The Disproportionate Overrepresentation of Minority Youth in ...

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It just goes to show that is all African—American kids in this community
were from two—parent families, living in Eldridge (a small suburban/rural
town outside of Davenport), going to North Scott High School, and their
parents were employed, we wouldn’t see them either. It’s a combination of
the risk factors, and because of their exposure to the risk factors we see
more of them. It has nothing to do with the color of their skin in my mind.
Just because you’re poor doesn’t mean you’ll be delinquent, but you have
to overcome so much more when you’re poor.
One reason, obviously, they have been caught. Being at the lower end of
the spectrum they probably don’t have the coping skills that a lot of whites
who come from a more middle class have. Although I think that if you
look at low income whites, you will probably find a good balance of
people who get in trouble from that unless they feel they can fight their
way out of the system or Use the system. People feel discouraged and
sometimes victimized by this system, especially minorities.
I think there’s institutionalized racism in America. There’s lots of reasons,
I kind of attribute it to white people not understanding black people. I
don’t think they mean to. I think it’s ignorance, not a lot of studying or
understanding, not living around black people, listening to what they were
told, believing in myths and other hypocrisies or stories. It’s unfortunate,
but I really attribute it to a lack of understanding on the part of white
people. I think black people tend to understand white people a little better,
because they’ve been in the minority so they can see how we operate. And
not enough white people have been in a situation where they’ve been
around a lot of black people, until later in life, and then sometimes their
ideas are formulated and then they have to work at changing themselves.
That’s kind of where I believe a lot of the problem lies.
I think that the way society has treated non—whites has a lot to do with it
but then I think that there comes a certain point when you can’t blame
society anymore and you need to take care of it on your own. I think it is
because of the breakup of the family and the high incidence of poverty and
the single—parent families and lack of education and unemployment and
alcoholism and all of those things and I think that would certainly affect
me.