It’s tempting to feel optimistic about some of the things happening in Rochester, especially in a spring like this one, with the weather in the 70’s and neighborhoods throughout the city awash in flowers. The Midtown site is getting ready for new streets (and, we hope, new development), stories keep trickling in about new businesses opening and new developments planned, the Jazz Festival is just six weeks away….
And then we get a wake-up call like “The State of Black Rochester 2013.”
The book, issued last week by the Rochester Area Community Foundation’s African American Giving Initiative, is patterned after the National Urban League’s important “State of Black America” reports. Like the national surveys, the Rochester book details the status of African Americans in a variety of key areas. And there’s little good news to be found.
As City Council member Dana Miller notes in his preface to the Rochester report, “Although the nation has re-elected the country’s first African American president, the economic realities for many African Americans, especially young men, remain bleak.”
Here are some of the statistics, drawn from studies by ACT Rochester, the Community Foundation’s program that assesses key local data:
About 32 percent of blacks and Hispanics in the Rochester region live in poverty.
The regional poverty rate for children is worse: 44 percent for blacks and 39 percent for Hispanics, compared to 11 percent for whites. And in the City of Rochester, according to ACT’s 2006-2010 data, nearly 50 percent of black children and more than 50 percent of Hispanic children are poor. The figure for white children – more than 30 percent – was better, but the three totals together underscore the growing concentration of poverty in the city.
In 2011, only 32 percent of Hispanic children and 29 percent of black children passed fourth-grade math tests. Only 26 percent of black children and 28 percent of Hispanic children passed fourth-grade English tests.
And in eighth grade, the news was worse: Only 16 percent of blacks and 20 percent of Hispanics passed English tests.
In 2006-2010, African Americans in the city spent 51 percent of their income on rent, Hispanics 55 percent. The median household income for African Americans in the region was 52 percent that of white households.
From Rochester Police Chief James Sheppard: Sixty-six percent of the arrests in the city in 2011 were of blacks; 78 percent of those arrested for violent crimes were black. Fifty-seven percent of the violent-crime victims were black. Seventy-five percent of the city’s violent crimes took place in mostly-black neighborhoods. And most of the city’s homicides were young black males killing other young black males.
Wade Norwood of the Finger Lakes Health Systems Agency offers these statistics in his chapter on the health of the region’s African Americans: More of them are obese than are Hispanics or whites; more of them smoke; more die of diabetes, heart disease, and HIV/AIDS. More are hospitalized for substance abuse.
In the section on education, Rochester Superintendent Bolgen Vargas offers what to me is the most ominous information:
In Rochester’s elementary schools, “African American students are not meeting any of the state standards in the areas of English, math, science or social studies.” Neither, in fact, are Hispanic children. Only white children are.
And, writes Vargas, “this gap in academic achievement is strongly associated with race, ethnicity, social-economic background, and family and neighborhood stability,” which are having a major, negative effect on children’s achievement in school.
“If this is left unaddressed,” writes Vargas, “the Rochester community can’t prosper, given that a significant proportion of the future growth of the population is projected to be largely African American and Latino.”
In their section on economic development, Clay Osborne, president of True Insights Consulting, and Eltrex CEO Matt Augustine write of two different Rochesters. One, they say, is “vibrant, hopeful, functional, wealthy, and highly livable.” The other is “a deeply disenfranchised community represented by escalating poverty, social and community dysfunction, burgeoning unemployment, and economic adversity aggravated by a deficient educational system that breeds sustained underperformance.”
And that Rochester, Osborne and Augustine say, correctly, is “reflective of an ‘American Nightmare’ from which we cannot awaken.”
The book addresses the documented racial discrimination that continues to exist in employment, in housing, in zoning regulations, in lending. And Action for a Better Community CEO James Norman reminds us that the discrimination and the disparities can be traced back to slavery, and, more recently, to government-sanctioned racial segregation.
It is a depressing, and terribly important book. It is written, in part, as Dana Miller notes in his preface, to help the community determine “where to focus its giving to provide the greatest impact.”
Rochester is historically a generous, concerned community. The information that this new book lays out isn’t new. And we’re a small enough, engaged enough community that we ought to be able to take this information and act on it – effectively.
I worry, though, that in her foreword to the book, Rochester Community Foundation CEO Jennifer Leonard has singled out a terrible truth about the Greater Rochester area.
“Though the racial inequities that Rochester faces, as documented in this book, reflect national trends,” Leonard writes, “ours are in many cases worse – driven, I believe, by a persistent disinclination either to address them or to find out how to do so.”
Concentrated poverty, poor education, racial discrimination: all of these have been at work, and this new book shows us the result. It’s not just a “city” problem; it’s affecting all of us. And all of us have to be willing to address it.
I’ll come back to some of the topics raised in “The State of Black Rochester” in future columns. Meantime, get the book. It’s on sale at Mood Makers in Village Gate (and on Amazon, but you ought to support a local business, particularly, in light of the economic concerns laid out in this book, a black owned business).
Despite the re-election of our first African American president, “the economic realities for many African Americans, especially young men, remain bleak.” – Dana Miller
This article appears in May 8-14, 2013.
The economic realities will remain bleak until the concepts of birth control and family planning are understood. It is pretty hard to ‘raise’ six children, with six different exCon/BabyDaddies with no money and no education. And that is the problem: they are not ‘raised’ they are released to the streets and the ‘village’ or ‘aunts’ , ‘cousins’ or ‘grandparents.’ If you look at successful black and Hispanic people, what they have in common is THEY WAITED TO HAVE CHILDREN UNTIL THEY COULD SUPPORT THEM. (Emotionally and financially)
It’s like Katy said you will have more children in poverty when Mom & Dad are 15 years old. They aren’t going to be the CEO of some company. It’s time for those in poverty to take responsability to teach thier young to STAY in school, work hard & wait to have kids. I wasn’t handed everything, I had to claw my way to were I’m at. My grandparents learned english when they moved here with nothing, both parents were poor growing up & made it to the middle class. Each generation we try to improve our kids education. You got to suck it up & roll up your sleeves.
Echoing the other comments, the elephant in the room, to judge from this summary, is the self-perpetuating cycle of casual immorality and bastardy. Nothing will change absent an overwhelming moral and spiritual awakening.
The transition from poverty to working class is the easiest of the upward transitions to be made and people born into a disadvantaged set of circumstances are in the prime position to enjoy some upward mobility, regardless of race or neighborhood. Being self-made has some unique benefits that being born with a silver spoon does not convey. Hard work builds character and a key motivating factor is to provide better opportunities for your kids than you had.
My inclination is that the failure to thrive discussed here is not due to people being black, or people being in the city, but it’s primarily a lifestyle choice of the people described, e.g. a conscious decision to indulge in unproductive behaviors while gaming the social safety net instead of undertaking the hard work of self improvement, or perhaps just not realizing that there’s another way to live due to lack of role models.
I 4th these notions!! How come nobody EVER brings up the biggest issue – having kids before you’re ready. Stopping that would fix many of the other problems that come up. And it’s not like getting pregnant is some disease you catch, there are easy and well-documented ways to prevent it. Of course, if your parent(s) didn’t choose to use these methods, it might not be immediately obvious to you. It all starts with the PARENTS!!!
BTW, just what does Prof. Obama’s election have to do with the price of tea? Does anybody actually think he has something in common with the population that is the subject of this report? For all intents he is as much the beneficiary of white privilege as anyone else. On the other hand, many of the report’s findings could apply to similarly situated people of other hues.
Putting all the blame on blacks and Hispanics for immorality and the continuing cycle of poverty rather than on our society for ignoring the problem while wasting our money to address theproblem on corporate welfare, senseless wars of choice, and tax breaks for the wealthy is both racist and classist.
Why do I suspect that those who are crying the loudest about the problem of out-of-wedlock children and the number of young parents who are unable to support children of their own are also the ones who were first in line to whine that the city schools’ plan to address the problem in part by handing out condoms was immoral and would only promote sexual congress and excess?
The findings in this article are nothing new. However, I want to express an opinion about the continuous misinterpretation of statistical data as representing the cause of the problem at hand – poverty. I quote the superintendant of the city school district that states:
“African American students are not meeting any of the state standards in the areas of English, math, science or social studies.” Neither, in fact, are Hispanic children. Only white children are.
this gap in academic achievement is strongly associated with race, ethnicity, social-economic background, and family and neighborhood stability,” which are having a major, negative effect on children’s achievement in school.
In statistical analysis – correlation of variables does not prove causation. In other words, just because there are a number of factors that are all associated with a certain outcome – poverty or poor academic performance, does not imply that the outcome is caused by all of those factors. So, for those that look at the implications that this is a racial or ethnicity driven problem, may be wrong. All of the factors indicated – “race, ethnicity, social-economic background, and family and neighborhood stability” are (I suspect) correlated with each other. They don’t all help explain the cause.
@Justice: LOL. Far from “ignoring the problem,” we’ve dumped trillions upon trillions of taxpayer dollars into all kinds of schemes we were promised would eradicate the problem. We spend more now than in the Golden Age of the so-called War on Poverty. So enough already about taxpayer money. And nobody’s placing “all the blame” on illegitimate parents. But moral revival is a necessary, even if not sufficient, part of the solution, and one that the original article ignored.
@MJN: You’re darn right, we object to government schools — the same ones that produce the abysmal results this article describes — diverting scarce time and resources to ideological campaigns promoting sexual filth and immorality. But that’s neither here nor there. Places where such policies have been in place for years have essentially the same or higher rates of illegitimacy.
A mixture of racism and good ideas in these comments so far. I consider the issue one of economics as much as race. Someone like Obama or Janet Lomax or Bill Johnson or Wade Norwood or Adam McFadden are all college-educated, upper middle-class and upper-class professionals. With higher education comes access to professional jobs, which provide a higher level of income. A white student in a poor school district (Gates, Chili, Albion) without college-educated parents is more likely to work in a low-wage, low-skilled job than an African-American who goes to SOTA who’s parents are a lawyer and a college professor. Why? Because the SOTA student has been raised in a culture of education and affluency, with clear role models to emulate. Institutional racism plays a role but not as much as certain activists and nay-sayers would like. Until we create easy access, high-paying jobs and give kids (white and black) good role models, this cycle will continue unabated and everyone will continue complaining unabated.
I think steve has had the most accurate and nuanced view of this issue, so far.
Some of the earlier commenters who have decried teenage parenting also have some reasonable points, even if the hyperbole is occasionally masking their points.
The problem we’re looking at here is a cyclical, self-perpetuating one that isn’t “caused” by race, but has a strong racial component due to historical factors.
Poor, impoverished, barely literate high-school dropouts are more likely to raise the same, no matter what color their skin is. When people of this type are concentrated due to housing costs and/or inability to take advantage of opportunities due to ignorance or ignorance-based fear, they become a visible class, and if there’s some way to distinguish them physically, that “reason” will be blamed as the cause.
It is absolutely true that people throughout history have raised themselves up by their bootstraps. It is equally true that those people are exceptional, and not the rule. (i.e. it’s possible, but not probable.) Education is the most democratic method of helping the lower class rise from poverty, but education also requires certain skills and habits that may not be well-supported at home.
But… at the root of the issue is that even when someone gets an education, they need a job to be able to take advantage of that education. There is a decided lack of jobs available in the Rochester area for people who have graduated high school, but not been able to go to college. To wit: there is no reason for many young people to put forth the effort to get a diploma, when there’s nothing to do with that diploma. Many of the service industry jobs they can get, they can get with a GED or less.
Rochester needs more lower-tech industrial-level jobs where people with only a high school diploma can make a living wage. As much as I, as an educator, want everyone to get the best and most education possible, I recognize that not everyone is college material. Those people deserve to be able to make a living as well. It should not require stitching together 3 jobs’ worth of income to be able to make ends meet.
How do we get those lower tech, higher paying jobs (higher than Wegmans or Wal-mart, anyway) here? That’s an answer I don’t have.
“He who dares not offend cannot be honest”
-Thomas Paine
Interesting article, with a lot of numbers thrown around, with the exception of one number. ACTRochester.org says that 79% of black “families” in the city of Rochester are single parent for the 2007-10 period, up from 74% in 2000. Nationally, the percentage of black “families” that are single parent is 63%. The black “family” has disintegrated and this is a direct contributor to poverty. The proliferaton of Dr. Conrad Murray “family values” in the black community means that a guy that fathers 8 kids from 7 different mommies is not all that unusual. The only way to change this is to demonize single parenthood in the same way we demonize other things in society that we want less of – cigarette smoking, obesity, texting while driving, and more. We just collectively need the guts to call a spade a spade. The “lifestyle choice” of having kids out of wedlock is wrong, and should be discouraged. I, for one, and sick and tired of paying for somebody else’s irresponsible lifestyle “choices.” Enough is enough.
Another ironic essay by Towler, seeing that she has saw fit to not hire even one single black person or hispanic from the “City” of Rochester for her newspaper. Feel free to look at the staff names and google their pictures. Not one minority. And then have the gall to wax on about employment discrimination. PLEASE!!!!