A slice of a slice is not the whole pie

As soon as I got finished reading that New York Times article ("Plight Deepens for Black Men, Studies Warn") I needed to take a walk, and right across the street at the bodega I overheard about three brothers musing about the jail time they've done.

Of course it's a reality, still, it's not everyone's and definitely not the majority, as the media coverage this week seems to convey. Understandably, I've been upset with the coverage resulting from the article (it's already archived on nytimes.com but someone with the username "bcgntn" was quick enough to post it as a PDF). Just now I was watching News Hour on PBS and took issue with the way they handled their related report, "Black Men Left Out Of Growing Economy" (RealAudio clip). I applaud Jim Lehrer and Ray Suarez for their good faith effort, but like many reporters this past week they were way too loose with how they identified just who they were reporting on. Way too easily, reporters keep interchanging "black men" (which means all of us) with qualified phrases such as "black men who dropped out of high school," or "black men with criminal records," or "black men out of work." Then they'll go on to quote high stats and figures that overstate reality because they're speaking of the high percentages within lower percentages. If we're discussing black men in general then no, we aren't all a bunch of jobless, uneducated, incarcerated absent fathers. Believe it or not the majority of us are living responsibly and contributing to this economy but the reports understate this.

Now I am not at all disputing that an honest look at the numbers makes very clear that the vicious cycle of poverty, absent fathers, poor education, joblessness, crime, harassment, incarceration, and poor re-entry policies has entrapped more black men than it has other groups of men. But the problem is in how we're connected to the cycle, not in being "black men," as some negligent reporting conveys. Some of the reporting makes it seem like, when it comes to the factors contributing to our problems, black manness itself is now a factor!

Unfair education opportunities, unjust real estate practices, or undersupported job training programs are problems that men face because they prevent men from being providers. The fact that these problems face black men in particular actually exposes the enduring, indelible legacy of racial inequality and injustice that we have to deal with on top of the things more in our control (yes, some things are totally in our control: like we have total control over who we get pregnant -- I think the non-custodial father problem should be addressed separately). Brothers who are caught up definitely need help and want opportunities to help themselves, but don't get lost in that style of reporting and start to convince yourself that the NY Times article was about the majority of "black men."

I'm so sick of hearing "black men" when it's not followed with a qualifier -- black men who what? No, black men in general are not all some jobless, drug dealing, prison-bound dead-beat dads. And we damn sure aren't all out here on the down-low or trying to date white and Asian women. Once a small group takes on a trait, it implicates all of us and that's so misleading. Don't believe the hype! People really need to fall back with all these terribly misguided images of who we are (and on our part we really need to proactively put some different counter images of ourselves out here).

Yes the numbers are staggering, really bad: about a third (i.e. a minority) of black men between 20 and 39 (i.e. not all black men) are in the cycle in some way or another. But make sure you read through the info with the whole picture in mind. Alarm is necessary and overdue because the numbers for those of us in the cycle are so much higher than they are for any other group, and I am definitely grounded deep enough in reality to know that for those of us who are not in the cycle, it is easiest for us to get sucked into the cycle. But the 2004 stat that revealed that half of black men were jobless applied only to men in their 20s without a college education FROM A SMAPLE POOL IN NEW YORK CITY! So the number reflects a problem that applies to a whole lot of us, and it needs attention and resources and solutions, but it's just not the vast majority of us.

If you actually read parts of the article in reverse it changes the tone, and the bias. The article states that "By their mid-30's, 6 in 10 black men who had dropped out of school had spent time in prison. In the inner cities, more than half of all black men do not finish high school... According to census data, there are about five million black men ages 20 to 39 in the United States."

So we can flip it and begin with, there are about 12 million black men in the U.S. and of this 12 million, 5 million are between 20 and 39. So 5 million in that age bracket equals about 42% of all black men and of that 42%, the majority of them completed high school and entered the workforce.

Finishing high school is the most crucial factor because its only in looking at the numbers of those who did not finish high school or who did not go on to college that we start to see the numbers skyrocket.

But again, keep in mind that as the article goes, it speaks of percentages of percentages of percentages. Slices of smaller slices. My point is that, although our slices are wider than other groups' slices, we're still just talking about slices, not our whole pie.


On another note, the media seem to be calling black men to task both here and abroad. Read this from Newsweek: African Women Reshaping Broken Continent"