Americans frame black suffering as private individual failure rather than state concern

Evidence

The result has been the privatization of black misery. Whatever bad things are happening in opportunity deserts, it is not the concern of the state or of Americans who don’t live there, beyond questions of their own safety and protection. They see it as an issue of individual behavior and bad choices. People who live in opportunity deserts, Americans think, have done something to deserve to be there. Social misery, understood in this sense, is a private affair. Somehow, people absurdly believe—and they have done so for much of our history—that black social misery is the result of hundreds of thousands of unrelated bad individual decisions by black people all across this country. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 65

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the value gap thesis — the privatization framing explains how indifference is maintained, linking to the reader’s goal of defining racial habits. — connects to: Post-civil-rights conservatives perceived the state as serving black Americans; Black poverty is publicly framed as bad character rather than missing opportunity — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black: How Race Still…, 114