greater attention and effort should be aimed at preventing and identifying unwanted pregnancies that result from sexual victimization.

More:

Each year in the US, 10,000-15,000 abortions occur among women whose pregnancies are a result of reported rape or incest. An unknown number of pregnancies resulting from rape are carried to term. There is absolutely no veracity to the claim that "If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to shut that whole thing down." A woman who is raped has no control over ovulation, fertilization, or implantation of a fertilized egg (ie, pregnancy). To suggest otherwise contradicts basic biological truths.

I've said this before but conservatives often perceive liberal attachment to diversity as a kind of "everyone's a winner" cuddle party, where we sit around exchanging rice-cakes and hating on the military. But the great strength of diversity is it forces you into a room with people who have experiences very different from your own. It's all fine and good to laugh at Sherrod Brown dancing to Jay-Z. But dude is outside his lane and he's learning something. M.C. Rove should be so lucky.
If you are not around people who will look at you like you are crazy when you make stupid claims about other people's experiences, then you tend to keep saying stupid things about other people's experiences. It is not enough to pay a political price, or even to be shamed into silence. You have to come to believe -- in your heart -- that sincerity itself is not the same as accurate information. It is not enough for you to not be "the party of stupid" or to "stop saying stupid things" you must show some active commitment toward being less stupid.
That commitment is never comfortable. And you might find yourself the next contestant on that Summer-Jam screen. But your going to be on that screen anyway. Better to be awkward than stupid.