The relationship of black males to the college campus and the prison compound has shaped the peculiar configuration of black communities over the last two and a half decades. There was a time when much of black life was shaped by the aftermath of the civil rights movement. Immediately after the civil rights movement, the avenues for black upward mobility were expanded and there occurred a sizeable increase in the black middle class.
Since American politics have shifted to the right, public policy emanating from the state sector has been instrumental in constricting those avenues of upward mobility. The outgrowth of the ideological shift is increasing inequality, falling wages for the middle class and grinding invisible poverty.
Much of the thought process dominant in America is still grounded in frontier society. There is still extreme dependency on coercion and, as Katrina has revealed, there are always devouring elements waiting to prey on society. It is the crude nature of American capitalism that in some quarters what holds the society together is naked force. Once that naked force is absent, the predators come out of the woodwork “to be paid.”
Even before the 1980s, crimes in America began to spiral out of control. The major crime indicators – homicide, felonies, robberies, rape and burglaries – showed dramatic surges and made cities after dark unsafe. Not much change in the crime rate occurred in the suburbs, as the economic environmental dynamics were different from the inner cities.
Sociologists like William Julius Wilson and Robert Sampson wrote about the disintegrating impact that de-industrialization was having on the major cities such as Chicago, Detroit, New York City, Baltimore and Cleveland. De-industrialization – the movement of the manufacturing base to other global cities – destroyed social capital and made it extremely difficult for neighborhood wholesomeness. The scrapping of neighborhoods made it possible for black male survival.
It was not defined as such, but this was the first impact of globalization and it brought a devastating wallop to black neighborhoods.
White America saw the threat to the social order, but rather than the state sector responding to meet the economic needs of those thrown out of work, the response was to use the criminal justice system to place the lid on the economic crisis that burgeoned into a social crisis.
To use an analogy akin to New Orleans, the black population was under water, under siege and the response was not a rescue mission but a mission of incarceration. Legislators, governors, congress and presidents concentrated on the expansion of the criminal justice system. The prison population began to rise and in the first decade of the 21st century, over 2 million Americans were incarcerated. America holds the distinction of having the highest incarceration rates of any industrialized country in the modern world. It is a testimony to the weakness of the social failure of America and the inability to effectively create a democratic capitalist system.
At midyear in 2003, there were 2,078,570 persons in America’s prisons as reported by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The breakdown of the numbers was as follows: 1,450,920 prisons in federal and state custody and the remaining were held in jails. Although blacks constitute 12.3 percent of the United States population, they are 43.9 percent of all those in holding cells. Human Rights Watch points out that the pattern for the percentage of blacks incarcerated in institutions to exponentially exceed the number of blacks in a particular state. This trend is national, not the peculiarity of any region. For example, blacks constitute 26 percent of the residents in Alabama but constitute 61.9 percent of the inmate population. The black population in Florida is 14.6 percent and the black incarcerated population is 48.1 percent. In New York, the black population comprises 15.9 percent of the state and the black prison population is 54 percent.
By the 1990s, there began to be a sharp drop in crime rates. The homicide rate, which had spiked during the decade of the 1980s, began to trend downward in the 1990s. Today, it is comparable with the rate of the 1960s. Despite the sharp reduction in crime, the prison population continues to accelerate and white civil society and those in charge of state power have failed to identify the crippling impact that high rates of incarceration have had on the black community and the injurious impact on the larger society.
The high rates of black incarceration should not be seen as a black problem. It is an American problem. This is what the society reproduces. There is a propensity for violence in American society and that tendency is even more acute when one isolates blacks in the age bracket, 18 to 24. The nation’s homicide rate has plummeted in all categories and that reduction cannot solely be attributed to police managerial techniques and/or the expansion of police presence. The literature is still conflicting on what accounts for the decline, yet there have been no serious studies assessing the changes taking place in inner city communities.
Concomitant with the prison explosion is the access revolution that has taken hold in higher education. The public policy that was instrumental in augmenting access to higher education began in the 1970s. When blacks came out of slavery and with the reinstitution of Jim Crow, the educational system, including higher education, was segregated and blacks who sought higher education had to attend what has become known as black historical colleges. The avenues for attending non-historical black colleges were given a new impetus in the post-civil rights movement. In our own backyard, black students at New York City College held sit-ins in order to bring about expanded access in the City University of New York (CUNY).
The democratization of CUNY did not benefit merely black folks but working class whites and working class Hispanics who were able to grasp those higher educational opportunities. Despite all the talk about the crisis in high school education, graduation rates have improved throughout the 1990s. As documented in the American Council on Education’s report on Minorities 2004, the white graduation rate has moved from 80.2 percent in 1992 to 87.1 percent in 2002. Similar increases in black graduate rates have occurred. At the beginning of the 1990s, the black graduation rate was 75.5 percent and that has inched up to 77.2 percent in 2002. The Hispanic rate at 54.6 percent at the beginning of the 1990s has improved to 61.5 percent at the beginning of the 21st century.
There have been dramatic increases in college participation among minority groups, which by definition include blacks, Hispanics, Asians and American Indians. What is of interest in this surge in higher education is that because of the falling birth rate of whites, even though the percentage of those entering college has increased, the numerical increase has been marginal. The birth rate in the black and Hispanic population is still increasing and not only is the percentage of participation rates occurring but the overall base is increasing exponentially.
Also fascinating are the gender differences apparent in the black and Hispanic population. In 1980, there were 6,422,000 white high school graduates attending colleges and by 2002, that figure modestly increased to 7 million, even though over the 20-year period the percentage of whites leaving high school had decreased. White women began to outspace white men in undergraduate freshmen classes by 2002, when the percentage of white women entering college was placed at 48.5 percent and white men at 45.4 percent in 2002.
In the college explosion, black women have begun to outdistance black men. It is not that the percentage of black men has failed to increase, but it is that the percentage of black women is occurring at an accelerated pace in comparison to black men. There was about 1,115,000 blacks completed high school in 1980 and that figure increased to 1,353,000 by 2002. Black men entered college at a 26.3 percent rate in 1980 and rose to 35.1 percent rate in 2002.
In 1980, black women completed high school at a rate of 72.5 percent, or an equivalent of 1,475,000 black women. Over the two-decade period, black women increased their high school completion rates to 81 percent. That amounted to 1,006,088 high school graduates and an increased college enrollment rate to 44.6 percent closing in on the white female and white male rates. A similar gender imbalance in completion of high school and enrollment rates in college has surfaced in the Hispanic community.
Over the last couple of decades, America has been a society that has provided opportunities for its citizens in higher education and minorities and working-class whites have seized those opportunities. The same society has embarked on a massive public policy of incarceration and the mass incarceration rates fall disproportionately on black men. There are more black men in prison than there are coming into college for the first year. That is a sad commentary on American society. Despite changes in race relations, white America continues in the historical tradition that began in 1619 with the systematic emasculation of the black male. The black female has not been the target of this mass incarceration and has developed the prowess of navigating around the minefields of institutionalized racism. In the paraphrased words of the poet Langston Hughes, America cannot be America until America integrates black males into the mainstream of the larger society.
