True Disadvantage

In The Truly Disadvantaged, William Julius Wilson talks about the ghetto underclass and the ideas behind the disadvantage that blacks and minorities face. In the second chapter, Wilson introduces us to the idea of social dislocation within the inner city communities. He talks about how when we look at things like out of wedlock births and welfare dependency, there’s a significant difference in the numbers between the races. The problem is that many policy makers and people in power will not accept the fact that there is a discrepancy, or do anything to explain it. Wilson references the work of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who depicted black liberal families in an unflattering light in his writing The Negro Family, also known as the Moynihan Report. Moynihan argued that “ as antidiscrimination laws break down barriers to black liberty, issues of equality will draw attention away from issues of liberty” (Wilson 20). In other words, people will always tend to focus more on the equality side than on the actual issue of liberty and freedom when it comes to social issues. I think that this point is illustrated in the next section of the book, where Wilson talks about the “tangle of pathology in the inner city”.

 Wilson talks about the reinforcement of stereotypes through figures and statistics on black on black crime. While reading this part of the chapter, I thought back to a discussion I had in a previous criminology class. The discussion was about how crime statistics can be misleading and even have false information. In the discussion we also talked about the myth of black on black crime; how some people are more likely than others to be victims of crimes, and how those numbers can also be manipulated to reflect any statistic. For example, black people make up about 12.3% of the US population. However, black men make up 37% of the prison population. In 2013, almost 3% of black males of all ages were imprisoned, compared to 0.5% of white males of all ages. So the question is; why are young black males being imprisoned at such high rates?

News coverage of so-called “black on black” crime helps to reinforce the idea that the real problem isn’t the judicial system and law enforcement disproportionately targeting black people with initiatives like Stop and Frisk, but that the problem is black people killing each other. The reality is, most crimes occur between people of the same race. Wilson also talks about the effects of historic discrimination as well as contemporary discrimination. So essentially, at a time where they should have been prospering, poor blacks ended up in a worse economic position than before. Although there were antidiscrimination laws and programs being put in place, poor blacks were not able to benefit greatly from them. Today, many poor blacks are still in the same situation, and media and statistic distortion affects the community and its people.

When reading this section, I began to think about some of the things I learned in my black studies class last semester. In The Social Philosophy of Hip Hop, we talked about how hip hop music has always been a reflection of the state of the black community. This happens because the artists who make the music are usually speaking on the things that they have seen around them. The quality of the music, can sometimes reflect the quality of life in the community. For example, in the past there have been anthems that were a voice of the people. Stevie Wonder’s song “Superstitious” is actually about Nixon and the Watergate scandal in the 1960’s. Lil’Wayne’s song “Tie My Hands” is about the destruction of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and the state the community was in after the storm. Songs like “Formation” by Beyonce reflect a need in the black community for women to stick together and encourage one another and the community. Likewise, Kendrick Lamar’s

performance of "We Gon’ Be Alright"
at the 2016 grammy’s reflected the disproportionate amount of black men in prison and the need for black men to support one another. Despite the negative media surrounding things like black on black crime, the music reflects a community that is working to overcome contemporary discrimination and focus on issues of liberty and equality.


More on black on black crime as a myth: http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/distorted-exaggeration-black-black-crime-ignores-much-americas-criminality

Stats on Prison Populations: http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p13.pdf