Where are all the Black Men?

For those you who like to pretend the issue of race is dead and buried.....

This chronicles a dire reality in American social/racial landscape. Black American men are missing, either dead, locked up or in the military. Nationwide, black women outnumber black men by 2 million with another million in prison.

This growing gender gap has enormously negative implications for the future of black America. And there are nuances in the statistics that make the prognosis even bleaker. For example, among well-educated, professional black women -- a group that is growing rapidly -- the gap is a chasm. Surely, that progress for black women is good news that shouldn't be overlooked. However, as black women advance, black men are falling even further behind.

In fact, the more successful a black woman becomes, the more likely she will end up alone, Walter Farrell, a University of North Carolina professor, said in a March 2002 Washington Monthly article. As a result, professional black women are having fewer children, meaning that a growing percentage of black children are being born into less educated, less affluent families.

Unless we make some dramatic changes in the way our society tracks black men, all of these conditions will worsen, with increasingly nightmarish consequences. The primary culprit is the tracking of black men into a criminal justice system that a growing number of critics have dubbed the "prison-industrial complex." Many are there because of the so-called war on drugs and its accompanying mandatory minimum sentences.

The tracking process begins in elementary school, where African-American males routinely are assumed to be academically deficient and then demonized for their angry reactions to those biased assumptions. Resentful of a system that blithely dismisses their potential, many black boys eventually become alienated from scholastic activity. A recent study found that only 38 percent of Chicago's black males have graduated from high school since 1995.

These uneducated youth are the raw material of the prison-industrial complex. Lacking marketable skills, they flock to the ruthless underground economy of drug commerce where they are easily siphoned into the "injustice" system--victims of the drug war.

It's ironic that black political leadership is probably the weakest it has ever been in the united States. Actually, may be it is not that ironic. Where are the black young lions taking on the establishment on issues that important to the survival of the race? What the fuck does Jesse Jackson do these days, fucking run around pontificating about some white woman who through bulimia rendered herself a seemingly debatable vegetable. That the debate is a personal and private matter is not the point, Jackson saw it as an opportunity to score political kudos at a National level.

The Black Congressional Caucas, what the fuck do those people do? Why aren't fucking doing things that matter to black people. I bet you they are all in the pockets of some bribe-meisters (aka lobbyists to you).