Body Parts

School Choice and the Black Middle Class

The sad death of her son, twenty-six years old, while riding a motorcycle on a Los Angeles freeway, has brought an extended family and network of friends to our neighbor's home. For several days and evening, she has had their support and comfort, as well as advice. Naturally, as on every similar occasion in my experience, friends and family re-united, even under sorrowful circumstances, invariably turn to reminiscence of their childhood and youth together. Because our friendship with our grieving neighbor does not extend back that far, we could not contribute anecdotes; but we enjoyed listening to their stories and news. The news particularly interested me. There was much discussion of schools they attended and to which they sent or were sending their children. The schools were mostly private. In the case of one young cousin, who has elementary school children (and whom I saw nearly daily during the school year, as my walk took me by her school), she was removing them from public school. She has enrolled them in a nearby Catholic school, though she is not Catholic. I asked her about the choice. Well, it was her aunt's school, and the school of several other relatives. She made the choice, which entails considerable sacrifice, for the educational quality of the school. "My girls will learn more. They will learn discipline," she said, referring to intellectual discipline. In the crowded rooms, several other women volunteered similar information. One young woman had just graduated from a small Christian college in Texas. She said that she didn't want to leave Southern California for Texas ("It's so boring there"), but family insisted. She majored in biology and is now working as a surgical room assistant at a nearby university hospital and applying to medical school. The names of other, elementary and secondary, private schools were mentioned, but I was not familiar with them.

The choices of these families are similar to the choices of other middle class black families in our neighborhood. One family sent their two daughters to private local Christian colleges. The son went into the Navy (their father served in the Marines). This family lives in a modest home that could use some repair; but the condition of their house is clearly a sacrifice they made to pay for the high tuition of the private schools. They also have sent their daughters to Europe for month-long tours in the Summers. Last year, the oldest daughter, a teacher, travelled to New Zealand and Australia. The son sees the world with his job, of course. When they don't travel abroad, they travel to Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, and other ancestral home states to visit distant cousins.

Some nearby families have opted for public schools, of course. The daughters of two of our neighbors graduated from a state college; one is in business in Las Vegas and the other is headed for teaching in public schools. The men of another neighbor's family attended Sprawling Suburb's community college. No doubt, convenience and cost were a factor in their decisions. Military service was a common route to education and vocational training for black men on our street (I can think, quickly, of three black patriarchs on our street who were military).

The decision for education and the choice often of religious schools are integral to the pattern of life-decisions of these families that has brought them success. Family life; religious life with church attendance; maintenance of networks of kith and kin; owning their homes; several I know own their own businesses; college and often private college; travel. Sacrifice of one generation for the advance of the next.

Imagine how a school voucher program could expand and strengthen the black middle class.

How the Region's Agricultural Market Works

From Kimberly Pierceall, "Crops, livestock boomed in 2007", The Press-Enterprise (Riverside, California, July 24, 2008, E1):

" 'It was a year like I've never seen before,' said Gary Foster, general manager of Norco Ranch in Norco. The company has 1.3 million hens in San Bernardino County and another 1.7 million in Riverside County.

"After two years of record losses because of over production of eggs, the industry began cutting back.

"A dozen eggs were worth 49 cents in 2006.

"By the end of that year, the tide had shifted.

"A dozen eggs were worth 78 cents in 2007.

" 'We have never been that smart,' he said, calling the timing 'dumb, blind luck'."

Saturday Morning Southern California Horse Country

Arriving for a lesson at a Chino Hills stable

Shipping Explosives In Cargo Containers

From Scott Shane (New York Times News Service), "Inside interrogation of al-Qaeda planner", The Press-Enterprise (Riverside, California, Sunday, June 22, 2008, A1), from the interrogation of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, murderer of Daniel Pearl and planner of 9/11 attacks:

"Asked, for example, how he would smuggle explosives into the United States, Mohammed told CIA officers that he might send a shipping container from Japan loaded with personal computers, half of them packed with bomb materials, according to a foreign official briefed on the episode."

Mohammed's off-hand suggestion reminds us that shipping containers are the most likely route for moving a nuclear weapon into the United States. Yes, we know that Homeland Security knows this, that Congress has appropriated money for screening every container, that containers are checked for radioactivity, that most containers are checked, bonded, and sealed in foreign ports, at least those ports that participate in our security program. Despite the security measures, which get better all the time, a container plan must tempt terrorists. There are millions and millions of containers passing through a half-dozen US ports. Eventually, bribes, lax checks, or faulty surveillance equipment, and a container or two will slip pass security inspectors.

LA-Long Beach is the nation's major trans-shipping port for containers. As containers from LA-Long Beach pass through the inland region for seventy miles to begin their long passage through the deserts to the nation's metro-markets, the inland communities must have civil defense procedures in place. If an area-wide plume of radioactive waste is a possibility from an explosion, we must have plans for area-wide evacuation and reception areas out of Southern California already set up. We cannot assume, because we have not been hit badly since 9/11, that the threat of a terrorist strike against us has ended.

Violent Crime Follows Section 8 Dispersal of Inner City Gangs

Writing for Atlantic Monthly, Hanna Rosin chronicles the efforts of Memphis police and criminologists to determine the cause of new geographic patterns of criminal gang activity in their city. The cause is housing programs that move Blacks (in the case of Memphis) from the inner city ghetto to suburban housing, usually rentals paid through Section 8.

The Memphis finding is not news to anyone with their eyes wide open. In Southern California, as I have discussed in blogs, the clampdown on Black gangs in central LA simply resulted in their dispersal throughout the region, into Riverside, San Bernardino, and the Moreno Valley, for instance. Their arrival in the suburbs intensified the ongoing warfare between Latino gangs and Black gangs. The murder rate in San Bernardino is so high that it has decimated the social integrity of the city. Eastern Los Angeles County and Western San Bernardino County, around Montclair, has become heavily Latino, pushing Anglo populations further into the suburbs and leaving the older communities to their ongoing racial conflict.

We have long known about the effect of subsidized housing on this pattern. A decade ago, a son's friend took a job as a private security guard, was posted at a large apartment complex filled with Section 8 rentals, and was shot (in the butt, not fatally, thank goodness) within a month. He left the private security business. Less than two weeks ago, I advised a friend not to take an offer for a Section 8 apartment, because housing complex was so violent. She and her children would be living in a war zone.

We are long way from recognizing the pernicious effects of welfare programs on the nation's social fabric, and on the social integrity especially of our racial minority populations.

(Thanks to Instapundit for the Rosin reference.)

Will Gas Prices Stunt Growth of Suburbs and Exurbs?

On the basis of several interviews of former automobile commuters who are now taking light rail, in Pasadena, California, a journalist for The Wall Street Journal believes that the high gas prices will slow growth of suburbs and exurbs--those suburbs far far away. While the notion is interesting, it overlooks one real-world fact. In the major metropolitan centers, homeownership rates are lower than average. Working class and middle class city dwellers have to rent for modest accommodations. It is Los Angeles city's low rate--less than 50% of LA's households live in their owned residences--, coupled with high home prices that drives people out of the city into the surburbs. That situation isn't going to change. Even in this terrible housing market, the decline in housing prices have attracted buyers out of cities. Riverside County, Southern California, ground zero for the suburban housing boom and bust, has just experienced two months of sales increases, not declines. Once in the suburbs, the new settlers will be driving cars all over the place, even if, for a while, at maybe 8% to 10% fewer miles while gas prices are high. And while a small percentage of new suburbanites might elect to take commuter trains to work, the overwhelming majority will, still, drive their cars. The rise in gas prices will only force commuters into cars with higher gas mileages. Time to get real, folks; socialist ecotopia ain't on the horizon.

Shades of Brown: Commencement at Moreno Valley High School

The recent past and the future of Southern California were on display at the Moreno Valley High School Commencement yesterday late afternoon. We attended to celebrate a friend's graduation. The occasion was wildly, happily celebratory, with the several thousand family members and friends in the two football bleachers screaming to their graduate as he or she took the diploma, blowing horns powered by compressed air, and shouting to friends elsewhere in the stands.

The school graduated 441 students. I guess seventy-five percent of them were Latino, with most of the remaining students being black, and a sprinkling of Anglo whites and Pacific Islanders. There were almost no Asian students. The crowds, as well as the students, are a profile of the demographics constructed by immigration in Southern California in the past twenty years.

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The Moreno Valley grew rapidly in the 1980s. I remember hay fields, bean fields, citrus orchards, and horse ranches in the Valley in the early 1970s. The population increase began with black families. Affirmative action had at last brought significant numbers of black workers into the aerospace industry in Los Angeles County and Orange County. The pay was good. Many workers moved their families to the Moreno Valley where they could buy larger homes than in the coastal towns where they worked. The increase in population occurred so quickly in that decade that segregation did not have time to take place. New subdivisions intermingled black, white, and Latino with near randomness. In the 1990s, the Latino population increased rapidly to take advantage of the lower housing prices. Our friends, originally from El Salvador with three children born in SoCal, came to the Valley at this time.

Unhappily for the African American aerospace workers, the collapse of the Southern California defense industry in the 1990s threw most of them out of work and undercut the economic basis of the Valley's settlement. Nonetheless, the housing boom generated its own economic base. The warehouse distribution center around the Ontario Airport expanded thirty miles to the East to the Valley, to take advantage of the vast expanses of open land around March Air Reserve Base. Thousands of new industrial jobs were at hand.

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The hope and the problems of MoVal, as it is, not necessarily affectionately, known were fully displayed at graduation. Latino and black gangs coagulated and paraded themselves in their black or blue uniform dress. Gang members' tatooes ran up and down their arms, showed on their necks, and occasionally were branded into their scalps. In the festivities, with heavy police presence, there were no confrontations.

The hopes of the community crossed the graduation platform. The ceremony individually introduced and highlighted the ten graduating students with the highest G.P.A.  There were three young men and seven young women so honored, a ratio that perhaps reveals the great anti-academic social pressures on the boys and young men attending the high school. Nine of the ten students had been accepted to college; one graduate hadn't decided where she wants to go to school. All were going to a University of California campus--two to UCLA, three to UC Irvine, and four to UC Riverside. I thought to myself, UC is doing its job.

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Suddenly, Summer

On our walk, Bear noticed also the slow withdrawal of Winter and Spring. She peered around corners and glanced behind her, expecting to see some dogs we know lingering at a distance from us; but we were alone. The ever-present roar of freeway traffic in the background faded, as if it were being pulled away from us, toward the mountains to the North. The normal stream of cars, mothers rushing their children to the elementary school by the park, not stopping at stop signs, speeding up side streets to avoid police, had dried up. Quiet spread out from our feet, as if it were a thing, the tide of noise drawing back from the shore. A few children meandered toward school, surprising us by their stealth, their skate boards oiled and new rubber wheels rolling noiselessly along the asphalt. The air did not stir. The sun filtered softly through a loitering haze. We heard song birds. A moment cleared in our lives. I remembered as a boy in northern New England going to the spring in Summer to get fresh water. I pushed the leaves on the water away from the center of the barrel. I could see the water bubbling through the sand at the bottom. I dipped the blue, galvanized tip pot, with a long handle, into the water. The water as always sparkled brightly with light and drank cool to the lips.

American Genius 2 Buckaroo

Part 2 of my portrait of a Southern California horse trainer and owner of a boarding stable. Based on interviews, "Buckaroo" explores the colorful youth of the man before World War 2 at a cattle ranch in Arizona. 5 minutes long.

Buckaroo, here.

It Rains in Southern California

Two days raining in Sprawling Suburb. Cold thunderstorms, gray and masculine, coast in from the West. The wind roils the sky. Downpours flood through the opaque air, lashing the tile floor of the second storey porch in sheets, bass chords on a piano keyboard. Yesterday, the unexected, strenuous weather excited me. I ran up and down the house to look at the views from each level--from the third floor across the wet green of the arroyo golf course, the second floor to the old subdivision's asphalt street, mirroring the deluge, lastly the basement, looking out the windows of what had been originally a maid's quarters, to the ground level patio, with its wrought iron furniture and the massive trunk of the sheltering camphor tree obstructing the view. Today, served notice of the storm to come by yesterday's late evening weather news, I camp in the living room. With my multimedia laptop on the flat arm of a chair, I insinuate myself back into the little movie I am making. Even with clouds blocking the sun, enough light streams through the mullioned windows, one with 32 panes, one with 40 panes, to work without turning on the lamps. To remove the chill from the air, I light the gas log in the fireplace. Yellow flames cheerily illuminate the commodious room and wave shadows against the arched ceiling. The mahogany framed windows, the oak floor, the cream colored plaster walls and beams, the golden oak Stickley chairs and the sectional leather couch, all warm in the firelight, an underappreciated woman at a quiet bar, finally complimented for her quiet beauty, just before the lounge closes.