Thora Institute

Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”
--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.

Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
Are Failing Black America by Algernon Austin
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________________________________________________________________________


The Center on Education Policy has conducted a detailed analysis of test-score trends since the implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) in 2002. The report finds reading and math scores up in most states. Further, the black-white test-score gap has narrowed in most of the states analyzed. Some commentators are taking these findings to mean that NCLB is succeeding. The truth is that we really don’t know if NCLB is working or not.

For black students, we have findings from only a little more that a dozen states. This is because it was only appropriate to conduct the black-white test-score gap analysis on states with sufficient data available and with a large enough population of black students to yield reliable statistics. The table below provides a summary of some of the report’s findings. For elementary, middle and high schools, in reading and in math, a large majority of the states analyzed showed narrowing achievement gaps between black and white students since 2002.



If test scores are up and racial gaps are narrowing, doesn’t this mean that NCLB is working? No, it doesn’t. As the authors of the report state on page 1: “it is not possible to directly relate changes in student achievement to NCLB.” Contrary to popular belief, test scores have risen often prior to NCLB, particularly in the lower grades. (See the long-term math trends.) So, rising scores alone do not tell us whether NCLB caused the increase or some other factor that has produced increases in test scores in the past. To complicate matters further, something completely new—that is not NCLB—could be causing an increase in test scores.

Prior researchers have attempted to evaluate NCLB by comparing the growth in test scores before and after NCLB. The logic is that if student scores are increasing at, lets say, on average, three points a year before NCLB and then they increase at five points a year after NCLB, this looks like NCLB is responsible for the additional two points a year growth. Earlier research that I have seen with this methodology has found no significant positive effect after NCLB. (See the Civil Rights Project report using this method.)

This type of research is suggestive, but not conclusive. It’s not a slam dunk. If NCLB is a super, great program one would expect it to have big effects that would be clearly visible. But it could still work and not show much effect. If student test scores go from three points a year before NCLB to one point a year after NCLB, NCLB could still be effective. In this situation, it could be that were it not for NCLB student scores would have been declining by three points a year. NCLB could be preventing negative growth that is due to something else.

Just as we could not assume that declining test scores were the result of NCLB, we can’t assume that increasing test scores are the result of NCLB either. Scores are going up, but we’re seen big jumps in test scores in the past for reasons other than NCLB. In the past, however, few people in the media paid any attention.


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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2008 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.

Researchers studying the housing market believe that the foreclosure crisis is just beginning. Some of them say that it will continue into 2010. Black communities are expected to experience a historic loss of wealth and suffer further from the negative ripple effects of communities with vacant homes and declining tax bases. To gain some perspective on this crisis watch the Economic Policy Institute event: Race, Ethnicity and the Subprime Mortgage Crisis. Scroll to the bottom of this page for the full-length video, in three parts.

Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”
--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.

Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
Are Failing Black America by Algernon Austin
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________________________________________________________________________

[re-post]

Source: Karen Davis et al., Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: An International Update on the Comparative Performance of American Health Care, The Commonwealth Fund, May 2007, p. viii.

The U.S, spends more than twice as much per capita on health care as the United Kingdom, yet a recent report ranked the U.K.’s health system first and the U.S.’s last among six nations. We pay the most to get the least.

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: An International Update on the Comparative Performance of American Health Care by Karen Davis et al. compares the health care systems in Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. The researchers compare the countries on the quality of care, access, efficiency, equity, and the promotion of healthy living. The U.S. scored last on access, efficiency, equity, and the promotion of healthy living. On quality of care the U.S. was second to last.

The report states:

The most notable way the U.S. differs from other countries is the absence of universal health insurance coverage. Other nations ensure the accessibility of care through universal health insurance systems and through better ties between patients and the physician practices that serve as their long-term “medical home.” It is not surprising, therefore, that the U.S. substantially underperforms other countries on measures of access to care and equity in health care between populations with above-average and below-average incomes.

With the inclusion of physician survey data in the analysis, it is also apparent that the U.S. is lagging in adoption of information technology and national policies that promote quality improvement. The U.S. can learn from what physicians and patients have to say about practices that can lead to better management of chronic conditions and better coordination of care. Information systems in countries like Germany, New Zealand, and the U.K. enhance the ability of physicians to monitor chronic conditions and medication use. These countries also routinely employ non-physician clinicians such as nurses to assist with managing patients with chronic diseases.

For decades, nations in the developed world have provided high-quality, inexpensive health care to all of their citizens. The U.S. stands alone with an expensive, low-quality health care system than covers fewer and fewer of its citizens each year.

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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2008 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.

Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”
--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.

Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
Are Failing Black America by Algernon Austin
Barnes & Noble.com Amazon.com

[On the Need for Comprehensive Criminal Justice Reform.]
________________________________________________________________________


. . . Well, At Least, in the Last 10 Years

For a recent presentation, I needed to quickly illustrate some of the major facts about black America that none of the leading black public intellectuals have paid attention to. I came up with the figure below. The figure allows us to compare the direction and percent change in the poverty rate, the violent crime victimization race, the share of bachelors degrees earned and the teenage birth rate for blacks from 1990 to 2000. The poverty rate was cut by nearly 30 percent, the violent crime rate by nearly 50 percent, the share of bachelor’s degrees increased by 50 percent and the teen birth rate was cut by nearly a third. Somehow black public intellectuals missed these positive developments and claimed that conditions in black America were worse than ever.





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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2008 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.

Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”
--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.

Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
Are Failing Black America by Algernon Austin
Barnes & Noble.com Amazon.com

[On the Need for Comprehensive Criminal Justice Reform.]
________________________________________________________________________


It is difficult to understand the current changes in the black family because many different things are happening at the same time. Many people know that the percent of black births that are out-of-wedlock is very high, but few people know that there are three different reasons why this is the case.

Most people probably know this one: there is a large number of black single parent families. But one rarely hears discussions about the other two: the low black marital birth rate and the high rate of black adults who are single and without children. If married black women had babies at the rate they did in the past and single black adults married and also had babies, the percent of black births that are out-of-wedlock would drop significantly because there would be many more in-wedlock births.

It is important to realize that the “percent of births” is not a birth rate. The birth rate is the number of births for every 1,000 women in a specific category. The last marital birth rates calculated by the National Center for Health Statistics were for 2002. In 2002, the black marital birth rate was 64.9 births for every 1,000 married black women. The white marital birth rate was 88.2 for every 1,000 married white women. The black marital birth rate was 23.3 births less that the white rate. In the past, the black marital birth rate used to be higher than the white rate. Because there is such a low number of births among married black women, the percent of births to unmarried black women is especially high.

The percent of women ages 18 to 44 who were not married and have no children is higher for blacks than for whites. By my calculations from the American Community Survey, in 2006, 32.8 percent of white women in this age range were single without children. There were 6 percent more black women in this category, 38.8 percent. As recently as 1990, only 29.3 percent of black women in this age group were unmarried and without children. Last year, scholars at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill reported that these single adults living alone were making up a larger share of the black middle class.

The changes in black family structure are far more complicated than most people realize. Few people know that there are three separate factors producing the high percent of births that are out-of-wedlock among blacks. Is the low birth rate for married black women a good thing or a bad thing? Should we be concerned about the increase in single black adults without children? We haven’t asked these questions because there has been more hasty assumptions than serious data analysis about black families.


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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2008 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.

Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”
--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.

Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
Are Failing Black America by Algernon Austin
Barnes & Noble.com Amazon.com

[On the Need for Comprehensive Criminal Justice Reform.]
________________________________________________________________________


Barack Obama delivered another masterful speech Sunday. The news report I saw made it seem like he merely did an impersonation of Bill Cosby, but he was more subtle and sophisticated than that. Nonetheless, it was a speech that Cosby would be proud of since it did endorse Cosby’s arguments.

Obama said that yes black communities needed more jobs and better schools and that past injustices did play a role in the absence of fathers in black homes, but that black people could not use those things as excuses. He said that black men should not be languishing in prison when they should be out looking for a job.

There are too many issues here that should be unpacked and discussed for me to deal with all of them at this point, but I’ll tackle a few.

The injustices are not only in the past. Our current criminal justice system is biased by race and class as I illustrated last week in “Whites, Blacks and Illicit Drugs”. If we had different criminal justice policies there would be fewer black men in prison. We need to work to eliminate the race and class biases in the criminal justice system. We need to expand opportunities for drug treatment. We need to use alternative, community-based sentencing for certain non-violent offenders. If we had elected officials who were committed to reforms of this sort, there would be more black men available to be the fathers that Obama and Cosby would like to see.

This is a very real issue for black women in the poorest black communities. Even the conservative (by my standards) scholar Isabel Sawhill admits that “for certain subgroups of African-American women” she “did find a shortage of eligible men” for them to marry.¹ We simply can’t improve the rate of two-parent families in the poorest black communities without dealing with the present racial injustices in our criminal justice system.

Obama argues that blacks should not use issues like the lack of jobs, the high rate of poverty, the high degree of economic inequality as excuses for the absence of men in black families. But there is a growing body of research that identifies the lack of jobs, poverty and economic inequality as important causes of the higher rates of crime in black communities.² If we want to keep black men out of prison, we will also need economic policies to address these issues.

The economic development of poor black communities is also important because black men who are unemployed are probably less likely to marry. Poor black women are probably not interested in marrying unemployed black men. Unemployed black men are probably reluctant to marry if they cannot contribute financially to the household.

The more education one has the more likely one is to marry.³ The issue of the separate and unequal education that black students receive is, again, not simply an excuse. If we improve the educational attainment of blacks, we will likely increase marriage rates.

If Obama wishes to increase the marriage rates in black communities, he needs to (1) recognize the racial disparities in our criminal justice system as one of the current injustices facing black America, (2) institute policies that lead to good jobs for blacks, and (3) improve the quality of black schools. Is Obama able to recognize the importance of these policies? Will Obama be willing and able to deliver them, if he does?


References
1. Isabel V. Sawhill, “The Behavioral Aspects of Poverty,” The Public Interest, Fall 2003, p. 88.

2. Eric D. Gould, Bruce A. Weinberg, and David B. Mustard, “Crime Rates and Local Labor Market Opportunities in the United States: 1979-1997,” The Review of Economics and Statistics 84(1), February 2002: 45-61; Stephen Machin and Costas Meghir, “Crime and Economic Incentives,” Journal of Human Resources 39(4), Autumn 2004: 958-979; Jens Ludwig, Greg J. Duncan, and Paul Hirschfield, “Urban Poverty and Juvenile Crime: Evidence from a Randomized Housing-Mobility Experiment,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 116(2), May 2001: 655-679; Morgan Kelly, “Inequality and Crime,” Review of Economics and Statistics 82(4), November 2000: 530-539.

3. David T. Ellwood and Christopher Jencks, “The Uneven Spread of Single-Parent Families: What Do We Know? Where Do We Look for Answers?” in Social Inequality, Kathryn Neckerman ed. (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2004), 3-77.


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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

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[From the Daily Voice.com]

It is easy to be misled about the reality of race and drugs in America. Movies, television shows, rap music and the incarceration statistics could lead one to believe that drug abuse and drug dealing are far more common among blacks than among other groups.

Occasionally, however, some news reaches the general public to suggest that this might not be the case.

So far this year, 95 San Diego State University students (PDF file) have been arrested for drug dealing and possession. The picture one gets from looking at the arrested students--and the school student newspaper did provide pictures--is radically different from the picture in much of America's popular culture. The arrested students look like middle-class California--white, Hispanic, Asian and black--with blacks in the minority.

This large number of arrests is the result of a special focus by the University police, the Drug Enforcement Agency and the San Diego County District Attorney's Office after the death of a white student from a drug overdose last year. Although San Diego State University may be rare among universities in seriously pursuing illicit drugs on its campus, it is by no means the only university with drug users and drug dealers. As the president of the University stated, "Drug use is a concern on virtually every campus in our country."

When a white student was arrested at New York University for dealing drugs in 2004, a spokesperson for that university concurred. "The issue of drug use by college students is an issue that institutions of higher learning confront on a daily basis," he stated.

Contrary to the popular stereotype, drug use surveys like the National Survey on Drug Use and Health show similar levels of drug use among blacks and whites. If whites across the country use illicit drugs, they have to get them from somewhere. Criminologists are convinced that most whites get them from other white friends and acquaintances.

At San Diego State, apparently, many students purchased their drugs from other students. In the Washington D.C. area, my neck of the woods, police recently arrested students from some of the region's elite, predominantly-white high schools for allegedly selling marijuana to other students.

We have every reason to believe that blacks and whites use drugs and deal drugs at roughly comparable rates but the black incarceration rate for drug offenses is about ten times the white rate. For men, the disparity is about twelve times the white rate. Black women are incarcerated at about five times the rate of white women.

These disparities mean that white youth involved with drugs are much more likely to have opportunities to rehabilitate themselves and then get on with their lives. For many students at universities like San Diego State, they can use drugs or deal drugs and still end up in later years as respected adults in the American middle class.

For the many black youth who have similar levels of drug involvement, they are more likely to be arrested and incarcerated. For these black youth, a criminal record makes the prospect of finding a good job--or any job--very difficult. Black youth who are incarcerated carry that scarlet letter of a criminal record for the rest of their lives.

If we want to change this lopsided racial disparity in drug incarceration there are two options. We could begin to police predominantly white high schools, colleges, workplaces and neighborhoods searching for drugs as intensively as we police poor black communities. Drug dragnets like the one at San Diego State University would have to become the rule rather than the exception.

The second option is that we rethink the whole idea of the "war on drugs." A recent report by the Sentencing Project states that we've arrested 31 million people for drug offenses since 1980. These arrests have been disproportionately in lower-income black communities, yet I doubt there is a poor black community where we can say the "war on drugs" has been won.

There are many advocates at the Sentencing Project, the Justice Policy Institute, the Drug Policy Alliance, Common Sense for Drug Policy, Efficacy and other organizations with ideas for a new approach to the issue of illicit drugs. After two decades and 31 million arrests have failed to solve the problem, isn't it time to consider another approach?


Copyright © 2008, TheDailyVoice.com, Inc.

An Economic Policy Institute Event

Race, Ethnicity, and the Subprime Mortgage Crisis

June 12, 2008, 2:30 PM - 5:00 PM

Economic Policy Institute
1333 H Street, NW, Suite 300, East Tower
Washington, D.C. 20005

Moderated by
Dr. ALGERNON AUSTIN
Director of the Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy
with presentations by
GRACIELA APONTE, National Council of La Raza
DEBBIE BOCIAN, Center for Responsible Lending
WILHELMINA LEIGH , Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies
DEDRICK MUHAMMAD, Institute for Policy Studies
GREGORY SQUIRES, George Washington University
RSVP here.
________________________________________________________________________


Fraud has been rampant in the sale of subprime mortgages.--Economist, March 22, 2008.


An analysis for The Wall Street Journal of more than $2.5 trillion in subprime loans made since 2000 shows that as the number of subprime loans mushroomed, an increasing proportion of them went to people with credit scores high enough to often qualify for conventional loans with far better terms.

In 2005, the peak year of the subprime boom, the study says that borrowers with such credit scores got more than half -- 55% -- of all subprime mortgages that were ultimately packaged into securities for sale to investors, as most subprime loans are. The study by First American LoanPerformance, a San Francisco research firm, says the proportion rose even higher by the end of 2006, to 61%. The figure was just 41% in 2000, according to the study. Even a significant number of borrowers with top-notch credit signed up for expensive subprime loans, the firm's analysis found.--Wall Street Journal, December 3, 2007


Even with risk controls, the neighborhood minority share is consistently significant and positively related to subprime share in both years. Furthermore, the neighborhood educational level is consistently significant and negatively related to subprime lending.-- Paul S. Calem and Jonathan E. Hershaff, and Susan M. Wachter, Housing Policy Debate 15(3), 2004.


Only 20 percent of subprime loans in 2005 were made by banks or thrift institutions, two entities that are supervised by federal regulators. More than half (51 percent) were made by unsupervised mortgage companies, and 29 percent were made by the more lightly supervised subsidiaries of supervised lenders. --The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studites


In 2006, more than one-half (52.9 percent) of African Americans and nearly half of Hispanics (47.3 percent) who acquired home-purchase loans had subprime loans. This is in contrast to the fourth (26.1 percent) of counterpart white borrowers who acquired these loans.38 Almost a third (31 percent) of American Indian or Alaska Native homebuyers also purchased homes with subprime loans.----The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studites


African-American women, who represent half of African-American home purchase borrowers, are particularly vulnerable. In fact, there is evidence that subprime lenders charge black women and Latinas higher rates and fees than same-race men and white men, again, regardless of income and across all loan types. --Anita F. Hill, Boston Globe, October 22, 2007


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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

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One of the 10 Best Black Books of 2006! --Kam Williams, Dallasblack.com

I taught Getting It Wrong to my undergrad black politics class. The book is a real tonic. --Adolph Reed, University of Pennsylvania

Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
Are Failing Black America by Algernon Austin
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________________________________________________________________________

[re-post]

The U.S. has the highest child poverty rate among 24 OECD countries, indicates UNICEF in its latest Innocenti Research Centre Report Card. The Report Card was issued in February of this year, and it rates many different aspects of child well-being in OECD countries. This week and in coming weeks, I will review some of the findings.


Source: UNICEF, Child Poverty in Perspective: An Overview of Child Well-Being in Rich Countries, Innocenti Report Card 7, 2007.

When child poverty is defined as the percent of 0 to 17 year-olds in households with earnings of less than 50 percent of the national median income, the United States scores worst among developed nations. Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden have the lowest child poverty rates.

The U.S. is not only last, it is far behind the second-to-last country, New Zealand. New Zealand beats the U.S. by more than 5 percentage points. This is the largest difference between two adjacent countries in the entire ranking.

We cannot blame the last place ranking of the U.S. on that favorite target—single parents. The Report Card states,

Variations between countries in the proportion of children growing up in lone-parent families do not explain national poverty rates. Sweden, for example, has a higher proportion of children living in lone-parent families than the United States or the United Kingdom but a much lower child poverty rate than either.

Poverty is still fundamentally an issue of low income, not family structure.

This measure of poverty, as less than 50 percent of the national median, is really a measure of income inequality. It is a relative measure, not an absolute one. In terms of the absolute value of income, a household defined as in poverty in the U.S. could have higher earnings than a household that is not in relative income poverty in a poorer developed nation.

This point is an important one to keep in mind. On the other hand, Americans judge their well-being relative to other Americans, not relative to the living standards of people in countries like Greece, Poland and the Czech Republic.

On the broader measure of the material well-being of children, the U.S. places 17th out of the 21 countries with complete data. This placement is better, but not much better.

The Report Card defines material well-being as an average of measures of relative income poverty, households without jobs and reported deprivation.

The U.S. is 17th in well-being but places highly—5th (out of 24)—in the percentage of children living in households without an employed parent. Many of the countries with lower rates of relative income poverty among children have higher unemployment rates than the U.S. It is easier to find a job in the U.S. and also easier to be impoverished. This situation occurs because in most developed nations, the public sees poverty as harmful to the nation. In the U.S., we see people not working as the greater threat. The end result is that we have many families that can be described as working poor.

The reported deprivation scale is an average of three items: affluence, educational resources, and books.

The affluence measure asks children if their family owns an automobile, if they have their own bedroom, if they have traveled on vacation with their family and how many computers their family owns. This measure allows the high standard of living in the U.S. to be factored in.

The U.S. scores highly on affluence—6th (out of 20)—but still some distance from number one. Norway, Netherlands, Sweden, Canada and Switzerland all score higher. Denmark is immediately behind the U.S.

The U.S. is 13th (out of 24) in the percentage of children reporting less than six educational possessions, and a depressing 22nd (out of 24) on the percentage of children reporting less than 10 books in the home. The low score for the U.S. in these areas cannot be simply because children are using the worldwide web for their information. Countries with equal or higher technological development (e.g., Japan, Germany and Canada) outscore the U.S. in children with books.

“Variation in government policy appears to account for most of the variation in child poverty levels between OECD countries,” states the Innocenti Centre. In others words, the U.S. could have lower child poverty rates, we just have to want it.

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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2007 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.
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[The Thora Institute needs you.]

Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”
--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.

Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
Are Failing Black America by Algernon Austin
Barnes & Noble.com Amazon.com

[On the Need for Comprehensive Criminal Justice Reform.]
________________________________________________________________________


Many people focus on the general disparities in school funding as an explanation for disparities in educational outcomes. This is an important point, but it is not as precise an argument as it could be. Critics point out that there are schools with high levels of funding that have low educational outcomes.

The issue is not merely how much dollars in general is going to a school. Some schools are in areas with higher costs of living. Some schools cost more to run. Some schools are better managed than others. These and other factors may absorb additional dollars in school funding without necessarily producing increases in school quality. The better argument, therefore, is about school quality. Predominantly black schools are more likely to be low-quality schools than predominantly white schools. People should make arguments specifically about reducing the disparities in school quality rather than school funding.

In general, however, there is a relationship between school quality and school funding. This relationship is probably particularly strong when one looks at the amount of dollars spent on school construction. Growth and Disparity: A Decade of U.S. Public School Construction by Building Educational Success Together (BEST) allows us to look at the class and race disparities in public school construction spending.

High income areas spent nearly three times as much on school construction as low income areas. In zip code areas where the median household income was at least $100,000, $11,500 per student was spent on school construction. In zip code areas where the median household income was less than $20,000, only $4,140 was spent on school construction.

There was a weaker disparity by the race of the school district. Predominantly white school districts spent about a third more than predominantly minority school districts. School districts that were more than 90 percent white spent $7,102 per student, but school districts that were more than 90 percent minority spent $5,172 per student.

Although the quality of school buildings may not be a common school quality measure, it matters for educational outcomes. BEST states, “An increasing body of research indicates that poor building conditions such as a lack of temperature control, poor indoor air quality, insufficient daylight, overcrowded classrooms, and a lack of specialty classrooms are obstacles to academic achievement.” Having science labs that are up-to-date and working and other good facilities also probably provide some educational benefit. In America’s schools, wealthier and whiter schools tend to have all of these things and poorer and blacker schools tend not to.


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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2008 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
[The Thora Institute needs you.]

Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”
--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.

Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
Are Failing Black America by Algernon Austin
Barnes & Noble.com Amazon.com

[Will White Rap Fans Help or Hurt Black America?]
________________________________________________________________________

[This piece originally appeared in the Daily Voice.]

Nothing succeeds like stereotypes. Anti-black stereotypes are especially powerful. Take, for example, the now popular claim that black students don't value education. This claim has been repeated over and over again in spite of the fact that there is a mountain of evidence against it.

In 1986, in an Urban Review article, two scholars studying a Washington D.C. high school claimed that black students did not achieve academically because of a fear of being perceived as "acting white." People pounced so quickly on this idea that they failed to realize that the researchers did not actually present any black students who said they were afraid of being called "white."

Of the eight students discussed in the article, four indicated that they were worried about being called "brainiacs." The other four raised other issues. A fear of "acting white" was the researchers' highly debatable interpretation of what was going on, but it was not a direct quotation.

Many white students have been called "brainiac," "nerd," "geek," and similar names by other white students. It is unfortunate that students tease and bully each other. But this is not "a black thing." The real question therefore is whether academically-oriented teasing is more common among black students than among whites. There is no convincing evidence that this is the case. A 2003 study by the Girl Scout Research Institute, for example, found equal levels of concern about school-related teasing among black and white girls.

What about pro-school attitudes? Contrary to the popular stereotype, much of the evidence suggests that black students value education more than whites. The same year the Urban Review article was published, the Monitoring the Future survey found that 74 percent of black high school seniors believed that getting good grades was of "great" or "very great importance," but only 41 percent of white seniors felt as strongly. Half of black seniors reported that knowing a lot about intellectual matters was of "great" or "very great importance," but only one-fifth of white seniors felt the same.

Other and more recent surveys have had similar results. A 2006 survey by Public Agenda found that black students were more likely than white students to believe that "increasing math and science education would improve high school." The Higher Education Research Institute's 2006 survey of college freshmen found that the majority-black students at historically black colleges were more likely to aspire to obtain a Ph.D. than college freshmen generally.

Different organizations asking different questions of different black students at different times have all come to the same conclusion: black students value education. Despite the fact that these surveys are based on interviews of hundreds of black students from nationally-representative samples, none of them has been deemed as newsworthy as that study with four students worried about being called "brainiacs."

I can imagine some critics arguing that it doesn't matter what black students say, what matters is what they do. They might point out that black students have lower levels of academic achievement than white students. This is true, but it is only a part of the achievement story. One has to look at the trends in academic achievement, not just the one-time snapshots.

Since the 1970s, the best standardized tests have shown a greater increase in black students' scores than in white students' scores. The long-term trend National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) math test for eight graders, for example, shows a 14 point gain for white students but a 34 point gain for black students. There remains a large gap in scores on this test, but it was 20 points larger in the 1970s.

There are similar results for the long-term trend NAEP reading test, for the National Assessment of Adult Literacy test, the General Social Survey vocabulary test and other standardized exams. If black students are rejecting education left and right, why are their test scores increasing?

What the current academic research shows is that much of the black-white achievement gap exists prior to first-grade, many years before academic teasing begins. This gap is due to broad social and economic disadvantages among black families in comparison to white families. The gap grows during school years because these disadvantaged black students then attend schools of lower quality than white students.

Adults concerned about raising black student achievement have two options: we can get back into the civil rights business of confronting the social and economic inequalities that produce the achievement gap or we can cling to convenient stereotypes and keep on blaming black students. Blaming black students certainly means less work for us.


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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”
--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.

Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
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[Will White Rap Fans Help or Hurt Black America?]
________________________________________________________________________


Race is fundamentally a sociological phenomenon. For some, recent developments in genetics produce confusion on this matter because it seems that scientists are uncovering the biology of race. But actually the opposite is occurring.

For example,a new discovery suggests that maybe 40 percent of blacks have a natural beta blocker that helps them recover from heart failure. Only two percent of whites appear to have this trait. This is a large and significant racial disparity. Blacks are twenty times more likely than whites to have the beta-blocker characteristic.

Some people take findings of this sort and assume that it shows that race is biological. But this is not the case. Let’s say we simply followed the biology and made a “beta-blocker race” and a “non-beta-blocker race.” Neither of these races map onto the racial categories for blacks or whites. Sixty percent of blacks and 98 percent of whites are of the same “race”—“non-beta-blockers.” We don’t know what the breakdown is for Asians or other racial categories that people have defined. Presumably, these groups would only complicate matters further because some portion of them would likely also fall into the “non-beta-blocker race.”

In recent years, scientists have found many genetic correlates to our sociological racial categories. Most of these correlates have been in what can be called the “junk DNA” in our genetic code and, unlike the beta blocker characteristic, have no apparent usefulness to our wellbeing. With many of these correlates in their toolboxes and some understanding of mathematical probabilities, scientists can use biology to predict a person’s actual race or racial ancestry from their DNA.

This process is akin to someone using a person’s consumption patterns to predict their political affiliation. If you know that 60 percent of people who buy car A vote Democratic. And 55 percent of people who listen to music B vote Democratic. And 68 percent of people who drink beer C vote Democratic. And 75 percent of people who shop at store D vote Democratic. If someone does all four of the above things—A, B, C and D—that Democrats are more likely to do than Republicans, then it is highly likely that they are a Democrat.

Geneticists have found hundreds of bits of the genetic code that are somewhat more likely to be in one racial group than another. They use these hundreds of snippets to calculate the likelihood that someone belongs to a particular racial group. Since these analyses rely on probabilities, the confidence of the prediction depends on the specific methodology and the characteristics of the group. The last time I looked into this matter, scientists found American Indian membership very difficult to predict. Scientists, however, have been constantly working to improve their methodology.

Now to do these predictions, scientists have to start with the racial category and then find the DNA that correlate. They did not simply look at the DNA and then racial categories appeared to them. Going back to the predicting Democrats example, you have to start off knowing who is a Democrat. Only then can you identify which consumption items are important to look at. Similarly, you have to start with racial categories to find the DNA bits that a useful. It cannot be done just using biology. The social category comes first and then scientists try to rig up a system of biology and mathematics to best approximate the social categories.

Using a process similar to this one, geneticists can now identify if someone is black or white. They can even go further and identify if someone’s ancestry is from a specific part of the world, like West Africa as opposed to some other part of sub-Saharan Africa. They also can make fairly accurate assessments of what share of one’s ancestry came from West Africa and what share came from Western Europe. Although scientists are piecing together large numbers of genetic clues to predict a person’s race and ancestry, this assemblage of genetic snippets is not race.

These techniques were only recently discovered. They are probably less than 20 years old, yet race is more than 300 hundred years old. People in the eighteenth century knew the concept of race, but they would be completely dumbfounded by the genetic work scientists are doing today. A person from the eighteenth century and a twenty-first century geneticist could easily talk about race, but they could not immediately talk about genetics.

That scientists can find genetic correlates to racial categories after the fact, should not blind us to the fact that it was not the genes that constructed the categories in the first place. It was people’s social definitions. In the U.S. the one-drop rule in particular highlighted the fact that even physical appearance could be of secondary importance. The U.S. Postal Service reminds us of this with a Black Heritage stamp of Charles Chesnutt. It was not biology that made Chesnutt black.



[Read more about the social construction of race in Achieving Blackness.]

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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2008 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.
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Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”
--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.

Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
Are Failing Black America by Algernon Austin
Barnes & Noble.com Amazon.com

[Will White Rap Fans Help or Hurt Black America?]
________________________________________________________________________


By a variety of measures, the American middle class is economically stressed and insecure. How insecure is today’s black middle class specifically? Dëmos finds a third of the black middle class at risk of falling out of the middle class. The Pew Research Center finds roughly similar levels of economic insecurity among the black middle class.

“Middle class” is actually a squishy concept. There are many ways that people define middle class. For example, the Black Directions report on the black middle class compares seven different ways of defining the middle-class-ness. Who is in the middle class and how large it is depends on how one defines it.

The Pew Research Center simply asked respondents to declare whether or not they were middle class. When one does this half of black adults say that they are middle class. This seems like a high percentage when one considers that about half of white adults also declare themselves to be middle class.

Isn’t the white middle class larger than the black middle class?

The key issue again is how one defines middle class. If one looks at the median family income of blacks and whites who say that they are middle class, the black median is nearly $10,000 less than the white median. By a subjective measure, the Pew data indicates that the black middle class is the same size as the white middle class. An objective, income-based definition of “middle class” could yield a black “middle class” that is smaller than the white “middle class.” Eight percent more whites than blacks say they are upper class however, and ten percent more blacks than whites say that they are lower class.

Source: The Pew Research Center.

From 24 to 40 percent of middle-class blacks are economically insecure depending on the measure. In the Pew survey, 24 percent of middle-class blacks struggle to meet expenses. Twenty-four percent are also afraid that they may face wage cuts or lose benefits in the coming year. Thirty percent are worried that they might lose their job. Forty percent experienced two or more financial difficulties in the past year (i.e., they could not pay bills, could not save or had to cut spending).

Dëmos has assessed the financial security of the black middle class using objective measures. They examined households making two to six times the poverty level (roughly $40,000 to $120,000 for a family of four). The head of the households had to be between 25 to 64 years old and not have more than $500,000 in assets.

Dëmos also defined specific criteria for being “financially secure,” “financially at-risk” and in-between. This “middle class security index” has specific asset levels, educational achievement, housing expenses, living expenses, and health insurance coverage to place households in one of the three categories. According to the Dëmos’ index, a third of the black middle class are at high risk for slipping out of the middle class.

It is now clear that the project of black socioeconomic advancement has at least three parts: (1) poverty reduction, (2) upward mobility and (3) securing the black middle class. The assumption had been that while the black middle class did not have as high incomes and were not as wealthy as the white middle class, they had nonetheless “made it.” New research suggests that for too many in the black middle class being middle class is merely a stop on the way to poverty.


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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2008 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.
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Note: White poverty estimates prior to 1980 include Hispanics. Data from 1980 to 2000 is of non-Hispanic whites. The 2006 estimate is of the "white alone, not Hispanic" population. Black poverty estimates include Hispanics. The 2006 black estimate is of the "black alone" population.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau.


Many people have been talking about black poverty, but few show that they have actually examined the poverty trends. The figure above shows the decade-by-decade change in poverty for blacks and for whites. Between 1959 and 1969, the black poverty rate declined by a tremendous 22.9 percentage points. The following decades showed relatively small declines until the 1990s. From 1990-1999, the black poverty rate declined by 8.3 percentage points. Since 2000, black poverty has increased slightly. Anyone really serious about reducing black poverty would try to understand these changes. Of particular interest should be the 1960s and the 1990s declines.

In recent years, Bill Cosby, John McWhorter, Juan Williams and others have argued that since the 1960s bad values have caused an increase in black poverty. The truth of the matter is that aside from some fluctuations, there has been no sustained increase in black poverty. In the 1990s, quite contrary to the popular claims, black America saw a sizable reduction in black poverty.

Further, it is clear that there are large economic forces affecting both black and white poverty rates. When black poverty declines, white poverty declines. When black poverty increases; white poverty increases. Any theory of black poverty has to explain why black and white poverty move in parallel. A theory of cultural problems that are unique to blacks does not explain the parallel trends for whites.

Most of the current crop of black public intellectuals have not examined the economic data with any care. They do not seem to understand that economic conditions and labor market practices affect black economic outcomes. It should not be a radical idea that economic factors have an important role to play in black poverty rates. The reason why black and white poverty rates move in parallel is because both blacks and whites are affected by the overall U.S. economy in similar ways. (There are differences for populations with large numbers of recent immigrants.)

Two black economists, Steven Pitts and William Spriggs, have issued a report, Beyond the Mountiantop: King’s Prescription for Poverty situating the discussion of black poverty in the dynamics of the America economy. The report pulls Martin Luther King Jr. into contemporary debates by presenting King’s views on the causes of poverty.

King does not side with the current generation of black public intellectuals. In 1967, King stated:

At that time [of the early 20th century] economic status was considered the measure of the individual’s abilities and talents. And in the thinking of that day, the absence of worldly goods indicated a want of industrious habits and moral fiber. We’ve come a long way in our understanding of human motivation and of the blind operation of our economic system. Now we realize that dislocations in the market operation of our economy and the prevalence of discrimination thrust people into idleness and bind then in constant or frequent unemployment against their will. The poor are less often dismissed, I hope, from our conscience today by being branded as inferior and incompetent. We also know that no matter how dynamically the economy develops and expands, it does not eliminate all poverty.

King understood black poverty, therefore, as a two-part problem: (1) a general failure of the economic system to distribute wealth, which would affect blacks and whites, and (2) the result of anti-black discrimination in the labor market. King explicitly rejects the culture-of-poverty-type ideas that are popular today, and sees those type of ideas as an out-of-date way of thinking not based on a good understanding of the economy.

Given these causes of black poverty, Pitts and Spriggs identify four policy goals:

• generate full employment—everyone who wants a job should have one
• fight discrimination
• protect worker’s freedom and right to join a union
• raise the minimum wage
.

Pitts and Spriggs point out that the reason there was a tremendous decline in black poverty over the 1960s was because all four of these goals were in place. The economy was at full employment. The U.S. government was still earnest about enforcing anti-discrimination policies. Unions were strong and growing. And the real value of the minimum wage was high.

During the 1970s and 1980s all of these policy goals were in decline or largely absent. During the 1990s, only one of the four policy items was really in place. The economy achieved full employment at the national level. But there was lax enforcement and weak support for anti-discrimination policy. Unionization rates were declining. And the real value of the federal minimum wage in 2006 was $2.33 less than it was in 1969. One is better than none, but it is clear that four is better than one.

In an era when so many people “get it wrong” about poverty in black America, it is refreshing to see some folks who get it right.


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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2008 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.
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D.C. Event

Policy Prescriptions for Growing Income Inequality in the United States

by Algernon Austin

A Presentation for the Labor and Employment Relations Association, Washington, D.C. Chapter

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Woman's National Democratic Club, 1526 New Hampshire Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20036

Please contact Lorenzo Di Silvio or by phone at (202) 822-2127 x119 to make a reservation for this meeting. Please make your reservation no later than 5:00 p.m. on Monday, April 21. Reservations are on a “first-come, first-served” basis, so please reserve your place promptly as space is limited. An e-mail response is preferred. Sign-in 11:45, luncheon 12:15, program 12:45. $20 for members with reservations, $10 for student members, $25 for non-members and members without reservations.
________________________________________________________________________


“Most Americans feel stuck in their tracks,” reports the Pew Research Center. “A majority of adults in this country say that in the past five years they either haven’t moved ahead in life or have fallen backwards. This is the most downbeat assessment of personal progress in nearly a half century of polling by the Pew Research Center and the Gallup Organization.”

This conclusion is based on the new Pew Inside the Middle Class survey that hones in on the views of the American middle class, although people from all class backgrounds were surveyed. Last year, the Pew Research Center released a report showing increased pessimism among blacks. That survey covered many different issues from the new one, so the two surveys are not completely comparable. However, there are some similar questions. The new Pew middle-class study suggests that at least part of the reason for increased pessimism among blacks is due to the fact that Americans generally are more pessimistic about the state of the country.

The average American household earned less in 2006 (the most recent year for Census data) than in 1999 and is in more debt. The American middle class feels that it has to strain more to maintain a middle-class lifestyle and middle-class adults are desperate for more free time. All of these factors lead Americans generally to be more pessimistic.

In some ways blacks seem more pessimistic than whites. This year 40 percent of all Americans said that their lives are better now than five years ago. Last year, only 20 percent of blacks said that blacks are better off now than five years ago. It is important to note that these are different questions. One asks for individuals to assess their own lives another asks for individuals to assess a group. It is also worth noting that both percentages have declined recently. From 2002 to 2008, the percent of Americans saying that their lives are better today declined by 8 percentage points. From 1999 to 2007, 12 percent fewer blacks stated that blacks are better off. It is quite possible that some blacks are saying that blacks are doing worse because they are actually doing worse personally.

In 1986, 57 percent of blacks surveyed stated that they believed that things would be better in the future for blacks. In 2007, the percentage had declined to 44 percent. Was this decline due to a perceived cultural crisis or to the economic downturn? Or both? The new middle-class survey suggests the downturn might be playing a significant role. The black response to the future of blacks matches the national response to the future of America’s children to a surprising degree. See the figure below. (Click on the image for a better view.) This might just be a coincidence, but it seems likely that people who are experiencing economic hardship would be pessimistic about things generally.

Source: Pew Research Center, Inside the Middle Class, p. 42 and Optimism about Black Progress Declines, p. 1.


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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

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[This piece was originally published in
the Daily Voice.com.]

How the country responds or does not respond to the housing crisis could add to the long list of racial grievances. As Senator Barack Obama so effectively argued, race can play a big part in our perception of the world. My sense is that, to a degree, whites and blacks have very different readings of what happened to produce the housing crisis.

Of course, there is a diversity of views among whites and blacks, but in talking with people and reading articles, op-eds and reports, I've noticed certain tendencies. My evidence is anecdotal, so I could be wrong, but I would wager that in this issue, as in so many others, race matters.

The whites I've encountered have tended to be more sympathetic to the tough-love approach espoused by Senator John McCain. They have talked about people who irresponsibly sought to purchase more house than they could afford. Or people who thought their home values would rise forever and used their homes like a machine that printed money. In these narratives, people who are facing foreclosure do not deserve much sympathy. They made their bed and they should lie in it.

The blacks that I've heard from bring a very different perspective to the issue. They think of the history of racial discrimination by the Federal Housing Authority. They also think of the recent findings of racial discrimination in lending from paired-tester studies. When these blacks hear of the disproportionate negative impact of the subprime crisis on people of color, their first suspicion is that once again racial discrimination was at play.

Were borrowers facing foreclosure greedy and irresponsible, or were they exploited by racially-biased predatory lenders looking to bundle and sell loans?

It is very difficult to determine to what extent either of these positions is true. But it is very important that we do find out. If we were to bail out large numbers of greedy and irresponsible borrowers, that would be a bad. On the other hand, if we were to ignore the plight of large numbers of blacks who were taken advantage of by lenders, that would also be bad.

It is good to be aware that people have different perspectives on issues. These perspectives should be heard and understood. But, as difficult a time as the country has had in just acknowledging different perspectives, that acknowledgement is still the easy part of the problem.

The hard part is determining which perspective is right and getting everyone, or at least a majority of both sides, to agree on what is the right answer. Only when there is agreement on the right answer can a policy response be crafted that is seen as fair and appropriate by all and racial conflict avoided.

In the housing meltdown, it is quite possible that both positions are correct. It is possible that some people greedily pursued houses they could not afford. It is also possible that minority borrowers were exploited by lenders.

If we are going to bail out institutions involved in the crisis, the federal government should require that we learn exactly what went wrong. If lenders open their records to researchers at the Federal Reserve or the General Accounting Office, we can learn more about the people who borrowed and the homes they acquired. Were the homes extravagant or were the interest terms exorbitant and the deals shady?

It is clear that blacks were more likely to have subprime mortgages, but as lenders are quick to point out, this fact does not prove discrimination. Blacks tend to have more debt, lower incomes and much less wealth than whites, so it could be that blacks' generally worse credit scores placed them disproportionately in the subprime market. If the federal government commissioned a study with individual credit score data--used confidentially, of course--we could obtain very strong evidence on whether it was race or credit scores that placed so many blacks in the subprime market.

Armed with the findings of this research and with sensitivities to the long history of racial discrimination by financial institutions, the country could then move toward a sensible path to prevent us from ending up in this place again.

Recognizing that blacks and whites may come at issues like the housing crisis from different perspectives is an important insight. These perspectives need to be acknowledged and respected. But we can't end there. We need to figure out how we can get blacks and whites--and everybody else--to agree on a common vision of how we should move forward. That is the hard part.

Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”
--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.

Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
Are Failing Black America by Algernon Austin
Barnes & Noble.com Amazon.com

[On the Need for Comprehensive Criminal Justice Reform.]
________________________________________________________________________


Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently made quite candid remarks that race still matters today. Below are quotes taken from the Washington Times article.

Condi Quotes

“descendants of slaves did not get much of a head start, and I think you continue to see some of the effects of that. That particular birth defect [during the founding of the United States] makes it hard for us to confront it, hard for us to talk about it, and hard for us to realize that it has continuing relevance for who we are today.”

“[Race is] a paradox and contradiction in this country, [which] we still haven't resolved.”

“[Race] continues to have effects [on public discussions and] the deepest thoughts that people hold.”

“America doesn't have an easy time dealing with race. [Members of my family have] endured terrible humiliations.”

“What I would like understood as a black American is that black Americans loved and had faith in this country even when this country didn't love and have faith in them — and that's our legacy.”

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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2008 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
[The Thora Institute needs you.]

Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”
--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.

Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
Are Failing Black America by Algernon Austin
Barnes & Noble.com Amazon.com

[On the Need for Comprehensive Criminal Justice Reform.]
________________________________________________________________________


I recently came across yet another call for black entrepreneurship as a means to black economic development. I think this is a big mistake. I see this idea on par with recommending that people buy lottery tickets to achieve wealth.

Now, I do think that having a successful business is a supreme way to build wealth and income. I also believe that there should be more successful black businesses.

So, why am I not big on entrepreneurship?

The simple reason is that most businesses fail. There is a high reward to having a successful business because it is a high-risk venture. If it were easy to have a successful business everyone would have done it already.

Some people have a brilliant idea and those people should start a business. Some people have a great passion to own their own business and they should probably do it. Some have the wealth so that if they lose their investment they can easily continue with their lives. These folks can do it if they have sufficient interest. But even when you tally up the numbers of people in these three categories, you still end up with a small minority.

There are many pitfalls in the way of business success. According to Patricia Schaefer, starting a business just to make money is one of the top wrong reasons to start a businesses. Schaefer sees the singular-focus on getting rich as one of the leading reasons businesses fail.

Starting a business is like becoming a professional athlete or a skilled musician. It’s not for everybody. Some people—a small number—have what is necessary and most people don’t.

A better solution for most people is to find the best job they can, save and invest wisely. People should also support government policies that lead to a broadly shared prosperity. There are investments that the government can make to improve people’s job and educational opportunities. There are investments that would make America a stronger country economically. These policies are as important as any personal action one can take.

There is somewhat of a compromise position. Michael E. Gerber, author of The E-Myth Revisited, points to franchising as an easier path to business success. How does a small-businessperson compete with gigantic businesses like McDonalds, Toyota and Starbucks? She doesn’t have to. She can open a McDonalds or a Toyota dealership or a Starbucks. Now, this path is not easy either, but it can be easier than starting from scratch.

Entrepreneurship for the right people is a great idea. For the wrong people, it can lead to disaster. In many ways homeownership is different from entrepreneurship. Homeownership, for one, is a policy for a wide range of people; entrepreneurship is not. But even a wise general policy like homeownership, when engaged under the wrong terms, can lead to disaster. See what the subprime housing crisis is costing black America. If we can’t tell every black person to go out and purchase a home, we have to realize that we also cannot tell the masses of black people to go out and start a business.


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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2008 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
[The Thora Institute needs you.]

Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”
--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.

Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
Are Failing Black America by Algernon Austin
Barnes & Noble.com Amazon.com

[On the Need for Comprehensive Criminal Justice Reform.]
________________________________________________________________________


Have you ever missed an appointment? Maybe you forgot; maybe you overslept; maybe you were stuck in traffic; maybe there was an emergency of some sort? Well, if you were on parole, missing an appointment with a parole officer could lead you back to prison.

Does this make sense?

Should people be incarcerated for the “crime” of missing an appointment? Should we be paying $25,000 or more a year in prison costs on people who missed appointments? Should we be building new prisons to accommodate inmates who missed appointments? Is this a wise use of our tax dollars?

My presentation here is likely too simplistic, but it does point to a real issue in our dysfunctional criminal justice system. Many people released from prison are re-incarcerated for technical violations which include missing an appointment.

One in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008, a report from the Pew Center on the States, observes:

While some violators are re-incarcerated for new crimes, a significant number wind up back in prison for so-called “technical” violations—transgressions such as a failed drug test or missed appointment with a supervisory agent. California locks up massive numbers of violators, scrambling to accommodate them in a sprawling, 171,444-inmate system so crowded that a three-judge panel may order a population reduction. A 2005 study showed that more than two-thirds of parolees in the Golden State were returned to prison within three years of release; of those, 39 percent were due to technical violations. (p. 18)

There are alternatives to re-incarceration for technical violations.

These include a mix of day reporting centers, electronic monitoring systems, and community service. This strategy makes offenders pay for their missteps but keeps prison beds free for more violent and chronic lawbreakers. And, it makes it more likely the violators will be able to pay victim restitution, child support and taxes. (p. 19)

These alternatives are more proportionate to the offense, and they are a lot less costly to society as a whole and to the ex-offender. Most states, however, do not take this sensible route, but instead rely on re-incarceration.

Much of the attention One in 100 received focused on America’s incredibly high incarceration rate. But the report also contained several “smart on crime” recommendations for making our criminal justice system more effective, less expensive and more humane. The report advocated the use of what I’m calling “smart sentencing,” “smart parole and probation,” and “smart release” policies.

“Smart” Sentencing and Diversion Policies

• Drug courts that break the cycle of crime and addiction with frequent drug tests, a continuum of treatment services and increasing penalties for violations.


• Targeted penalty changes that steer selected low-risk offenders to community corrections programs or modify mandatory minimums.


• Comprehensive sentencing guidelines that allow states to decide as a matter of policy which types of offenders should go to prison and which are appropriate for community corrections.

“Smart” Parole and Probation Policies

• Intermediate sanctions such as day reporting centers for offenders who break the rules of their release, to ensure that each violation receives a swift, certain and proportionate response.


• Short-term residential facilities for persistent rule violators with substance abuse problems.


• Performance incentives that shorten terms of supervision for offenders who comply with their conditions and fulfill obligations such as victim restitution and child support.

“Smart” Release Policies

• Risk reduction credits that allow slightly earlier release for inmates who complete treatment and education programs designed to reduce recidivism.


• Risk-based release instruments that use analysis of actual recidivism patterns to help releasing authorities decide who should remain behind bars and who is ready for release.


• Sufficient program availability in prisons and the community so release isn’t delayed because inmates cannot complete requirements.
(p. 20)

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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

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Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”
--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.

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[On the Need for Comprehensive Criminal Justice Reform.]
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Washington Post columnist, Richard Cohen should be commended for his concern about the high incarceration rate of black men. But his understanding and diagnosis of the problem is off base. He repeats the mantras of the leading black public intellectuals and claims that “a kind of cultural malignancy has taken root in parts of the African American underclass.”

Let’s look at the actual violent crime data by race from the Bureau of Justice Statistics.


What one sees here is that violent crime in black America is way down from where it was in the 1970s and 1980s. If one were to presume a simple and direct relationship between bad cultural values and crime—I don’t, but the pundits do—then one should be arguing that black America has much better cultural values today than in past decades. Also, one should note that the black violent crime rate is lower now than the white violent crime rate was in the 1970s. Did anyone declare that a “cultural malignancy” had taken root in white America during the 1970s? For anyone bothering to look at the data, there is no basis on which to claim that a “cultural malignancy has taken root” in black America.

Where people routinely “get it wrong” is by presuming that the incarceration rate is a simple reflection of the crime rate—it isn’t. America’s so-called tough on crime policies and war on drugs have dramatically increased the incarceration rate. We saw above that there has been no huge upward trend in violent crime since the 1970s. Below we can see the overall violent crime and property crime trends. Both show declines since the 1970s.