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A Study of the Socio-Economic Issues Affecting African American Youth in the 1980S and 1990S

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A Study of the Socio-Economic Issues Affecting African American Youth in the 1980S and 1990S Searching For Answers: A Study of the Socio-Economic Issues Affecting African American Youth in the 1980s and 1990s by Brett Francis A thesis presented to the University of Waterloo in fulfilment of the thesis requirement for the degree of Master of Arts in History Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, 2013 © Brett Francis 2013 Author’s Declaration I hereby declare that I am the sole author of this thesis. This is a true copy of the thesis, including any required final revisions, as accepted by my examiners. I understand that my thesis may be made electronically available to the public. ii Abstract The central goal of this thesis is to explore several popular "talking points" that were believed to relate to high crime rates amongst African American male youth. I argue that in many instances, issues relating to employment, education, and family structure can operate in unison to greatly increase the likelihood that young black men would take part in criminal activity. The issues discussed within this thesis relate closely to those discussed earlier in Thomas Sugrue's pivotal work The Origins of the Urban Crisis. This thesis will focus on the period from 1980 through to 1999 to discuss how issues relating to crime and poverty persisted throughout urban areas within the United States. I have assembled a variety of primary and secondary sources from several different disciplines to properly develop my argument related to the various socio-economic issues surrounding the African American community during this period. iii Acknowledgements I would like to thank my friends and family for their unwavering support and encouragement throughout this entire process. I would also like to express my great appreciation towards the members of my examination committee Drs. Cyr and Sbardellati for taking the time to take part in my defence. I would like to thank my supervisor Dr. Andrew Hunt, whose valuable advice and experience made this project possible. Finally, I’d like to express my gratitude to Donna Lang for her assistance over the past two years. iv Table Of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Socio-Political Developments in the Late 20th Century United States 15 Chapter 2: Popular Culture 25 Chapter 3: Family Structure 55 Chapter 4: Education 79 Chapter 5: Employment 104 Chapter 6: Conclusion 119 Works Cited 123 v Introduction From the mid-1980s into the 1990s, an urban crisis emerged across the United States. Crime rates soared, fueled by drug related deaths and violence. The postwar era saw a mostly white upper-middle class abandon urban areas for the suburbs. At the same time, the nation’s poor, consisting mainly of ethnic minorities, became concentrated in inner-city neighbourhoods. Crime and gang violence brought a considerable amount of attention focused towards African Americans living in urban areas. Statistically speaking, many of these concerns were justified as African- American males were jailed at alarmingly high rates in comparison to other Americans. They became over-represented within the criminal justice system. A study that examined the racial disproportionality in imprisonment within the United States was authored by Alfred Blumstein in 1982. Blumstein noted that imprisonment in the United States was severely disproportional along racial lines. A 7:1 ratio existed between black and white incarceration rates, with black males in their twenties incarcerated at a rate 25 times higher than the rate for the total population.1 But statistics alone do not explain why one particular demographic became over-represented in the American criminal justice system. The purpose of this thesis will be for it to serve as a historical corrective; it will study several debates that occured between different scholars, commentors, and pundits as they attempted to explain to why disproportinately high levels of African American male youth commited crimes. To properly address these debates several key subjects will be addressed within this thesis that 1 Alfred Blumstein. “On the Racial Disproportionality of United Statesʼ Prison Population”, Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 73, 1982, pg 1259-1281. The data for Blumsteinʼs study came from a 1974 Department of Justice survey of state prison inmates and the 1974 Uniform Crime Reports(UCR). Uniform Crime Reports are published by the FBI and considered official data on crime in the United States. 1 were frequent “talking points.” Four subjects that will be approached within this paper will be: family structure, employment, education, and popular culture. These topics have been selected because they were often seen as potenial indicators of social conditions within the United States that could be responsible for increased criminal activity amongst young black males. This is not to say that there is a definite link between employment,education, family structure, and crime. There is little evidence available that provides anything beyond a casual link between these three subjects and criminal activity. This thesis will only seek to look at what expert sociologists, pyschologists, critics, and researchers have said on both sides of these debates and determine which side, if any, had more validity towards their argument. Ultimately, this paper will argue that employment, family structure, and education played the greatest role in the relationship between young black men and criminal activity. These three subjects will be described as co- dependant factors based on how they interacted with one another to create the conditions that have led to increased criminal activity amongst young black men. This paper will argue that the likelihood that young African-American boys would become involved in criminal activity increased when two or more of these factors existed together. It wasn’t enough for young black men to be jobless, or a high school dropout, or to come from a dysfunctional family. However, when these two or more of these factors existed simultaneously the likelihood that a young black male could become involved in criminal activity increased. Issues relating to employment, family structure, and eduction rarely influenced the behaviours or actions of young Black males in isolation from one another. Families could often become fractured due to a lack of jobs available to young fathers. A lack of family support had the potential to lead to young African American males becoming disillusioned with school and 2 dropping out before completing high school. Similarly, without a high school diploma, access to any type of employment beyond minimum wage positions was unlikely. In order to properly address the aforementioned relationships between education, family structure, employment and crime, this paper will look at a variety of primary and secondary resources. Survey data obtained from the Black Youth Project, the African American Men Survey, and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth will be used throughout the paper to provide greater insight into the opinions and behaviours of black youth that may lead to criminal activity. Secondary literature from a variety of different discplines such as sociology, family studies and film studies will be explored. This paper will define youth as children aged 8 to 18 years. Studying this age demographic is important because, at this stage, children are still developing emotionally and could still be heavily influenced by the cultural, social, and economic environments in which they were raised. Studying older African American males would overlook critical developmental stages in the childhood of male African American children that could potentially contribute to criminal activity later in life. Chronologically speaking, this paper will look specifically at the period between 1985 and 1995. This time frame is crucial when attempting to understand which factors have affected the development of black youth. Looking at this ten-year period provides a window into the ongoing political shift to the right within the United States that began in the late 1960s and altered the social and economic landscape of the country. Drug use and the violence that accompanied the drug trade expanded, and with the growth of violence, it led to feelings of fear and suspicion directed towards the inner city and African Americans. The conditions that occurred throughout this period mirrored those referred to by Thomas Sugrue in his earlier book The Origins of the 3 Urban Crisis. In his book, Sugrue described the decline of urban areas within the United States. While Sugrue looked specifically at urban Detroit from the 1940s to the 1970s, his book made several critiques and observations that were applicable to urban ghettos across America. Sugrue looked at three forces, suburbanization, deindustrialization, and the emergence of rights-based liberalism, as being particularly harmful to the future economic and social prosperity of African Americans.2 Deindustrialization coupled with the racial discrimination of employers left working class African Americans unable to access blue collar jobs that had previously been available. Moreover, Sugrue examined the rise of labour militancy as a reason behind the rise of automation and decentralization within the manufacturing industry. Automating the different segments of the manufacturing process was a cheaper alternative for many industries but it left many African Americans without employment. Suburbanization left African Americans confined to urban areas that became economically stagnant while businesses began to relocate to suburban areas. Racial
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