> The black women left behind find that potential partners of the same race are scarce, while men, who face an abundant supply of potential mates, don’t need to compete as hard to find one. As a result, Mr. Charles said, “men seem less likely to commit to romantic relationships, or to work hard to maintain them.”<p>Interesting, I never thought about this side-effect of mass incarceration. Another aggravating factor in a repeating cycle?<p>I remember reading a hypothesis of why many middle eastern countries generate so many young angry jihadists is that most of the young men had never had a stable interactions with women in their youth. Most grew up in socially conservative environments and missed out on the stabilizing effect of having relationships with women, not having a sexual output, not having reasons to stay alive for a girl at home, or even missing out on having a female perspective on things (women are arguably less war-prone than men).<p>Middle eastern young males obviously experience a different social environment than black men do but I'm curious if stable relationships with women really do lead to less violence/crime by males? Or is that merely hopeful thinking by social conservatives?
I'm a Black Man. Growing up there was a realization that being alive and out of trouble over the age of 21 was an accomplishment. This would extend to middle class. Due to a history of American apartheid, there were often just a few degrees of separation between middle class and working/poor class kin.
And these "missing men" are only the ones currently incarcerated. After incarceration many men have difficulties securing employment, which further destabilizes relationships.
Moynihan in 1965, writing at the Labor Dept.: "The steady expansion of welfare programs can be taken as a measure of the steady disintegration of the Negro family structure over the past generation in the United States." <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Negro_Family:_The_Case_For_National_Action" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Negro_Family:_The_Case_For_...</a><p>The welfare state and the drug war have had devastating effects on the U.S. black population. To take just one statistic, when Moynihan published his report, the black out-of-wedlock birth rate was 25%. Now, it's over 70% (and almost 30% among the white population). Complete tragedy.
The numbers are boggling. I don't understand how Americans tolerate such a blatantly racist prison system.<p><a href="http://www.naacp.org/pages/criminal-justice-fact-sheet" rel="nofollow">http://www.naacp.org/pages/criminal-justice-fact-sheet</a>
Want some interesting perspective - in 1968 Jim Crow laws were still in effect (aka separate but "equal") until they were finally made illegal.<p>But you can be positive that just making it illegal in 1968 didn't end the practice, it most certainly went on into the 70s<p>That's only a couple of generations ago.<p>It's crazy that some people don't understand why it take so long to recover from hundreds of years of that, people of color were literally second class citizens.
Historically this was solved by polygamy. (The cause of the missing men back then was usually war and travel danger on business expeditions.)<p>Polygamy is still occurring, except without the official status of wife.<p>Makes me wonder if the benefits of outlawing polygamy in the US might not outweigh the harm - especially because it happens anyway.
Many of us learned a short, sanitized history of human rights in school. The story tends to focus on progress. We once had Inquisitions and witch burnings, and then the Enlightenment put an end to that. We had slavery and Jim Crow, and then the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil Rights movement fixed those.<p>The unspoken implication is that the problems are now solved. Schools teach children the injustices of history, but rarely talk about the injustice of the status quo. The message is that the evil is past, and that <i>present</i> authority is legitimate and benevolent.<p>So, what injustices will students learn about in 2100?<p>I think that today's mass incarceration, the war on drugs, and unequal education will be towards the top of the list. Students will learn how we once had 5% of the world's population, but 50% of the world's inmates. They'll learn how many of those inmates were in jail for nonviolent offenses, especially drug offenses. One of the root causes for the cycle of poverty, crime, and jail time is unequal education. It manifests in the many communities and schools that simply don't teach children the skills necessary to succeed or make a legitimate living. Students of the future will probably learn how some of the worst schools in the industrialized world in the early 21st century were sometimes a few miles away from the best, separated by a certain road or a set of train tracks. "Schools" with fifteen year olds that were barely literate, with armed police officers on staff, with metal detectors at the entrance.<p>Then, they'll learn how those injustices were fixed.<p>---<p>I'm sure at some point we'll shift from punishing the poor to trying harder to empower them--or at least empower their children--to live better.<p>What can we do today to be part of that?
"The gaps tend to be smallest in the West."<p>Well, except for LA and Oakland. I wonder why the other west coast cities have the opposite trend?
I noticed that quite a few city areas have 55%+ Black Men to 45%- Black Women. If births are relatively equal, that means that the 'Missing' numerics from some of the cities can't necessarily be 100% due to incarceration or death. Now the total # is still accurate as it takes national totals (if we're assuming that Black Men and Women leave the country in equal numbers). You can't just count an imbalance in a city/state as 'missing' otherwise we could reverse this and say that Oregon/Washington have lots of missing Black women in equally appalling percentages.
<i>The black women left behind find that potential partners of the same race are scarce,...The imbalance has also forced women to rely on themselves — often alone...</i><p>There is a pretty obvious solution to this problem which has been legal since 1967. It works well and the babies come out really cute. Weird how the NYT glosses that over...
Sorry to be the voice of Bill Cosby but my read of this is that black men are killing each other and then going to prison for it (drug charges are responsible for maybe 20% of people in prison - ie stats would still be largely same without the drug war).<p>And somehow that's everybody else's fault?
Black women are unapproachable. Not sure why is that. Are white males not attractive in black women eyes?<p>The effect is the reverse with white women as they tend to flirt with black man, hence the interracial children are mostly from black males and white females. I don't have a study to support this, but I do have personal experience.