The Savage Difference

"Night after night, on television, Americans can watch police or federal agents rounding up black men and black teenagers. The sight of white policemen breaking down the doors of houses, black people emerging with their head bent low in order to avoid the television cameras, has become a form of prime-time television entertainment in America. The story that is told by television cameras is a story of deformity. The story that is not told is the lifelong deformation of poor children by their own society and government. We hear of an insatiable attraction to consumer goods like sneakers, stereos and video recorders. The story that we do not hear is of the aggressive marketing of these commodities in neighborhoods where very poor black people live: neighborhoods where appetites for purchasable mediocrity are easily inflamed because there sometimes is so little that is rich and beautiful to offer competition. Once these children learn that lovely and transcendent things are not for them, it may be a little easier to settle for the cheaper satisfactions.

A psychiatrist whom I have known for many years speaks of the ways violence [in black communities] is viewed and understood by suburban neighbors: "When they hear of all these murders, all these men in prison, all these women pregnant with no husbands, they don't buy that explanation that it's poverty, or public schools, or racial segregation. They say, 'We didn't have much money when we started out, but we led clean and decent lives. We did it. Why can't they?' I try to get inside that statement. So I ask them what they mean. What I hear is something that sounds very much like a genetic answer: 'They don't have it.' What they mean is lack of brains, or lack of drive, or lack of willingness to work. Something like that. Whatever it is, it sounds almost inherent. Some of them are less direct. They don't say genetics; what they talk about is history. 'This is what they have become, for lots of complicated reasons. Slavery, injustice or whatever.' But they really do believe it when they say this is what they've become, that this is what they are. And they don't believe that better schools or social change will affect it very much. So it comes down to an explination that is so intrinisc, so immutable, that it might as well be called genetic. They see a slipshod deviant nature - violence, lassitude, a reckless sxulaity, a feverish need to over-reproduce - as if it were a character imprinted on black people. The degree to which ths racial explination is accepted would surprise you.""

--Jonathan Kozol, 1991.