that. We were with these kids a long, long time" ("First Grade").
Throughout the course of the study, both Alexander and Entwisle continued to reach out to the students, sending annual birthday cards, conducting impromptu visits and phone calls, with the goal of tracking the students’ progress and looking for any patterns of similarities that may emerge. "Over time, their lives were constrained — or cushioned — by the circumstances they were born into, by the employment and education prospects of their parents, by the addictions or job contacts that would become their economic inheritance", the researchers intoned ("First Grade"). "[T]he threads running through all those numbers and conversations: The families and neighborhoods these children were born into cast a heavy influence over the rest of their lives, from how they fared in the first grade to what they became as grownups" ("First Grade"). And though many of the students ultimately acquired midlevel jobs and stable households as adults, those limited examples of success came primarily as a result of those isolated examples leveraging their limited networks and resources to help pry open the doors of economic opportunity.
In her much-heralded viral TED Talk, "How We're Priming Some Kids for College--Others for Prison," urban ethnologist Alice Goffman helped to lay bare the stark realities facing America's minority youth. "It's poor kids that we're sending to prison, too many drawn from African-American and Latino communities so that prison now stands firmly between the young people trying to make it and the fulfillment of the American Dream," Goffman declared. "The problem's actually a bit worse than this," she continued, "because we're not just sending poor kids to prison, we're saddling poor kids with court fees, with probation, parole restrictions and low-level warrants. We're asking them to live in halfway houses and on house arrest, and we're asking them to negotiate a police force that is entering poor communities of color, not for the purposes of promoting public safety, but to make arrest counts, to line city coffers." With these systemic challenges facing Black males in America, it’s any wonder anyone can succeed under the weight of such oppression.
With that being said, however, the issues that Black males face even at an early age, must also be viewed from the prism of personal responsibility and the necessary accountability it takes to acknowledge the role Black males often play in how their narrative is shaped and ultimately viewed by others. "I don't have any quarrel with the notion that Black folks tend to harm each other more than any other race. With that being said, however, I do have a problem when people try to cast it as there being something pathologically wrong with Black folks because that's just not true," he quickly denoted. "I believe that as we work on our educational issues in this country, those of us who are are educated must try to lend our talents and knowledge in service to our community, so that we can better those that don't have the same opportunities as us. So, my suggestion is that we continue to work with each other and promote those things that we know will maximize the opportunities for success for our young people and for our families and for our community."
To that end, for people like Gregory Diggs, a ready remedy, or at least a soothing antidote, to the sting of systemic disadvantage lies in the importance of individual mentorship. "I have mentored on many different levels, and professionally I've worked for a couple of mentoring organizations, so I have been integral in developing programs and providing services and training around mentorship and I do believe that mentoring is important," Diggs declared. "Again, the thing for me is making sure as we experience whatever success that we have as Black people, we try to make time to share those experiences with those who are less fortunate. That, I believe, is how we can try to make an effort to help our whole community to have the best possible outcomes."
Yet, in spite of overwhelming evidence leading even the most skeptical of rational thinkers to conclude that there is a systemic disadvantage for Black males in America, one cannot help but acknowledge the impact of racial privilege in this country. In an economic policy report for the Washington Post, journalist Max Ehrenfreund demonstrated the inherent advantages that even the poorest of white children have over young boys and girls of color in America. "A stark new finding epitomizes that reality: In recent decades, rich Black kids have been more likely to go to prison than poor white kids. "Race trumps class, at least when it comes to incarceration," said Darrick Hamilton of the New School, one of the researchers who produced the study" (Ehrenfreund). Hamilton, along with his colleagues Khaing Zaw and William Darity of Duke University, in analyzing "The Long Shadow", the aforementioned longitudinal study conducted in Baltimore, concluded that, in many ways, discrimination against African-Americas and other minority groups, was not only complicated but steeped in economic inequality.
"The researchers grouped participants in the survey by their race and their household wealth as of 1985 and then looked back through the data to see how many people in each group ultimately went to prison" (Ehrenfreund). "About 2.7 percent of the poorest white young people — those whose household wealth was in the poorest 10th of the distribution in 1985, when they were between 20 and 28 years old — ultimately went to prison", the study noted. "In the next 10th, 3.1 percent ultimately went to prison. The households of young people in both of these groups had more debts than assets. In other words, their wealth was negative. All the same, their chances of being imprisoned were far less than those of Black youth from much more affluent circumstances" (Ehrenfreund). "About 10 percent of affluent Black youths in 1985 would eventually go to prison. Only the very wealthiest Black youth — those whose household wealth in 1985 exceeded $69,000 in 2012 dollars — had a better chance of avoiding prison than the poorest white youth. Among Black young people in this group, 2.4 percent were incarcerated" (Ehrenfreund). In short, economic status does not trump racial privilege when it comes to the long arm of the law in America. And should Black males defy the odds and avoid the criminal justice system altogether, they are still less likely to accumulate wealth than their white counterparts, regardless of their economic station in life.
Does It Even Matter?
As an individual that served on the front lines between public schools and private prisons, Gregory Diggs attested to said obstacles, the same ones that his students face each and every day. "I'm going to say it like it is... most of us have come through the American education system, so even before you become college-educated, you soon begin to realize that people who look like you are not really included in the curriculum and it leads to a sense of invisibility for those marginalized groups for the rest of their lives," Diggs opined. "I grew up in an integrated school and even the white students that I grew up with had no understanding of Latinos or Latino culture, of African-Americans or African-American culture, and yet, we all grew up together... and that's the sad part of it all. We were right there... together" he noted disappointingly. "There's definitely an "invisible problem" in America and it disproportionately impacts Black males. The issue is that people don't see us and, on the other hand, what they do see when they choose to view us is a distorted, mythical, demonic monstrous vision that doesn't have much to do with us, but with the negative myths of us," all of which help to fuel the cradle to prison pipeline, he observed.
Even the most gentrified and urbane African-Americans, some of whom have been able to attain significant resources, as compared to other Blacks who weren't so fortunate, have not been able to escape the reality of their Blackness. Famed New York Times best-selling author, Lawrence Otis Graham, a Harvard University Law School graduate knows all too well the limitations that even someone with his financial wherewithal and academic pedigree have for both he and his children, simply because of his racial background. In a heart-rending essay entitled, "I Taught My Black Kids Their Elite Upbringing Would Protect Them from Discrimination. I Was Wrong," Graham spoke of the helplessness he felt when coming to the realization that his wealthy Black children weren't exempted from racial hostility simply because they had access to money, power and certain privileges. "I knew the day would come, but I did not know how it would happen, where I would be, or how I would respond. It is that moment every Black parent fears: the day their child is called a nigger" (Graham). The acclaimed attorney went on to describe an incident in which his