Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives (15 page)

Toshiba certainly believes that opportunities for youth have declined since she was young. “When we were coming up, even though I stayed in the projects, we always had something to do,” she says. “We had a center to go to. We went to parties. Everybody got home safe. This generation has changed.” Most generations do. But statistics suggest that many such recollections owe more to nostalgia for the past or despair about the present than to what actually happened then or is happening now. The murder rate in Charlotte today, for example, is close to half of what it was when Mario was Stanley’s age.
²⁰
Rapes, robberies, assaults, burglaries, and car
thefts have nosedived by a similar rate.
²¹
In other words, it’s likely that fewer partygoers were getting home safe in Toshiba’s day than they are now.

According to the Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Campaign of North Carolina, when Mario was Stanley’s age, the pregnancy rate for teens aged fifteen to nineteen in Mecklenburg County, which includes Charlotte, was more than double what it is now.
²²
Meanwhile, the rate of black teenage pregnancies in the county fell by 39 percent between 2007 and 2012 and continues to drop each year.
²³
Most of the ills associated with the most acute and calamitous moral declines—shootings, crime, teen pregnancy—are actually improving.

It’s not difficult to see where people get the impression that trends are heading in the opposite direction. Many of the assumptions that inform public commentary about black life are, in fact, misinformed. Take just two examples. It’s widely assumed that African Americans are more likely to take drugs than any other racial group. That’s not true. According to the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, whites are considerably more likely than blacks to have ever used cocaine, hallucinogens, marijuana, LSD, stimulants like crystal meth, and pain relievers like oxycontin. While African-Americans were more likely to have used some of those drugs in the last 30 days, the only drug African Americans were more likely to have ever tried was crack.
²⁴

It’s also widely assumed that black men routinely abandon their children. That’s also not true. Black people are less likely to marry than whites, and black men are less likely to live with their partners. But according to the National Center for Health Statistics, when children are under age five, black fathers are more likely to feed or eat meals with them, bathe, diaper, or dress them, and read to them daily than fathers in any other racial group, whether they live with their kids or not. As their children get older, black fathers are more likely to take children to and from activities daily, talk to them about their day, and help them with their homework. Black men are also disproportionately more likely to be single parents than dads from other racial groups.
²⁵

The one aspect of black life that has changed dramatically since Toshiba and Mario were Stanley’s age is incarceration rates. But that has less to do with a change in behavior (over a generation crime has gone down) than a change in policy (during that same time span prison numbers have shot up).
²⁶

These faulty assumptions matter because they feed into the notion that it is deficiencies in black culture in general and black parenting in particular that are responsible for the shootings, that on some level the shootings reflect the collective death wish of a community incapable of and unwilling to care for its young. So pervasive and ingrained are these views that the truth ceases to matter—they become scripts that many Americans repeat reflexively, and often uncritically, with all the confidence endowed by fact. The scripts are so ingrained that the very people denigrated by them recite them as if by rote.

O
F THE TEN CHILDREN
covered in this book, seven were black, two were Hispanic, and one was white. All were working class and male. For now, if only to lighten the load on Toshiba’s shoulders, let us focus on two key facets of American society.

First, America is not a meritocracy. “Belief in America’s essential fairness, that we live in a land of equal opportunity, helps bind us together,” writes Joseph Stiglitz in
The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future.
“That, at least, is the American myth, powerful and enduring. Increasingly, it is just that—a myth. Of course, there are exceptions, but for economists and sociologists what matters are not the few success stories but what happens to most of those at the bottom and in the middle.”
²⁷

Indeed, with each passing year, America is becoming more class-ridden and plutocratic. The gap between rich and poor grows, and the likelihood that the poor will become rich diminishes. Those who do move up expend great energy and money and don’t get very far. Poor kids who work hard and go to college still fare worse than rich kids who did badly in school.

Second, America is racist. Not all Americans. But America—its judiciary, economy, and social fabric. How could it not be? It’s only been fifty years since it ascended from an essentially apartheid state and African Americans secured the vote and their civil rights. Much has changed since then. Mixed-race relationships are at an all-time high,
²⁸
black voter turnout is on a par with white,
²⁹
and, of course, there is a black president.

But racism is a hardy virus that mutates to adapt to the body politic in which it is embedded. For all the ways in which America imagines itself color-blind, the statistics suggest otherwise. African Americans are six times more likely to be incarcerated, twice as likely to be unemployed, and almost three times more likely to live in poverty than whites.
³⁰
The discrepancy between black and white wealth and income is greater now than it was at the time of the March on Washington in 1963,
³¹
and schools in the South are more segregated now than they have been in forty years.
³²

Michael Harrington, author of
The Other America,
argues that once the poor are born to the wrong parents, in the wrong part of the country, and in the wrong racial group, all but a few are doomed. “Once that mistake has been made,” he writes, “they could be paragons of will and morality, but most of them would never even have had a chance to get out of the other America.”
³³

America is not unique in this regard. Virtually every Western nation has racial and class hierarchies, and in much of the world inequalities are widening. But there are few countries where class distinctions are regarded as anathema to the nation’s core belief system and where racial disparities are simultaneously so brazenly displayed and denied.

B
EFORE CONTINUING
,
IT IS
necessary to stop and frisk one last straw man who inevitably prowls any argument about structural inequality: personal responsibility. I have never heard anyone claim that individuals should not take responsibility for what they do. But lest there be any confusion: We all have free will. We all have agency. We all must take
responsibility for what we do. Our life trajectories are not predetermined. These are essential tenets of our basic humanity. The fact that someone is poor or black or both does not give him free license to behave in a certain way or relieve her from the consequences of her actions. I was raised black and poor (though in England, where race and class interact differently), and I have two black American children. I was raised to take responsibility for what I do, and that’s the way I raise my kids.

This book is full of people who made bad decisions; as a result, some put themselves in the line of fire, while others pulled the trigger. Not all bad decisions are equal. Some of the people who populate these pages are dead; others are in prison; some are still walking the streets. In all likelihood, Demontre Rice was born black and working class just like Stanley, Judy, and Mario. So race and class excuse nothing. They are not the crutches with which the misanthropic and morally ambivalent can prop themselves up as though standing tall.

But they can explain a great deal. The circumstances into which people are born and the range of opportunities to which they are exposed shape both the choices available to them and the process by which they make those choices even if they, ultimately, still make the choice. I have yet to meet anyone who denies that individuals have free will. But I also have yet to meet anyone who makes a convincing argument that circumstances don’t shape what you can do with that will.

A paper presented to the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston’s annual conference in October 2014 revealed that, by the time they get to age forty, high school dropouts born to rich families are as likely to be earning high salaries as college graduates from poor families.
³⁴
Or as the
Washington Post
put it, “Poor kids who do everything right don’t do better than rich kids who do everything wrong.”
³⁵

Some beat the odds. In his career as a behavior specialist, Mario can recall those who made it. “I will say it’s possible,” he concedes. There was a boy at Stanley’s elementary school they called “the runner.” “He would get mad and start running. We ended up on I-77 chasing this boy in and out of traffic,” says Mario with a smile. That boy managed to work his way out of behavior class and into the mainstream. “Now he’s in his
junior year in college,” says Mario. But the fact that he can even remember this particular case suggests that “the runner” wasn’t running with the pack. He was the one who got away.

Such stories don’t change the odds. They just illustrate them. Failing to understand that seems like a chronic lack of imagination and empathy. “Take a bunch of teenage boys from the whitest, safest suburb in America and plunk them down in a place where their friends are murdered and they are constantly attacked and threatened,” writes Leovy in
Ghettoside.
“Signal that no one cares, and fail to solve murders. Limit their options for escape. Then see what happens.”
³⁶

Trey, Stanley’s friend, made it out. He left Charlotte to study at Benedict College, a historically black college in Columbia, South Carolina. “Before I left, I was in the same predicament as everybody. I weren’t too focused. I was always in trouble. With the wrong crowd and the police.” When I asked him what had steered him from the path that had taken both Stanley’s and Ajewan’s lives, he answered with one word. “School. Once I got that acceptance letter. . . . Oh snap. God let me try to change my life.” How he managed to apply himself, to separate himself from the bad influences wasn’t clear. Trey did not even know himself.