Racism in the Eyes of an Octogenarian ❗
Or
A Sixty Year Saga of Calamitous
Capitulation to a Cultural Quagmire
By: Stanley J Alexander, MD
January 28, 2021
Recently I chronicled my eight+ decades of observations on Racism in So Cal, but this generated too lengthy an epistle, so I will skip the early parts for now and just summarize: there were issues with the Hispanics and also those that involved White Motorcycle Gang(s). But that was not the case with Blacks: no gangs and their neighborhoods were safe for them and those of us biking or wandering through. So, when did that demographic change? Seems it all broke down in the 1960s. Note that in the late 1940s Blacks were entering the middle class at an unprecedented rate. I will touch on how that changed and why.
Lots of things happened in the 60s: The Vietnam War, which became associated with protests and rioting in the streets; disrespect for soldiers; a disparaging of America and burning of the flag. Also then came the end of the draft; street drugs; the ‘Pill’; and a change in morality. And perhaps most importantly, or as a consequence thereof, was the outbreak of out-of-wedlock births, where Blacks blew through the top of the charts. In comparison, harking back to my junior and high school days (the 1940s), not only the girls, but most of the boys graduated as virgins. That was changing. Looking back later, and now as a physician, in the late 1960s, I volunteered at a “Free Clinic” which was mostly geared toward giving young girls BC pills without parenteral consent. I quit after a couple of months - I had a hard time rationalizing the facilitation of ‘free sex’ for these young, mostly innocent girls, who were there under pressure from boyfriends, peers or rarely by a mother (never a dad). And there was little time for a “Why don’t you take some time and think about it” option.
The unwed motherhood rates went up progressively from 24% in the 1950s to over 70% in the 1990s, but for the Black communities, it went to over 80%. And being a young unwed Black mother became a badge of honor. With most of the White community, pregnancies lead to marriage or adoption. Not so with the “Baby Mama” of the ghetto. And what was the outcome? It generated an ingrained underclass. Not only had the Single Parent Family (SPF) there become most common, but the pattern became self-sustaining, where about 78% of female offspring followed suit. Associated with this was a “Cycle of Poverty.”
Add to that, no parental supervision or role-modeling from father figures which eroded the underpinnings of morality, allowed drug use to become rampant, and then a further predictable corollary, that of crime and gangs.
The Black gangs really escalated in the 1990s. That’s when the Bloods and Crips gangs took root. The streets became more dangerous.
Award winning novelist, Michael Connelly, put it this way.
“The explosion of the gang population and its attendant violence occurred with the same speed as the crack epidemic. The LAPD in South Central was overwhelmed and responded with a program called CRASH [Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums]. CRASH attacked the lower levels of the pyramid…so…it disrupted the street business of the gangs, but rarely reached the top.”
These street soldiers were young men fired in the anti-cop caldron of South LA. They were seasoned by racism, drugs, societal indifference, and the erosion of traditional family and education structures, then put on the street, where they could make more in a day than their mothers made in a month. They were cheered on in this lifestyle from every boom box and car stereo by a rap message that said fuck the police and the rest of society.
Of course, the blame for this was placed on poverty, racism, and suppressed opportunity. That credo was supported by Washington politicians, the Leftist press, and Academia, whom one might refer to now as the new “Iron Triangle.” Some others cried out such as Charles Barkley, a Black basketball player, who noted, “You poor blacks have been told for the past 40 years to vote Democrat, and guess what, 40 years later you are still poor.” Unfortunately, most such lone voices went unheeded. It all seemed to be tied up in a nice little package, that is until those strings were cut apart by MOYNIHAN’S SCISSORS.
Daniel Patrick “Pat” Moynihan, a Harvard Scholar, who became a Harvard Professor, then a US Senator (D-NY), was the one person who really perceived an oddity here. Moynihan apparently felt he knew something about ghettos and poverty from his youth in ‘the Wild Irish Slums.’ While working in the Department of Labor as Assistant Secretary, Moynihan noted something he could not explain: For decades the enrollment in welfare programs followed the rate of unemployment. The greater the unemployment, the greater the need for and application for public welfare. In the minority population, however, he noted a strange apparition starting. In the 1960s as employment improved for Blacks, unexpectantly, the welfare rolls expanded and the curves crossed (scissored). He struggled with this, but found no other explanation other than the observation that poverty in predominately Black communities was a cultural phenomenon and that phenomena related to unwed mothers!
To fix the problem, he felt, clearly one needed to focus on the needs for a male figure in the household and the need to underscore the value of a nuclear family. But that concept never really took root.
Mohnihan’s seminal publication was entitled, “The Negro Family: A Case for National Action.” Rather than action, however, his work was dissed and countered with outrage throughout Washington, the Civil Rights Movement people, and the civil servants of the “permanent government” (career politicians). Some addressed the report as ‘blaming the victim’ and opined that Black poverty actually ‘… was a defect in the system’ that caused the Black devolution, and countered with cries for more monies to the black minority as a panacea. So, rather than a hand up, a handout was proffered as a salvation. The New York Times even wrote an opposition series, “Class Matters,” but according to Kay S. Hymowitz (in 2005), of the Manhattan Institute, they (the Times) missed the two most basic facts on the family as enunciated by Moynihan:
(1) Entrenched multigenerational poverty is largely Black; and
(2) it is intertwined with the collapse of the nuclear family.
This is not universal but is largely a low-income and Black family phenomenon. And those born and raised under such a descriptive tend to stay there: fully 75% of those offspring will remain in poverty and not escape to the middle class. But as you will see, there is a way out.
Why does this happen? Following the Brown Act and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, legal racism became dismantled. Going into the 60s, the economy was humming and half of all blacks moved out of poverty and into the middle class, then things began stalling. By 1964 there were more blacks out of work than in 1954. This doesn’t seem logical.
What children learned in the ‘disorganized home’ was that adults do not finish school, do not get jobs, or in the case of men, do not take care of their children or bend to authority. Marriage on the other hand provides a “stable home’ for children to learn common virtues.
Implicit here is that marriage orients men and women towards the future, asking them to not just commit to each other, but to plan for the future, to earn, to save, and to devote themselves to their children’s prospects by putting the children’s opportunities first. Young black women on the other hand tend to drift into pregnancy, often more than once and often by more than one man. And if Black Pride made it difficult to grapple with this issue, Feminism made it impossible.
Such mothers are not so likely to “shape their children’s character and ability” in the ways that lead to upward mobility. Of black children born between 1967 and 1969, 72% received Aid to Families with Dependent Children [AFDC] before the age of 18. Hymowitz noted that within the 15 years following the Moynihan report, we had witnessed both the birth of millions of fatherless children and the entrenchment of an underclass. Moynihan had also discussed an associated tangle of pathology.
These are some of the statistics from that toxic environment:
§ Nearly 6/10 children with only their mother are at or near the poverty level,
§ School dropout rate and failure to achieve an HS diploma or GED is higher in the US than most other Western countries but twice as high in those poverty defined zones,
§ 75% of children/adolescents in chemical dependency hospitals are from SFPs [Single Family Parents],
§ Over ½ of all youths incarcerated for criminal acts are from SPF homes,
§ 63% of suicides are by individuals from SPF,
§ 75% of pregnancies involve SPF adolescents.
In 1995 all this was reiterated by an article in The Washington Post authored by William Raspberry. He acknowledged the Scissors effect but noted that no-one knows what to make of this “statistical artifact.”
In 2005, the afore- referenced Kay S Hymowitz clarified the issues brought forth by Moynihan with her work, The Negro Family: 40 years of Lies. This a magnificent summary of Moynihan’s scissors and why it never gained the momentum that had started under President Lyndon Johnson, including a remarkable presidential address at Howard University.
Then in 2015, renowned author, GEORGE WILL, wrote, The prescience of Moynihan’s Scissors. Here he noted how that report had shattered confidence in social salvation through economic growth (such as John F Kennedy’s maxim that “a rising tide would lift all boats”) and reduced barriers to individual striving. This was discouraging because the government knows how to alter incentives and remove barriers but not how to manipulate culture.
Today, Mr. Will goes on, a nation dismayed by inequality and transgenerational transmission of poverty must face the truth that political scientist Edwards Meade enunciated nearly 25 years ago: “The iniquities that stem from the workplace are now trivial compared with those stemming from family structure. What matters for success is less whether your father was rich or poor than whether you knew your father at all.”
Additionally, there is a YOU-Tube Watch, from January 2020, that is extremely graphic. You can reach this by Googling “Moynihan’s Scissors – YouTube.” Lots of trash talk, but the Black narrator therein tells it like it is! Seems to be directed toward Blacks. I wish that this lively presentation could be required viewing – as well as Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged – and become essential tutorials in schools.
The Solution:
To help put things in perspective, I am familiar with the forgoing statistics and references: they emanated from my research in developing a resolution that I presented to the AMA for endorsement in 2013. In my Resolution A-422, I iterated that there are four things that the black population or any slum/poverty district needs to do to break the “CYCLE OF POVERTY. Those tenants are as follows:
> Graduate from High School,
> Get a job after graduation, (unless you go on to post-graduate work)
> Don’t get married until you are at least 21, and
> Don’t have a baby until you are married.
The statistics show that if you follow these 4 directives you have nearly a 75% chance of going on to middle class. Research on this had been done by the Brookings Institute, a non-profit, public policy organization based in Washington, D.C. Here the topic was Single-Parent Families (SPF). They and others have taken positions, but the Brookings seems to make the most sense.
So, why is this not being done? Some is politics. People like to use these issues for political gain. Another is ignorance. While these tenants seem self-evident, looking at web-sites in the affected area, the target population seems confused as to the actual cause and therefore the solutions to their plight. Regarding the former, let me give another example from sports legend, Charles Barkley. He was sorted out to be a role model, but his response was a jolt to Robert K. Merton, a sociologist. “I am not a role model,” Barkley stated. “I am not paid to be a role model. I am paid to wreak havoc on the basketball court. Parents should be the role models. Just because I dunk a basketball doesn’t mean I should raise your kids.”
Good answer, and certainly better than that of Colin Kaepernick or James LeBron. Jason Whitlock, a sports columnist, goes even further. He states, “…in retrospect, the elevation of athletes and other celebrities as primary figures in the formation of behavioral norms for young people helped create the conditions that are empowering the destructive Black Lives Matter movement today.”
He further notes that “(black) kids shut their bedroom doors, turn on their televisions, laptops, and game consoles, plug in their earbuds, open social media apps, and disappear into a world far removed from mom (and/or dad). With a mere push of a button, they tune out the worldview of their families and tune in the worldview of those like athlete James LeBron, actress Leah Dunham, rapper Snoop Dog, social media race-baiter Shaun King and others like him. On top of all this, we see America’s enemies, particularly China, using these role models to promote racial division and destabilize our country – with those on the political left as willing accomplices. Today, they have coalesced around the BLM movement to push America toward a level of racial dysfunction and animus not experienced since the Civil War.”
All of us have been subject to the slings and arrows of life, but we took it in stride. Our motto was, “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but names can never hurt me.” Now that has been turned on its ear, and now taunts, gestures, mocking, provocations, and unintended insults are considered as ‘microaggressions’ for which one can now lose a job, be dismissed from school, or have their Twitter account frozen. When did we start becoming so fragile? Again, the answer is it started in the 1960s, and is just now reaching a peak.
Summary:
We have been force-fed that the plight of Blacks stems from issues of alleged systemic racism, but instead, we find it is largely a cultural issue, and throwing money at it won’t help. What isn’t cultural are diseases like CoViD-19. The reason that Blacks and others of color are at such high risk is not systemic racism but genetics. There is a much higher incidence of diabetes, metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular disease, and auto-immune disorders in these populations, regardless of financial status. In one study on survival in Systemic Lupus, an auto-immune disease, there were better results among the better educated, as opposed solely to their income bracket. So, yes, we need better schooling: our current system has been failing some of us. But that’s a separate issue for another time.
But the reason for the plight of Blacks in most inner cities comes down to that of being raised in a dysfunctional, matriarchal family with no male figures for offering discipline or being there to serve as role models. Without that, or without time in the military, the ensuing progeny develop no respect for authority figures and thereby get themselves into trouble with law enforcement, school teachers, etc.
Loss of self-esteem can emanate from such a tangle of pathology, which can surely lead to frustration, anger, or suicide. The male progeny therefrom too often looks to the local gang leaders for direction, and the most available jobs for many of them now come in the field of illegal drugs, where they can join a gang after they have ‘earned their bones’ via some violent crime. Programs like ‘No Child Left Behind’ have merit, but it doesn’t cut to the root cause.
Given that we know the problem, can we fix it? Here I’m reminded of the joke, “How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb?” The answer: “Only one, but the light bulb has to want to change.” So, trying to get the ‘hood’ educated as to why life has been so difficult for them and to believe the truth about this cultural aberration is the answer, rather than blaming the issue on systemic racism or white supremacy. But also to let them know that there is a way out. And our government needs to know, again, that throwing money on the issue might even make things worse. I hope some time we might even hear them cry, “We have met the enemy and they are us!”
Respectfully,
Stanley J. Alexander, M.S., M.S., FACP, FACR
Clinical Professor of Medicine/Rheumatology (Ret)
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