Blacksmythe

And gets bits right. But because they’re interested in dealing with intra-racial dynamics rather than inter-racial ones (which is odd given the subject) they miss the forest for the trees.

They also put the tired bit in about successful black men “getting blondes.” Though four times as many black men marry non-black women as black women do, note how small those numbers are. 400,000 sounds like a lot, but in the entire scheme of things that’s something like 4%. But there is some real stuff. Think about the economics of scarcity. What happens to the value of a given good if it is in high demand but low quantity? What about a good that is in high quantity but relatively low demand?

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Traffic coming off I35 Bridge, looking South

Originally uploaded by Mordac whose website can be found here.
The recent problems in Minnesota, New York City, and according to Craig Nulan, Montreal, and Saint Louis, all reveal the growing problems in managing our infrastructure. Many of the roads and bridges built during the first major wave of highway construction were overdesigned, so if the specs say that the structures can bear 100 tons, they can likely bear 200.

But this assumes constant maintenance. Which also assumes money to pay maintenance workers, to train maintenance workers. This also assumes education to train people to become maintenance workers. It is easy, perhaps too easy, to blame the current administration.

Make no mistake, particularly given the recent attempt of Tony Snow to blame this on the states (go to the “questions” section of the press release), the current administration does bear a great deal of responsibility. Not just because they happen to be the ones in charge and the highway system is clearly the responsibility of the federal government. But because the ideology they support–conservatism–is at base an anti-government ideology that rails against the use of the federal government for any purpose other than national offense and incarceration.

However they are not alone. John Edwards is the first major democratic presidential candidate to talk earnestly about economic inequality, and to a lesser extent racial inequality. Has any candidate over the last 30 years suggested devoting the billions of dollars needed to make sure our roads continue to work? Our bridges?

Apocalyptic movies like Mad Max, Escape from New York, and the like rarely say exactly how the world went to hell. But I don’t think it starts with a nuclear holocaust. It starts like this. A bridge crumbles here, a series of pipes burst there. There is a brief blip of public awareness, then back to business. But the ties that link cities to one another dwindle. The ties between individuals in cities dwindle.

Those gardens are starting to look better and better every day. Craig and Cobb are beginning to think seriously about this issue. We all should.

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I knew this was coming. Because we’ve been seeing this same pattern among black men. And what happens to us eventually trickles up, for good or ill. Note the last couple of paragraphs.

Several experts also said that rising income for women might affect marriage rates if women expect their mates to have at least equivalent salaries and education.

“When New York college women say there are few eligible men around, they’re right if they mean they’ll only settle for someone with an education akin to their own,” Professor Hacker said.

Doesn’t this sound familiar? Now among working class women I am not sure what the trends are, nor am I sure what the trends will be. Could be that they too will experience a rise in income while their male counterparts fall behind. But this may not be true. There are more manufacturing jobs for white men than there are for black men if for no other reason than the fact that many of those jobs are still the product of patronage and whites have more power to allocate those types of resources than blacks do. Or Latinos for that matter.

But whatever backlash we see, I’m not sure this genie will ever be put back into the bottle. Not unless some type of catastrophe occurs.

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I’ve started a new photoblog over at Vox. My man George reminded me about the following video.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/lxNAPqGDwCo" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

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No joke. What jumps out to me was the fact that Henry Ford (and I’m assuming they mean the hospital) buys most of their stuff from local gardeners. I know that most urban folk have gotten out of the habit of growing their own food–and sometimes it’s hard for me to remember that black Americans for the most part have a rural rather than urban history. But the sooner people get on this bandwagon and get off at least one of the tits that holds us hostage the better. As my own wallet gets increasingly tighter and tighter I wish we had our own plot so we could at least live off of our own vegetables for a bit. Thanks to Chow for dropping this story on me.

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