first off, cimmaron, spare me retro-cliches like this:
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If we just throw more money at the problem, it will go away."
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which has nothing to do with anything that i actually have said in this thread.
when i made this, the last thing i would have expected is to find myself 80 posts in having spent alot of time fighting of conservative phantoms and/or boogeymen and almost none talking about the actual topic.
so forgive me if i'm a bit tired of it and want to make that move stop.
i think the core of the problems, the space from which most depart and one way or another seem to return to, lay with the history of the united states since the reconstruction, in the fights that were waged against federal attempts to redistribute land, for example, to the african-american population after the end of the civil war. this was at the origin of the southeastern right's obsession with states as a theater of conflict. knowing that their often racist politics would get shot down at a national level even in 1870... so it lay in a regressive-to-racist politics in the southeast triggered by apparent status anxiety by petit bourgeois whites.
it lay in the development and repetition of patterns of spatial segregation by class and race, a pattern that repeated across several reorganizations of capitalism and so is more a quirk particular to the us. spatial segregation is a real problem: what you don't see doesn't exist, yes? that's the "common sense" approach. spatial segregation coupled with local control over school funding has generated enormously bad results for a whole spectrum of people---but folk prefer to pretend somehow that the educational system in the united states is a meritocracy---and conservatives who have some Problem with the notion of the public just as they have a problem with the social and a problem with history pretend that privatizing the problem will solve it. but that's about diminishing the quality of education in order to produce more conservatives, in my view, all this "voucher" shit.
it lay in long-term patterns of discrimination as to credit and ownership, long term policies aimed at treating the african-american population as a management issue.
so we collectively, socially, reap what we sow.
the insistence on trying to locate some "internal cultural factors" disconnected from reference to the history that shaped them, that they repeat, is just an attempt to blame the population for the effects of the policies that have conditioned them as a population--in other words, the same old conservative nonsense.
i have tended for a long time to find the message of people like malcolm x a whole lot more coherent than that of mlk---without substantive economic reorganization, the united states is an oligarchy in which people walk around bragging about how free they are by centralized command. so i think to address these problems--the general problem of the inequalities in the distribution of wealth and the disproportionate effects of this inequality on african-americans, will require a significant socio-economic reorganization.
which would start with a wholesale rejection of everything about neoliberal ideology.
i'm at work, so this is a kind of preamble. i doubt i'm the only person who thinks along these lines tho, so feel free to add stuff or change stuff or write something else.