Blacks and Neighborhoods in America

"Bowling team members lament disintegration of community ties as their deepest-held beliefs fall out of vogue with some younger black men." Echoing Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone, Lonnae O'Neal Parker assisted by Meg Smith add to the Washington Post's "Being a Black Man" series with today's article The Old Kinship.

Excerpts:

"When we were in the South, that's all we had was each other. We were still competing in school or athletics or whatever, being the best we could be, but we still had the community," Hodges said. And community held you up. Black people have lost that, the bowler said. "We're separate now. Now, we're fragile."

The retired ex-union guys have watched the rules change. In two generations, they've seen some of their deepest beliefs -- in work, family, respect and responsibility --fall out of vogue with some younger black men. And they've seen their vaunted brotherhood, an answer when the old Negro spiritual wondered how their souls got over, dissipate as black men maim and kill one another over the smallest slights. It's something they could not have imagined as young men, laboring to find their places....

Community was often a balm against internalizing racism, Jackson said,but it was also easier to spot racism "when there was a sign that said' whites only.' "In some ways, Thompson recognizes that younger men face tough challenges: fewer good jobs, poor schools. But he can't shake the belief that a black man should strive, and overcome anyway, the way he did....

And youth culture is violent and intolerant, the bowlers agreed. There is no room for a simple "I'm sorry" anymore..

"Sometimes I wish she would have had the opportunity to grow up like I did," Garrison said. No locks on the door. "The neighborhood was like another mama and daddy."

The neighborhood protected you...

"We was raised right," Mitchell said. "But it was our generation that lost the kids."

"If we could just get back the closeness," Hodges said.

It is a lamentation for a gathering of older men.

It seems to be a time for considering the role of neighborhoods in our lives. Yesterday's Wall Street Journal had a front page article How Much Does a Neighborhood Affect the Poor, as part of their series "Poverty: The New Search for Solutions"

Beginning in 1994, the federal government offered a lottery for housing vouchers to families in five major cities. Families were randomly assigned to different groups. One group received vouchers to be used specifically to subsidize rents in neighborhoods where poverty was low. About 860 families eventually moved.

Another group, of 1,440 families, wasn't offered vouchers and, initially at least, stayed in high-poverty neighborhoods. Researchers have since tracked and compared the fortunes of the two groups.

The program, called Moving to Opportunity, was administered by HUD.

Findings: Among them:boys whose families moved actually fared worse than boys who stayed in bad neighborhoods. Girls, however, fared significantly better. Adults felt better, physically and mentally, than those who stayed behind, but didn't do better financially.

Among nearly 800 teenage girls, 83% of those who relocated to low-poverty neighborhoods had either graduated from high school or were still in school five years after the move, compared with 71% in the control group. Alcohol use was lower. Arrest rates were lower. And mental-health measures improved. Away from the violence of the ghetto, girls seemed to flourish.

Teenage boys didn't. School participation deteriorated and property-crime rates, mental distress, and smoking all increased among those who moved with the vouchers, compared with teenage boys in families who didn't move.

"It seems like the boys were less able to make social connections to their new areas," says Jeffrey Kling...

A more recent review of social connectivity was published in the June 2006 issue of the American Sociological Review, itself rsummarized by Duke News and Communications.

Durham, N.C. -- Americans’ circle of confidants has shrunk dramatically in the past two decades and the number of people who say they have no one with whom to discuss important matters has more than doubled, according to a new study by sociologists at Duke University and the University of Arizona.

“The evidence shows that Americans have fewer confidants and those ties are also more family-based than they used to be,” said Lynn Smith-Lovin, Robert L. Wilson Professor of Sociology at Duke University and one of the authors of Social Isolation in America: Changes in Core Discussion Networks Over Two Decades.

look at cultures wouldn't be complete without the related comparison between Detroit Michigan and the city just south across the river, Windsor Ontario. (yep,it's south.)

An interview with Barry Glassner on-line tells us that:

MICHAEL MOORE used Barry Glassner's book The Culture of Fear (2000) as research for the Oscar-winning documentary Bowling for Columbine. The film’s telling comparison of Windsor, Canada, and Detroit, two demographically similar and neighboring cities with dramatically different crime statistics, is based on Glassner’s research.

(photo credit: Kali Tal )

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