By Kay Hymowitz
Friday, September 18, 2015
Hard on the heels of his number-one best-selling book
Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates has now published a mega treatise in
The Atlantic misleadingly titled “The Black Family in the Age of Mass
Incarceration.” I say “misleading” because aside from a brief summary of the
1965 Moynihan Report and a few nods to the effects of incarceration on children
and the costs of visiting relatives upstate, you won’t find much to chew on
about the black family — or any families, for that matter. It’s hard to know
whether Coates is being evasive or is just indifferent to the reams of writing
on the topic — I suspect it’s the latter — but it doesn’t much matter. The
effect is equivocation all the way down.
Coates has been understandably lauded for his prose: “a
stunning piece of writing,” New York Times film critic A. O. Scott tweeted
about this most recent effort. Unlike so many dreary writers with his views, he
nimbly avoids cant and cliché. The rich, almost sensual wall of sound he
creates has already put him on the National Book Award short list, and other
nominations are certain to be coming. But once you trek past the Solzhenitsyn
quote, cut down the dense bramble of sometimes gripping, sometimes extraneous
historical and biographical details, and push through the striking metaphors
and the heart-tugging, enraging anecdotes of white cruelty, you reach a
clearing where three basic points will appear — the first two uncontroversial,
the third a symptom of his equivocations. They are the following:
1. Incarcerated men have a hard time both supporting and
engaging with their families while they are in prison and after they are
released.
2. Prison is a demoralizing, dangerous place.
3. Mass incarceration is the latest iteration of the
American oppression of black people.
Why Coates decided to frame these ideas around Daniel
Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action”
will strike alert readers as something of a puzzle, as is the Atlantic’s
editors’ assertion that Moynihan “helped create the system” of mass
incarceration. That paper, meant to be in-house for the Johnson administration
but leaked to the press, sounded an alarm about a rise in welfare rolls — in
other words, in black single-parent households — despite continued improvement
in black male employment.
According to social-science wisdom then and now, jobs
were supposed to make men more “marriageable,” to use modern terminology, and
yet that was proving not to be the case. Moynihan rightly suspected that we
were on the verge of a cultural revolution. As he recalled three decades later:
The work began in the most orthodox setting, the U.S. Department of Labor, to establish at some level of statistical conciseness what “everyone knew”: that economic conditions determine social conditions. Whereupon, it turned out that what everyone knew was evidently not so.
(For those interested in a deeper dive into the report,
see here.)
It’s possible that Coates and the folks at The Atlantic
are convinced that the belief that family breakdown poses a threat to black
children and communities, what the writer simplistically calls “respectability
politics,” is a root cause of mass incarceration. The case is never made. Regardless,
Moynihan was writing more than a decade before the phenomenon was even a
glimmer in the eye of an increasingly crime-weary public. His only mention of
prison is as a source of crime data. He does, however, note that fatherless
boys are more prone to delinquency, a fact that has been confirmed repeatedly
in research since then, though one never mentioned by Coates.
This is not a one-time lapse. Coates’s article is marked
by the sin of omission. You might think that an article on the Moynihan report
and the black family would mention somewhere that today 72 percent of black
children, up from 24 percent when the report was written, are born to unmarried
mothers. You might assume that an analyst of the black family would explain
that large numbers of those children — far more than mass incarceration can
explain, by the way — will have at best erratic relationships with their
fathers. You would expect him to show how one of the main reasons fathers fade
out of their children’s lives is “multi-partner fertility” — parents who have
children by a series of partners — and that multi-partner fertility is
particularly widespread among blacks and incarcerated men. He might look at the
research suggesting that children living with an unrelated father are more
likely to suffer abuse. You would expect him to ponder all of this because
there is abundant evidence that boys growing up under these conditions have
less self-control than those growing up in more stable families, and most of
all, because those boys are far more prone to commit crimes. You would think at
least some of this would find its way into the pages of a 17,000-word piece
called “The Black Family in an Age of Mass Incarceration,” but you would be
wrong.
What makes all of this especially surprising is
that Coates has made his own fatherhood a central fact of his public identity
and a rich source of intimacy with his readers. As someone who wrote his recent
book in the form of a letter to his adored son, he clearly believes, as
Moynihan put it, that “the child learns a way of looking at life in his early
years.” But instead of bringing either research or his own experience to bear
on Moynihan’s argument about what families, and specifically fathers, do, in a
rare lapse into boilerplate, Coates damns the whole line of thought as
“patriarchal.” “’The Negro Family’ is a flawed work in part because it is a
fundamentally sexist document that promotes the importance not just of family
but of patriarchy.”
Worse, Coates ignores the rage that Moynihan’s concerns
over the family evoked. He asserts rather that “the controversy [over the
report] transformed [him] into one of the most celebrated public intellectuals
of his era.” Yet the Johnson administration quickly disavowed the report; for
decades much of the academic and policy community reviled the document and its
“racist” author, so much so that in 1987 William Julius Wilson, no ideological
ally of Moynihan’s, criticized his profession for the “vitriol” that made them
blind to a problem that had reached “catastrophic proportions.” “Celebrated,”
indeed. Sometimes you read a statement that is so shockingly slanted that it
makes everything you read by that writer suspect forever. For me, that is one
of those sentences.
If Coates is not particularly interested in how families
socialize children and why it might matter when fathers are no longer part of
the deal, he is preoccupied with “the persistent and systematic notion that
blacks were especially prone to crime. “ He is at his best recounting the way
such abominations as vicious slave owners, lynchings, and the Constitution’s
fugitive-slave clause turned the natural human urge for freedom and
self-defense into “acts of villainy.” He is surely right that some politicians
exploited public fears of black violence. He is also correct that the public
and legislatures have been slow to readjust criminal-justice policy to the
decline in crime that began in the 1990s (and may or may not be reversing
itself as I write). A large number of people across the political spectrum have
come to believe the criminal-justice system is in need of a serious overhaul.
But the reform-minded won’t find much guidance here.
Coates bundles together the slave girl who kills her owner after he raped her
for five years and impregnated her twice with a 16-year-old who shot and killed
a cabbie for no apparent reason and places them into a box labeled “the myth of
black criminality.” He overstates the extent of the prison population serving
sentences for drug offenses while understating the crisis that faced the
country by the late 1960s and 1970s. “The principal source of the intensifying
war on crime was white anxiety about social control,” he writes, ignoring the
tens of thousands of dead and maimed bodies piling up in urban morgues, not to
mention the fact that black leaders and politicians were also demanding that
the criminals plaguing their communities be taken off the streets.
The gross injustice of the fugitive-slave clause, of
1950s federal housing policy, and of lead poisoning cannot erase the fact that
black men commit seven times as many murders as whites do (2008 numbers). The
majority of black (and white) prisoners have committed violent crimes. Even
after reasonable reforms like releasing some of the 10 percent of prisoners
over 55, reducing or abolishing drug laws, rethinking juvenile sentences, and,
more controversially, shortening sentences for some violent offenders, blacks
will still disproportionately populate the nation’s prisons. “If we reserve
prisons for people who’ve committed the most serious crimes that pose major
threats to public safety,” says Marie Gottschalk, the very liberal author of
Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics, “we’re probably
going to have fewer African Americans overall in prison but higher racial
disparities in the prison population.” No doubt, as Coates describes, the costs
of visiting a loved one in prison, hiring lawyers, and forgoing possible
income, on the arguable assumption that many of the men in question have been
contributing to family coffers, are a hardship for the poor. Most people would
probably consider it an even bigger hardship to have a violent partner, father,
or brother in the house and on the streets.
“By 2000, more than 1 million black children had a father
in jail or prison — and roughly half of those fathers were living in the same
household as their kids when they were locked up,” Coates writes in a rare
moment of concern about the experience of black children. “Paternal
incarceration is associated with behavior problems and delinquency, especially
among boys.” If you think this would make Coates consider the behavior problems
associated with paternal absence caused by abandonment, parental separations,
and serial step siblings, you would be wrong.
“Through it all, the children suffer,” he concludes. Yes.
They do.
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