So apparently Geraldo Rivera made another Whistle Stop on his "Black Men Suck" Tour the other day, this time at the oh-so-Black-Friendly environs of Fox and Friends.
Video via Media Matters
Rivera first clarified that "too many young black men are being killed unnecessarily in encounters with police" and that "too many black moms are more fearful of the cops when their kids go out at night than they are the crooks."
He then used basketball star LeBron James' recent decision to wear an "I Can't Breathe" T-shirt to share his take on "black, brown, and other minority families" that are in crisis.
"The families in crisis are in crisis not because of the interface between cops and young black men but because of family dysfunction, fathers being irresponsible," Rivera said. "That is a much more difficult, complex situation than wanting to advocate against police violence toward, you know, toward young black men."
...
"We're the victims. Yet again, we're the victims. Let's fix this problem," Rivera said. "But what about the much more difficult problem of 'We're The Problem.'"
Geraldo claims that address Police Violence against young black men is an "Easy Issue" - but if that were the case we wouldn't have been dealing with it
since Reconstruction. Also Eric Garner
was a Father, as well as being a Grand Father. If he was indeed selling "loosies" on the street, and at this point I've begun to doubt that was even the case at the time of his death, he was doing so to
provide for his family which is actually still intact. I don't see exactly how he was "The Problem" in any sense.
First off let's admit that Police have a bias against young black men, because some of them do, the link between the dehumanization of black children and police use of force has been studied and documented.
The researchers involved with the study tested 176 police officers, mostly white males, with an average of 37-years-old, to determine their levels of bias. The biases that researchers tested for were prejudice and unconscious dehumanization. To determine prejudice researchers had officers fill out a widely used questionnaire that featured statements such as “it is likely that blacks will bring violence to neighborhoods when they move in.”
Those who compared blacks to apes were seen as having a higher level of dehumanization. Researchers compared the officer’s personal records against their levels of dehumanization towards blacks. They found that officers who had higher levels of dehumanization towards blacks were more likely of having a history of using force against black children in custody, than those who did not dehumanize blacks. Use of force was defined for the purposes of the study as instances of an officer using a takedown or wristlock; kicking or punching; striking with a blunt instrument using a police dog, restraints or hobbling; or using tear gas, electric shock or killing. Surprisingly, only dehumanization was found to increase a police officer’s use of force against blacks. Both conscious and unconscious prejudice did not have any link to the likelihood of police officers using violent force against black children in custody, according to the study.
Police officers’ unconscious dehumanization of blacks could have been the result of negative interactions with black children, rather than the cause of using force with black children.
So there's that - let me next say that there
already has been an effort to address the problem of Black Fathers, and that was the
Million Fathers March which took place in
630 cities in 2013. And that effort isn't over, it's ongoing.
But let's also admit the rest of the realities here:
It's harder to be an African-American Father. It's more difficult to provide for your family, and to protect them and to keep them together.
Specifically it's harder to get a job with an African-American Name according to the National Bureau of Economic Research.
"Job applicants with white names needed to send about 10 resumes to get one callback; those with African-American names needed to send around 15 resumes to get one callback."
A job applicant with a name that sounds like it might belong to an African-American - say, Lakisha Washington or Jamal Jones - can find it harder to get a job. Despite laws against discrimination, affirmative action, a degree of employer enlightenment, and the desire by some businesses to enhance profits by hiring those most qualified regardless of race, African-Americans are twice as likely as whites to be unemployed and they earn nearly 25 percent less when they are employed.
Also Black Men need to be
Better Educated than White Men to get the Same Job.
Meet Steve and Kwame, two fictional guys who just graduated from the University of Maryland. Almost everything about them is weirdly identical—they majored in the same subject, they got the same grades in college, they have the same bullet points on their resumes—but Kwame is African American and Steve is white. Now, they’re both spending their post-pomp-and-circumstance summer looking for jobs. Do they have the same employment prospects?
A recent report from the advocacy group Young Invincibles suggests not: African American millennial men need two or more levels of education to have the same employment prospects as their white peers. White male college graduates have a 97.6% employment rate. Black male college graduates have a 92.8% employment rate—which correlates more closely with the job prospects for white men who have some college education but no degree (92.5%).
All other factors being equal between these two individuals does not product equal results.
If you were to simply look, you can find similar disparities for blacks when they look for housing or when they try to get a loan to fund them to start a business.
New academic research reveals that minority entrepreneurs are treated significantly differently (see: worse) than their white counterparts when seeking financing for a small business, even when all other variables — their credentials, their companies, even their clothes — are identical.
Conducted by business school professors at Utah State University, Brigham Young University and Rutgers University, the study featured nine businessmen—three white, three black, and three Hispanic. Similar in size and stature, donning the same outfits, and armed with similar education levels and financial profiles, they visited numerous banks seeking a roughly $60,000 loan to expand the very same business.
Once inside the bank, their experiences were not so similar.
The Hispanic and black business owners were provided far less information about loan terms, offered less application help by loan officers, less frequently handed a business card, and asked more questions about their personal finances.
All of this supports my point, that just as President Obama has stated "
As An African American You Have To Work Twice As Hard As Anyone Else If You Want To Get By", while some people are running through the rat race of success on greased skids, black people - still - are going through an uphill steeple-chase with tiger-pits and bear traps to fall into.
This is not to say that it's not possible to defeat the traps and escape the pits. It can be done. Jesse Owens did it. The Tuskegee Airmen did it. Jackie Robinson did it. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. did it. Mohammad Ali did it. Michael Jackson did it. President Barack Obama did it. The point though is that these guys are not the standard, they're all the exceptional. Most black people are not super-exceptional, super-human, with super-smarts, and super-endurance that will magically create equal outcomes out of unequal circumstances - and they shouldn't be expected to be.
Such unfair expectations are the pistons that keep the engines of discrimination alive in our time. No, people don't put up "White Only" signs anymore, they just don't give some people they don't like, don't know, or don't understand the extra little chance to get a bit further ahead that they'll offer to others. People play favorites. And so far that has generally worked more against black people than it's worked for them.
When that happens some people, normal, average, everyday hardworking people, are going to fall a bit behind when faced with these greater challenges than everyone else. That's just logic. It's cause and effect.
There is also the reality that some people after facing some of these challenges just reach the "fuck it" point and give up trying all together. There are some people who've lost all faith in our system of justice, and our system of democracy and I'm mature enough to admit that probably does include a great deal of black people, just as I also realize they probably have their reasons for feeling that way.
The problem is: I don't see how what Geraldo is doing is going restore the lost faith and lost hope of those people. How's he inspiring them to go back and yet again risk having hearts broken once more with seeing an America that continues to claim to be "Land of the Free" and the "Land of Opportunity" yet that freedom and those opportunities continue to drift further and further from their grasp?
Even though he doesn't say this in so many words, clearly all he's doing is telling the white people, the ones who probably didn't pick up the resume with Kwame's name on it, and didn't hand out the little extra reference information for Lakisha when she came in for her loan that it's Not Your Fault that both Kwame and Lakisha broke up over money problems and are now both filled with a simmering bowl of rage, suspicion and frustration - even against some people who may have treated them perfectly fine and fairly. The problem with not having those "Whites Only" signs anymore is nobody knows whose out to screw you and whose not.
Just like white people don't know if the next black person they see is some kind of crook or criminal, while black people don't know whether the next cop they meet is going be honest and fair or he's going to be rude, paranoid vicious jerk. You really don't know until you find out the hard way.
Geraldo is telling White people that their constant suspicion and fear of black people isn't any kind of problem, that it's all "justified", it's all on the black people. "They're the Problem" he says.
In support of Geraldo's previous comments that Lebron James should've worn a "Be a Better Father" t-shirt I got the following twitter response when after I pointed out that discrimination that specifically targets young black men - in jobs, in loans, in housing and yes, with police - is and has been for generations a major reason why they haven't been "Fathers" and so many Black women have traditionally become the heads of their own households and families.
What I first find interesting in this chart is that the Black and White Out-of-wedlock rate have never been the same. Starting in 1940 this indicates that for whites it was about 2%, where's for blacks it's about 15%. As you move forward in time it's not really the case that one rate explodes while the remains the same - they both increase at fairly similar rates, with whites increases to about 28%, which 14x higher than before and greater than where black people started out, while blacks after peaking above 70% have actually been coming down and are now average at 68% which is still over 4x higher than where they began, but still not nearly a 14x increase.
So if you really want to talk about single-motherhood, it's not really something that's only impacted black people far from it. In fact when you include another chart that highlight Latinos, who are generally known for their strong catholic based families, you find something very interesting even on this chart from Heritage.
When you include Hispanics and Latinos on this chart, their sitting at over
twice the rate of whites at over 50% Unwed Births - so um, who exactly is the "problem" there?
[Also my wife pointed out to me that you could be seeing this differential between whites and minorities because of a difference in access to health care, particularly contraceptive care and/or abortion, so again there may not be a direct correlation to "irresponsible fathers" shown here.]
If you look up some of the same elements of discrimination against Latinos that I looked up for blacks I suspect you'll see that the same situations exist, even if they in some cases aren't as pronounced.
Using a "matched pair" methodology, Hispanic and White non-Hispanic testers with virtually identical profiles interacted with housing agents in various scenarios. In San Antonio and Atlanta, the ERC conducted 50 phone tests and 25 in-person tests, while in Birmingham, the ERC conducted 75 in-person tests. What we discovered was troubling:
Latino testers experienced at least one type of adverse, differential treatment in 42 percent of the tests (95 of 225 tests), and two or more types of adverse treatment in 16 percent of the tests (35 tests) when compared to their White counterparts.
Housing agents were less willing or receptive to schedule an appointment with Hispanic testers than they were with their matched White testers.
In sales tests, agents provided White testers with lender recommendations or other advantageous financing information that was not provided to their matched Hispanic testers.
In rental tests, agents quoted higher fees, costs, and/or more extensive application requirements to Hispanic testers than to their matched White testers.
Again, these hurdles don't completely block blacks and latinos from success in their jobs and being able to raise successful families - but they
certainly DON'T HELP THEM ANY either. Also the concept of the "Nuclear Family" has pretty much disintegrated. Families are blended now, crossing multiple generations and multiple marriages, with ex-es, half-siblings, adoptees and same-sex parents becoming more and more of the norm. It's not just about the "Fathers" but about the entire Family.
Further Geraldo's implicit argument that lack of fathers is what leads to young black male crime is also incorrect.
As you can see from this chart from the FBI Uniform Crime Report the Violent Crime and Murder rate has been on a steady decline for almost 20 years. It's simply
Not the Case that there is some type of one-to-one correlation between single mothers and increased violent crime, in fact if anything - it's the reverse.
So the next time Geraldo begins to spout off about how Black people don't know how to keep their families together and that's why so many unarmed black men are getting shot down and choked in the streets by police, maybe he should a) Have a little look in his own backyard first b) consider that their might be external as well as internal pressures and choices that are driving these families apart and c) admit that the black violent crime rate - even using the most egregious estimates of being 2-3x greater - does not justify or excuse of rate of police use of force that's 3x times greater or the chances of a young black men being killed by police at 21 times greater.
Vyan