In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

| 135 6 The Black Nationalist Cure to Disproportionate Minority Contact Kenneth B. Nunn It takes a village to raise a child. —African proverb “It takes a village to raise a child.” On this we can all agree. But what happens to the children when a village has been destroyed? Or harmed? If it takes a village to raise a child, then children cannot be raised properly when there is no village to take care of them. Less drastically, if it is fair to suppose that a well-functioning village will produce high-functioning children, then a poorly functioning village will produce poorly functioning children. While children are extremely resilient, even a resilient child has little chance to make it to adulthood without proper attention and care. In his best-selling book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell points out that success is not only the result of individual effort; it requires a supportive cultural foundation as well. According to Gladwell, “The culture we belong to and the legacies passed down by our forebears shape the patterns of our achievement in ways we cannot begin to imagine” (Gladwell 2008, 19). In other words, “it takes a village to raise a child.” To illustrate his point, Gladwell recounts an intriguing medical mystery surrounding health outcomes in the small town of Roseto, Pennsylvania. In the 1950s, prior to the introduction of cholesterol-lowering medication and widespread awareness of heart-healthy diets, doctors discovered that heart disease was nearly nonexistent in Roseto. Further investigation revealed that Rosetans had a remarkably good quality of life in general. According to sociologist John Bruhn, “There was no suicide, no alcoholism, no drug addiction, and very little crime. They didn’t have anyone on welfare. Then we looked at peptic ulcers. They didn’t have any of those either. These people were dying of old age. That’s it” (Gladwell 2008, 18). Careful research removed diet, exercise, genetic background, and environmental factors as explanations for the Rosetans’ good fortune. In the 136 | Kenneth B. Nunn end, the researchers concluded it was the unique social environment that the Rosetans had constructed for themselves that explained the health outcomes of the village—the way they communicated with each other, the way they shared, the respect they had for elders, and their commitment to civic involvement. Gladwell tells us that “[i]n transplanting the paesani culture of southern Italy to the hills of eastern Pennsylvania, the Rosetans had created a powerful, protective social structure capable of insulating them from the pressures of the modern world” (Gladwell 2008, 9). Gladwell argued that if doctors truly wanted to understand why an individual was healthy, they had to look beyond the individual. They had to understand the culture he or she was part of, and who their friends and families were, and what town their families came from. They had to appreciate the idea that the values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are. (Gladwell 2008, 10-11) African Americans, Native Americans, Hispanics/Latinos, Native Hawaiians , and Asian Americans are disproportionately represented in the nation’s juvenile justice infrastructure. They are referred to juvenile programs more frequently by social workers, they are arrested more frequently, they are charged with juvenile crimes more frequently, they are adjudicated more frequently, and they are more likely to be held in custody and referred to juvenile prisons and jails. The Department of Juvenile Justice refers to this phenomenon as “disproportionate minority contact” and in an effort to stop it has encouraged scholars, policymakers, NGOs, and public agencies to focus their attention on this issue. Since 1988, the department has instituted an array of programs, policies, recommendations, and funding opportunities seeking to reduce or end disproportionate minority contact, and an entire ecosystem of programs, grantees, and experts has been created to help end it. In this chapter, I argue that these efforts may have some success, but ultimately they will miss the mark of ending disproportionate minority contact. For they treat symptoms, not the disease. I argue that what causes disproportionate minority contact is the social and political oppression of young people ’s communities. The very existence of disproportionate minority contact is evidence of that oppression and the reason why these communities cannot function as they should. Unlike the Italian immigrants in Roseto, Pennsylvania, African Americans were not able to transport their culture intact across the Atlantic. [18.219.236.62] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 07:13 GMT...

Share