A president’s first term is a fresh track in the snow. His second term moves on a set of rutted paths. The shiny cause has become a vast machine, its wheels spinning on internal impulses unrelated to presidential priorities or pressing needs. As President Obama moves toward his fourth State of the Union address, he will be looking for policies that appeal to the country, but he will also try to rekindle the purpose of his administration. Inertia and intellectual exhaustion are fought with presidential initiatives. One issue in particular cries out for attention while receiving almost none. Our politics moves from budget showdown to cultural conflict to trivial controversy while carefully avoiding the greatest single threat to the unity of America: the vast, increasing segregation of young, African American men and boys from the promise of their country. America is in the process of managing, accommodating and containing a crisis that should be intolerable. More than 50 percent of young black men in inner cities are now dropping out of school — making high school graduation the exception to this dismal new rule. They consequently lag behind other groups in college attendance and graduation.
Their rates of incarceration are disproportionately high and rates of workforce participation disproportionately low. “For virtually each outcome considered,” Harry Holzer of Georgetown University has written, “young black men now lag behind every other race and gender group” in the United States. Primary Source. This supports his argument of how blacks are slowly getting lagged behind other races due to the fact of them dropping out of school. This strengthens the author’s argument as his point is proven even further. The problem has gotten worse for decades, in good economic times and bad. Others benefited from the tight labor markets of the 1990s. African American men did not. By 2004, more than half of all black men in their 20s were unemployed. And the size of this problem gets consistently underestimated, since employment figures exclude the incarcerated. A problem that seems insoluble is thus rendered invisible. Social scientists debate which are the greatest causes of these problems, but they generally agree on the list. Declining blue-collar employment opportunities. Failing schools. Lingering racism.
Problems in School
Education is the most important factor for the development of human civilization. It is one of the ways that can help us to achieve our goals in the future. However, there have been many problems raised throughout the year in regarding to what our school system should be practicing to improve education. These problems consists of self-discipline, longstanding bullying and the case about school ...
Absent parents (just 37 percent of black children are raised in two-parent families).
The growth of an “oppositional culture” that undermines achievement. Child-support policies that unintentionally penalize honest work (up to half of black males are involved in the child-support system).
An incarceration boom that has made ex-offenders less employable. Some of these trends gather a disturbing momentum. More than 50 percent of prison inmates are parents with minor children — and those children are significantly more likely to be suspended or expelled from school. Issues of economics and values are often impossible to disentangle. “As relative rewards to mainstream legal work of less-educated young black men have declined,” argues Holzer, “so have their own attachment to the mainstream worlds of school and work and to mainstream behaviors and values more broadly.” Primary Source. This allows author the to implement a source that adds another perspective on his point that still strengthens the author’s argument about blacks.
Who in America devotes sustained, practical attention to young African American males? “Perversely enough,” Hugh Price of the National Urban League has observed, “the only potent lobby that looks after their food, clothing and shelter is the prison-industrial complex, which thrives on incarcerating them.” Primary Source. This source allows the author to further explain what he is talking about in the next point and provides more elaboration on the author’s points in this paragraph which overall makes his argument stronger. This general lack of national urgency is an indictment of people on the whole ideological spectrum, including liberals. Once upon a time, liberalism was about something more than the marginal tax rates and the interests of the middle class. Leaders such as Hubert Humphrey, Robert F. Kennedy and Daniel Patrick Moynihan focused national sympathy on marginalized groups.
The Term Paper on Outcomes for Children of Incarcerated Parents
Most states lack uniform methods of recording the demographic information regarding an inmate’s children. Moreover, many inmates may choose not to identify their children for the fear of the possibility of adverse involvement from various child welfare agencies. A Black child in the United States is nine times more likely than a White child to have a parent in prison. A Hispanic child is three ...
Moynihan gave sophisticated attention to African American males in his 1965 report on black families in America. If the reelection of President Obama is to mark a new era of liberal governance, let’s at least have some causes worthy of the liberal moral impulse. The one advantage of a social challenge on this scale is that it offers broad opportunities for creative policy: promoting early childhood education and parenting skills; encouraging youth development and mentoring; expanding technical education and apprenticeships; fostering college enrollment and completion; offering greater opportunities for national service; extending wage subsidies to low-income, noncustodial fathers; reforming sentencing and easing prisoner reentry. When there is a canyon to fill, just about everyone can usefully take a shovel.
