It was more America’s “war on drugs” I was talking about. A war that has disproportionately placed black men in jail away from their families. A war that affects mostly the poor under educated or uneducated lot of the inner city who are mostly black. Who are undereducated because of poverty that was a direct consequence of slavery and Jim Crow and other forms of discrimination. A war where if one gets caught commuting the exact same crime but is white has seen lighter sentences for them in comparison to the blacks. There has been a large population of non violent offenders in this country who’ve been incarcerated for a ridiculous amount of time for selling marijuana.
That’s what I really meant. But even in your example, a lack of positive, hardworking black male role models leads the younger generation to commit crimes instead of focusing on school and or work. While there needs to me a mindset change in the black communities as well in order to move forward in the right direction, a lot of what has happened to the black community is in effect due to centuries of racism. And while it may not be as overt today, we all still exhibit subconscious biases that sometimes lead to certain people not moving forward in the same trajectory as others.
Look, when I first moved in this country, I was very naive about the plight of black people. Till I went to medical school and joined my educated sisters and brothers, had a black dean who made me “look in the mirror” so to speak, went to residency in a minority town but where the docs and nurses where very Caucasian, got married to a person who studied sociology and started reading more about these things.
Someone on this board has already said it but it’s more difficult to get to home base when one is starting from first base compared to third base. Add an injured leg to that runner in first base, and then it becomes almost impossible to ever catch up for many, many people of color.
