Black social misery is commonly framed as private individual bad choices
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
Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims
- DEFINE: The ‘privatization of black misery’ framing the reader needs when distinguishing the value gap from mere prejudice.