Black in America 2

Northstarmom · July 27, 2009, 12:32pm

“There are actually alot of black kids who feel like this, out of the black people i know the guys prefer white women and have said that they are uncomfortable around black men. The one black girl who is a friend doesn’t date black guys and said that black women don’t like her. So I think it is more common than you think.”

I’ve seen such situations, and what they really are referring to is a class issue. They were black kids brought up in upper middle class and affluent, overhwelmingly white suburbs where most people were highly educated. The black students from such an environment would feel equally out of place among lower class white people.

I am, incidentally, speaking from experience as a black person who grew up in a white suburb where my brother and I integrated the school system. When I went to Harvard and encountered black people from affluent, highly educated backgrounds, I didn’t have problems relating to them except for the fact that I didn’t know anything about black sororities and social groups such as Jack and Jill that affluent, educated black people tended to be a part of.

I had more difficulty connecting with black people who lived in gang-infested inner cities and white people who grew up in trailer parks and low income rural areas where people drink heavily and do lots of hunting.

I have the feeling that the OP would feel reasonably comfortable at a Jack and Jill convention or at a convention like the National Medical Association – the association of black doctors. In fact, it was at places like this that many of my black Harvard classmates had been able to finally be around lots of other black people. They weren’t going to the inner city to shop at the Dollar Store.

Northstarmom · July 27, 2009, 12:40pm

"The part about black women is offensive because it makes it seem as if “good” black men are somehow scarce something that I think is a little untrue. I know several smart black guys, and every black men that I know from high school is going to college and there are a lot of black people at my high school. So the concept that black men are somehow statistically lacking is somewhat offensive. "

You can continue to close your eyes and deny reality while taking care of only yourself or you can open your eyes, see the truth, and then reach out to be part of the solution. By helping your struggling black brothers, you’ll also be helping yourself because no matter how accomplished you are, the fact that so many black males are in prison, unemployed, drop outs from college and high school will reflect on what the world in general expects of you.

You and your black male friends are the exceptions.

“t midyear 2008, there were 4,777 black male inmates per 100,000 black males held in state and federal prisons and local jails, compared to 1,760 Hispanic male inmates per 100,000 Hispanic males and 727 white male inmates per 100,000 white males.”
[Bureau</a> of Justice Statistics Prison Statistics](<a href=“http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/prisons.htm]Bureau”>Home | Bureau of Justice Statistics)

“About 10.4% of the entire African-American male population in the United States aged 25 to 29 was incarcerated, by far the largest racial or ethnic group—by comparison, 2.4% of Hispanic men and 1.2% of white men in that same age group were incarcerated. According to a report by the Justice Policy Institute in 2002, the number of black men in prison has grown to five times the rate it was twenty years ago. Today, more African-American men are in jail than in college. In 2000 there were 791,600 black men in prison and 603,032 enrolled in college. In 1980, there were 143,000 black men in prison and 463,700 enrolled in college.”
[Prison</a> Population Exceeds Two Million — Infoplease.com](<a href=“http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0881455.html]Prison”>http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0881455.html)

"Nationally, a mere quarter of the 1.9-million black men between 18 and 24 attended college in 2000, the last year the American Council on Education reported such statistics. By contrast, 35 percent of black women in the same age group and 36 percent of all 18- to 24-year-olds were attending college.

A grimmer statistic, according to the American Council on Education, is that the graduation rate of black men is the lowest of any population. Only 35 percent of the black men who enrolled in NCAA Division I schools in 1996 graduated within six years. White men, on the other hand, graduated at a rate of 59 percent; Hispanic men, 46 percent; American Indian men, 41 percent; and black women, 45 percent."

[Columns:</a> On campus, grim statistics for African-American men](<a href=“http://www.sptimes.com/2004/01/04/Columns/On_campus__grim_stati.shtml]Columns:”>http://www.sptimes.com/2004/01/04/Columns/On_campus__grim_stati.shtml)

Northstarmom · July 27, 2009, 12:45pm

"I want to be sure to say here that I do not fault Dbate. It may make a lot of blacks angry, but I think there is a lot about black culture that should make a lot of blacks wants to run from it. I think it is just a mess. "

There is no uniform black culture. What you probably are referring to is the culture that reflects many lower class black people who admire and emulate thugs.

Upper class black culture is very different.

MBA_Grad_2009 · July 27, 2009, 12:45pm

Ummmmmm … that statistic would seem to suggest that 95.223% of all black males are not incarcerated. So how does being part of 95%+ make our friend the “exception”?

Dbate · July 27, 2009, 12:47pm

I don’t understand how you are supposed to be a part of the solution. I mean I understand that these people look like me, but people are individuals you can not goad people into avenues unless they want to. For example I taught physics and biology to remedial students who were mostly black, they overwhelming were receptive of me because I was black and it is something that I would like to continue while at Yale for local schools. But that only happens if people WANT to change something, people internally have to have the impetus to better themselves others can not do it for them.

And I still find the whole concept of “lacking good black men offensive” because it makes it seem as if there aren’t good black men. Often times it is used as a justification for why black women date white men and I found that really incredulous.

Dbate · July 27, 2009, 12:55pm

That is kind of true, I was at a debate tournament in a hotel where they were also hosting an accounting/business thing for black professionals and it was incredibly easy to strike up a conversation and speak with a man who worked for Price Water Coopers, and I prefer the company of the black people that i know. Who incidentally happen to be really smart or upper class. The same thing happened when I visited Yale, I meet the black people and we got along really easily at the Black Student Alliance.

Northstarmom · July 27, 2009, 12:56pm

You can be part of the solution by volunteering and doing other things to make society a better place. That, to me, is part of the rent we all should pay for the privileges of being alive, and I think that the rent is higher for people like you and me who had the good fortune of getting good educations because we were born to families who were reasonably affluent, educated, and supported our getting a quality education.

At Yale you could, for instance, be a Big Brother, get involved in prison reform, help educate low income people about good health practices, and/or do a myriad of other things that could make a difference in your community. Believe it or not – most people who end up at Ivies do community service because they like making a difference, and most of the students continue to do community service in college and afterward. They aren’t just all about themselves and getting ahead.

“Ummmmmm … that statistic would seem to suggest that 95.223% of all black males are not incarcerated. So how does being part of 95%+ make our friend the “exception”?”
As you can see, when it comes to being a black male who lacks a prison record and also is a college grad, there are relatively few such people. Certainly, they do exist, but the numbers are lower than those of black women who would like date or marry such a man.

"The paper, appearing this week in the American Sociological Review, estimates that 20 percent of all black men born from 1965 through 1969 had served time in prison by the time they reached their early 30s. By comparison, less than 3 percent of white males born in the same time period had been in prison.

Equally startling, the risks of prison incarceration rose steeply with lower levels of education. Among blacks, 30.2 percent of those who didn’t attend college had gone to prison by 1999 and 58.9 percent of black high school dropouts born from 1965 through 1969 had served time in state or federal prison by their early 30s.

“More strikingly than patterns of military enlistment, marriage or college graduation, prison time differentiates the young adulthood of black men from the life course of white males. Imprisonment is now a common life event for an entire demographic group,” said Becky Pettit, one of the study’s authors and a University of Washington assistant professor of sociology. Bruce Western, a Princeton University professor of sociology, is the co-author."
[uwnews.org</a> | More young black men have done prison time than military service or earned college degree, study shows | University of Washington News and Information](<a href=“http://www.uwnews.org/article.asp?articleID=4393]uwnews.org”>http://www.uwnews.org/article.asp?articleID=4393)

MBA_Grad_2009 · July 27, 2009, 12:59pm

Dbate may correct me if I am wrong, but it sounds to me that he might be, as I am, an individualist rather than someone obsessed with race. He might, shocking as it sounds, have taken Dr. King’s words to heart and be someone focused on individual character rather than superficial features.

Northstarmom · July 27, 2009, 1:05pm

I have met some affluent, educated, straight black men who have never married. From what I’ve seen, they don’t see a reason to marry unless they decide to have children within wedlock. Otherwise, they have a great time playing the field – and given their scarcity – they have a large field to play in.

" Banks said African-Americans have the lowest marriage rate out of all demographics: African-American women are three times as likely to never marry as their white counterparts. Sears said 70 percent of black children are born out of wedlock.

The reason behind this marriage gap is the subject of much research. One answer is the rate of incarceration of young black men, which Banks said totals over one million – more than the number of young black men in college. The gap could be the product of a numbers imbalance: There are more marriageable women than men.

But Banks said marriage market issues cannot be the whole answer. If the gap were attributable to a numbers imbalance, one would assume that the available African-American men would all be married.

On the contrary, “the men who are in short supply are less likely to marry than their white counterparts,” Banks said. “That’s extraordinary.”

Black men also show a different socioeconomic marriage pattern than men from other races. The typical pattern is that the wealthier a man is, the more likely it is that he will marry. Among black men, however, the pattern is reversed. A black man who makes over $150,000 a year is less likely to marry than a black man who makes $70,000 a year, Banks said…"
[Panel</a> Explores Minority Marriage Gap](<a href=“http://www.law.virginia.edu/html/news/2009_spr/marriage.htm]Panel”>http://www.law.virginia.edu/html/news/2009_spr/marriage.htm)

Dbate · July 27, 2009, 1:08pm

I don’t know who this weird people are but I have wanted to be married and be a father for a really long time. What would be the point of making alot of money if you didn’t have children and a family to share it with. But something that is often overlooked when making these comparisons is the assumption that black men will marry black women and black women will marry black men. I mean there are a number of successful blacks (male and female) who marry other races. So the entire concept of a “marriage gap” is stupid because people don’t have to marry their own race. I never even seriously thought of limiting myself to black women, so why would any black woman limit herself to black men?

Hunt · July 27, 2009, 1:15pm

When I went to Yale decades ago, there were a number of students I knew who had very limited life experiences before coming there. (The ones I remember were white.) They learned a lot while they were there, because Yale is diverse, New Haven is New Haven, and most Yale students will go down to New York as well. My advice to Dbate is to listen a lot when you first get to college, and try not to make too many pronouncements about racial issues until you hear what a lot of others have to say. People will easily forgive lack of experience, but not anything they will perceive as arrogance (i.e., don’t tell your roommates that your teachers considered you “incredibly” intelligent). Take it easy, and you’ll be fine.

Dbate · July 27, 2009, 1:28pm

Hunt, I am not arrogant at all. It is one thing that I am pretty sure of, I didn’t even consider myself smart until the whole college process got underway. It was actually my teachers who encouraged me to apply to Ivy schools. I was just going to go to the state school University of Texas.

Hunt · July 27, 2009, 1:30pm

You’re good to go then. Just go back over this thread, review the things you said that got incredulous reactions from other posters, and try not to say those things for at least the first few weeks of college.

owlice · July 27, 2009, 1:32pm

Indeed I can, for that’s exactly what my kid said about Ithaca. He was uncomfortable there because there were so many white people, and, in the parts of Ithaca we were in (Cornell, Moosewood, etc.), very few blacks. He has NO desire to go back to Ithaca. He was, in his words, “freaked out.”

But then, he went to public school in a district in which the student body is 91% black/Hispanic (74% black, 17% Hispanic) and only 5% white, and we live in a black-majority county between two black-majority cities. One February while observing his class, I realized he was the only white kid in the class; all the other kids were black. I’d been in the classroom many times that school year, but had never noticed that before.

There’s no way we’d be in a DMV here that was majority white and certainly the people in the stores we go to reflect our neighborhood.

Not just lower class, but certainly many middle class black kids as well, at least where I live.

Northstarmom · July 27, 2009, 1:35pm

In the OP’s defense: When I went to Harvard in the late 1960s, I was virtually as clueless as he is. Even though I am black, I had grown up in an affluent white suburb, and the few black people whom I knew – who mainly were family members living hundreds of miles away – were well educated people who included even a millionaire whose kids went to school with the Kennedy kids in NYC. I thought that virtually all people – including black people – lived in educated, reasonably financially comfortable families in safe environments.

I thought that racism was something that people only encountered in the South (I’d seen the civil rights marches on TV), and I was sure that I would never be victimized by racism. I also thought people were poor (and I didn’t know any poor people) because they didn’t work hard. I didn’t realize that I had been born into a privileged life that gave me many advantages.

By the end of freshman year at Harvard, I had a much broader, less naive view of the world due, in part, to the friends I made at Harvard, friends who came from a variety of social classes. By the time I had graduated, I had been personally affected by racism – when a black friend and I were falsely accused of shoplifting at the Harvard Coop – the student bookstore. The white security guard detained us, telling management that “one of them” had stolen. I knew I wasn’t a thief, and my friend – who was the most honest person I’ve ever known (the daughter of a judge, she refused to even illegally drink because she said that might reflect badly on her dad), was not a thief either. After management looked through our belongings – and found only the items we had purchased – we were allowed to leave the store.

Only years later did I learn how much my family had protected me from racism. For instance, I was in my late 20s when I learned that due to restrictive covenants against black people living in our Upstate NY area – my parents had to search a great deal before being able to find a home they would be allowed to buy. Even after they bought our home, a white neighbor tried to take up a petition to prevent our black family from moving there.

While we’re on the subject of being insulated from the real world, I didn’t meet my first teen mom until I was 20. She was a student at Wellesley who had a child whom her mother was raising in Tex. The next time I met a person who had been an unmarried teen mom, I was in my 30s, and she was a coworker who had gotten pregnant after being raped while in high school.

Two years ago, I had a friend whom I was shocked to learn was a greatgrandmom at age 52. She was shocked that I had had both of my sons in wedlock, and that both had been planned pregnancies. She had a master’s degree, but had had an alcoholic mom and a criminal dad, who ended up dying in prison. Neither of her parents had gone beyond high school.

DeVann · July 27, 2009, 1:44pm

of course they can’t show the entire black experience but it can be hard being black in america were this a country with mostly white people.

samiamy · July 27, 2009, 1:54pm

poet,

My d didn’t make her pronouncement because she wanted a diverse educational experience, she and her friends made the pronouncements of not wanting to attend the LAC because it was just too white for what they were accustomed to. There is a “white” culture believe it or not, but from my POV it is more of the stepford wives environment and I believe that is the environment they said made them uncomfortable. One of the boys they are friends with opted to attend they went to visit him over winter break, and when they came home they said yep their gut feeling they had accepted students day was spot on. Too white for them.

Shrinkrap · July 27, 2009, 4:34pm

“It seems just a bit ironic that the only person here to have clearly identified himself as black, is the one being lectured on how he should think about race and what sort of behavior should be seen as germane to the question, down to smug inferences that his preferred dating partners …”

Dbate is somewhat (in) famous in that reagard . I believe HE knows who “we” are.

After all, it takes a village!

Dbate · July 27, 2009, 4:43pm

Yeah, I know who all the black people are on here. I had an exchange a while back. As an integration to the other thread. Apparently Gates is married to a white lady, and from some people’s opinions it means he can’t complain about racism? W T F?

Pyar · July 27, 2009, 5:27pm

I just wanted to add to the discussion. I am an Indian male who went to a high school that is 98% white. I’m from a suburban town. In my experience, I would have to say that I am the most comfortable with white people and they make up the majority of my friends. But I think that is just a matter of coincidence. I think also what struck me is that I had no problem, when I started college, making friends with black students. And before college I had virtually no interaction with anyone that was black ever. Despite all that it really made no difference in my case whether a person was white or black.

The interesting part for me was that I found it the most awkward and very hard to interact with other Indian people. The same goes for my brother as well. My parents found that very unusual because they had been very excited that we would now get to hang out with other Indians our age. They were surprised and confused why neither one of us went out of way to make friends with other Indians and hang out with them. I’ve spent a long time thinking about this now. Why I acted like that, why I still partially act like that. I think it maybe because of 1. the environment I grew up in (A majority white school, which made me very comfortable with white people) 2. I had no preconceived notions regarding white or black people (I pretty much knew the situation that black people are in, basically all the things that have been discussed so far in this thread. But that never caused me to have any preconceived opinions or caused hesitation for me when I met someone that was black.) 3. What I did have is many preconceived notions about Indians, I felt like there was a strong expectation of how I should act around Indians, I felt like around other Indians I would be judged to see if I was “Indian” enough. I didn’t know if I would be able to fit the culture. I didn’t know how to connect with them. It seemed to me that being Indian would get in the way of any other interaction I would have with them whereas with someone who is white or black, race really didn’t matter.

So why does all this matter for this thread? I still don’t know exactly why I hesitate to interact with other Indians. But I suspect it may be the case for me and people of other races that there is a hesitation regarding culture and trying to fit that culture, they may feel like they are being judged to see if they are “black” enough, or “asian” enough, etc. and that may make them feel uncomfortable. This boils down to stereotypes reinforced by the media and everyday life. Why try to interact with others of your race when you have to try to constantly fit the stereotype that they think you should be in when you can just hang out with other people and that stigma isn’t there. (Then again the stereotype exists when you interact with people of other races, in my opinion its easier to overcome that though)

I hope I didn’t ramble on too long and what I said makes sense. :p

Black in America 2

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