“These men are all talk. What we need is action—action!”
John Brown
The new “My Brother’s Keeper” initiative from Washington is a good thing. It is good to have national attention focused on the nation’s persistent racism and its consequences. It is good to have foundations and corporations allocate resources for programs to maintain this focus. The President is obviously sincere but what we have is simply an announcement: “details to follow.”
But from what we know so far, this looks perilously like another attempt to have the Black community take responsibility for institutional racism. Young Black men are told that if they pull up their pants, Black parents are told if they supervise the homework of their children, everything will get better.
It won’t get better.
The Black community is not responsible for racism. Racism is in the DNA of basic American institutions: the schools, the courts, the police, business and government. The very basis of public education in this country, the property tax finance model, when combined with increasing residential segregation, guarantees that most Black children will attend schools less well-resourced than those attended by most White children. The criminal justice system, from the cop on the beat to the judge in the courtroom, operate within practices that maximize the numbers of Black men, stopped, questioned, arrested, prosecuted and incarcerated. Those men, once released from jail or prison, are unlikely to get good jobs, unlikely to be able to support a family above the poverty level.
Better news comes from Attorney General Holder. According to The New York Times, “Mr. Holder wants to make prisoners eligible for early release if they were sentenced under the now-abolished crack guidelines. And he wants judges to have more discretion when sentencing nonviolent drug offenders.”
Extraordinary numbers of Black men are incarcerated for drug offenses. It is no accident that the first two states to legalize marijuana, Colorado and Oregon, are states with few Black people. The drug laws are not “needed” there. Elsewhere, they are primary drivers of disparate incarceration rates. The Attorney General’s conversations about crack guidelines and mandatory sentences are steps in the right direction, but the administration could—and should—go much further. The President should order the Attorney General to develop means by which he could pardon all federal prisoners imprisoned for drug offenses that would not now be illegal in Colorado and Oregon, as well as any others who have been sentenced for nonviolent drug offences, including any whose last offense under “three strikes” rules would otherwise have incurred a sentence of less than five years.
Other distortions in the criminal justice system are systematic stops, questioning, frisks and arrests of young and young adult Black men with no reasonable cause. In Milwaukee, in Newark, in New York City until a few weeks ago, nearly every young and young adult Black male would expect to be subjected to this at least once every couple of years. As a consequence of this pattern of police behavior, reinforced by similar actions of the district attorneys and courts, in Newark, for example, the lifetime likelihood of incarceration for a young adult Black male is nearly 100%.
The President should instruct the Attorney General to investigate police forces, local district attorneys and courts with records of racially inequitable enforcement of the laws. Those found to engage in racially disparate practices should be ordered to end those practices.
The education system is another critical site of the perpetuation of racial disparities.
Currently, in all states but Vermont and Hawaii, investments in the education of children are directly proportionate to the incomes of their families. School districts within states have wildly varying resources. Even schools within the same district are funded differently. And in enough instances to clinch the case, these disparities reflect the proportion of Black students in those schools, in those districts. The first step for real educational reform is to bring equity to this picture.
The President should instruct the Attorney General and the Secretary of Education to develop legal sanctions applicable to those states and districts with disparate de facto race-based funding for districts and schools within districts.
All these actions could be accomplished without additional funding.
Here are some suggestions that would involve a significant resource commitment.
In education:
• Full funding for schools with large Black enrollments, including pre-k; full-day kindergarten; extended school days, grades 1 to 12; challenging curricula and intensive professional development for teachers.
• Full funding for needs-based postsecondary scholarships.
For adults:
• A training, counseling and jobs program for all formerly incarcerated people.
• A family allowance for single female householders with children under 18 years of age so that no children are forced to grow up in poverty.
Once these actions are taken and these programs and others like them are in place, it would be good to develop those sketched in the “My Brother’s Keeper” proposal.
Otherwise, we will be once again offering to teach young Black men to fish in the desert.