On a visit to Chicago one summer, Ta-Nehisi Coates, riding on the Dan Ryan, saw for the first time the dilapidated, high-rise public housing projects stretching beside the expressway. The projects were a “moral disaster,” he thought, not just for the residents but also for “the metropolis of commuters who drove by, each day, and with their quiet acquiescence tolerated such a thing.”
Coates clearly doesn’t mince words in his stories. But I think he could have more fully explored root causes in his Atlantic piece in August, “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration.”
Research has indicated that poor black children are exposed to more violence than other children, not only in their neighborhoods, but also in their homes. Evidence also strongly suggests that children frequently exposed to violence—boys especially—are more likely to be violent themselves later in life. Yet family violence has never gotten the attention it merits in the media. I cop to a bias here. I’ve been reporting on impoverished African-Americans in Chicago for years, and family violence has been a central issue in the lives of the people I’ve written about—again and again and again. I’ve been disappointed that journalists seem to shy away from the subject.
Coates discussed race, parenting, and punishment on the Atlantic blog five years ago. When it’s relevant, I wish he’d work his intimate understanding of this challenging issue into his full-length articles. It’s certainly relevant in a discussion of crime and punishment. As Coates observes in the recent Atlantic article: “Mass incarceration is, ultimately, a problem of troublesome entanglements. . . . It is not possible to truly reform our justice system without reforming the institutional structures, the communities, and the politics that surround it.”
