Black Youth | Who is responsible?

I’ll ask you a question which I asked myself not long ago when presented with the problems many black youth face; if you want to get your house tidy, do you tidy the house or do you first stop allowing people to tread dirt through your home?

I ask this because for any community you have the internal and external stressors of that community. For example, for the black community, internal stressors may be:

• 9 times the rate of interaction with the judicial system in comparison to white youth
  
• Black children are 6 times more likely to be excluded in the UK
  
• Black earning power is 7% less in the black African community
  

This means more black people in prison, less with an education and less earning power. Every single one of these factors doesn’t just slow the rate in which black people can climb the socio-economic ladder. It may in fact mean that we fall further and further behind. This is partly due to wealth compounding, ie wealth has the potential to grow faster and faster.

The issue is that if you aren’t able to keep up, you’ll be left behind. This may be partly why the black community, despite being one of the first immigrant groups to the UK in modern history, is still one of the bottom 3 earning ethnic groups in Britain and the US, too.

These are problems we have to address, and do address, every day. Every black person I met growing up was told “you have to work twice as hard to get just as far”.

However let’s look at external barriers to our progression

• For some reason black youth are sentenced to longer prison sentences for the same crime and are up to 12 times more likely to be stopped and searched  
  
• Black children in the US are more likely to be disciplined for the same behaviour. This is suspected by many to me the same in the UK, too
  
• Black people are paid 17% less for the same standard of education
  

“teachers “increased the severity of suggested disciplinary actions when the race of the teachers didn’t match that of the child.”

Teacher Bias, Elephant in the Room

So we can see here how our community is experiencing disadvantage which is probably predisposed from a combination of what is within and outside of our control. So what do we focus on first? Myself and K from 1 Step Away From discuss barriers to our youth progressing.

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