Finished the first section. Interesting read.

Poor Coates takes it the chin as do current students walking around with scowls due to anger about racial inequality. The panelists note the progress made in the last 50 years. It is noteworthy that the panelists seem to ignore the dramatic decrease in crime since the 90s. This decrease occurred despite the popularity of rap music. Teen pregnancies have also decreased. Unwed mothers remain with us despite's the plunge in crime. This overlooking of new data by Orlando Patterson was pointed out in a New Yorker article.

A few years ago, in The Nation, Patterson responded to some disappointing statistics showing high unemployment and persistent segregation by urging African-Americans to “do some serious soul-searching.” But part of the problem with calls for cultural reform is that the so-called “ghetto poor” tend to agree with the kinds of messages that outsiders, whether tough-love politicians or self-conscious sociologists alike, would urge upon them: work matters, family matters, culture matters. Ethan Fosse draws on a number of recent surveys of the “disconnected”—the term refers to young people who are neither employed nor attending school—and finds that they adhere more strongly to various mainstream cultural values than their connected counterparts do: they are more likely to say that having a good career is “very important” to them, and seventy-four per cent of them say that black men “don’t take their education seriously enough,” compared with only sixty-two per cent of connected black youth. Surveys also suggest that disconnected young people are more likely to agree with Patterson’s critique of hip-hop—the people most susceptible to the genre’s influence turn out to be the ones most skeptical of it. In an overview chapter, Patterson wryly notes that results such as these may pose a conundrum. “Sociologists love subjects who tell truth to mainstream power,” he writes. “They grow uncomfortable when these subjects tell mainstream truths to sociologists.” But none of this offers encouragement for people who think that cultural change is a key to social uplift.

Just how dire is the situation? Moynihan worried that “the Negro community” was in a state of decline, bedevilled by an increasingly matriarchal family structure, which led to the increasing incidence of crime and delinquency. Much of Moynihan’s historical data was scant or inconclusive, but, when it came to violent crime, he guessed correctly: in the fifteen years after he published his report, the country’s homicide rate doubled, with blacks overrepresented among both perpetrators and victims. America, and Negro America in particular, was at the beginning of a years-long catastrophe. But what happened next was even more surprising: beginning in the early nineteen-nineties, the homicide rate, like other rates of violent crime, began to decline; today, African-Americans are about half as likely to be involved in a homicide, either as perpetrator or as victim, as they were two decades ago. Patterson and Fosse write that, in the years after Moynihan’s report, a “discrepancy” developed between the optimistic scholarship of sociologists, eager to emphasize the resilience of black families, and “the reality of urban black life,” which was increasingly grim. But the contemporary era has been marked by the opposite discrepancy: even as the new culturalists were resurrecting Moynihan’s diagnosis, the scourge of crime was in retreat.

Patterson, committed to his critique of African-American cultural life, can’t bring himself to celebrate this news. Hip-hop is important to him because it fuels his suspicion that, despite the drop in crime, black culture is in trouble. Fosse seems to share this pessimism, reporting “an alarming increase in the percentage of black youth who are structurally disconnected over the past decade.” He uses survey data to create a fitted curve, showing that “nearly 25 percent” of black youth were disconnected in 2012, while the white rate “has remained below 15 percent.” (The curve is not included in the book.) In fact, the data suggest that percentages of disconnection among black and white youth have been rising at about the same rate over the past decade; what’s most alarming is not the recent increase but the ongoing disparity. Among Patterson, Fosse, and their peers, the tendency to write as if black culture were in exceptional crisis seems to be what a sociologist might call an unexamined injunctive norm: a shared prescriptive rule, one so ingrained that its followers don’t even realize it exists.

And so the good news on crime gets downplayed. “By focusing too much on the sharp oscillation period between the eighties and late nineties,” Patterson writes, “social scientists working on crime run the risk of neglecting the historic pattern of high crime rates among blacks.” But this hardly justifies the fact that these sociologists, otherwise so concerned with the effects of crime and the criminal-justice system, aren’t more interested in this extraordinary rise and fall, which defied Moynihan’s suggestion that crime and “illegitimacy” were inextricably linked. Apparently, this great oscillation neither required nor induced any great changes in black culture, and it has inspired nothing like a consensus among criminologists looking for a cause. Fine-grained cultural trends and well-meaning cultural initiatives often seem insignificant compared with the mysterious forces that can stealthily double or halve the violent-crime rate in the course of a decade or two. A chapter on “street violence” mentions the homicide drop only in passing, in its final paragraph.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/09/dont-like

It would be nice to have more discussions between the culturalists and the structuralists.

Get to the rest of the article over the weekend.