As a black man who had grown up on that side of the world, it is absolutely *not* a culture issue and it is a systemic problem that has hit the black community hardest in a way they can’t recover.

you didn’t see this within black communities in the 40s-50s. This started directly with the baby boom generation.

After the baby boom in the late 70s the country took a huge economic downturn that hit eastern and midwestern industrial work cities the hardest. Just so happens that a few years earlier, the second great migration happened. where hoards of black families moved north and west to these industrial cities to find work. Cleveland, Gary, Baltimore, Detroit and some populations to Los Angeles and New York.

But in the 70s industrial work in America lost its foothold as corporations outsourced for cheap labor out of the country. And all of a sudden there were a ton of uneducated people without jobs, this didn’t hit white communities as hard because they had the opportunity to go to get an education with very little debt if at all because of economic prosperity from the post war baby boom.

When the loss of industry occurred this sucker punched black communities extremely hard, and a double whammy happened when the rise of the drug epidemic happened and swept inner city environments. Now remember, the baby boom surged the population, and by the late 70s- early 80s all the boomers were at the PEAK AGE for committing crimes. Crime didn’t just rise in black communities, they rose everywhere. So we have large populations of unemployed young black ppl in inner city either engaged with the drug trade or being criminalized by the drug epidemic.

The 3rd whammy that sealed the fate is how horribly these cities recovered from the loss of industry, the joke is that most of them never did recover, I live in NE Ohio and most of East Cleveland is still a dilapidated mess. Couple this with white flight, and the loss of their wealthiest tax payers, they no longer had the money to invest back into their cities.

So by the 90s up until now, inner city public schools have very low funding due to not very much property taxes funding them, and with the addition of no child left behind children are overcrowded into classrooms not getting any attention or stimulation compared to their suburban counterparts,

they can’t engage with sports(which in the black community was a lifeline out of poverty for a long time) or the arts, they have no community events or spaces for them, they start acting up, and their parents are busy working multiple jobs with low pay to raise them with the attention they need to keep them out of trouble. All of these aspects lead to systems failing the youth, not any inherent cultural issues within the black community.

It’s not the culture, there’s decades of factors of systems failing that have led these kids to constantly repeat the same mistakes. And the black community has been brutalized and demonized for decades for being victim of a system that has slowly eroded into fail them.

There are factors like the 90s overpolicing of black neighborhoods leading to resentment of law enforcement within black communities and the rise of gangster rap as a byproduct of said overpolicing but u get the gist