Bloom - Swagger: 10 Urgent Rules for Raising Boys in an Era of Failing Schools, Mass Joblessness, and Thug Culture

SWAGGER

ALSO BY LISA BLOOM

Think: Straight Talk for Women to
Stay Smart in a Dumbed-Down World

SWAGGER

LISA
BLOOM

A THINK PUBLICATION

in association with

Vantage Point Books and the Vantage Point Books colophon are registered trademarks of Vantage Press, Inc.

FIRST EDITION: May 2012

Copyright Think Publications, 2012

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

Published by Vantage Point Books

Vantage Press, Inc.

419 Park Avenue South

New York, NY 10016

www.vantagepointbooks.com

Manufactured in the United States of America

ISBN: 978-1-936467-69-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data are on file.

0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Cover design by Victor Mingovits

To my son, Sam,
and my daughter, Sarah

my best work

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

THE URGENCY OF FIGHTING FOR OUR BOYS BRAINS

AT THIS very moment, through no fault of their own, our boys are caught in the vortex of four powerful, insidious, often invisible forces that conspire to rob them of their future.

First, our heartbreakingly subpar schools. To say that twenty-first-century America doesnt value education is like saying Donald Trump doesnt prioritize humility. Class sizes grow, as kids sit on the floor or are crammed into temporary classrooms in hallways or bathrooms. School buildings crumble, leak, and emit toxic fumes. Junk-food school lunches make our kids sick and fat (while bloating the profits of giant food processing companies), dropping their test scores. Teachers are reduced to begging on charity websites for books for first graders. At even the best schools our kids graduate without knowing the basics of US history or the rudiments of science. Our kids already enjoy some of the shortest school days and school years in the developed world. And now we are witnessing a new sickening trend: in over one hundred counties in America, state budget cuts have pared the school week down to only four days. Hooray! An extra day every week to watch Fear Factor and play Xbox!

The minds of our children matter so little that we barely notice how many of them are now checking out of school. Only one in three Baltimore kids graduates from high school. For those who stay in, the news isnt much better: one in five American high school seniors graduates illiterate. And every miserable bit of education news skews worse for boys. Boys underperform compared to girls in every grade and subject. Theyre medicated, disciplined, suspended, and expelled far more often than girls are. In what should be in screaming, fist-sized headlines daily, nationwide the majority of our African American and Hispanic boys drop out of high school. Some of our schools are little more than holding pens, releasing antsy, angry, unskilled young men into our communities.

There, young men are pounded by the second force: the harshest economy facing graduates and dropouts since the Great Depression. Economists may debate whether or not we are officially in a recession, but theres no doubt that our economy falters, as thirteen million are unemployed, nine million are underemployed, and millions more discouraged workers have given up on looking for a job altogether. For young men the numbers are even worse than the painful national averages. For them, the jobless rate hovers at 18 percentfour million young American men who want to contribute and earn an income and support themselves and their families, but who just cant find a job. Like the rest of Americas jobless, theyll likely resort to relying on public assistance. An astonishing forty-six million Americans today need food stamps (now issued on debit cards), a huge jump in the last two years.

One hundred million Americans are now poor or near poor.

Traditionally male jobs? They are mostly gone, and they are not coming back. Most of the jobs lost since the Great Recession commenced in 2008 disappeared from the predominately male sectors such as manufacturing. In 1992 presidential candidate Ross Perot warned of the giant sucking sound wed hear if the North American Free Trade Agreement passed, sending American jobs to Mexico, but even Perot could not have imagined the gargantuan vacuum created when millions of American manufacturing jobs were siphoned off to China, India, and elsewhere. Those jobs are now extinct in America. The giant sucking sound turned out to be a muted, steady bleed-out of the blue-collar male work force.

As they are negotiating their way through our miserable schools and jobless economy, our popular culturethe third soul-leeching, invisible forceseduces our boys with flashy, loud messages that manhood equals macho bravado, emotional numbness, ignorance, and thugdom. Man enough to pull a gun, be man enough to squeeze it, raps NBA star Allan Iverson. Im a leader, not a reader, said a once-leading presidential candidate in 2011, as if the two are mutually exclusive.

There is one road for boys who dont overcome their failing schools, who arent exceptional enough to find a job where there is none, who absorb the message that real men express anger via gun violence or who use or sell drugs to escape or to make a few bucks, and that road has one dead-end terminus: our ever-expanding, bursting-to-the-seams prisons. Our prison population has skyrocketed to its highest level in US history, more than any other country on earth now or in human history, more than anyone could have imagined a generation ago, more than we have ever had by any measureraw numbers, percentage of our population, you name it. Largely casualties of our misguided War on Drugs, which has caused the number of incarcerated Americans to quadruple since 1980, over two million of our people are locked up, 93 percent of them men and boys, with another nearly five million under an increasingly restrictive system of correctional control in lieu of or after incarceration. This fourth potent force, mass incarceration, deprives its subjects of a future by literally locking them in cages. Criminalizing human behavior like never before, our judges are required by law to mete out increasingly punitive, long sentences, even for children. Even after inmates are released, they remain under the heavy-handed control of the criminal justice system for years or for life, often unable to vote, get a job, secure housing, or support a family.

In the United States, one man out of eighteen is incarcerated or on probation or parole, and more are locked up every day. We may be the last country on the planet to lock up juvenilesoverwhelmingly boysfor life-without-parole sentences for crimes committed when they were minors.

New prisons are under construction as you read this, waiting to house the next generation of American boys.

BORN INTO this user-unfriendly world, one not of their choosing and entirely beyond their control, our sons need us now more than ever. Ensnared by these four powerful forcesfailing schools, an unwelcoming economy, thug culture, and a harshly punitive justice systemmore boys and young men than ever are on the sidelines, cut out of a middle-class life, scratching their heads as to how that happened. Although women and girls suffer under these conditions too, theres no question that, on the whole, these forces disproportionately hammer our boys.