From school, I had always learned that poorer neighborhoods, higher crime, and lower college attendance for the black population  was the result of something called institutionalized racism, where limited resources and access to quality education and jobs, and the funding for these, begot those results, even if they were legally allowed to be successful, rich, and get a quality education. From my mother at home, however, she would tell me that they just had “different values.” She would say, and the CQ researcher echoed, that their family structure is weaker, and it’s not like something was stopping them from attaining the same stuff we had–it was that they didn’t work for it. I found myself disagreeing with her, but somewhat with my eyes closed–in my high school, a highly diverse place with a very large minority presence, few minority students were in my honors classes. It wasn’t proportional at all, even if we’d all had the same introductory classes the first year. When I was in the same classes as them, they didn’t seem to care. Maybe they didn’t.

I find it interesting how some conservatives blame welfare for single mothers for the falling apart of the family unit. I would like to question how Walter E. Williams, the economy professor on page 178, knows that the family unit a generation out of slavery had a family unit of more integrity, and what other factors may have been playing into those disparities between those then and the ones now.

While I do believe that unequal access to resources like funding and education are part of the problem, I’m not willing to believe that there isn’t a “moral” issue as well underlying these problems.