Young Black Men Face Harsh Reality
Compiled by the DiversityInc staff
© 2006 DiversityInc.com®
April 08, 2006
Addressing the current state of employment and education appear to be two ways to combat the bleak state of many young black men today. According to a recent article on MSNBC, young black men are falling behind in mainstream American society.
Three upcoming books written by scholars at Columbia, Georgetown and Princeton show some appalling findings. The books featured studies looking at the condition of the 5 million black men ages 20 to 39 living in the United States. Apparently, the studies found that black men were seven times more likely to go to prison than whites, and "almost 60 percent of black male high school dropouts in their early thirties have spent time in prison." In addition, unemployment for young black men has continued to increase. From 2000 to 2004, the number of high-school dropouts who were black with no jobs increased 7 percent, raising the number of unemployed to 72 percent.
Just as alarming as these findings is the depth of discrimination and imbalance facing the young black male. One of the books found that in a study of 1,500 private employers in New York City, white applicants who just came out of prison were just as likely to get hired as a black applicant with no criminal record. "In a diverse city like New York, the evidence of discrimination is unmistakable," said Devah Pager, a Princeton sociology professor and author of Punishment and Inequality in America.
One of the other authors, Harry Holzer, who also is a professor of public policy at Georgetown University, believes some of the reasons for the harsh reality for young black men can be attributed to "unemployment, enduring bias in American life, [and] the disproportionate impact of the war on drugs." Holzer points out that during the 1990s, a promising period in the labor market, "A lot of black moms were entering the labor market, but the dads kept dropping out." It's important to note that although black males are falling behind mainstream society, black women have continued to make advances, possibly an indication of "deadbeat dads," as Holzer describes.
The same predicament appears to face young black males year after year, which is a cycle Holzer calls "pre-emptive despair." With quality of schools continuing to diminish in racially segregated areas in the country, and the number of imprisoned men rising among blacks, is it any surprise, as Holzer explains, that "these young boys look down the road and sense a bleak future and they disconnect early—a self-fulfilling prophecy"?
Posted By: Candice Johnson
Saturday, April 8th 2006 at 5:01PM
You can also
click
here to view all posts by this author...
