Congressional Black Caucus: The Missing Black Male

Floor Speech

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Mrs. WATSON COLEMAN. I thank the gentleman from New Jersey for yielding and giving me the opportunity to lend my voice to what I think is a crisis that we are experiencing.

As my colleagues before me have pointed out, particularly Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, we are in the midst of an American crisis, shaking the very foundation of the Black community. The word crisis should motivate us to act now. Crisis describes a need for immediate action. Crisis calls for an immediate infusion of resources. Crisis requires a meeting of minds to find answers.

If thousands of people disappeared in the prime of their lives, their friends, their families, their coworkers having no idea where they went, we would be calling that a crisis. Yet, for years, our young, Black men have disappeared from their homes, their communities, and everything that would have been their lives.

Violence has taken them. Violence that we could have avoided with stronger schools to give youth the outlet that they need. Better jobs and job training to prepare these men to be supporters of strong families. Prisons have taken these men, prisons that we support through a legal system that dehumanizes men of color and enforces policies that all but ensure these men will enter an endless cycle of recidivism where more than 67 percent of them will come back into the communities with no preparation, no assistance whatsoever in becoming whole and healthy in their communities.

This is a nation that is quick to see these Black men as a problem, and this is a nation that seems to continue to ignore and deceive the slow, steady disappearance of 1.5 million Black men. This is devastating to our families and to our whole communities. It is past time that we see this for the crisis that it is and invest the resources and intellectual power that will end it and save our men and our families and our communities.

There is a very witty African American comic who refers to the crisis of Black men and the need to get them on the endangered species list, because when we recognize that a species is endangered, we place value on that species. We place resources in every opportunity to ensure that they continue, that they thrive, and that they live in the habitats that are healthy for them.

Well, this is a situation of an endangered species. This is, indeed, a crisis. So I thank my colleagues for drawing attention to this issue.

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