Jonathan Chait and Ta-Nehisi Coates have been hammering each other in a fascinating series of posts and ripostes over American blackness and its "culture of poverty," which Andrew Sullivan has helpfully collected here. There's no need to recap all their arguments, since you can read their posts yourself, but I will synopsize them as briefly as I can. Chait:
We have several points of disagreement, the most important of which is that Coates now maintains that there is no such thing as a culture of poverty. [And] Coates initially made the provocative claim that Barack Obama’s views about the relationship between culture and poverty are not only wrong but essentially identical to those of Paul Ryan. In his follow-up, he concedes that they are not identical, but maintains nonetheless that they are wrong.
In regards to black people, America's heritage is kleptocracy.... There is no evidence that black people are less responsible, less moral, or less upstanding in their dealings with America nor with themselves. But there is overwhelming evidence that America is irresponsible, immoral, and unconscionable in its dealings with black people and with itself.
I can agree with both Chait and Coates, notwithstanding their disagreements, which may seem like a contradiction but is, rather, a synthesis of sorts--because both Chait and Coates neglect class as the fundamental struggle in American society.
The United States is indeed a "kleptocracy"--albeit one with a happy-face--but hardly "in regards to black people" alone. There are poor but "responsible" whites and browns, just as there are "upstanding" middle-class whites and browns; nonetheless their share of the nation's bounty continues to stagnate at best, as the plutocracy walks away with the mother lode. And because the plutocracy owns the U.S. Congress as well as a fair number of state legislatures, I wouldn't look for a deluge of remedial redistributionism anytime soon.
Not to get too historically and analytically Marxist on you, but class has always dictated our national contours. Whence American racism? From wealthy plantationists who tired of the expense of white indentured servitude and the troubles wrought by unruly native Americans (the late Edmund Morgan was most brilliant on this), thus the "inherent inferiority" of the imported and darker skinned was invented. Reconstruction? In the end, plutocratic weariness of sociopolitical reform; time to move on with rapid industrialization and the concentration of wealth. Jim Crow? A political as much as a social movement, orchestrated, again, by wealthy whites desperate to split poor whites from even poorer blacks in the vote; and, once the latter's vote was negated altogether, to keep poor whites content in their impoverishment by convincing them of their inherent racial superiority.
The predominantly white upper class self-perpetuates through Ivy league networks just as "the ghetto"--I recall as a teenager helping my Hispanic friends hurl beer bottles at police cars attempting to patrol KC's West Side--is self-perpetuating in multicolored ignorance. At the secondary level the educational "system" is rigged through its chief funding mechanism: the property tax. Poor white schools and poor brown schools obey black schools' law of physics--absent proper upkeep, they deteriorate at the same rate.
Coates is right: "there is overwhelming evidence that America is irresponsible, immoral, and unconscionable in its dealings with black people and with itself." What he omits is that "itself" includes the same irresponsibility etc. for whites and browns and native Americans. It's not just or even principally a black problem. It's a problem of class, which both Coates and Chait, rather astonishingly, ignore.