New York Daily News - News & Views Columnists - Stanley Crouch: Separate & unequal

New York Daily News - News & Views Columnists - Stanley Crouch: Separate & unequalSeparate & unequal

It seems that some of us are committing intellectual suicide. It is undeclared and unrecognized by its victims, men of the black lower class. By contrast, both black women and the black middle class seem to be doing fine, better and better, in fact.

Recognition of this phenomenon is widespread. All this week I received telephone calls and spoke with people from across the country who were disturbed by recent studies showing that lower-class black men are falling further and further behind everyone in society, including Hispanics. Three-quarters of black high school dropouts are suffering from unemployment and a lack of job skills. The unemployment figures are much higher than for their white and Hispanic counterparts.

One person said to me that there is no need to be embarrassed or especially upset because what is going on can easily be explained - or at least understood. The black lower class is not only separated from America as a whole, it is also separated from those principles that have helped the black middle class do the most that it could for itself.

Once upon a time, black lower class did not mean welfare dependents, teenage mothers and young men who had served time before they were in their mid-20s. It once meant blue-collar workers, almost all of whom agreed that knowledge would result in freedom, while ignorance would result in slavery.

At that time, those who were in the black middle class usually lived in the black community, meaning that children had flesh-and-blood models of success. Desegregation, however, meant that black middle-class people moved to the suburbs and other places.

So, as one black man who works for Princeton University says, "You cannot be surprised if a population of young men who live on media images fail to believe in books if most of what they see and can relate to comes from hip-hop fantasies and professional athletes."

What it amounts to is that certain principles that were in place at least since the end of slavery have eroded.

Originally, perhaps because there was once such resistance to black education, achieving an education became a high cultural goal. Taking care of one's family and staying out of jail were also high achievements.

But with the fall of shame and the emergence of a cultural relativity that would seem to accept almost any kind of behavior, things have gone badly for black males. Once the pimp or the hustler was no longer thought of as slime and started to be seen as just another guy working his way through capitalism, black lower-class values had reached the bottom.

Now that we are there, it is important to understand that the job ahead for our society is not introducing something new but reasserting a set of survival principles based on excellence, which once had a strong position and can have one again.

Originally published on March 23, 2006