Devah Pager of Princeton and Algernon Austin of EPI Use White Racist Stereotypes To Explain Issues Crucial To The Black Community

At the risk of further alienating my liberal friends in New York who have knee-jerked me all the way into a hell reserved only for the vilest conservatives, I feel I must once again make what I consider to be valid observations of the Black and White left, reveal a few inconvenient truths, and then compare them, when appropriate, to the hard-line right.

So what is wrong with the Black and White intellectual left in America? Can they ever be unbiased? Non-racist? Can they ever dream of anything other than a simplistic Ebony Magazine-Al Sharpton view of White racism as a catch-all explanation for one of the single biggest and most embarrassing circumstances facing the Black community, namely, the disproportionate rate of Black youth incarceration and education failure?

Algernon Austin of the Economic Policy Institute, in his 2006 article, Don't Blame Black Culture for Economic Decline (Why Bill Cosby is Wrong), references a study by Princeton Professor of Sociology Devah Pager that purports to prove old fashioned White racism alive and well and preventing Black youth from obtaining entry-level jobs. Steve Horowitz, author of an article reviewing Devah Pager's 2007 book which includes the study ( Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration ), allows passion to overcome him when he notes:
The Princeton professor isn’t the first to point this out [that Black males spend way too much time in prison], but she does well to bring this up in context of her research for two reasons. First, all Americans should be outraged by these facts. They should be shouting this information from the rooftops, demanding explanations from their elected officials, and actively working for solutions. Why is America incarcerating so many people and why are so many of them black?

The view of Devah Pager and Steve Horowitz, based on my experience, pretty much sums up the viewpoint of White liberal America ... Soooo it's the fault of America? It's the fault of that abstract entity no two people can define the same way? Huh? ... And Americans should be outraged! Yes. Americans should be outraged that the Black and White left in America avoid and deny the complex circumstances that work to prevent Black youth from achievement. And why? Because most of these well-documented facts by unbiased and balanced studies point to issues other than White racism as determining factors for failure and incarceration. In other words, they violate principles of the Religion of The Eternal Victim that have gripped much of Black America and their White supporters. And God help us all, some of these facts actually fault the Black community, Black leaders, and Black culture as having some responsibility ... Now, I just have to avoid the snipers! Making statements like these is kinda like revealing to hardcore Christians their ongoing hypocrisy for supporting the Iraq War.

Stepping outside the confines of the Religion of The EV, let's breeze over a few things that tend to contradict its beliefs, i.e., that tend to show compelling evidence that forces other than White racism are at work. Anyone at anytime, can research the many instances of intense and pervasive government corruption that have plagued the city of Washington, D.C.--from the trial of Mary Treadwell (Mayor Barry's wife) and her cronies to the more recent Washington D.C. Tax Office scandal--and conclude quite readily that the Black government of D.C., empowered to help the Black community of D.C., instead did just the opposite for the better part of three decades. By means of fraud, embezzlement, abuse of power, and wasteful spending, the politicians and bureaucrats of D.C. stabbed the Black community in the back so many times that only through a miracle of denial (related to blaming the White racism of Congress) have the Black community of Washington been prevented from taking to the streets in massive protest. The D.C. Tax Office, once the investigation was complete, was found to have brilliantly siphoned off 40 million or more of public funds before getting caught. And this is just for starters!

In other words, the Black government of D.C., supported by the Black elite of D.C. and the Black and White media, willfully and knowingly deprived its citizens of those funds necessary to maintain their communities and their schools, and in the most shameful manner imaginable. Not a single member of The Religion of The Eternal Victim will ever admit that conditions such as these play a role in the subject at hand. They will laugh at you, accuse you of being a racist, avoid you, become enraged, argue illogically, but never an admission. Once more, the Black and White left of America remind me of Evangelical behavior at such time you provide them undeniable proof of evolution.

But now let's return to Devah Pager of Princeton. It appears Devah Pager has failed, and in remarkably obvious fashion, to examine studies by groups in her own backyard of Princeton, studies that offer a viewpoint on Black youth that contradict her conclusions and those of her followers like Steve Horowitz. From the Future Of Children website:

A more important explanation focuses on respect: low-income men often fail to work because doing so would violate their self esteem. Black youth, for example, typically demand higher wages before they will work than whites with the same qualifications. Economists might say that they have a higher “reservation wage”—the wage that would induce them to accept a job. But this framing again suggests a quality of calm calculation that is lacking. Actually, passion reigns. Black youth will often refuse to work for “chump change” even if it means not working at all. Or they accept jobs but then find them unrewarding or abusive. So they leave them in a huff or are fired.

And further:

Low-skilled blacks feel that employers treat them as expendable, firing them at the least provocation. To the employers, however, it seems that the men simply “don’t want to work.” So bosses grow wary of hiring them, particularly minorities and ex-offenders. They often hire women or immigrants instead. One cannot call such preferences racist, because black employers voice the same complaints as whites.

Okay, now another comprehensive and scholarly study that also presents a more complex picture than Devah Pager, Algernon Austin, and their supporters would have you believe. It is put together nicely in a book entitled, The Meaning of Race for Employers, by Joleen Kirscheman and Kathryn Neckerman. Here is a slice:

Despite Black's disproportionate representation in the urban underclass, however defined, analyses of inner-city joblessness seldon consider racism or discrimination as a significant cause ... Lacking the mainstream role models they once had, inner-city blacks no longer learn and value the habits associated with steady work.

Because of this viewpoint that life is more complex than the Religion of The Eternal Victim will have you believe, the Black and White left will accuse me of being a racist, of supporting the White racist conspiracy, and will readily accuse any Black American of being a race traitor if she or he dares to voice any agreement with my viewpoint, or let's say, with the viewpoint of anyone who doesn't accept the basic beliefs of the Religion.

Yes, been there, done that ... I'm wistfully taken back to a telemarketing job I once had and the group of Jesus freaks there shouting at me viciously in the lunch room that I was going to hell because I didn't accept their version of reality.

Back to my motto. The truth will piss you off.