Views > June 16, 2005
Black Men: Missing
By Salim Muwakkil
As we limp into the 21st century, a gender gap is rending the fabric of the entire African-American community.
The overwhelming absence of Black men has always been one of the most distressing facts about life in America’s public housing developments. In Chicago, for example, black women are the vast majority of lease holders in the Chicago Housing Authority; men are like ghosts in the projects.
Besieged by poverty, disease, violence and mass incarceration, African-American men are conspicuously missing in action. At one time, this gender imbalance afflicted mostly lower-income neighborhoods. But as we limp into the 21st century, that gender gap is rending the fabric of the entire African-American community.
“Where have all the Black men gone?” asked the headline on a story by Jonathan Tilove for The Star Ledger in Newark, N.J. The article examined the New Jersey city of East Orange, where there are 37 percent more adult women than men. Tilove wrote that most of the missing men are dead, and many others are locked up or in the military.
“Worst yet,” he wrote, “the gender imbalance in East Orange is not some grotesque anomaly. It’s a vivid snapshot of a very troubling reality in black America.” Tilove noted that nationwide adult black women outnumber black men by 2 million. With nearly another million black men in prison or the military, the reality in most black communities across the country is an even greater imbalance—a gap of 2.8 million, or 26 percent, according to Census Bureau figures for 2002. The comparable disparity for whites was 8 percent.
In some cities the gap is even higher. There are more than 30 percent more black women than men in Baltimore, New Orleans, Chicago and Cleveland. In New York City the number is 36 percent and in Philadelphia, 37 percent. As the black population ages, the gap widens. “By the time people reach their 60s in East Orange, there are 47 percent more black women than men,” Tilove wrote.
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.
The recent edition of the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education warns that “a large and growing gender gap in African-American higher education has become a troublesome trend casting a shadow on overall black education progress.” The Journal reports that in 2001, there were 1,095,000 black women enrolled in institutions of higher education and only 604,000 black men. The gap, which is even wider at professional schools, has increased since 2001.
It’s also important to note that despite unprecedented gains, black women are the fastest growing group of inmates in the nation’s prisons. And they still bear the brunt of urban poverty as single parents in the commercial wastelands that too often are their neighborhoods.
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. Some also become victims of lethal gun violence—homicide remains the leading cause of death for young black men.
Unless we strenuously intervene to better the prospects of African-American men, who incidentally comprise about one-eighth of the earth’s entire population of prison inmates, we may just be accomplices to a process of genocide in our own country.
More information about Salim Muwakkil
-
subscribe to print magazine
-
email this article to a friend
-
Reader Comments
-
extended discussion >>>Continued...
Discussions with more than 5 comments are continued on our special discussion page to encourage continuity and ease of use. There are currently 66 posts.
Member Login
Also by Salim Muwakkil
Popular Discussions
- 20 Million Arrests, and Counting
53 posts since Sep 25 08 - Feeding the Beast
In order to weaken federal agencies, the Bush administration has expanded them to the point of collapse
47 posts since Aug 18 08 - McCain’s Feminist Mistake
28 posts since Sep 7 08 - Why Soldiers Rape
Culture of misogyny, illegal occupation, fuel sexual violence in military
28 posts since Aug 13 08 - Back for the Future
Progressives at the Democratic National Convention look to FDR as a model for an Obama presidency
11 posts since Sep 15 08
© 2005 In These Times | Reprint Policy | Privacy Policy | Powered by Expression Engine | RSS Feeds
