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George Flaggs, an African-American who’s served in the Mississippi House for 18 years, makes no bones about his rocky start in life. “My dad couldn’t read or write. And I probably had a record number of days being suspended from school -- I was always into something.”
In eighth grade, Flaggs tried to drop out. “My momma gave me the best whopping of my life. She told me-- whatever, I had to stay in school. That education was my one tool to get ahead in life.”
Flaggs took the advice, eventually earning a degree in industrial technology. Older civil rights leaders in his home town of Vicksburg convinced him to run for the legislature in 1988. He won, “standing on their shoulders” -- even while, he notes, some of his boyhood friends have ended up “in prison, or on drugs, some dead.”
Last year Flaggs was a member of a national commission, headed by former Ron Dellums, a former member of Congress, now Oakland, Calif., which focused precisely on the high personal failure rate of young men of color. American society has created a “pipeline” to prison, in the words of Dr. Gail Christopher, director of the Health Policy Institute of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, sponsor of the report:
“We expel them from school at the drop of a hat through zero tolerance programs. When they have substance abuse or mental health problems, they go to jail instead of treatment. We’re warehousing our young people in jails where they learn to be criminals.”
Harsh economics, the Dellums Commission acknowledged, set the stage for devastation of communities of colors in recent decades -- “rapid de-industrialization, de-unionization, and a steep decline in jobs and real wages for working-class men of all colors.” But the commission noted the impact for young men of color was worsened immeasurably by punitive and ineffective drug laws, underfunding of urban schools, regressive tax structures, official measures to inhibit unions, stagnation of the minimum wage, and shrinking government housing aids.
With the historic male role of worker and family leader undercut, 46.6 percent of African-American households are now headed by women. Minorities’ high school graduation and college-going levels are abysmally low. Imprisonment of blacks and Hispanics is a major factor in America’s shift from 204,000 prison inmates in 1973 to a world-leading 2.2 million in 2003.
The Dellums Commission urges remedies at every turn: foster home care reform; restricting zero tolerance policies in schools to truly serious threats; school-based health care; equity in school funding; higher minimum wages; banks providing non-predatory lending services in poor communities, and more.
Flaggs is doing his bit: He persuaded a skeptical Mississippi legislature and Republican governor to approve juvenile justice reform legislation that downplays incarceration in favor of community-based rehabilitation. Remedial reading and writing is mandated for all the troubled youth -- “whether in detention, suspension, whatever, every child can learn, Flaggs insists, adding: “If we can reform Mississippi, we can reform any place.”
Spread Mississippi’s new education- and treatment-based alternatives to incarceration nationally, says Flaggs, “and in ten years we won’t have the huge prison populations we have today.”
But will changes in public policy alone turn the tide and give young men of color a better break? The Dellums Commission says “no,” charging that the media depicts young men of color so negatively that whites’ fears of crime, and thus their support for such punitive steps as mandatory long sentences, are exacerbated.
Plus, says commission member Badi Foster of the Washington-based Phelps-Stokes Fund, the money-making music and fashion industries, profiting off hip-hop entertainment’s frequently violent, profane and sexually exploitive themes, foster a culture that actually drives some minority youth toward gangs. Media profit-seeking is directly implicit, he charges, in casting Latino and African-American kids as enemies of the majority society.
Families, schools, society all play a role, notes Flaggs: from earliest years on, young people need to be surrounded by love; “without love children easily choose the path of least resistance--the streets.”
Sen. Barack Obama picked up the theme in his recent Selma, Ala., speech. In the spirit of the civil rights movement, it’s correct, he said, to fight for funding that’s as adequate for schools in poor areas as for schools in rich ones.
But, said Obama, the word needs to be passed to young men that “fatherhood doesn’t end with conception.” And parents must insist kids do their homework and shake off the idea “that reading and writing and conjugating your verbs are something white.”
Foster urges a unified vision: These youth of color will be a part of our national future. So we need to “rehumanize” our way of viewing them, stop seeing them as “throwaway people.”
The job, in short, isn’t just more equitable and wiser public policies, as vital as they are. It’s also renewal of spirit in families of color. Neither can succeed without the other.
Comments may be addressed to npeirce@citistates.com
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