Jobs are the key to stemming KC’s violence epidemic
In a recent editorial, The Star suggested a litany of proposed remedies for Kansas City’s spate of gun violence: tighter gun registration, early childhood education, access to health and mental care, improved relationships with police, even parenting classes.
Everything, it seemed, except jobs.
Nothing stops a bullet like a job. As President Ronald Reagan said, jobs make the best social programs. Find people long-term employment and our violence issues shrink to a manageable size.
Why? Because denying people work destabilizes households and fuels social problems.
Long-term unemployment undermines family formation and maintenance, as well as home ownership and building wealth. The general weight of those responsibilities helps govern behavior and teaches children values and restraint.
The Heartland Black Chamber and the Urban League of Greater Kansas City, among others, do important work on this front. But they can’t do it alone. We have an entire class of people denied the dignity of stability, giving them virtually no path to stakeholder status.
The worst thing societies do is create people with nothing to lose. Community violence is about the collective “us,” not a distant “them.”
We’ve sown unfairness and this current bloodletting is the bitter harvest: At least 87 homicides already this year. At least 25 people wounded by gunfire in one weekend.
What we’re really talking about is inequality. As Equal Justice Initiative founder Bryan Stevenson says: “The opposite of poverty isn’t wealth. The opposite of poverty is justice.”
How, in the most diverse America ever, do we still tolerate so many all-white or virtually all-white workplaces?
This idea of structural opportunity gaps has considerable conservative backing. Read Nancy Di Tomaso’s book, “The American Non-Dilemma: Racial Inequality Without Racism.” Conservatives have showered it with awards. Di Tomaso, a distinguished professor at Rutgers University, says white Americans of means practice “opportunity hoarding,” favoring people already within their circles. It’s not systemic racism, just tribal favoritism. Mechanisms of advantage and whites helping whites reproduce racial inequality.
Fifty years ago this year, President Lyndon Johnson’s Kerner Commission made a different though similar declaration: “White society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”
Economic violence is a real thing, and implicit bias isn’t just some innocuous preference. In employment and policing, it carries powerful and potentially disastrous consequences.
Regardless of the reason — systemic racism or rank favoritism — opportunity gaps lead to violence against people standing on the outside of the economy looking in. Black people’s unemployment rate is typically nearly twice that of white people.
African Americans face significant employment barriers, including recruiter biases. A 2004 study found that employers were 50 percent more likely to interview a person with a “white-sounding” name over a “black-sounding” one on résumés with identical qualifications.
Most proposed remedies to gun violence address symptoms, but only slow the shooting temporarily. To make progress, people need to feel as though they don’t need weapons to confront life’s complexities. People need employment.
We need enterprise zones, entrepreneurship, greater access to capital and federal investment. We need infrastructure work and companies that will open factories and call centers in communities under the most gunfire.
It will take time. We got here over centuries. It may take decades to see sustained results.
Two questions remain.
First, are we willing?
And second, will we do what Robert Fulguhm suggested in his book, “All I Really Need to Know, I Learned in Kindergarten?” Share everything. Say you’re sorry when you hurt someone. And when you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands and stick together.
Mark McCormick is director of strategic communications for the ACLU of Kansas.