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The Nation's Pulse
Among the Dropouts
Leftist intellectuals still believe money can buy happiness and success.
They form a singular presence in our inner-cities: young, African-American men hanging out aimlessly on stoops at mid-day, seven days a week.
Meet the urban dropouts. These days about half of all young black men in the U.S. drop out of high school. In Detroit and Cleveland the rate is 73 percent. Here in St. Louis, 62 percent of black males drop out. But that’s just half of the story. When these young men drop out of school, they also drop out of society. Long before they reach adulthood they have given up any hope of leading successful lives and, instead, have consigned themselves to lives of poverty and alienation and meaninglessness.
Talk about a Lost Generation.
Dropouts give various reasons for leaving school, but the general theme is they “follow what they see,” and that, because they are black and from the ghetto, they never had a chance to succeed anyway. Others drop out because, being functionally illiterate, they found school embarrassing and a waste of time.
While middle class youths have their sights set firmly on the future, urban dropouts live only for the present. Education and self-improvement are things one does for the future, a future they cannot even imagine. “Extreme present-orientedness, not lack of income or wealth, is the principal cause of poverty in the sense of ‘the culture of poverty,’ wrote Edward Banfield in his 1970 urban study The Unheavenly City.
Such a world view is completely foreign to middle and upper class youths who are taught early the importance of education, sacrifice and hard work, to delay gratification and to plan for the future. In fact, most of us in the middle class are too future-oriented, so much so that we read self-help books about mindfulness techniques to learn how to “live in the moment.”
At an age when middle class kids are just beginning to contemplate all the possibilities life has in store — whether they will attend college or perhaps go into the family business — these adolescents have decided life is already over for them. The rest of their days will be spent with other dropouts, hanging out on the stoop, smoking weed and listening to degrading rap music. And there is no one around to encourage them to think or act differently. Their biological fathers (or inseminators) are missing in action. Their mothers suffer the same pathologies. Besides, if mom gets on their case too often about working they’ll go “stay” somewhere else. After all, grandma will always take you in. For a while, anyway.
Conservative thinkers have long distinguished between two radically different types of poverty: the temporary, hard luck kind, and the permanent culture of poverty which affects the multi-generational underclass. While the working class may experience occasional economic hardship or destitution due to certain external factors (a recession, layoffs, death of breadwinner, illness), the underclass suffers immutable poverty due to internal factors, such as a radical present-orientedness, low cognitive skills, disdain for education, high rates of teenage pregnancies, low rates of marriage, a high degree of disorganization, marginalization from organized civic life, and strong feelings of fatalism, dependence and inferiority.
DESPITE THESE OBVIOUS and intractable problems, many leftist intellectuals insist all that is needed is a transfer of wealth to the underclass, because, after all, money can buy anything. These intellectuals would do well to read Banfield or Susan Mayer’s What Money Can’t Buy, both of which make convincing cases that doubling the income of the underclass does nothing to improve their situation; they simply spend the extra cash on luxuries or gambling and not on, say piano lessons or books. Nor will doubling one’s income magically transform bad mothers and fathers into good, diligent, industrious, caring parents, which is, more than any other factor, what poor children need to be successful.
Not having grown up amidst the Culture of Poverty, I am admittedly puzzled by such utter hopelessness. To a working class person very few things are entirely hopeless. Just stay in school, get your G.E.D. Learn a trade. Get some kind of job. Work hard and you’ll rise in the world, guaranteed. It’s not all that difficult. That is, unless you have already given up.
About the Author
Christopher Orlet writes from St. Louis.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (44) | Leave a comment
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Pecos Pete| 9.13.12 @ 7:05AM
Interesting and scary. What happens in another 20 years as these young men and women create more of the same?
Appleby| 9.13.12 @ 7:13AM
Even in the days when "Girls" were told that "it's no use training Girls to be anything --- they just get pregnant and quit", young women had ambitions and many of us fought hard to achieve both in school and out. My parents were from dirt-poor families in Depression I, yet they went on to be successful parents and put two of us girls through university (the other two married young, one successfully and one disastrously twice). Mama got her GED at age 50, with the second highest score in Alabama history, and Daddy took extension courses under the GI Bill at Cornell University. And in the times when we were lacking money at home, Daddy always said we were not "Po" -- we were broke. Broke, he said, means that right now you don't have money. "Po" meant that you'd never have any money. Incidentally, Daddy was a feminist although he would have socked you in the mouth for saying so. He told us that the only two things that Girls couldn't do were play pro football and father children. Otherwise, we were just as good as Boys and could accomplish anything our gifts and talents led us to do.
LindaF | 9.13.12 @ 7:53AM
I think it's Learned Helplessness. By providing a cushion for them, society has made it possible for them NOT to learn their hard-knocks lessons. There is something life-affirming and envigorating about life delivering a slap across the face.
Once you recover from the immediate pain, you can start working to avoid another slap.
Albert Constantine Jr.| 9.13.12 @ 8:35AM
I think it is similar to, but not exactly helplessness. More accurately, I would say it is a learned lack of sense of responsibility for changing one’s circumstance, accompanied with a sense of entitlement for the goods that derive for accomplishment (without being required to actually participate in accomplishing) and a sense of empowerment that allows you to do almost anything to almost anyone to satisfy your sense of immediate gratification.
That being said, I think your prescription for the cure should be listed in best practices.
Occam's Tool| 9.20.12 @ 11:03AM
Liberal Welfare policies marginalize men, detaching them from family responsibilities. Boys, thus, become undisciplined teens and young men, and thus, the cycle perpetuates.
My adopted son is Mestizo, a mix of Mayan Peasant and Spanish male (we have complete dossier on mom, not dad). Ike, despite his (treated) ADHD, routinely scores 99 precentile on his California Achievement Test. He is 8. His football coach just told my wife that, in addition to being an excellent player, he is the politest boy he has ever coached.
I come home and set limits for Ike when I get home, and support his mother's discipline efforts. I also tell him, EVERY DAY, how much I love him and how proud I am of his athletic and academic achievement.
But most of all, I tell him how proud I am of him for being well behaved, kind, and good. Lots of hugs, lots of discipline, lots of encouragement. His achievements are entirely the results of culture, environment and planned nurturing. "Men are, with few exceptions, all the same. He does best who trained in the best school." It was as true millenia ago as it is now. The eternal verities changeth not, because Man does not change.
My son is also homeschooled by a woman who graduated Summa Cum Laude in Accounting on 2 full ride academic scholarships from the Capstone. His daddy (me) had a full tuition scholarship at TCU, and graduated Magna Cum Laude in Biology. He knows I work very hard, and am on 24 hour call more than half my life.
It is that simple.
PolishKnight| 9.13.12 @ 9:10AM
None of this is new. Sadly, it's been in place since the 1970's. That said, a few observations:
The left is big on promising hope and change, and blaming all the problems of the world on Republican administrations but also whites (and especially white males.) This is their reality as much as breathing air is to us or fish breathes water. White male leftists understand that while blaming evil Republicans for all the faults of the world is well and good, most of them (for now, more on this later) know that living that way and smoking weed and hanging out at protests will give them a life of The Big Lebowski. At least that was my generation.
In general, many young men (including whites) know that marriage is for suckers and ironically, only gays want to get married because the blame-the-male paradigm doesn't apply, does it? For young black men, the situation is even more hopeless since the whole welfare system revolves around women. Once they're 18, they're out on their own and now due to the new democrat constituencies (Mexicans, radical Islam, and even successful minorities such as Asians that are getting preferential treatment as "historical victims"), there's a lot of new hands to cut up the preferential treatment pie on college campuses. Ironically, black men have been chucked overboard faster than the left abandoned their working class 1890's marxist white male constituency.
Derek Leaberry| 9.13.12 @ 9:14AM
The cycle of illegitimacy, lack of work attitude, and snubbing of education will continue as it is a part of the cultural bedrock of West Africa from where almost all of America's blacks come. Robert Kaplan- no conservative and no race hater- discusses this in THE COMING ANARCHY. He paints a vivid picture of the shantytowns of West Africa that are Third World equivalents of what we have in Cleveland or Baltimore or Detroit or the Mississippi Delta. When asked about unsolvable problems, James Burnham answered that problems that can not be solved aren't really problems. And so we have the permanent American slums.
jothepro| 9.13.12 @ 9:38AM
Derek, Thomas Sowell wrote a book titled 'Black Rednecks and White Liberals'. You might want to expand your knowledge on this subject by reading it. It sure did help me understand better.
Derek Leaberry| 9.13.12 @ 10:44AM
I read a book review of Dr. Sowell's book when it came out and I do want to read it. His thesis was that African slaves adopted the ways of southern whites, most of whom came from the southwest of England. It is one of the few times I think Dr. Sowell got it wrong. Instead, I would say that the slaves from West Africa retained West African attitudes. As for the southern white rednecks, I would point to David Hackett Fischer, who in ALBION'S SEED, maintained that these folks came largely from the violent English-Scottish border country. Most of these folks settled in Appalachia where slavery never really took hold.
Albert Constantine Jr.| 9.13.12 @ 12:12PM
"His thesis was that African slaves adopted the ways of southern whites, most of whom came from the southwest of England. "
I would have substituted "the violent honor culture and other mores" instead of ways if I was to describe what I took to be the book's central thesis. While I'm not sure that his thesis is completely correct, I think there is some merit in what he wrote there.
Big Bob| 9.13.12 @ 3:53PM
One of the best books I read all year the year that it came out. Revolutionary in its insights. It destroys the longstanding myths of the left.
Anti-Statist| 9.13.12 @ 11:34AM
You're absolutely correct. I've been to West Africa and what you see there, you see here, with the difference being that over there, the indolent culture is the majority culture and the indicators of wealth if others aren't often seen, except for the government types that blow through town in their Mercedes Benzes biyght with foreign aid money.
The sense of living in the day without regard for the future, and no organization, are characteristics that came with the slave trade and survived slavery and on to the present day. Seems to be genetic in nature.
Alan| 9.13.12 @ 9:52AM
I'll amend the title of this article:
Leftist intellectuals still believe SOMEBODY ELSES money can buy happiness and success
gene| 9.13.12 @ 10:03AM
MSNBC and Chris Matthews would not agree with this man.
THKrupp| 9.13.12 @ 10:25AM
I agree completely. Although its not just a problem with poor blacks. Where I live there are a lot of people like this and they are all white. Just by doing the basics a person can make themselves successful. 80% is just showing up.
Who Knows?| 9.13.12 @ 11:32AM
THKrupp---I’ve been wanting to ask you something.
You claimed that modern tractors, with deflated tires, compact the soil less than a human footprint.
Are you kidding?
I measured my truck tire footprint. The total square inches from 4 tires divided into a weight of around 4,000 pounds gives a pounds-per-square-inch a LOT more than going the same for a human.
And, a modern tractor is probably ten times heavier.
The physics doesn’t compute, my friend.
Also, the idea of double digging the soil and loosening it precludes walking on it. My beds are no more than 5 feet wide, so I NEVER have to step on them.
Best wishes.
THKrupp| 9.13.12 @ 12:32PM
Ahh, btw I looked up that french method you referenced...thats very interesting. Thats basically what modern farming methods are trying to reproduce. High populations, increased fracture of soil structures to increase the amount of air and water infiltration. Breaking up of compaction layers to allow root growth.
A truck tire is a lot smaller than a tractor tire or track. Truck tires are very compacting. A tracked tractor has a huge foot print to spread out the significant amount of weight. Large tractors running duels with the tires inflated to the correct pressure also have a huge foot print. I havent done the calculations myself but I have read that tracked tractors and tractors with the proper tire inflation exert 8-12 pounds of force per square inch.
THKrupp| 9.13.12 @ 12:45PM
also with large equipment very little of the field actually comes into contact with the tires. Most equpment is at least 30 foot wide anymore. The tires run in the same spot typically. The compaction layers are caused not by traffic but by dragging steel horizontally through the soil. Vertical tillage reduces this significantly.
THKrupp| 9.13.12 @ 3:27PM
I just did the calculations for a Cat 85E and it comes out to 5350 square inches of foot print. 107 x 25 wheel base x 2. The tractor weighs 34895 pounds which equals approx 6.5 # per square inch.
Who Knows?| 9.13.12 @ 5:52PM
Looks like you were right all along.
So the tractors have tracks, around 9 feet long by 2 feet wide?
Wow--that's a HUGE footprint.
THKrupp| 9.14.12 @ 9:50AM
yeah its a huge foot print. I couldnt find the data for regular tires though. Whats interesting is that the french gardening system you were talking about has been around for a long time. Thats basically what modern agriculture is trying to recreate but on a larger scale. Its only been in the last 15 years or so that that has been the case. The development of the roots is really important now. It took a long time to figure that out.
Bill8472| 9.13.12 @ 10:32AM
Because we live in a culture that is deeply focused on race and the relative advantages and disadvantages of being a product of one race or another, we tell children that the American dream that you can be whatever your own decisions and hard work can make you, we now consign poor kids to failure due to race.
And the teachers who teach that you are what your race makes you are on strike in Chicago in order to make more than $50 an hour with health insurance and lifelong retirement bennies. They want to be rewarded for their 9-month-a-year campaign to turn our nation into 19th Century Europe.
TinaB| 9.14.12 @ 10:58AM
I did the math yesterday, at $13,000 per student, and approximately 400,000 students, the Chicago School District has a 60% graduation rate. So . . .
That is a budget of $5.2 billion, and out of that a loss of $2.08 billion. And the teachers want more? Looks to me like almost half aren't doing their job and should be let go. Just like Clint said about BHO.
TinaB| 9.14.12 @ 11:05AM
Then again, since I've done a 180 on the American Public School System, I should see it as maybe some of the 40% who drop out may be better off than many of the 60% who hang in there. If they lose their souls by accommodating the School Machine, and it's accompanying propaganda/history, and their independence and creativity are swallowed up by groupthink, maybe they would have been better off to have left the traditional school system instead of adapting to it.
C. Vernon Crisler | 9.13.12 @ 11:20AM
Government welfarism creates dependency. That is the biggest problem. For those who've grown dependent on others, it takes a great deal of mental struggle to change this outlook (witness the Israelites when they came out of slavery in Egypt -- wanted to go back when things got a little tough).
There are also cultural attitudes. For blacks to do well in school, they have to suffer the accusations from their fellow blacks that they are "acting white." Notice how different this attitude is from that of Asians or Indians.
Not all persistent poverty is a result of present-orientation. Some of it is due to religious folly (as in Islamic countries), while in other cases it may be due to war, disease, famine, discrimination, or socialism. But as many at the Republican Convention implicitly pointed out, getting out of poverty is a generational struggle: sometimes parents have to make great sacrifices so that their children can make it up the social ladder. But if that has to be done, America is the best place to do it -- something I wish young black men understood (and there are a few who do, but not enough).
Who Knows?| 9.13.12 @ 11:24AM
The big question is, where do all these dropouts who aren't working, just hanging out, get the money to survive on? Let alone buy weed.
Albert Constantine Jr.| 9.13.12 @ 12:29PM
Taxpayers
The Avenger| 9.13.12 @ 12:43PM
Exactly Albert. The taxpayers are being duped.
Who Knows?| 9.13.12 @ 5:42PM
Albert--
I already knew THAT.
What programs? Besides food stamps, I mean.
Albert Constantine Jr.| 9.13.12 @ 6:40PM
Among the scams, sell your Medicaid provided pills for cash on the black market. Use drugs pre-natally, and when your child is born with medical issues, sign him/her up for SSDI. If your baby's father has been identified, ever worked and paid into Social Security and is now a victim of homicide or other premature death, survivor benefits. In addition, there are the standard welfare programs such as TANF, etc.
Another non-taxpaying source is the lawsuit payout (slip and falls and auto accidents are quite popular, fraudulent and otherwise).
TinaB| 9.14.12 @ 11:07AM
Welfare, WIC, selling food stamps for cash or swapping for drug d'jour. Buy the food and the party comes to your house. Don't ask me how I know. I've already asked for forgiveness.
cowgirl| 9.13.12 @ 12:32PM
Read:
America Coming Apart - By Charles Murray.
cicero| 9.13.12 @ 12:44PM
Easy answer: they live off of the women and children. Their societies have been turned up side down. Western culture has always made the man responsible for the protection, sustenance, and shelter of the women andd children Under the welfare state culture, the women provide all of the above, by way of birthing children for which they are paid stipends by the state. The men are only necessary for about 5 minutes once per year.
While this may cause chaos in their communities, it sustains a huge governmental and non-governmental beaurocracy that manages to skim 72% of all money asssignable to care for the resultant underclass. Of course, this is not sustainable in the long run. However, beaurocracies do not operate in the long run, but in the moment.
The Avenger| 9.13.12 @ 12:46PM
Like, like, like!!!
TinaB| 9.14.12 @ 11:10AM
If you think about it it's more like 5 minutes, 4 times every 3 years. Jus sayin.
The Avenger| 9.13.12 @ 12:45PM
We have allowed liberals to control the narrative in so far as the war on poverty is concerned. They define it and offer the solutions while we pay for their foolishness. This has to stop and it needs to stop sooner rather than later.
JFGalt| 9.13.12 @ 12:58PM
This is why they hate immigrants that become successful so much. They come to this country with what looks like nothing and become successful. What they do bring is hope and the willingness to work. I've met and worked with many poor black kids. Some made it others didn't. A strong mother or father often was key. I remember this one kid who was surprised that he actually had to show up for work EVERYDAY. He was a nice kid. Smart and full of potential but zero motivation. We continue to pour money into these poor neighborhoods and schools and get very little back in return except scorn. They see dope dealers or gangbangers running around covered in gold jewelry and see that as their only hope. But we don't truly go after those people because they quickly learn how to use money to create a wall of protectors around them from the ranks of the police and political friends. It's sad but given the fact that unsuccessful blacks are taught to look down on successful blacks as sellouts - I don't see how this will ever change. Their music and urban culture embrace a sort of slave mentality which is endorsed by their acedemics and community organizers. Think of it as a Business Model. The current model works for the upper echelons of their communities so they're not going to help to change it in fact only in lip service.
TinaB| 9.14.12 @ 11:19AM
Correcto mundo. According to Charlotte Iserbyt, John Taylor Gatto and others, this means the public schools are actually functioning just as planned in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The truth must never get out.
A great website that is uncovering the latest steps in the master plan for schooling our children for the Global Village is:
invisibleserfscollar.com
But beware. The future is as ugly as a Democrat victory in November, and, even without that, changing the school system at this point in time is very iffy.
CJW| 9.13.12 @ 1:32PM
Obama has made a big difference in four years!!
He could have used his bully pulpit to encourage these young black males to stay in school, get a job, don't have babies without having a job and getting married, and learn a trade if they do not stay in school.
Instead Michelle says our biggest problem is fat children. And Obama says our biggest problem is those evil Republicans and Mitt.
Obama has really made a big difference and has really concentrated on helping these young black males. He has ruined the economy and increased their unemployment.
Albert Constantine Jr.| 9.13.12 @ 5:35PM
The irony that one must consider regarding Michelle's "War on Obesity" is that many of its "victims" got fat on food supplied via the School Lunch Program and Food Stamps.
Big Bob| 9.13.12 @ 3:51PM
I don't think they actually believe that. They want to be able tell who and what GETS the money. It's all about the power and influence. As one famous radio personality says, "follow the money"; it's all about who gets to direct it, not what it does.
Petronius| 9.14.12 @ 2:01AM
The things that bring success are not taught in any school. The success most people desire, they see as unattainable regardless of circumstance. Charles Murray just realized what we knew would happen when the Civil Rights Laws outlawed the Right to Freely Associate for the White Middle Class. The deficiencies of minorities get subsidized at the expense and denial of opportunity to those more qualified. And with the current PC persecutions blaming all evils on them, Men want nothing to do with academics. Social Darwinism still goes. But social engineering makes average White males equivalent to Untouchables in India. The only difference is white dropouts seldom opt for gangs as they turn in on themselves. There is little visible demonstrable evidence that a degree will result in the career of their choice paying enough to live as they like on their own terms without kowtowing to institutional authority. And that can only be dodged by jocks and those "in with the right people." H. L. Mencken said, "Getting a living is too easy in this country. It gives rise to inferior men." It's still true for the wrong reasons, due to Affirmative Action. And what happens to the average person who jumps though all the hoops, does everything right, perseveres, and "Builds It himself?" The Liberal social engineers won't let him keep it. What future is there for those who see nothing on the horizon but an army of parasites and officials who plunder their earnings and oppress them?
monikaborua | 11.3.12 @ 5:04AM
Most of the people of poorer countries think about the same that money can bring success and happiness.
Modern Farming | 11.3.12 @ 5:14AM
Absolutely agree with Mr. Christopher Orlet. Not only the poor black but also for almost all poor of the other countries.