Let America Be America Again Deductive Reasoning

"O, let America be America again—The land that never has been nonetheless—" (Langston Hughes)

My anguish, my horror, my sense of complicity—these things proceed me from writing. I don't desire to sound like the old (white) schoolmarm, or the bleeding heart (white) liberal, or the judgmental (white) bitch, or. . .

But I want you lot (my white friends and followers of my blog) to read the indictment beneath.

Please give the few minutes out of your (white) privileged twenty-four hour period yous will need to read this statement of truths you and I, the white dominators, need to hear.

We—yous and I—tin can't say information technology'due south not our fault, that it was begun past our (white) ancestors and we are not to arraign—we are to blame. My guess is not one African-American human is reading this. If you are, I don't know what to say to yous. I don't know the correct matter, the helpful affair, or the self-aware thing that tin can possibly begin to right a centuries-old incorrect.

So I will effort my damnedest to hear Joshua DuBois. If his words are besides hard, perchance I can at least try to hear the lovely poesy of Langston Hughes I've copied at the end of Joshua DuBois's writing.

I desire you lot (my white friends and followers of my blog) to read the truths below.

[Note: Copyright of Newsweek Global: the holding of Newsweek LLC and its content may not be copied . . . (I am breaking copyright laws. So be it. I'grand willing to take the risk if you volition read this)]

Joshua DuBois, "The Fight for Black Men"

There are more than African-Americans on probation, parole, or in prison today than were slaves in 1850. It is not a crunch of criminal offense. It is a crisis of people existence left behind.

There is an piece of cake fashion to meet Joe Jones, and a hard way. Let'south get-go with the like shooting fish in a barrel way. If you and I were at a cocktail political party, I'd introduce you to a tall, bald, black man, standing a shoulder above most everybody else. Knowing Joe Jones, he'd probably be wearing a tan suit and muted tie. Joe'due south subdued, foursquare-rimmed glasses fit nicely with his veiled intellect–he's the kind of guy who readily drops half-dozen-dollar words without a hint of pretense.

I'd probably ask Joe to tell yous about the nonprofit he runs, the Center for Urban Families on Baltimore's West Side. CFUF is a national model for helping men and women who are confronting addiction, poverty, and despair turn their lives around, and instruction absent fathers how to reconnect with their kids. Joe's a pocket-sized guy, so I'd take to brag on his behalf, most the bigwigs who have dropped by his middle, and all the awards the organisation has won.

Finally, I'd say in passing: "You know, Joe has a powerful personal story himself. His own father wasn't around, he struggled in the streets for a while, and then pulled himself up, and fabricated it out." Squeamish and nifty. Joe would nod and smiling. You'd nod and grinning. I'd nod and smile. We'd all be grinning–appropriately inspired.

That'due south the easy way to meet Joe Jones. But there'due south also the hard way. The hard fashion is to grapple with the fact that Joe's family didn't just emerge from some unseen ghetto thousands of miles away. No, his grandfather migrated to Baltimore from North Carolina, and started a business–a waste-management facility, one of the city'southward more successful ones. His grandparents were "models of stability," Joe told me. A few generations earlier that, Joe'southward family were slaves.

It's hard to effigy out what happened to Joe'due south dad, and thousands of other blackness fathers similar him. Joe's dad was training to be a teacher, but one day in the mid-'60s he hopped into the driver side of a Ford Thunderbird, visibly angry, slung his duffel bag on the passenger side, and drove off for good. Joe saw the whole thing from his upstairs window in the Lafayette Court housing projects; he thought his dad was going to the laundromat, and saturday waiting for him, for hours.

It'south tough to stomach what happened later. How Joe, an adorable kid of 13–never a smoker, never a drinker–met a guy a couple years older than him. And this person put information technology into Joe's young head that perchance it wouldn't be a bad matter to stick a needle in his arm, and let a bit of heroin rush in. And so, equally a xiii-year-quondam, he did. Joe's 2 cousins shared the needle with him–their dad wasn't effectually either–and his all-time friend, Barry, also fatherless, did as well.

Then now Joe's an adolescent junkie, hanging out on Edmonson Avenue in West Baltimore and shooting up wherever he can find a shadow long enough to hibernate himself: sometimes in a bowling alley bathroom, sometimes in his aunt's basement. He was fourteen when he was busted for the first fourth dimension for using drugs, along with his two cousins and Barry. The other boys' parents bailed them out, give thanks God, but the police suggested that Joe, the ringleader, should stew for a little while to acquire his lesson–yous know, "tough on criminal offense."

Turns out, this wasn't the best move for Joe. During his few extra days in jail, in the throes of heroin withdrawal that his young arrangement wasn't treatment well, Joe met a local kingpin who taught him how to be a more than efficient junkie, and a more effective criminal. Or as Joe puts it now (in his always-impeccable phrasing): "This man created a pathway for me to negotiate the street environment in a way that I hadn't anticipated. It was the worst thing that could've happened to me."

So in the span of a few years, Joe went from a stable household to a single-parent family unit. From a middle-school honor student to a street-corner addict. From the grandson of a businessman and slap-up-great-great-grandson of slaves to the son of an absent father, and a futurity deadbeat dad himself. It was a jumble of inputs–bad parenting and bad policy, misguided culture and tragic history–resulting in one articulate output: a woefully lost kid.

At that place is a lot more than to Joe Jones's story–more pain than most tin bear; more dazzler than yous'd expect. We'll get to all of that, including his fateful come across with the president of the Us.

But beginning, a few words nearly the globe Joe comes from: the world of depression-income black men. Why talk about this world? After all, information technology'southward unproblematic enough to ignore. We can safely constrict these men away in our inner cities and allow them to interact largely among themselves. We tin rush past them in front of the gas station, murmur silently when the nightly news tells u.s.a. of a shooting across boondocks, or smile when we encounter a dainty, inspiring homo similar Joe. We can go on them in these places. It'due south safe and like shooting fish in a barrel for u.s..

However if we're honest, we'll have to acknowledge that when ane single grouping of people is conspicuously left backside, information technology never bodes well for guild as a whole. In many ways, blackness men in America are a walking gut check; we acquire from them a lot about ourselves, how far we've really come up as a land, and how much further we have to go.

I spent the by few months talking to dozens of experts who are working to address the crunch among black men. Information technology was clear from these conversations that the reasons for this crunch are circuitous–equally are the solutions. Merely information technology was also clear that the fight for black men, which is currently being waged by activists, politicians, celebrities, and everyday people alike, can indeed exist won.

Equally with Joe Jones, it starts by understanding their history, and their stories.

THE Earliest chapter in that story is a tough one. I'd rather skip it. You'd rather that I skip information technology. Merely every bit Ralph Ellison once remarked, channeling Faulkner, our complicated racial by is "a role of the living nowadays"; it's a by that "speaks fifty-fifty when no one wills to listen."

-The facts are a bit overwhelming, but non in much dispute. Africans were imported to the U.s. as purchased goods beginning effectually 1620. By 1770, when Crispus Attucks, a free black man, spilled the starting time drop of blood in the cause of the American Revolution, nearly xviii percentage of the American population–almost 700,000 people–were slaves. Past the time of the Emancipation Annunciation, that number had exploded to over 4 meg.

Beneath these sterile facts lay a grisly reality. Blacks were systemically dehumanized for hundreds of years, a do that had unique social and psychological effects on men. They were worked and whipped in fields like cattle. Whatsoever semblance of pride, any weep for justice, any measure of 18-carat manhood was tortured, browbeaten, or sold out of them. Matrimony was strictly prohibited. About were forbidden from learning to read and write. The wealth derived from their labor–the massive wealth derived from cotton, our chief export throughout much of the 19th and early 20th centuries–was channeled elsewhere.

Just, because slavery ended 150 years ago, we often assume that this dehumanization is ancient history. Information technology is not. Every bit Douglas Blackmon of The Wall Street Journal meticulously documents in his Pulitzer Prize–winning book, Slavery by Another Name, blacks were kept in virtual bondage through Jim Crow laws, sharecropping, and, quite oft, a form of quasi-slavery called peonage, which endured well into the heart of the 20th century.

Here's how it worked: black men (it was normally men) were arrested for niggling crimes or no crimes at all; "selling cotton afterward sunset" was a favorite charge. They were then assessed a steep fine. If they could not pay, they were imprisoned for long sentences and forced to piece of work for complimentary. This allowed savvy industrialists to supercede thousands of slaves with thousands of convicts.

While some whites were caught up in this system, the forced labor camps were 80 to ninety per centum populated by black men. This practise endured until 1948, when the federal criminal lawmaking was rewritten to helpfully analyze that the constabulary forbade involuntary servitude.

Around that time, adamant activists–from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to Fannie Lou Hamer–organized to need equal treatment. We know the civil rights story well: Brown v. Board of Instruction in 1954, which overturned the separate-only-equal doctrine; the Civil Rights Deed of 1964, which outlawed various forms of discrimination; and the Voting Rights Human action of 1965, which carved a clear path to the unfettered right to vote.

And that, we told black men, was that. Immediately following the civil rights movement, in the early 1970s, we bodacious these men, with fingers peradventure gently crossed backside our backs, that all the discrimination they had faced was behind them; that in that location would be no further barriers to opportunity, even unspoken ones; that it was time for them to wake upwards. Get a job. Become married, and outset a family. Build wealth. Take agree of the American dream. We won't stop you–nosotros hope.

We focused our social investments in this period–our brief War on Poverty–on women and children, because men were supposed to figure it out. Just in the 1970s and 1980s, many of these blackness men didn't. Just like their keen-grandfathers never fully figured out how to teach their sons almost manhood while beingness lashed in a field. But like their grandfathers never completely figured out how to pass on lessons almost building wealth when theirs was stolen through peonage and sharecropping.

Their fathers tried to rally around Martin Luther King as a symbol of what they could exist–but he was gunned down on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. In the post–civil rights era, many of these black men, men similar Joe Jones's father, weren't quite figuring it out either. And neither are many of their sons and grandsons, those vivid if frequently scowling men we meet on our streets.

Why not? The reasons are as complicated as the difficult history, and simple debates about government spending versus personal responsibility are woefully insufficient.

But 1 of the cardinal reasons has to do with our criminal justice arrangement. And it points the way toward ane of the fundamental solutions–maybe the single most important thing authorities can practise to help win the fight for black men.

No ane has washed more to shed light on this issue than Michelle Alexander. Alexander may be this century'south Harriet Beecher Stowe, the storied author of Uncle Tom's Cabin about whom President Lincoln remarked, "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this Dandy War?" But instead of making a state of war, Alexander wrote a book to stop one.

Alexander was a young civil rights attorney working for the ACLU of California and trying to discover a model plaintiff for a ceremonious rights instance against the Oakland Police Department, which at the fourth dimension was rife with corruption. 1 day, a 19-yr-old black human walked into her office, and he looked similar the perfect case to bear witness that the Oakland PD had gone bad.

The human had been stopped and released dozens of times, for no reason at all. He had been forced to lie on the ground spread-eagle and been subjected to invasive searches, subsequently which the police found nothing. And, important, he had taken meticulous notes of all this–every terminate, every date, every badge number. "I was getting more and more excited," Alexander told me, "because I thought this was our plaintiff."

Yet, at the cease of his presentation, the homo shared one final fact: he had a felony record, having been disrepair for a drug crime years earlier and convicted as an adult. Alexander stopped him there. "I explained to him that I couldn't take his example," she told me. "It wouldn't be fair to him or to us. With his felony record he'd take no credibility on the witness stand; he'd be cross-examined most his past."

Alexander tried to explicate to the boyfriend that information technology wouldn't work out, but he pushed back in protest. He said that the confidence was for a pocket-sized criminal offense, and that he'd just taken a plea deal to avoid more jail time. He said his by should have no bearing on the repeated abuse he had experienced.

Just Alexander didn't budge, and eventually the young man had enough. Fighting back tears, he yelled at her, "You're no meliorate than anyone else! The minute I tell you I take a criminal record, you terminate listening. I can't get a task. I tin can't feed my family. Where am I supposed to sleep? How long am I supposed to pay for my record?"

The homo stormed out in a huff, leaving Alexander stunned. At that point, something clicked with her, something that pulled together all of her prior experience in civil rights law and history. Alexander realized that, non unlike the peonage system in the early 20th century, the "war on drugs" had created what she calls a "permanent nether-caste" of men convicted of drug offenses. Men who, fifty-fifty later on their release from incarceration for relatively minor crimes, would never again be able to navigate the world on equal ground with the balance of us. Men like the young man she met but could not serve.

The full explanation of this permanent under-caste of blackness men and the devastation information technology has wrought is meticulously and powerfully delivered in The New Jim Crow–Alexander'south book nigh the war on drugs, which was on The New York Times bestseller list for nigh a year and today can exist found in the easily of conclusion makers across the state, from federal courtrooms to the halls of Congress. In the book, she describes the ramp-up of criminal-justice spending in the 1980s as the result of an intentional political strategy rather than a reasoned law enforcement response. The issue has been the mass incarceration of African-Americans, more often than not men, with footling connection to bodily rates of crime.

Alexander shows that at that place are more African-Americans in the corrections system today–in prison house or on probation or parole–than there were enslaved in 1850. Equally of 2004, more black men were denied the right to vote considering of a criminal record than in 1870, when the Fifteenth Subpoena was ratified, giving blacks the right to vote. In the three decades since the war on drugs began, the U.S. prison population has exploded from 300,000 to more than than ii 1000000 people, giving our country the highest incarceration charge per unit in the world–higher than Russia, China, and other regimes we consider repressive. A significant bulk of black men in some urban areas are labeled felons for life; in and around Chicago, when you include prisoners, that number approaches fourscore per centum.

But isn't this simply a role of more criminal offense in black communities? Aren't we arresting violent super-predators, the type nosotros see on television set? Alexander makes clear: in nearly communities, the answer is no.

"It has cipher to do with crime rates," she told me. "Crime rates accept fluctuated over fourth dimension–we're currently at celebrated lows–just incarceration rates have consistently soared." People of color are arrested in big numbers for relatively minor offenses–four out of five drug arrests in 2005 were for possession, not sales–and then given sentences that outpace their white counterparts. In fact, in the 1990s, when the war on drugs was at its peak, most 80 percent of the increase in drug arrests was for possession of marijuana.

The result of all of this is the "under-caste," an apt if cringe-worthy term describing the massive numbers of black men who cannot access housing, who are screened out of employment, and who in many states are denied the correct to vote. Facing severely express options and few opportunities for rehabilitation, millions of these men re-offend, creating more victims in our communities and landing themselves back in jail.

These men are increasingly isolated from the rest of America–including from centre-class African-Americans. Every bit the Rev. Al Sharpton, the nationally known civil rights activist and founder of the National Action Network, told me in an interview, "Nosotros're in the best of times and worst of times, at the aforementioned time." "Information technology'southward the all-time-fourth dimension times," Sharpton continued, "because we have a black president, black attorney general, blackness CEOs. But information technology's the worst of times considering millions of African-American men are being locked up and left out like never earlier."

Ben Jealous, the president of the NAACP, agrees. In an interview, Jealous declared to me that "blackness men are the most incarcerated people on the planet warehoused in prison for nonviolent crimes that 2 decades ago would accept resulted in little to no jail fourth dimension."

But Jealous is as well hopeful. The NAACP is going state by state, attaching applied solutions to Alexander'due south thesis. And because of strained prison house budgets and concern about bloated government, they are finding receptive audiences not just amidst liberals but among conservatives also. For example, they are presently working with Gov. Nathan Deal of Georgia, a Tea Party Republican, to, in Jealous's words, "make their prison system dramatically smaller." "Our allies on the correct are beginning to think about criminal-justice reform," Jealous says. "They are finally getting beyond 'tough on crime' slogans, and actually focusing on what works."

In fact, bipartisan efforts on criminal-justice reform are growing. On the Autonomous side, Chaser General Eric Holder has confronted the issue head on, spearheading an initiative to tackle youth violence and create new reentry programs for returning offenders, while working with Congress to reduce racial disparities in sentencing. He'southward been joined on the right by Republican Congressman Frank Wolf, who has taken a particular interest in "smart on criminal offense" approaches, driven past his relationship with Prison Fellowship, an evangelical Christian organization that believes in giving second chances to people who've been incarcerated.

Meanwhile, from the halls of Congress to statehouses beyond the country, people are reading Michelle Alexander'due south volume. On a contempo afternoon, I drove to the function of U.Due south. Congressman Bobby Rush, sitting for an hour with this stalwart of the Congressional Black Conclave whose feel on the issue of black men in America spans from a stint in the Black Panther party to Christian pulpits to losing his own son to gun violence. Rush recently had a spat with a fellow Illinoisan, Republican Sen. Mark Kirk, who fabricated headlines recommending that Chicago spend $30 1000000 more to lock upwardly young gang members. "I sent him a copy of The New Jim Crow," Rush told me. "He promised me that he would read it."

IF MICHELLE Alexander is worried most black men'due south criminal records, John Hope Bryant is concerned with their wallets. "I believe that 99 pct of black leaders are digging in the wrong pigsty," Bryant told me. "If yous're poor, your health care's going to suck, your housing is going to suck, your infrastructure is going to suck if you lot're poor, everything sucks."

Bryant speaks similar Martin Luther King on an auctioneer's stand–a frenetic ball of energy and ideas, seamlessly mixing civil rights maxims with fiscal advice at 100 miles an hour. He started his first business in Compton, California, at the age of 10, when the corner shop in his neighborhood stopped selling the type of candy kids wanted. He opened up his own store in his mother's living room, and in iii months was so successful that, in his words, "I put the corner shop out of business organisation."

Since then, Bryant has been convinced that the fashion out for black men is through a burgeoning banking concern account, not a social service plan. "The whole world pivots on economical issues. If you don't solve that, you lot tin't solve anything else," Bryant says. "Only if you do solve that, you accept a chance at solving everything else."

Bryant has put his money–and substantial energy–where his mouth is. He runs the largest network of financial literacy centers in the country–HOPE Financial Dignity Centers–which help low-income Americans access credit for minor businesses, manage their budgets, open bank accounts, and purchase homes.

Like Michelle Alexander and others, Bryant is concerned with the mass incarceration of immature black men only from a slightly different angle. "There's a very expert chance that we're really locking up the only potential we've got to revitalize inner-city neighborhoods in America," Bryant told me. "Drug dealers, gang organizers–they're all natural entrepreneurs. They get up early, they work late, they hustle–just they accept misplaced values and terrible part models."

Bryant created the HOPE Business in a Box plan to help troubled youth start, fund, and operate small businesses. He as well thinks that black businessmen should help young black boys ditch the "rappers and ball players" that they currently hold up as role models, and look in a different direction for examples of success. "These young men are the best gamble nosotros have to create jobs and Gross domestic product in our neighborhoods," Bryant says, "if nosotros can just get them back on the right runway."

BRYANT'South Effort is just i of a growing number of innovative private and public programs that are making existent inroads on this issue. Many of these initiatives are taking identify under the umbrella of George Soros'southward Open Society Foundations, which has created a Campaign for Blackness Male Achievement and a Leadership and Sustainability Institute to knit together previously disparate programs for blackness men and boys, and assistance the field outlive funding from whatever ane source. The attempt is led by Shawn Dove, a burly man who speaks with a thick New York accent that has hints of all five boroughs at once. In fact, he's lived in all of them, just he cut his teeth mostly at 80th Street and Amsterdam Avenue.

It was on that corner that Dove sold loose joints equally a teenager, teetering betwixt a strict Jamaican household, where his unmarried female parent ruled with an iron fist, and the warm glow of New York evenings and the allure that hustling brings.

One mean solar day some friends invited Shawn to a basketball game on the Upper West Side, and he met a guy named John Simon, who ran a youth program called DOME (Developing Opportunities for Meaningful Teaching). Simon told Shawn that he had the potential for greatness if he would only focus. "I took him up on his offering," Shawn told me.

From at that place information technology was a fast runway to Wesleyan University, a stint in the garment industry, and a career equally a shining star amidst nonprofit executives in New York. But several years agone, Shawn received a telephone call that would change his life.

Information technology was from the Open up Society Institute–now Open Order Foundations. They were looking for someone to get-go a project on low-income blackness men, and wondered if Shawn would be interested in the chore. Shawn said yep, and half dozen years later on he has helped create an entire field of "blackness male achievement," an ecosystem of organizations, programs, and leaders with one straightforward if daunting goal: give depression-income African-American men and boys an opportunity to succeed, a pathway to the American dream.

Nether this umbrella is a Black Male person Accomplishment Fellows Plan, which supports social entrepreneurs in urban communities, in partnership with the Echoing Green Foundation. And so at that place is "BMe," a collection of thousands of video testimonials that let black men to tell their story in their own voices. Dove's establish has besides partnered with Mayor Michael Bloomberg in New York on the Young Men'due south Initiative, a citywide effort to redirect black and Latino boys bound for prison to another path. Linda Gibbs, the deputy mayor of wellness and human being services of New York, told me that the Young Men'southward Initiative is nearly building a "continuum of services," including job training, mentoring, and male-friendly health care to give troubled immature men the best chance to succeed. In less than two years of running the plan, Gibbs says they've seen a "dramatic reduction in the number of young men who are serving time," too as a reduction in re-arrests. (The program has sparked a similar effort in other cities called Cities United–in which Mayor Mitch Landrieu of New Orleans, Mayor Michael Nutter of Philadelphia, Casey Family Programs, and the National League of Cities are leading participants.)

Dove has also convened other major funders–including William Bell of Casey and Robert Ross at the California Endowment–into a new Blackness Male Achievement Funders coalition, each with a dissimilar approach to a previously intractable problem. Ross, the California Endowment'south president and a pediatrician from the South Bronx who took a three-month sabbatical to study the issue of young blackness men in America, focuses on behavioral wellness and education. The California Endowment is funding programs to close the achievement gap in tertiary-grade reading scores and develop alternative approaches to suspension when dealing with troubled boys. "Overly harsh discipline and suspension marginalizes, stigmatizes, and criminalizes these boys," Ross told me. "When an African-American male in eighth class has defiant behavior in the classroom, it'south like seeing a burn on their body; nosotros demand to care for their behavior as evidence of a problem to exist solved rather than a kid to lock up."

There'southward powerful work happening outside of Dove'due south network as well. For case, Michael Curtin, CEO of D.C. Cardinal Kitchen, believes the food industry tin can help to empower black men and women. Since 1989, the kitchen has served over 25 one thousand thousand meals to low-income people in the D.C. area–but don't call it a nutrient depository financial institution. Instead, Curtin, a former restaurateur, runs a rigorous culinary job-grooming plan, using the procedure of meal preparation to assist formerly homeless, addicted, and incarcerated men and women learn culinary skills and then notice employment in the hospitality industry.

I visited D.C. Central Kitchen recently and saw lines of men and women who were previously on the streets chopping vegetables, barking orders, and managing a full-scale industrial operation. Curtin told me at the time, "When I look back on my personal experience, I recognized that I was incredibly fortunate–I had a astounding family, I grew upwardly in safe communities, and went to good schools. I made reckless decisions, merely always had someone there to put me back on runway. Many of the men and women who come to u.s.a. grew up in very different circumstances–when they messed up, they didn't have someone to help get them dorsum on track. What we're trying to exercise at D.C. Cardinal Kitchen is provide people with that opportunity."
THE FIGHT for black men is beingness waged through policy and programs, as the piece of work of Shawn Dove and Michelle Alexander shows. Just there's also a concurrent fight going on for their culture and soul–and in that battle, Ta-Nehisi Coates is at the forefront.

Coates, a senior editor at The Atlantic, is a reluctant spokesman. He has shut downwardly his Twitter account more than than once. Afterward penning several landmark columns for The New York Times, he declined the Times'southward offer of a permanent weekly slot. And he does not write solely, or even primarily, about race. His recent topics of involvement range from the conflict in Syrian arab republic to Kurt Vonnegut. He speaks fluent French, and analyzes the hit bear witness Mad Men with gusto.

Simply try as he might, Coates cannot escape the mantle of leading cultural envoy. He writes in a way that's inherently viral, moving fast from blackness easily to white and and then around the world. What Henry Louis Gates says nigh race painstakingly, like an intricate symphony, and Cornel Due west declares elliptically, like a Pentecostal preacher or alto saxophonist, Coates offers direct up, with simply a splash of hip-hop every bit a attorney.

Consider his New York Times essay "The Good, Racist People," which summed up in nine paragraphs what black men take been trying to get off their chests for the concluding 30 years. Through personal stories, he bandage racism in America every bit "invisible violence," perpetrated by well-meaning folks all around. Or his landmark piece for The Atlantic, "Fear of a Black President," about what he calls the "false promise and double standard of integration" in the era of President Obama.

Coates is at the fulcrum of a resurgent cultural conversation virtually blackness men, one that is advancing in a number of sectors. There is the painter Kehinde Wiley, who mixes classical techniques with contemporary subjects to create stunning portraits of blacks in America. There are rappers like Lupe Fiasco and Kendrick Lamar, who are using their lyrics to put new spins on old truths. In sports, Miami Heat keen Dwyane Wade has teamed up with a cast of unlikely characters–including Grammy Award–winning artist Lecrae and bourgeois funder Foster Friess–to launch the "This Is Fatherhood" challenge, which encourages young people around the country, and especially black men, to tell stories of what fatherhood ways to them. In film, the talent agent Tamara Houston has launched a new organization, ICON MANN, to create a space for Hollywood's leading blackness male actors to learn from one another and project their values to the world.

Just Coates is in many ways this move's biographer. In an interview, he told me that the goal of his writing is non to "fix" race relations in America. "I have folks who write me and want me to help out with their racist uncle; I don't want whatsoever role of that," he said with light-hearted sarcasm. But when pushed, he admitted that he does run across himself as "an agent in pursuit of the truth of this country, of which I'k a citizen, in which I was raised, which I dearest." "I want to understand it," he continued. "I want to explore it, and make that exploration every bit honest as I tin."

I asked Coates almost the best way to assist blackness men who are struggling, and he didn't point to a particular program. Instead, he said, "If at that place'due south one affair that's missing in our country, information technology's an acknowledgment of the broad humanity of black folks. Racism–and anti-black racism in detail–is the belief that there'southward something wrong with black people and I hateful something in our bones." He continued, "In our own community, we've internalized this. We wonder if we lack moral courage."
"I desire the country to understand that there'due south nothing incorrect with u.s.a.," Coates says, with urgency in his voice. "Things have happened in this state, but at that place'south aught wrong with us. My job is to help shut the gap between what they meet in the states and who we actually are."

"WHO We actually are." Information technology took Joe Jones about ii decades to effigy that out. That'southward how long he was strung out–after his dad pulled off in the Thunderbird, his mom went away to work, and he made a series of bad decisions on Edmonson Artery; after jail made him more than of a criminal and a junkie, not less. By 1986, Joe was spending $800 to $900 a day on a mixture of heroin and crack.

In that location were some bright moments–the birth of his son, a job at the Social Security Administration. Merely in one way or another, they all were deflated, pricked past the same needle that he regularly thrust into his arm.

Finally, facing a five-twelvemonth prison sentence for drug possession, Joe argued and cajoled his way into an in-patient treatment program instead. He told me: "At that place was a half-dozen-calendar month wait for the program, but I knew I needed to go in now. The merely way you could get in was if you lot were crazy, and so I acted as crazy as I could."

Information technology worked. And from the moment he got serious treatment, things kept working for Joe. I asked him how it all came together, and he told me information technology was pretty simple: people listened to him, got to know him, and they liked him.

There was the staff at the handling center who grew to know Joe Jones as not but an addict but a man, "counselors and therapists who could help me sympathize why I did the things that I did."

In that location was the dean at Baltimore City Community College, who admitted Joe despite his criminal record. He and Joe became then shut that Joe ended upwards counseling the dean when the dean's son was struggling with his own drug addiction. Joe graduated from the college with an bookkeeping degree, at the meridian of his course. There was also the young adult female Joe met in the fiscal aid office at this community higher–she liked him and so much that she later became his wife.

This phenomenon of knowing, and liking, was repeated over and over in my interviews with experts on troubled youth. As Geoffrey Canada, CEO of the Harlem Children'south Zone–our country'due south become-to model for turning around tough neighborhoods–told me, "First y'all have to know them, and then you have to like them, enough to respect what they're going through but not accept responses that may exist inappropriate."

Canada connected, "You actually exercise have to similar them. Boys, when they're threatened and angry, they human action out in ways that make them hard to deal with. They can go threatening, sullen, disrespectful. They acquire to be frightening as a defence force mechanism in the environments they take to navigate."

"When you lot don't like them," he said, "those are reasons to get rid of them–to put them out of programs, put them out of schools, to call the police to deal with them, lock them upwardly. But when they're kids that you actually know, and actually like, they volition listen to you, and you will listen to them. And that's where change starts."

A few people got to know Joe Jones, so like him. And his life inverse. Joe entered a serial of nonprofit jobs, from HIV counseling to health care, and eventually began working for the Baltimore Health Department. He persuaded the city of Baltimore to starting time a fatherhood program, forth with programs on maternal and child wellness. These efforts were so successful that the mayor of Baltimore at the time, Kurt Schmoke, helped Joe spin them off into a larger, independent organization, which became the Eye for Urban Families, the organization that Joe runs today.

At CFUF, Joe uses evidenced-based models to help the aforementioned types of men and women he grew upwards effectually. Funded in part by Shawn Dove'south campaign, Joe's center has a successful job-training program, including partnerships with major Baltimore employers. They accept a fatherhood program, along with programs on maternal and child health. These efforts were so successful that the mayor of Baltimore at the fourth dimension, Kurt Schmoke, helped Joe spin them off into a larger, contained arrangement, which became the Center for Urban Families, the organization that Joe runs today.

At CFUF, Joe uses evidenced-based models to help the same types of men and women he grew up around. Funded in role by Shawn Dove's campaign, Joe's center has a successful job-training plan, including partnerships with major Baltimore employers. They take a fatherhood program that gives dads practical skills to reconnect with their kids and pay back child support. Joe as well wrote land legislation chosen "Couples Advancing Together"; it's based on a simple but powerful thought that low-income men and women who are romantically involved should develop life plans and financial goals together. Social programs focusing on job preparation and financial literacy have traditionally served these couples separately, instead of acknowledging that their goals and life plans are inherently intertwined. Joe'south couples-services concept has the potential to dramatically modify how these programs work; it passed the Maryland legislature in April and was signed into law by Gov. Martin O'Malley in May.
And a few weeks agone, something special happened. The man who possibly almost radically symbolizes both the hope of blackness men in America and the challenges from which they spring stopped by to see Joe Jones. President Obama, himself a product of a single-parent household, visited the Center for Urban Families to say howdy to Joe and the men he serves. Obama met with employers, people being trained for jobs, and dads getting back on track. His remarks were private, candid, and–based on accounts from those in attendance–had quite an impact on a agglomeration of guys from West Baltimore who were struggling to go far by.

Afterward that same weekend, Obama traveled to Morehouse College in Atlanta to deliver a speech communication to the black male graduates in that location. He was to talk about fatherhood and responsibility, and what African-American men must practice to compete in the world. But in one brief, unscripted moment at Morehouse, the 2 dichotomized worlds of black men–Joe's new i and his old one; the soaring heights of the presidency and the depths of the streets–briefly and powerfully collided.

I had been a small part of the planning procedure for the speech. Obama'southward relationship with his father–years of absence and cursory flickers of presence–is one of the defining aspects of his life. While I grew upwards with a strong and supportive stepfather, my ain biological begetter had a beautiful, tragic, and securely complicated story–a blackness human being who received a Ph.D. from Cornell University, and ended his life in a federal penitentiary in North Carolina. Out of this mutual gear up of experiences, I worked for years with the president on his fatherhood initiative, an try to assistance absent fathers around the state become back on the right track.

I had the text in front of me as Obama was delivering the speech. And so it came as a surprise when, every bit the president neared his close, something pulled him away from the prepared remarks. He was supposed to exist moving to a final story about 1 of the graduates, but instead started talking about men who had been left behind. I take to imagine he was picturing men like those he saw at the Center for Urban Families, men like those he had known his whole life. Men like Joe.

"Whatever success I have achieved," the president said, "whatever positions of leadership I have held have depended less on Ivy League degrees or Sat scores or GPAs, and have instead been due to that sense of connection and empathy–the special obligation I felt, as a black human being like you lot, to assistance those who need it most, people who didn't have the opportunities that I had."
He continued, "Considering there but for the grace of God go I. I might have been in their shoes. I might have been in prison house"–a jarring thing to hear from the president of the U.s.a.. "I might take been unemployed. I might not take been able to back up a family. And that motivates me."

Obama's voice faded off into a trail of emotion and applause, and he returned to the text. But the bespeak was made.
We take walked a winding route with blackness men in this country, with no small amount of pain and tears along the way. But all Americans have walked that road together. Our connection to each other is, every bit James Baldwin once said of the relationship between blacks and whites, "far deeper and more than passionate than whatsoever of u.s. like to recall." And it's that connexion, that empathy, that "at that place just for the grace of God go I" mentality, that must motivate our gild'southward efforts on behalf of low-income black men. Because our history, our present circumstance, and our humanity demand it. Because there are boys walking the streets of this state with the brightest of futures–the next Shawn Dove, the next Joe Jones, the next Barack Obama–if just they were given a shot.

JOSHUA DUBOIS was President Obama'southward beginning managing director of the White House organized religion-based initiative, and is at present an author, instructor, speaker, and CEO of Values Partnerships.

"Let America Be America Again," by Langston Hughes (1902 – 1967)
Let America exist America again.
Allow it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is gratuitous.

(America never was America to me.)

Permit America exist the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Permit information technology exist that great stiff country of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one to a higher place.

(Information technology never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is gratuitous,
Equality is in the air nosotros breathe.

(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the costless.")

Say, who are you lot that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you lot that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery'south scars.
I am the ruby-red man driven from the state,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of canis familiaris eat dog, of mighty beat out the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that aboriginal endless concatenation
Of profit, ability, gain, of grab the land!
Of catch the golden! Of take hold of the means of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one'due south ain greed!

I am the farmer, bondservant to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, hateful—
Hungry still today despite the dream.
Browbeaten nevertheless today—O, Pioneers!
I am the human who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Still I'm the ane who dreamt our basic dream
In the Onetime Earth while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so potent, so brave, so true,
That even all the same its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land information technology has become.
O, I'chiliad the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my domicile—
For I'k the one who left dark Ireland'south shore,
And Poland'south apparently, and England'due south grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely non me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot downward when nosotros strike?
The millions who accept nada for our pay?
For all the dreams nosotros've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes nosotros've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who take nothing for our pay—
Except the dream that's almost expressionless today.

O, let America be America once more—
The state that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the country where every human being is free.
The country that's mine—the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and hurting,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose turn in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me whatever ugly proper name you cull—
The steel of freedom does non stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people'southward lives,
We must have back our land over again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it apparently,
America never was America to me,
And nevertheless I swear this oath—
America will be!

[I should not put this motion-picture show here considering we volition all exist and then shocked we volition say it'southward too much, it'southward too existent, it can't happen anymore. Ask Eric Garner's widow nearly that.]

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Source: https://mesenescent.wordpress.com/2014/12/05/o-let-america-be-america-again-the-land-that-never-has-been-yet-langston-hughes/

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