Why Does Anyone Want To Be Mayor of New York?

As a public Max Rose fan, I was happy to see he's apparently bouncing back from his 2020 re-election defeat and pursuing a run for mayor of New York City. The re-election defeat was disappointing, but it should not be a career-ender -- along with Joe Cunningham (SC) and maybe Kendra Horn (OK), Rose's 2018 win was probably among the biggest upsets of the last midterm and was always going to be difficult turf to hold onto once the blue wave inevitably receded. So I'm glad he's getting back on the horse, though I suspect it will be a crowded field and (to the extent anybody cares what I, a non-New York, thinks) I'd want to give everyone a chance to make their case.

But really, my main reaction when I read Rose's announcement was to wonder why anyone would want the job of New York City mayor? From my vantage point, the mayor of New York appears to the official home base of political no-win situations. There are a million-and-one interest groups, a barely functioning bureaucracy, all the challenges facing any urban center (but bigger, because New York), all with just enough influence to be blamed but not enough to actually hold responsibility.

I mean, look at de Blasio. I remember when he first ran for the post, he had a progressive-populist left (remember when the NYPD literally turned their backs on him? That'd be progressive gold if it happened in 2019 instead!). Now, six years into his term, everybody hates him. He almost impresses in the degree to which he's forged a cross-city, cross-ideology, cross-everything coalition united around the core conceit of despising Bill de Blasio (the pandemic isn't helping things, but this dynamic predates that). De Blasio's predecessor, Michael Bloomberg, was rich enough that essentially nothing mattered about his tenure, but it certainly didn't end up helping him one whit when he ran for President this year. And before that we have of course Rudy Giuliani, who managed to take a gift-wrapped political present as "America's mayor" and parlay it into perhaps the most embarrassing presidential campaign of my lifetime (and following that ... well, we all know where that story goes). Who on earth looks at that history and thinks "me next!"?

To be clear: I'm glad that there still are talented figures who want the job. It'd be far worse if they didn't; a place like New York needs and deserves smart, ambitious politicians who are willing to tackle the myriad problems it faces as the biggest city in America. And there's an alternate universe where mayor of New York is considered a real prize.

But boy oh boy, count me as glad I'm not one of the candidates for the job. Whoever ends up emerging out the other side as the next mayor of the Big Apple, wish them luck, because I'll bet they need it.

Who Benefits from a National Popular Vote?

Hillary Clinton will win the national popular vote.

This is a lot less relevant than it seems. Legally, of course, it's entirely irrelevant: we elect our President through the electoral college system, not the popular vote. And even as a talking point, its bark is worth more than its bite. Just because Hillary Clinton won the popular vote under  the system we have (where the popular vote isn't the prize) doesn't mean she would have won had a popular vote plurality been the deciding factor. Both candidates' strategy would have been very different had the popular vote been the deciding factor; perhaps if Trump had an incentive to focus on ginning up more votes in, say, Los Angeles, the numbers would work out differently. It's not implausible that Clinton would have won the popular vote anyway, but it's a hypothesis supported by moderate -- not overwhelming -- evidence.

Nonetheless, the fact that we've now had two elections in 16 years where the popular vote winner was the electoral college loser has put our status quo system under unprecedented scrutiny. My inclination is to support reform: it's hard to justify the electoral college (particularly since it is about to fail at one of its original justifications -- ensuring that a wave of populist demagoguery doesn't put a manifestly unqualified hack in the oval office).

Perhaps the only plausible contemporary justification for the electoral college I've seen is that it forces candidates to appeal to a wide range of Americans, instead of just concentrating on big cities. Who would spend time in rural states like Iowa or New Hampshire were it not for the electoral college incentive? The claim is that, if we only decided things by the popular vote, our presidential election campaigns would be fought out only in our biggest cities, leaving many Americans on the outside looking in.

I don't find this objection compelling for two reasons. First, the electoral college also very obviously causes large swaths of America to be overlooked. "Safe states" like California or Texas (or Delaware or Wyoming) are entirely ignored. And if certain regions have to be ignored in a democratic system, in a democracy it seems like "having fewer people" is a pretty decent metric for allocating our attention.

But second, I'm actually unconvinced that we'd see widespread neglect of rural America in a popular vote model. The way actual presidential campaigns operate in swing states is illustrative. In Wisconsin, for example, it's not like Democrats and Republicans spend all their time fighting for votes in Milwaukee and Madison, and ignore the rest of the state entirely. Rather, there is plenty of attention paid to the outlying regions -- particularly by Republicans, who try to drum up support from many smaller counties to counteract huge Democratic margins in the cities. This seems to be pretty standard across most contested states. So why wouldn't we see the same dynamic play out nationwide: Republicans rallying many small-population regions to try to overcome large Democratic margins in cities?

And this brings me to my final observation. I support a national popular vote model because it seems more democratic than our status quo. But I think people are being mislead in thinking that it necessarily benefits the Democratic Party. Many large urban centers are in blue states that are not currently contested. Many rural areas, by contrast, are in purple states which are absolutely contested. In other words, our political system right now has Democrats and Republicans nip-and-tuck in a situation where Democrats do try to appeal to rural and exurban voters, and Republicans basically don't try to appeal to urban voters. It seems like the GOP has a lot more room to grow if, as it'd have an incentive to do in a popular vote system, it starts making a serious play for city votes (it's also true that in doing so it may have an incentive to moderate itself by appealing to a more diverse constituency that it currently ignores).

Again, my small-d democratic preferences aren't based on what helps the large-D Democratic Party. But this is a note of caution about thinking that a popular vote model will necessarily be a boon for progressives. It may well help the GOP more (though it also might help the GOP break out of its increasingly radical shell).

Trains and Their Alternatives

By far, my favorite species of libertarian writing is the article which attacks a government spending project by articulating all the other spending projects -- also opposed by libertarians -- that could instead receive the money. This Reason article making fun of a new light rail project in downtown Detroit is a great example of the genre.

I don't know enough about the particulars of Detroit to know if the project makes sense or not. I do note that reviving urban cores via densification around light rail hubs has a very strong record of success and plays into the increasingly car-less preferences of the millennial generation. Given that this is pretty much the trend in urban revitalization, you'd think the article might mention it somewhere, but alas. Indeed, the article seems peculiarly attached to the thesis that "downtown" is a doomed concept which fell apart in 1967 and will never rise again -- a theory that seems to my ears to be, what, a decade out of date? At least? The trend in the United States has been towards restoring the central nature of "downtown" areas, as young professionals like being able to walk (or take a quick hop on public transportation) to their jobs, their favorite restaurants, or their after-work hangouts. So the idea that Detroit would benefit from following this path is hardly some sort of absurdist boondoggle.

The real joy though, comes in all the caveats that are snuck in throughout the article, much as a parent might hide vegetables under the mashed potatoes. "Detroit's light rail line could be written off as a typical government pork fest, if only a large share of the construction funds weren't coming from private sources." Uh-oh -- sometimes private benefactors make choices with their money that don't perfectly align with Reason's read on Rational Choice Theory? Say it ain't so! What about convenience? Well, obviously, the best way to think about that is their absurd hypothetical where a local business magnate uses his god-given right as a Free Market Maker issues some sort of decree to "mandate that his employees utilize the new light rail line in their daily commutes after it opens in 2016." The idea behind these light rail projects typically is that people move close to the train stations and don't drive anywhere, but that really basic concept is again nowhere to be seen.

And what about the "26 percent of Detroit households that don’t own cars"? Here, Reason suggests that further investment in the city's bus lines would be a better use of the money. And maybe so -- there are a lot of reasons to favor rapid-bus transit over train lines, greater flexibility being among the most prominent! But of course, if that was on the table it would be another government spending atrocity Reason would oppose on principled libertarian grounds. And even if Reason was remotely likely to offer its full-throated support to massive government subsidies to local bus lines -- which I don't think we'll see in any form except as a hypothetical counterplan to actual proposed projects -- the fact is one of these projects is on the table (thanks to private money, no less), and one isn't.

So yes, color me skeptical that their problem with the rail project stems either from Reason's deep understanding of contemporary urban redevelopment policy or their heartfelt commitment to bus service.

The Ghetto Ghetto?

Ta-Nehisi Coates hits back -- hard -- at the essentialization of folks who hail from the "ghetto".

What I know about "inner city blacks," of those who "act ghetto," is the same as what I lately came to know about about suburban whites, about Puerto-Rican New Yorkers, about Ivy Leauge graduates, about gay conservatives, and Israeli-Americans. That they are all different from us all and from each other, that they deserve to be treated with the same nuance, with the same soft touch, with the same eye for complexity and dimension that you'd want for your own family in friends.

My partner Kenyatta says that one of the things that convinced her to go to Howard was a habit she observed among some of her white friends. She was a smart girl, well-spoken and kind. Sometimes when she'd gotten close to a white girl at her school, the girl would make some casually prejudice remark about black people and then say, "But you're not black." The point being that, despite Kenyatta darkness, what they saw as "black" was everything that she was not. She talks about jhow she initially took this as a compliment, and then she realized the true insidiousness within it--that had they exchanged no words, said white friend would have drawn the same conclusions about her.

In that same spirit, I think people who meet and talk to me, who read this blog don't think of me as "ghetto." But I'm not sure they'd think the same if they saw me at 8 A.M. on Lenox Ave, rocking the black hoodie and grey New Balance, on my way to the Associated. Ghetto, in its most unironic usage, is a word for people you don't know. It's word that allows you to erase individuals and create boxes. It's true that I was different than most of my friends--but most of my friends were different from my friends. All people, at their core, ultimately are.

PostBourgie weighs in as well. Two excellent posts.

Friends and Classmates

A Wall Street Journal editorial urges President Obama to continue DC's school choice program, which, among other things, has provided the scholarships that allow two of Malia and Sasha's classmates at Sidwell Friends to attend the school. Meanwhile, the Heritage Foundation has put up this video with more student voices pleading with Obama to save their scholarships (via Greg Sisk):



I've written before on my feelings on the school vouchers debate, including my discomfort when wealthy White liberals box in students of color into schools they'd never dream of sending their own kids to. At the same time, I remain convinced that school choice is not a solution to the problem -- at best it is a stop gap measure that will help some kids, some times, but will do very little to resolve the bigger issues plaguing inner-city education. There is simply no way that "school choice" will provide a good education for every child, and frankly, it's not designed to. If it is an escape hatch, it is a very narrow one.

Now, I'll be honest -- at this point, I'm willing to support a stop-gap compared to just ignoring the problem. But my fear is that voucher advocates don't recognize that the policy is insufficient to get us where we want to go. Viewing vouchers as a panacea when that is clearly false, voucher advocates don't get broader systematic reform. That's its own problem, and one that worries me significantly.

Those Inferior City-Dwellers Need To Stop Being So Elitist!

In all my years of reading CNN, rarely have I seen a column as schizophrenic, offensive, and breath-takingly idiotic as the bit Ruben Navarrette just phoned in "defending" Sarah Palin. Navarrette trots out the tired canard that Palin was "targeted" by the media because she wasn't sufficiently "elite". I'd guess she was targeted because she wasn't sufficiently "talented", but that's just me.

But honestly, that's not what troubles me. What pissed me off to no end was Navarrette's hit job on Colin Powell, whom I lauded earlier this month for striking back against the idea that there is something inferior about the "values" of big cities. "[M]ost of us don't live in small towns," Powell said. "I was raised in the South Bronx, and there's nothing wrong with my value system from the South Bronx."

Navarrette's response to this is astounding:

You'd think the presidential campaign was about conservatives picking on urbanites. It wasn't. Sure, some Republicans probably made a mistake by using phrases such as "real America" or "real Americans" as a rallying cry for the base. Americans who live in cities might have thought they were being slighted.

Gosh, what an absurd thought! Cast aside that "some Republicans" includes Palin herself, the woman Navarrette feels compelled to stand up for. The idea that the Republican Party isn't anti-urbanist is so fanciful I didn't even realize it was up for discussion anymore. There is virtually no overlap between "city resident" and "Republican" voter. Cities are primarily made up of groups that the GOP has always dripped contempt for: non-Christians, people of color, and GLBT folks. Nobody misses the code: When Republicans talk about "San Francisco values", they mean gay; and when they talk about "cosmopolitan elitists", they mean Jews.

But what's most striking about Navarrette's piece is that -- literally paragraphs after saying that nobody has anything against city people -- he then proceeds to launch into a broad-based attack assailing the values of ... urban dwellers.

After Powell attacked Palin, one of the governor's most vocal defenders, conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh, returned the favor by attacking Powell.

"What is this hatred for conservatives and small-town people and Sarah Palin?" Limbaugh asked on his radio show. "I know a lot of people that are from the Bronx, Gen. Powell, and if you think the values there in the Bronx today reflect the ones you grew up with, take a trip back and see if the street corners and the activities there are the same as when you were growing up."

Limbaugh got it. When people use phrases such as "small-town values," it's as much about time as it is place. The idea isn't that people who live in small towns have better values than people who live in cities. It's simply an attempt to recall, with nostalgia, what life was like when more Americans lived in small towns.

It used to be that more families ate dinner together and high school students worked summers and after school. It used to be that our schools didn't make excuses for why some kids don't learn because they were too busy trying to teach them.

It used to be that parents weren't interested in being their kids' best friends, only good parents. And it used to be that people pulled their own weight and would never dare ask for a handout.

Rush %*%#ing Limbaugh? And you're trying to pretend like you're the victim here? This defies belief. And you know what life was like when most American's lived in small towns? I couldn't tell you -- Jews often weren't allowed in, and Blacks got lynched. I actually have no problem with contemporary small town values -- but I'll be damned if I let this faux-nostalgia for apartheid America be recast as something noble.

I know people who grew up in inner-ring suburbs (like myself). And we're doing fine. I know people who grew up in small towns in America's heartland (like my girlfriend). And they're doing fine too. And I know people who grew up in the middle of America's great cities. And they're doing fine as well. There's nothing wrong with being from Bethesda, just as there is nothing wrong with being from Owatonna and there is nothing wrong with being from Chicago. And Barack Obama -- who will be our nation's first President with urban roots since at least JFK -- hopefully will let people like Navarrette know that, loud and clear.

Shooting Through Detroit

The gun-loving boys at The VC would love this post at the Detroit Blog, about Detroit's one remaining (legal) gun store -- owned by a Black man who counts Robert F. Williams as a personal hero and considers gun-control laws an outcropping of White racism. That's because they actually do the historical work of tying gun control to White supremacy. I wonder if, say, the National Rifle Association would be quite as fan-friendly to the Black Panthers though?

Look. You can't be pro-gun control and not recognize the fact that many of those laws have deep, deep racist roots. At the same time, I think it's pertinent that nowadays, it's the Black urban political leadership that is among the heaviest supporters of gun restrictions.

I think gun policy is a complicated issue. Though I think the laws do need to be tightened (primarily because extremist groups like the NRA have managed to keep even common sense regulations off the books), beyond some of the more obvious reforms (background checks, registration, assault weapons bans) I can see the arguments on both sides. It's important, I think, to remember that there is a significant branch of the urban Black community whose position on guns is fundamentally conservative, precisely because their current environment is so violent and deadly that they feel they need a gun for protection.

Anyway, the post is interesting. And if you want to know more about Robert Williams, I can highly recommend Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Willaims and the Roots of Black Power.

One Bazillion Points to Colin Powell

Gen. Colin Powell may have a bunch of stains on his conscience regarding the run up to the Iraq War, but he gets a lot of redemption for one line in this interview with Fareed Zakeria:

When [Gov. Palin] talked about small town values are good -- well most of us don't live in small towns. I was raised in the South Bronx, and there's nothing wrong with my value system from the South Bronx.

This anti-urbanist streak of the GOP is not just anti-liberal ("San Francisco Values" -- though that's also code for anti-gay). It's also both implicitly anti-Black, casting itself against the dark faces of the inner city, and anti-Jewish, as Jews are predominantly centered in and around cities and are the quintissential embodiment of the "cosmopolitanism" that Rudy Giuliani (of all people!) railed against at the RNC. Yet we cower to the idea that being from Wasilla, Alaska, makes one better than someone from Bethesda, Maryland, or the South Bronx, New York. It's good to see Gen. Powell take a stand against that fundamentally divisive and anti-patriotic sentiment.

What Are Dreams Worth?

This story through Feministe, about a teacher in inner-city LA fired for being too encouraging of political activism amongst her students, is interesting to me. Dyed-in-the-wool leftist I may be, but that does not make me comfortable with every manifestation of leftism. There are some things this teacher did which I think are fine and/or beneficial. I have no problem with afro-centric curricula. I certainly have no problem with the poetry of Langston Hughes (my hyper-White suburban high school taught Hughes, for crying out loud), or the autobiography of Malcolm X (one of the most important figures in 20th century American history).

And there are things that make me uncomfortable as well. The video the students created in support of the teacher, for example (it's on the Feministe post) -- where they refer to each other as comrades? That rang the wrong way with me. The Intifada poster? Obviously I'm not thrilled. In general, the type of leftism she seems to be encouraging is not the type that is to my liking, and I'd be lying if I said otherwise. So it does not surprise me that the LA school district is even less happy about it than I am.

But there was something else in that video that was worth mentioning. The part where the kids said that this teacher had made them believe they could do anything. That they could attend top four-year colleges. That they could become doctors and lawyers. It was a message, they said, that was being given by far too few educators at their school. And if that's the case, and this teacher is inspiring these kids to look beyond themselves and beyond their surroundings, I can deal with being made a little uncomfortable. It is well, well worth it.

Lots of people go through a radical left stage. A great many of the big conservative intellectuals of the 20th century spent time as communist or socialist sympathizers. Spending time as a leftist is not the worst thing in the world, no matter what your opinion of the politics. These kids are, if nothing else, engaged in the type of civic activism that is precisely what we want to see in our American democratic project. Particularly in the inner-cities, a more engaged, civic-minded citizenry is the first step to reform. People who care about their education, who care about their surroundings, and are willing to take on the bureaucracy to get what they think they need.

Any teacher who can inculcate those values, in my book, is a teacher who deserves to stay.

Keeping the Ex

Megan McArdle has a really great post up on the economics of hiring ex-convicts, and how we can restructure our system to make it easier. If we want ex-convicts to stay "ex-", we need to offer them some prospect of legitimate employment after their conviction. At the moment, that's basically impossible, making criminality the rational response. That's fine if you're okay with the status quo affecting many urban men: "catch-imprison-release-catch again", where the externalities fall nearly exclusively upon "certain" communities not-us. But if we want to actually do more than than watch from the sidelines as urban communities wither, rot, and die, then we need to start looking for ways to open up the current deadland of opportunity -- even for those who, like most of us, have made some mistakes in life.

The post was done at the request of Ta-Nehisi Coates, a liberal Black male blogger who is rapidly becoming one of my favorites. He wanted a differing perspective on the topic, so he enlisted McArdle, a libertarian-leaning conservative. McArdle's ideas are certainly tinged with that philosophy, but each one of her suggestions would be something I could endorse without hesitation. Most importantly, she is cognizant of the "the moral dimension" of the issue:

I don't know about you, but I've made a fair number of spectacular moral and economic mistakes in my life. Middle class kids, though, have margin for error. It's all very well to talk about how poor kids could pull themselves out of it if they did X, Y and Z, and I happen to believe that this is correct. The problem is that the first slip a poor kid makes is usually his last--as John Scalzi said, "Being poor is having to live with choices you didn't know you made when you were 14 years old."

McArdle's suggestions are what happens when you pursue integrated social discourse with an eye towards solving problems, not burying people who feel too problematic for us to handle. McArdle's views on the world are different from mine. But she pursues the issues in good faith, with an eye towards actually fixing the problem. That type of contribution is always welcome, regardless of political persuasion.

Parental Commitment

I find it interesting that in this post much of the comment debate is focusing on the issue of parental involvement or commitment to their children's education. I find this so for two reasons. First, nobody cites sources saying that urban parents are "less committed" to the education of their children. This is because "commitment" is a nebulous term. What are we talking about? If we mean "helping one's children out with their schoolwork", then obviously there is an advantage for wealthier, well-educated parents over poorer and more poorly-educated ones. If you have only an 8th-grade education, it's tough to help your kid with her algebra homework no matter how "committed" you are. If we mean "dedicating time and resources to improving your child's educational experience" (volunteering to read at elementary school, chaparoning field trips, raising money for new programs), the same thing applies: poorer families are less able to take time off work to engage in these activities, and have fewer private resources to invest. The parents at one suburban New Jersey raised $187,000 to send their choir to Vienna, Austria for a concert. It is not a failure of commitment that prevents parents in Anacostia from doing the same. These metrics of "commitment" boil down to the argument that in order for poor students in urban schools to succeed, they need to become rich, which is not a meaningful statement.

If "parental commitment" is to mean anything with a critical bite in the context of reforming urban schools, then, it has to be more abstract: parents who "value" education and learning, who are "committed" to extolling the importance of it. And I do believe that's what we're talking about when we say we want parents "committed" to education. After all, O'Reilly's quote in the aforementioned post was one that contrasted the "values" in urban versus suburban school districts. Unfortunately, it's devilishly difficult to measure "parental commitment" under this definition. This makes it all the more troublesome that people just assume that urban parents do not value education the same way that suburban parents do. Without any empirical evidence backing it up, the statement reeks of stereotyping and prejudice.

Several years ago, the Wall Street Journal tried to bank-shot an argument for parental commitment by claiming that the amount of money spent on schools was a proxy for how much a given community's parents cared about education. They did so in the context of arguing that more money, itself, was not an important factor in the educational achievement of students. To explain the strong correlation between high spending and high performance in many affluent districts, the Journal argued that it was not the money, but the value commitment that impelled parents to spend the money via taxation, that was responsible for the performance. But this, as Jonathan Kozol points out in his magnificant (and chilling) book Savage Inequalities, is belied by the fact that many parents in urban school districts do, in fact, vote to tax themselves at high rates -- far higher ones than most suburban districts, in fact -- in order to invest in the public school system. The problem, of course, is that even a higher percentage of income going to schools still yields massive inequalities when starting from a lower base. Most educational spending comes from property taxes, and the inner cities suffer from a deficit of high-value property. At the time of Kozol's writing, the property value of the entire city of Camden, New Jersey, combined, was less than that of a single Atlantic City Casino. But if the Journal is correct and willingness to spend what money one has on the public schools is a solid proxy for parental commitment to education, than commitment does not appear to be the inner city's problem.

The second reason I find this discussion interesting is the way in which it displaces discussion of alternative or systematic reform avenues -- particularly ones which might threaten the interests of suburban school districts (or even simply problematize the comfort suburban parents and graduates feel that the status quo which advantages them is "fair") -- in favor of aggressively foisting responsibility back on inner city families. Kozol notes that, while in reality the way we organize public schooling in America needs many changes and many reforms if it is to solve the problem of educational inequality

The search is for the one change that will cost the least and bring the best return. "Changing parent values" is the ideal answer to this search because, if it were possible, it would cost nothing and, since it isn't really possible, it doesn't even need to be attempted. [Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities (New York: Harper, 1992), 136]

Coupled with the lack of empirical evidence that urban communities actually suffer from a significant deficit of parent's who understand the value of an education, the discussion takes on the gloss of a very perverse type of wishful thinking: Though we have no proof that it's the parents fault that inner city students suffer, we hope it is, because the alternative is that the explanation lies in something we did, in how we organized the system, in the resources we give to ourselves and deny to them. These thoughts are scary, so we push them away and advocate "solutions" whose only benefits are not that they actually are geared towards the obstacles faced by urban schoolchildren, but that they don't require anything out of ourselves.

I don't disagree that parental commitment to the value of education is a very important thing for the development of children. But I do think it is in many ways a distraction. There is little proof that it is the major barrier facing urban school districts; it is way too convenient an explanation in that even to the extent it is "the problem" (as if there is only one!) it's one that requires absolutely nothing out of larger society (indeed, is uniquely resilient to social reforms); and as for students who do have parents who don't value an education, it's not like we can just give up and throw them to the wolves. As PG says, children are not "property of parents" in this respect -- if parents don't care about education, well, guess what, we still do. Since we can't reform the values of the parents directly, we're still left in precisely the same position as when we started -- looking at alternative mechanisms to reform our educational system so it fairly serves children in inner cities.

Who's Responsible?

I very much like Marc Lamont Hill's post on the question of "responsibility" regarding issues facing the Black (particularly urban) community. Working off Philadelphia's new "10,000 men" program, which trains (mostly Black) young men to enter dangerous neighborhoods and act as "peacemakers", deterring illegal activity, Hill grapples with the strategic benefits and drawbacks of programs preaching such personal responsibility. Of course programs like 10,000 men are beneficial, if for no other reason than that they offer an alternative to the "police state" model of crime prevention in run-down areas -- an approach which has decimated these communities and made entire generations view the police as enemies, rather than protectors. But the rhetoric of such programs -- that with sufficient virtue and work ethic, the Black community can eliminate its problems without any broader social change, is dangerous. Hill argues:

If we’ve learned nothing from the historic Million Man March –where African American men became the first group of people to launch a protest march against themselves– we found out that the government and mainstream Americans will never stop large numbers of Negroes from confessing their collective sins in full public view. The problem is that, instead of inspiring policymakers to support our efforts, such actions reinforce the absurd notion that violence and poverty can be eliminated by embracing a gospel of individual responsibility. In this case, by agreeing to “take back our neighborhoods” we concede the point that we lost them solely due to our own personal failings.

The last time I checked, joblessness and crack had something to do with it too.

Rather than demanding higher wages, better schools, and stricter gun laws, the current plan absolves the government of its responsibility to protect our most vulnerable citizens. For example, even if we are to accept the quixotic idea that ten thousand unarmed civilians can make peace within inner-city war zones, couldn’t we expect even greater results from ten thousand trained officers? Unfortunately, the current initiative makes no such demands from the State.

The obvious solution, and the one Hill advocates, is to do both -- personally work to reduce violence and crime in our own neighborhoods, while also demanding that society at large do its part to remedy the structural forces holding back urban communities: lack of jobs, rundown and inadequate educational facilities, and economic isolation, to name a few. Certainly, personal responsibility is one plank in the bridge that will lead America to a just racial solution -- but a bridge with one plank is not very useful, no matter how solid it may be. A total solution is what's needed, and anybody who tries to look at the problem from a single angle -- be it totally structural, or totally personal, is going to come up short.