A POVERTY OF THE MIND

SEVERAL recent studies have garnered wide attention for reconfirming
the tragic disconnection of millions of black youths from the
American mainstream. But they also highlighted another crisis: the
failure of social scientists to adequately explain the problem, and
their inability to come up with any effective strategy to deal with it.

The main cause for this shortcoming is a deep-seated dogma that has
prevailed in social science and policy circles since the mid-1960's:
the rejection of any explanation that invokes a group's cultural
attributes -- its distinctive attitudes, values and predispositions,
and the resulting behavior of its members -- and the relentless
preference for relying on structural factors like low incomes,
joblessness, poor schools and bad housing.

Harry Holzer, an economist at Georgetown University and a co-author
of one of the recent studies, typifies this attitude. Joblessness, he
feels, is due to largely weak schooling, a lack of reading and math
skills at a time when such skills are increasingly required even for
blue-collar jobs, and the poverty of black neighborhoods. Unable to
find jobs, he claims, black males turn to illegal activities,
especially the drug trade and chronic drug use, and often end up in
prison. He also criticizes the practice of withholding child-support
payments from the wages of absentee fathers who do find jobs, telling
The Times that to these men, such levies "amount to a tax on earnings."

His conclusions are shared by scholars like Ronald B. Mincy of
Columbia, the author of a study called "Black Males Left Behind," and
Gary Orfield of Harvard, who asserts that America is "pumping out
boys with no honest alternative."

This is all standard explanatory fare. And, as usual, it fails to
answer the important questions. Why are young black men doing so
poorly in school that they lack basic literacy and math skills? These
scholars must know that countless studies by educational experts,
going all the way back to the landmark report by James Coleman of
Johns Hopkins University in 1966, have found that poor schools, per
se, do not explain why after 10 years of education a young man
remains illiterate.

Nor have studies explained why, if someone cannot get a job, he turns
to crime and drug abuse. One does not imply the other. Joblessness is
rampant in Latin America and India, but the mass of the populations
does not turn to crime.

And why do so many young unemployed black men have children --
several of them -- which they have no resources or intention to
support? And why, finally, do they murder each other at nine times
the rate of white youths?

What's most interesting about the recent spate of studies is that
analysts seem at last to be recognizing what has long been obvious to
anyone who takes culture seriously: socioeconomic factors are of
limited explanatory power. Thus it's doubly depressing that the
conclusions they draw and the prescriptions they recommend remain
mired in traditional socioeconomic thinking.

What has happened, I think, is that the economic boom years of the
90's and one of the most successful policy initiatives in memory --
welfare reform -- have made it impossible to ignore the effects of
culture. The Clinton administration achieved exactly what policy
analysts had long said would pull black men out of their torpor: the
economy grew at a rapid pace, providing millions of new jobs at all
levels. Yet the jobless black youths simply did not turn up to take
them. Instead, the opportunity was seized in large part by immigrants
- -- including many blacks -- mainly from Latin America and the Caribbean.

One oft-repeated excuse for the failure of black Americans to take
these jobs -- that they did not offer a living wage -- turned out to
be irrelevant. The sociologist Roger Waldinger of the University of
California at Los Angeles, for example, has shown that in New York
such jobs offered an opportunity to the chronically unemployed to
join the market and to acquire basic work skills that they later
transferred to better jobs, but that the takers were predominantly immigrants.

Why have academics been so allergic to cultural explanations? Until
the recent rise of behavioral economics, most economists have simply
not taken non-market forces seriously. But what about the
sociologists and other social scientists who ought to have known
better? Three gross misconceptions about culture explain the neglect.

First is the pervasive idea that cultural explanations inherently
blame the victim; that they focus on internal behavioral factors and,
as such, hold people responsible for their poverty, rather than
putting the onus on their deprived environment. (It hasn't helped
that many conservatives do actually put forth this view.)

But this argument is utterly bogus. To hold someone responsible for
his behavior is not to exclude any recognition of the environmental
factors that may have induced the problematic behavior in the first
place. Many victims of child abuse end up behaving in
self-destructive ways; to point out the link between their behavior
and the destructive acts is in no way to deny the causal role of
their earlier victimization and the need to address it.

Likewise, a cultural explanation of black male self-destructiveness
addresses not simply the immediate connection between their attitudes
and behavior and the undesired outcomes, but explores the origins and
changing nature of these attitudes, perhaps over generations, in
their brutalized past. It is impossible to understand the predatory
sexuality and irresponsible fathering behavior of young black men
without going back deep into their collective past.

Second, it is often assumed that cultural explanations are wholly
deterministic, leaving no room for human agency. This, too, is
nonsense. Modern students of culture have long shown that while it
partly determines behavior, it also enables people to change
behavior. People use their culture as a frame for understanding their
world, and as a resource to do much of what they want. The same
cultural patterns can frame different kinds of behavior, and by
failing to explore culture at any depth, analysts miss a great
opportunity to re-frame attitudes in a way that encourages desirable
behavior and outcomes.

Third, it is often assumed that cultural patterns cannot change --
the old "cake of custom" saw. This too is nonsense. Indeed, cultural
patterns are often easier to change than the economic factors favored
by policy analysts, and American history offers numerous examples.

My favorite is Jim Crow, that deeply entrenched set of cultural and
institutional practices built up over four centuries of racist
domination and exclusion of blacks by whites in the South. Nothing
could have been more cultural than that. And yet America was able to
dismantle the entire system within a single generation, so much so
that today blacks are now making a historic migratory shift back to
the South, which they find more congenial than the North. (At the
same time, economic inequality, which the policy analysts love to
discuss, has hardened in the South, like the rest of America.)

So what are some of the cultural factors that explain the sorry state
of young black men? They aren't always obvious. Sociological
investigation has found, in fact, that one popular explanation --
that black children who do well are derided by fellow blacks for
"acting white" -- turns out to be largely false, except for those
attending a minority of mixed-race schools.

An anecdote helps explain why: Several years ago, one of my students
went back to her high school to find out why it was that almost all
the black girls graduated and went to college whereas nearly all the
black boys either failed to graduate or did not go on to college.
Distressingly, she found that all the black boys knew the
consequences of not graduating and going on to college ("We're not
stupid!" they told her indignantly).

SO why were they flunking out? Their candid answer was that what
sociologists call the "cool-pose culture" of young black men was
simply too gratifying to give up. For these young men, it was almost
like a drug, hanging out on the street after school, shopping and
dressing sharply, sexual conquests, party drugs, hip-hop music and
culture, the fact that almost all the superstar athletes and a great
many of the nation's best entertainers were black.

Not only was living this subculture immensely fulfilling, the boys
said, it also brought them a great deal of respect from white youths.
This also explains the otherwise puzzling finding by social
psychologists that young black men and women tend to have the highest
levels of self-esteem of all ethnic groups, and that their self-image
is independent of how badly they were doing in school.

I call this the Dionysian trap for young black men. The important
thing to note about the subculture that ensnares them is that it is
not disconnected from the mainstream culture. To the contrary, it has
powerful support from some of America's largest corporations.
Hip-hop, professional basketball and homeboy fashions are as American
as cherry pie. Young white Americans are very much into these things,
but selectively; they know when it is time to turn off Fifty Cent and
get out the SAT prep book.

For young black men, however, that culture is all there is -- or so
they think. Sadly, their complete engagement in this part of the
American cultural mainstream, which they created and which feeds
their pride and self-respect, is a major factor in their
disconnection from the socioeconomic mainstream.

Of course, such attitudes explain only a part of the problem. In
academia, we need a new, multidisciplinary approach toward
understanding what makes young black men behave so
self-destructively. Collecting transcripts of their views and
rationalizations is a useful first step, but won't help nearly as
much as the recent rash of scholars with tape-recorders seem to
think. Getting the facts straight is important, but for decades we
have been overwhelmed with statistics on black youths, and running
more statistical regressions is beginning to approach the point of
diminishing returns to knowledge.

The tragedy unfolding in our inner cities is a time-slice of a deep
historical process that runs far back through the cataracts and
deluge of our racist past. Most black Americans have by now,
miraculously, escaped its consequences. The disconnected fifth
languishing in the ghettos is the remains. Too much is at stake for
us to fail to understand the plight of these young men. For them, and
for the rest of us.