New Audio: Michael Fauntroy and William Julius Wilson Discuss Racism

I just had the honor of participating in a 30-minute discussion on race and its impact on the Black community with Harvard Sociology Professor William Julius Wilson on Minnesota Public Radio's Midmorning with Kerri Miller. Wilson's book, More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City, was the basis of the discussion.  We talked about the importance of acknowledging and challenging prevailing structural impediments to Black achievement.  Wilson's book is great and clearly makes that argument that those who believe Black dysfunction is about individual behavior are wrong and need to look beyond race to understand what is going on the the Black community. The book also urges the Black Left to acknowledge and deal with some of the cultural factors that get in the way of Black progress.

I hope you'll check it out when you can (and pass it along to anyone you think will be interested in it).  I come in about about 9 minutes into the discussion.

There is one point that I didn't get to make. Government unemployment statistics are a farce. My understanding of official data leads me to conclude that things are far worse in Black communities than the government statistics suggests. Every president since John F. Kennedy has played games with the way the statistics are presented and the result is that they don't fully capture what's really going on. For example, official unemployment statistics don't include people who are working part time because they can't find full-time work. They also don't include people who have given up trying to find a job. In an increasingly difficult economic environment, these groups are getting larger, not smaller, yet are not reported. Kevin Phillips has written persuasively on this.