By Chris Powell
Every few weeks some government agency or news organization in Connecticut reports that members of racial minorities are more afflicted than whites in some respect. Two weeks ago it was the state child advocate’s office, which said children from racial minorities are far more likely to die from gun violence than white children.
This is supposed to be shocking. But the reaction it deserves is just: Uh, duh.
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A member of the child advocate office’s Child Fatality Review Panel — Pina Violano, a nursing professor at Quinnipiac University — says: “This is a tragedy every day in our neighborhoods that we are normalizing. We need to draw more attention to this. We need wraparound services for these kids. We need for them to be in school. We need mentors and we need mental health programs.”
No, thank you.
The murder of children is mainly the consequence of generational poverty. It won’t be addressed until generational poverty is addressed and particularly not until government examines why decades of poverty policy and its billions of dollars in spending have failed to reduce generational poverty and improve living conditions in the cities. Until that failure is addressed, please, no more “wraparound services,” “mentors,” and “mental health programs,” all the bromides of ineffectual social work, the nanny state, and bloated government.
If, as Professor Violano notes, children who are especially at risk are often not in school and in places where they shouldn’t be, what they need most is parents, who were omitted from the professor’s list of needs. Parents are “wraparound services,” or are obliged to be.
Most minority children in Connecticut’s cities live in single-parent households. Some are being raised by a grandparent. Many are neglected and when they get to school they don’t know how to behave. The misbehavior of neglected children has made hiring and retaining good teachers extremely difficult for city schools.
Within living memory nearly all children in Connecticut had two parents. So why do so many more children in the state, especially in the cities, no longer have two or even one? What happened in society, law, and government policy to change that? What might reverse the disastrous trend?
The child neglect of generational poverty, not gun violence, is the big tragedy Connecticut has been normalizing. Indeed, a whole industry has developed to normalize it, to try to remediate rather than eliminate it, and the more that gets remediated, the more that is produced to be remediated. All because no one in authority dares to ask: Where did the parents go? What destroyed the family?
Meanwhile state legislators are again contemplating whether Connecticut should give up on expecting members of racial minorities to comply with ordinary motor vehicle rules.
Last week the General Assembly’s Judiciary Committee held another hearing on a bill to prohibit police from stopping motorists for equipment violations — broken headlights and taillights, improperly displayed license plates, and such.
The complaint behind the bill is that such enforcement disproportionately targets racial minorities. Is this disproportion a matter of the racism of police officers, or is it, like the disproportion in child murders, a matter of racially disproportionate poverty — a matter of people who can’t as easily afford to keep their cars in good repair or who, being poor, lack respect for society and the law?
In any case there was testimony at the hearing that stops by police for auto equipment violations can get drivers violent and lead to shootings — either shootings of police by angry drivers or shootings by police of angry drivers who threaten them.
Of course no motorist likes being pulled over by police. But the premise of the legislation is that members of racial minorities simply can’t be expected to follow the law as everyone else is expected to do, so the law should not be enforced anymore.
That premise is disgraceful, demoralizing, and — yes — racist, but it may make sense if Connecticut believes that it will never alleviate poverty and the disproportions it imposes throughout life.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
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Chris Powell column 