Waldo Johnson Explores Ideas Surrounding Plight Of Black Men

Q & A: Social Scientist Explores Ideas Surrounding Plight Of Black Men
by The Atlanta Post

Dr. Waldo Johnson, a social scientist at The University of Chicago, has put together a book that he hopes will gets us closer to understanding the plight of Black men, whose trials and tribulations are yet to be fully explored in academia. His book, Social Work with African American Males: Health, Mental Health and Social Policy, integrates the perspective of several Black scholars and, hence, integrates both a professional and personal insight into “what’s hurting and helping young Black men.” We spoke to Dr. Johnson to learn more about this important work.

What inspired you to write this book and collaborate with others on this project?

The book is the result of a research conference that I hosted at the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago in May, 2005. Earlier drafts of several of the chapters contained in the book were presented as conference papers at the conference. At the encouragement of my dean, I decided to organize the research presentations and invited several other scholars to contribute research papers to form the edited volume.

Because the focus of the conference was social work responses to African American males across the life course, I invited social work and other social science scholars whose research examines the various social statuses and well-being indicators represented in the volume. As a fatherhood research scholar, I realized that my capability to address all of these issues and social statuses was limited. I also sought to identify new and emerging scholars, many of whom were junior research faculty, as contributors to the volume because my early research efforts were supported by mid-career and senior scholars.

I recognized that the younger scholars would either bring fresh perspectives to persistent issues and problems that plague African American males or would be addressing emerging issues and identifying human and social capital among African American males for solving problems.

Obviously you’re familiar with your subject matter but what would you say was the most most surprising finding, for you, that came from this book?

I am broadly familiar with the various issues and problems that are addressed in the edited volume. I have addressed a number of these issues in my own research. The most surprising findings are not simply the approach that individual contributors take in conducting this scholarship contained in the volume but also their personal motivation for doing so. For example, my earlier research which focused on unwed fatherhood among low income African American males emerged as a result of my prior social work practitioner career engaged in adolescent pregnancy prevention programming aimed at high school and young adult African American males.

As a social work practitioner and subsequently as a social work researcher, I came to recognize that the lack of strong paternal and son relationships contributed significantly to the escalation of intergenerational adolescent and young adult fatherhood among those in my studies. As an African American male growing up in Americus, Georgia located in the state’s southwestern region, I enjoyed a strong, positive relationship with my own father. My interest in examining the growing phenomenon of unwed and nonresident fatherhood among low-income African American males emerged as I began to consider how profoundly different my life course might have been under such circumstances.

However, like many of the contributors to this edited volume, I recognize the fragility of our respective social statuses and how as African American males, many of us have been touched personally or indirectly by many of the issues and problems examined in this volume. Recently, I participated in a social science research scholars network meeting focused on masculinity and the wellbeing of African American males in which one of the speakers asked those in the audience to stand if they knew someone personally who is or have been incarcerated. In a room of approximately fifty early and mid-career African American research scholars, all holding at least a doctoral degree and many on faculties at some of the nation’s top colleges and universities, less than ten persons remained seated. I dare say that incarceration does not impact the lives of our peer colleagues in this manner. The increasing pervasiveness of such issues and problems among African American males heightens the urgency that we as African American social science researchers share in seeking viable solutions.

Read the Full Interview @ The Atlanta Post

'Waiting for Superman' Won't Fly with Some Audiences

'Waiting for Superman' Won't Fly with Some Audiences
by R. L’Heureux Lewis

Waiting for Superman is a powerful film about educational reform and the potential of our schools from the same team that brought us by director Davis Guggenheim and producer Lesley Chilcott, the Academy Award winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth. Unfortunately the filmmakers leave the audience hoping for a change that is as likely as a caped crusader appearing in real life.

While the film taps into the concerns that many of us have towards a failing educational system, it fails to provide a full portrait of what is really happening in the nation's schools. If you're interested in heart wrenching stories, see this film. But if you are interested in changing education make sure you bring your x-ray vision so you can see beyond the veil of what the filmmakers are advocating.

The film opens with an interview of Anthony, a young black boy enrolled in a Washington, D.C. school. We learn that Anthony's father died years earlier from a possible drug overdose and his grandmother is now raising him in a poverty stricken neighborhood. With poise he answers math questions and in his eyes you see the glimmer of potential and high educational hopes. Unfortunately Anthony is slotted to attend a failing middle school that feeds into a high school nationally known as a "dropout factory" where 40 percent of students fail to graduate. This is an all too common reality many black, brown and poor students in the United States.

The happy ending to this story is to come by Anthony being rescued by an innovative new D.C. charter boarding school. The catch is that this salvation is only available to a few via a lottery. The lottery exists because when more people enroll in charter school than they can accommodate they must use a lottery system to determine admission. Guggenheim and filmmakers lament this point and stress "we know what works" but we leave success up to chance for our young people.

The story of Anthony and the other families that are followed are touching but do not tell the full reality of schooling, particularly in charter schools. Behind the heart tugging narrative lies an inconvenient truth, that charter schools on average actually perform no better than traditional public schools and often perform worse! In the nearly two-hour film this reality is tucked in a sound bite where the film confesses only 1 in 5 charter schools is excelling. Yes, you read that right, 80 percent of charter schools do no better or fare worse than traditional public schools. It is clear this research finding does not deter the filmmakers, but viewers should not be so quick to skip it. The Stanford's CREDO National Charter School Study has done the most comprehensive work on charter schools and found that they are far from a cure all for educational woes.

Read the Full Essay @ theGrio

The Peculiar Case of African-American World Cup Watching

The Peculiar Case of African-American World Cup Watching
by R. L’Heureux Lewis

Every four years, I suffer from a condition. I feel confused, disconnected from friends and co-workers, yet strangely compelled to engage foreign matters. These feelings are brought on by the arrival of the World Cup. Through conversations with a number of my black American friends I’ve learned that I am not alone in this sentiment. While the World Cup represents one of the most important events to take place around the globe, it remains far from sacred to Americans; even less so to many black Americans.

I recognize that the World Cup is very significant to many of my brothers and sisters throughout the African diaspora, but I wonder if it will ever hold deep meaning for most of us. While it may just seem like a sporting event, mending our disconnection from the World Cup holds great promise for African-Americans; learning to appreciate it could usher in a new period of global citizenship.

As I recently sat watching the United States v. England match someone asked, “Who are you rooting for?” “Neither! I don’t like colonizers or oppressors,” I responded. Off the cuff, I quickly realized that my comment spoke to a dilemma the sport presents to many black people in this country. My disengagement with the World Cup wasn’t just about politics, it was also about how I was socialized.

In the United States soccer is an overwhelmingly middle class, suburban and predominantly white activity. Images of plush green fields, orange slices and minivans rush to my mind when I hear the word soccer.

By contrast, around the world, children mired in poverty find football, as the majority of the world calls it, an ideal athletic outlet. Whether it is played on the plush fields of London or the dusty expanses of Dakar, soccer is a language for communication and competition. Sadly, it is an international language from which many black Americans have been barred.

Read the Full Essay @ the Atlanta Post

The Myth of Black Male Privilege?

The Myth of Black Male Privilege?

by Mark Anthony Neal

The question of Black Male Privilege has again resurfaced, seemingly as a counter narrative to annual celebrations of Women’s History Month. Though likely coincidental, the current debate about Black Male Privilege was inspired by a recent lecture by R. L’Heureux Lewis at the Founder’s Day Symposium at his alma mater, Morehouse College. Lewis offered a more streamlined version of his address to NPR’s Michael Martin describing Black Male Privilege as “built-in and often overlooked systematic advantages that center the experience and the concerns of black males while minimizing the power that black males hold.”

This is not a new conversation. In his book Whose Gonna Take the Weight? (2003), Kevin Powell’s critiques of black male sexism, misogyny and violence against black women are largely informed by his realizations of his own gender privilege as a black man. As I wrote in New Black Man (2005), “just because Black men are under siege, in White America, doesn’t mean they don’t exhibit behaviors that do real damage to others, particularly within black communities. What many [folk] want to do is excuse the behavior of black men because of the extenuating circumstances under which black manhood is lived in our society.” In his study of African-American literature, David Ikard highlights the ways that the fiction of Toni Morrison, for example, reveals “the extent to which black men exploit their gender privilege over black women,” often to their own detriment. Indeed, Lewis’s own formulation of Black Male Privilege is deeply indebted to Jewel Woods’s exhaustive and widely circulated “The Black Male Privileges Checklist.”

Nevertheless that idea that black men possess any privilege, is contested. As one commentator on Facebook argued, “the vast majority of African men in America do not exercise ANY privilege over Black women. Black women control THEIR households, and THEIR churches, and refuse to relinquish any of the control in either, clearly exercising their prerogative in both. If a man cannot exercise privilege in the larger society, or in his own home, where would he exercise real privilege and prerogative anywhere? This concept applies to such a very small coterie of Black men that its impact is not even worth discussing.”

In his response to Lewis, Lester Spence, half jokes, “How the hell can black men have privilege if there are more of them in jail than any other population, fewer in school than damn near any other population, and work as the poster child that drives black and non-black political attitudes rightward?” But Spence goes on to offer a recalibration of the debate acknowledging that “The very fact that the "black male crisis" is synonymous with the "black crisis" is a testimony to the way that black male privilege constructs what we think of as "black politics," what we think of as important enough to convene symposiums, to have boycotts and marches, to urge legislation for.”

Push back against the idea of Black Male Privilege is not surprising, particularly in the current economic environment. High rates of unemployment and other economic indices depict the lives of working class and working poor black men as nothing short of dire; the realities of black male incarceration (often premised on hustling) only exacerbate the situation. Indeed charging black men with any kind of gender privilege seems dangerously close to blaming the victim for their conditions. But the height of gender privilege is the refusal or inability to recognize, despite your predicament, that there are others in the black community who are struggling and suffering just as much as you are--and in the context domestic and sexual violence, often at the very hands of the very black men who are decrying their lack of privilege.

In terms of structural realities, Insight: The Center for Community Economic Development’s recent report, “Lifting As We Climb: Women of Color, Wealth, and America’s Future” offers concrete data on the ways that gender privilege manifest itself in the accumulation of wealth on a daily basis. While many think of wealth as in issue that only applies to elites, Insight describes wealth as fundamental to economic security and stability. There has been much attention to the study, written by researcher Mariko Chang, which suggest that single black women have a median wealth of $100, compared to single white women who have a median wealth of over $41,000. To be sure, single black men do not fair much better in comparison to their white male counterparts, but their median wealth of $7,900 is still dramatically greater than that of single black women. Indeed, a few thousand dollars in savings can help stave off the immediate crisis of joblessness, while $100 might get you a week’s worth of groceries.

Perhaps more telling is the comparison between single black women and men with children. According to the Insight report, the median wealth for single black male fathers is $26,000, while for single black women that amount is still only $100. More alarming is that when we take into account the parents of young children—those under the age of 18—the median wealth of single black mothers is $0. Even under those conditions black men fare significantly better than their black women peers, with median wealth just short of $11,000. It should be noted that across the board, single mothers are disadvantaged in comparison to men, regardless of race. These numbers, in particular, highlight one of the ways that gender privilege functions in our society. Whereas single fathers often have access to greater resources—financial, professional and even emotional—for performing what society views as exceptional parenting behavior, single mothers face a world in which the resources they need are often under siege by fiscal and social conservatives who often depict such women—particularly women of color—as lazy, over-sexed and slovenly.

Even the default argument, offered by some black men, that suggest that black women are more present in the professional workforce, doesn’t hold up in the Insight report. Though black women outnumber black men in professional and managerial positions (less than one-percent in the latter case), those numbers are undercut by an across the board income gap where black women make about 87% of what black men do. But as the Insight report cautions, “Earnings are no doubt important for building wealth, but they are converted into wealth at a much faster pace if they are linked with the wealth escalator—fringe benefits, favorable tax codes, and valuable government benefits—that are tied to employment, income and marital status” and women of color, “do not benefit from the wealth escalator to the same extent as men or white women.” As the report explains, “women of color experience a pay gap that is affected not just by the pay gap between men and women, but also between whites and minorities.”

Gender privilege is no myth and despite the structural crisis that black men face in American society, they often function with significantly more advantages than black women. The quicker black men come to terms with this reality and let go of their privileged victim status, the quicker black men and women can talk about strategies to increase the wealth and stability of all within our communities.

BLACK MALE PRIVILEGE? A CONTRADICTION, AN ILLUSION OR A REALITY?

BLACK MALE PRIVILEGE? A CONTRADICTION, AN ILLUSION OR A REALITY?

Define Black Male Privilege? That is exactly what Dr L'Hereux Lewis, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at CUNY says he can do. His work is part of a new segment on Wake Up Call on masculinity called: *'Between Peril & Privilege'.*

The recession has been dubbed a 'man'-cession' due its disproportionate impact on men; blue collar white men, middle class white men, Hispanics and African Americans. With destroyed industries and upward spiraling unemployment; the rise and rise of Rush Limbaugh who takes white middle class male sense of failure and turns it into rage, the ascent of a black man as president and a new generation of scholars - black and white - arguing we must re-define masculinity, Wake Up Call brings you this new segment. For social justice black men are so often in peril; in so many other elements of society white men enjoy privilege.

'Between Peril & Privilege' is the segment where Wake Up Call brings you provocative, critical analysis on masculinity. BYRON HURT, award winning film-maker, essayist and gender activist and MARK ANTHONY NEAL, a professor at Duke University and the author of New Black Man: Re-thinking Black Masculinity join Wake Up Call host, Esther Armah.

Listen Here (Segment begins at 46:00)

On Black Male Privilege

NPR
Tell Me More w/Michel Martin

Black Male Privilege?

A new look at the cross section of race and empowerment as it relates to black men has spelled out a new theory that one sociologist dubs "black male privilege." Host Michel Martin speaks with L'Heureux Lewis, assistant professor of sociology at the City University of New York, for more on why he thinks black male privilege exists.

Listen Here