Author: Wendi C. Thomas

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News News Feature

If It Makes You Happy …

I had one resolution for 2014: Do more of what makes you happy.

Beautiful in its simplicity, this resolution was at least 10 years in the making.

The problem: I was addicted to doing, accomplishing, achieving. My drug of choice: to-do lists. They were a tangible way to show progress — and I was a list addict.

Lists for work were on legal notepads: Call sources for a story; write 300 words by 2 p.m. Lists for home were written in blue ink on sheets of plain printer paper folded in half. I have been known to stop in the middle of wrangling a fitted sheet into submission to add “fold laundry” to the list, simply for the thrill of crossing it off later.

There’s psychology behind the (false) sense of control obsessive list makers derive from sifting their world into bulleted items. And there’s an entire personal productivity industry such as David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” system or one of my favorites, the pomodoro technique of timed productivity sessions.

In my 30s, I took the obsession to a new level, with lists of goals that, once accomplished, would signal my arrival in responsible adulthood. Or so I thought. On my list of “30 things to do before you turn 31”: Read one of the great classics each month (I started — and stopped — with Anna Karenina); purge the attic of 20-year-old newspaper clips from my days as a cub cops reporter in Indianapolis; master several new dishes to wow dinner guests.

But each year, when my birthday rolled around, I could only cross out a few goals. The rest were recycled for the next year, but as I approached 40, the list had no power to motivate. Instead, the sight of the lists was depressing. I saw it as a testament of my inability to GROW THE HELL UP AND DO MATURE GROWN PEOPLE STUFF.

And then, everything changed with the birth of my (first and only) niece two and a half years ago. I didn’t know you could love someone so completely that it terrified you. Suddenly I wanted nothing more than to spend hours playing peek-a-boo or letting her do stuff her mother wouldn’t, like liberate Kleenex from the tissue box, one by one.

What I wanted to do and what I thought I had to do were in constant conflict. Adding “perform Itsy Bitsy Spider ad nauseum” to my fastidious list felt indulgent. Would it be the first step on the road to slovenly loserville?

My “aha” moment came in a most 21st-century way: via Pinterest, where the inspirational quotes serve as a lazy woman’s version of Sunday mornings with Joel Osteen or Oprah’s “Live Your Best Life” tent meetings.

On this particular saying, there was no attribution. It wasn’t plastered over a treacly blue-sky background. Just seven words in a typewriter font: Do more of what makes you happy.

It was permission to make a new to-do list with just one item. I would do less of what I thought it was that adults did — tasks that were usually mundane and joyless. Instead, I would spend my time and energy with people I enjoy and on experiences that feed my soul.

Following this one rule meant that I knitted more. Nothing fancy, but my hands like the rhythm and the immediate (although poorly shaped and usually unwearable) results. I perfected a pound cake. I put years of childhood piano lessons to use and played classical music (poorly). I took my mother to Montreal and splurged on floor seats to a Cirque du Soleil show.

Sometimes being happy costs money, like when I went hiking in the Amazon with my cousin, my brother, and his girlfriend. But more often than not, happiness is free, such as karaoke night at my parents’ house. Listening to my Jamaican-born mother belt out the “Banana Boat Song” — it doesn’t get much better (or funnier) than that.

Or a recent afternoon with my darling niece. She’s in the pretend-play phase, which means she serves dinner in an overturned tambourine with a maraca-turned-spoon. On this day, we were playing bedtime. A book was my pillow, and she neglected to give me a blanket, but she told me “Sweet dreams!” as we settled onto the carpet.

Not 30 seconds later, my niece touched me on my shoulder to wake me. I opened my eyes. Her smiling face was just inches from mine. “Good morning, sunshine!” she said in her sweet, singsong voice. Before she dished oatmeal from a stacking toy cup, my niece asked, “Auntie Wendi, do you need a bib?”

That is happiness.

So for 2015, I have just one resolution: Do even more of what makes me happy.

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News News Feature

The Roots of Protest

Poverty is a form of violence.

It holds millions in bondage, locked into neighborhoods stripped of public or private investment, trapped in low-wage jobs. Often, this violence is state-sponsored via policies that benefit the wealthy at the expense of the poor, who are often brown and black. So it is a short walk from national protests against police brutality to calls for economic justice.

Rookie activist Tami Sawyer wants to help people in Memphis — the poorest large metro area in the nation — make that journey. In the past two weeks, the 32-year-old St. Mary’s alumna organized two die-ins — one outside the National Civil Rights Museum and another on Beale Street. These and dozens of similar protests nationwide were sparked by deaths of two unarmed black men — Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in Staten Island. In both cases, a grand jury failed to indict the white officers who killed them.

But the fury on display at protests and on social media is not directed solely at a warped criminal justice system. It is the entire game that is rigged.

“We can scream, we can yell, we can cry on TV,” Sawyer said, “but it will fall on deaf ears. We don’t have economic power.”

For proof, look at last week’s report from the Pew Research Center. Although the economy is recovering, the black-white wealth gap is now at its highest since 1989. In 2013, the median household wealth of white families ($141,900) was 13 times greater than that of black families ($11,000).

African Americans make up 14 percent of the country’s population, but black-owned businesses bring in just 0.5 percent of the nation’s receipts.

It is difficult to amass wealth when just two generations ago, black people were shut out of some trades, red-lined out of more desirable neighborhoods by racist lending policies, and banned from state-run colleges funded by their tax dollars.

With little inter-generational wealth, black people are more likely to be unemployed and, regardless of household income, live in neighborhoods where property values are falling. These poor neighborhoods are more likely to be hyper-policed, which puts black people at greater risk of encounters that could be defused by smart policing or that could end in death.

That’s an oversimplified version of how the criminal justice system functions in a larger machine that devalues black lives. (For the complete account, read Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow.) But in this context, it makes sense that the Ferguson grand jury decision, announced the Monday before Thanksgiving, spawned the #BlackOutBlackFriday shopping boycott. (Black Friday sales were down 11 percent, but pundits were loathe to credit hashtag activism.)

Sawyer supported the boycott but wondered about the long game. “You’re going to boycott on Friday, but when Cyber Monday comes up, you’re going to go spend money with Best Buy,” she griped.

Her Instagram page became a photo gallery to encourage people to shop with black-owned businesses on #buyblackfriday and beyond. “At the end of day, we don’t make it anywhere, if our own people don’t support it,” said Sawyer, who does employee development for government agencies.

Her vision of economic empowerment grew last week after a chance encounter with D’Army Bailey, a retired judge, attorney, and activist. At a black-owned coffee shop/office space in Uptown, Sawyer talked strategy with a man she’d met through the die-ins.

Bailey sat at a nearby table, eavesdropping. Then he interrupted. “He said, ‘Besides lying in the street, what else do you have planned?'” Sawyer recalled.

He was brusque, but she listened. “He said go to the county commission meeting and see what they’re debating today.”

She did. On the agenda was the economic impact plan for Graceland, which calls for $125 million in public investments to build a private hotel on the property and create 282 jobs.

“The jobs aren’t spelled out,” Sawyer said. “Are they going to be low-wage? Are they going to be middle-income?”

Those questions weren’t asked at the meeting. The lone vote against the plan came from Bailey’s brother, Walter.

“Being aware of how the money in this city is spent is important,” she said. “Our freedom as a culture ties into our economic freedom.”

Her next protest is planned for Christmas Eve, outside Graceland.

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News News Feature

The Cosby Show

In October 2006, a month before Bill Cosby settled a civil suit filed by a woman who accused him of sexual assault, I interviewed him backstage at the Orpheum.

He was in town to perform at a benefit for Hurricane Katrina-damaged Dillard University. I can’t remember who set up the meeting, but it was presented as a special treat: “Do you want to talk to Bill Cosby?”

How could I say no?

I would get to meet the creator of The Bill Cosby Show, the patriarch of the black familial perfection that was the Huxtables, to which my family was often favorably compared.

I remember being nervous before the interview. I worried that he’d think my questions were dumb, that he’d think I was dumb, that my pen would run out of ink and he’d wonder aloud about how dumb you had to be to show up to an interview with an inkless pen.

This was in Cosby’s “call out” days — when he’d plod about the country, scolding black audiences and preaching the salvation found in personal responsibility. All of black America’s woes would disappear if we’d parent better, polish our grammar, and, of course, pull up our pants.

By October 2006, the tally of Cosby’s accusers stood at six.

I took a tape recorder to the interview, so I could be sure to capture every word. Backstage, I waited my turn while Cosby talked to a mom and her kid.

Someone got me a chair, and I sidled up to ask some questions.

Words came out of Cosby’s mouth, but they didn’t relate to the questions posed. Nor were his responses formed in complete sentences that would make decent quotes. He was a rambling mess of disjointed thoughts.

More than once, I rephrased my question in an attempt to get something usable. My forehead crinkled in confusion, but Cosby got frustrated, as if I were the one being willfully obtuse.

Intimidated and anxious, I backed down. I thought: If what this rich, powerful Ph.D. is saying is clear to him and not to me, maybe I am dumb.

The column, which had two partial quotes from Cosby, stunk. (To be fair, it stunk not just because of Cosby’s refusal to cooperate but also because, back then, I foolishly bought into the respectability politics rhetoric on which Cosby’s call-outs were based. For that I apologize.)

In the past month, 14 women have publicly come forward to accuse the 77-year-old comedian of sexual assault, bringing the total number of accusers to 20.

Some of the incidents go back more than 40 years, and the women’s accounts are eerily similar: Cosby offers them a drink or pills, and when the woman comes to, she’s being groped or penetrated.

His shows are being cancelled, and organizations with any connections to Cosby are severing ties.

After I interviewed Cosby, I told my parents that I was so disappointed by how incoherent he was that I never wanted to interview any other famous person I admired. I didn’t want to mar the image in my head with reality.

The reality is that Cosby is either a serial rapist or the unluckiest guy on the planet. I’m certain it’s the former.

The testimony of these 20 accusers was persuasive. Any lingering doubts were erased after I saw how Cosby treated an Associated Press reporter last month.

In a brief snippet of the videotaped interview, the AP reporter awkwardly shifts his line of questioning from Bill and Camille Cosby’s art exhibit to the allegations of sexual assaults.

Bill becomes a manipulative bully, calling into question the reporter’s character for broaching the subject.

“I don’t want to compromise your integrity, but we don’t — I don’t — talk about it,” Cosby said, before asking that the video be “scuttled.”

“I think if you want to consider yourself to be serious, that it will not appear anywhere,” Cosby said.

He suggests that the reporter has reneged on an implicit agreement.

“The reason why we didn’t say that upfront was because we thought that AP had the integrity to not ask,” Cosby said.

The reporter makes no promises, but he’s clearly uncomfortable and the interview ends.

In the two-minute exchange, Cosby puts on his most convincing performance ever — as a predator accustomed to using his power and influence to intimidate others into submission and silence. It’s a role Cosby has played for decades, but it looks like the show is about to end.

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News News Feature

Bicycling Bias?

Those who sit left of center often gloat at the relative ease with which we broach the tender topic of race, at least as compared to the right. But given the oversized defensive reactions to a recent journal article about the primary beneficiaries of Memphis’ bike lanes, perhaps we progressives should pump our brakes. Without the thick skin that conservatives earned during decades of regressive racial politics, some Memphis progressives winced like spin-class rookies at the assertion that the movement does more for the creative class than it does for the 30 percent of city residents who live below the poverty line.

In “Behind a Bicycling Boom: Governance, cultural change, and place character in Memphis, Tennessee,” published last month in the journal Urban Studies, the authors quantified in detail the rise of the biking movement in Memphis.

Despite the advent of 60-plus miles of bike lanes, the development of the Shelby Farms Greenline, and plans for the Harahan Bridge project: “…change does not automatically benefit all citizens,” the authors wrote. “In fact, changes in place character of cities may play an active part in perpetuating inequalities in who has power and for whom that power is used.”

What the article did not do is call the bicycling bunch classist and racist, but that seems to be what some heard.

A commenter on the Memphis Flyer‘s website wrote: “Because we should obviously tilt our city to the ‘uncreative class’ and the ‘stagnation machine elite’ instead, for the sake of ‘inclusion’. (sic) … I’m as liberal as anybody, but cities cannot survive or grow on the backs of the apathetic, the unemployed, the dependent, and the criminal.” Another online reaction: “Idiots (both black & white BTW) who choose to try to stand in the way of positive changes with claims of racial inequality are what’s wrong with this city.”

In a far more sophisticated rebuttal, Kyle Wagenschutz, the city’s bicycle/pedestrian program manager, noted that the percentage of black cyclists was 57 percent in 2013, which almost mirrors the city’s black population.

Although the number of bicycle commuters has more than doubled between 2005 and 2013, the actual number of two-wheeled commuters is fewer than 650.

Does this mean that bicycling is bad? Of course not. But in backing Madison Avenue bike lanes despite business owners’ protests, did bike advocates lead with their commitment to reducing racial/structural inequality? Did they throw their fund-raising prowess behind the failed 2012 gas tax referendum that would have raised up to $6 million for public transportation?

They did not. And that’s okay, but it’s disingenuous to bristle when the article’s authors note the class privilege inherent in the $2 million raised for the Shelby Farms Greenline, used primarily for recreation.

Take the $4.1 million in tax breaks won by a developer to build an apartment complex along a planned pedestrian-bicycle route connecting Main Street in Memphis to Main Street in West Memphis. How will the profits from these and related projects build wealth for black families, where the median household wealth is $6,446 compared to $91,405 for white families?

How do we secure bikes for those who have lost their driver’s licenses because of unpaid traffic tickets — while advocating for changes in criminal justice policies?

How can a single mother of two kids (the typical makeup of a low-income Memphis family) get to her job by bike? Where would she shower when she arrives? Where would she store her bike?

There are bike advocates considering these tough questions, but if it’s true that only a hit dog hollers, why did this article strike such a nerve?

“Studies show that inequalities are reproduced by social processes, sometimes despite the best efforts and best intentions of good citizens,” said Wanda Rushing, a sociology professor at the U of M and one of the article’s three authors. “Sometimes good intentions lead to unexpected, and sometimes undesirable consequences.”

(Disclosure: Rushing and I will co-teach an economic inequality class this spring. The journal article was written months before we met.)

The awful efficiency of racism is that it persists even when there are no cross-toting, white-hooded Klansmen to be found. You can be a spandex-wearing, black-friend-having, progressive white bicyclist and still unwittingly replicate racist systems that advantage some and neglect others.

The question isn’t whether bike lanes run through black neighborhoods (they do) or whether bicycling advocates are bigots (most probably aren’t).

The question is: How will biking be different from the other well-intentioned movements that still leave brown and black people and poor people behind?

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Film Features Film/TV

Dear White People

If you assumed the intended audience for Dear White People is white people, you are forgiven.

Director Justin Simien’s debut film is less finger wagging at white folks than comedic commiseration with black people who must exist in mostly white spaces. It’s for every black student at top-tier universities and every black professional who doesn’t work for BET. If in the process, white people learn about the ways they create and maintain systems that disadvantage people of color, that’s cool too.

The satire follows the travails of four black students at Winchester University, a fictional Ivy League campus complete with ornate buildings, oak paneled halls, and micro aggressions galore.

The movie’s title is the sign-on Samantha White (Tessa Thompson) uses for her campus radio show. “Dear White People,” Samantha says, “the minimum requirement of black friends needed not to seem racist has just been raised to two. Sorry, but your weed man, Tyrone, does not count.”

Samantha’s activist worldview butts up against the on-campus political ambitions of racially palatable Troy Fairbanks (Brandon P. Bell) and irks classmate Colandrea “Coco” Conners (Teyonah Parris), whose blue contacts and long weave testify to her attempts to assimilate.

The film’s most intriguing character is the gay, socially awkward Lionel Higgins (Tyler James Williams of Everybody Hates Chris). With cultural tastes too white to find a home with black classmates and skin too brown to assimilate, he and his irregularly shaped Afro (“a black hole for white people’s fingers,” he laments) are batted around campus like a hacky sack.

With humor and edge, Dear White People, a darling at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, deftly navigates the minefield of racial identity.

What makes you black? Is it culture? Dating within your race? Rejecting European standards of beauty? Unquestioning solidarity with other black people? Disrupting discriminatory systems? Burying one part of your identity – sexuality, for example – to emphasize another? The intraracial tensions invoke the memory of the epic Jiggaboos vs. Wannabes warfare in Spike Lee’s 1988 School Daze.

Simien also lays bare the persistent aping of black culture by white students who are ignorant of how offensive the reductive mimicry is.

And if you think all the angst about being black in a white space is just hand wringing by hypersensitive colored folks, be sure to stay until the credits roll.

The film’s pacing lags occasionally, but for a debut film that relies in part on crowd-sourced funding, the production is polished. So much is packed into this movie that it can’t all be digested in one sitting. The themes it raises around interracial dating, self-segregation, and sexuality merit discussion and dissection. What Dear White People does not deserve is the burden of being all things to all people. It touches on sexuality (the director Simien came out as gay following the Sundance screening), but won’t satisfy those who want a prolonged exploration of where sexual orientation and race intersect. It repeats patriarchal messages, but don’t expect Simien to linger on women’s agency in romantic relationships.

Expect to laugh because it’s funny, but be prepared to wince because it’s all so true.

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Opinion Viewpoint

Teen Makeover

Memphis teens need an image makeover. But in the absence of Olivia Pope, the savvy media manipulator and star of ABC’s Scandal, they’ll have to do the job themselves.

The city’s youth have endured a prolonged public flogging since the violent September 6th attack on three people outside a Kroger store by some of their young peers and other unrelated incidents involving rowdy teens.

None of the victims’ injuries were severe. But, say several youth in the Bridge Builders Change leadership program, the damage to Memphis teens’ collective reputation and psyche remains.

“They make it seem like we’re barbaric,” said Ariel Moore, 16, a junior at Marion High School in Arkansas. “It really tears down youth.”

The program’s media cohort strategy to salvage their image: a YouTube video, BBChange, less than three minutes long. In the same online space where their collective character was dented, the teens want to contrast who the media say they are with who they know themselves to be.

The teens’ video begins with a mash-up of Google searches, audio snippets of news reports, and scrolling Twitter feeds filtered by the words “Memphis” and “teens.”

“Pack of Wild Teens in Memphis caught on video beating man. Civilized People or Animals? America or The 3rd World?” wondered @HouseCracka.

“THIS IS WHY I CARRY A GLOCK 19 EVERYWHERE THESE DAYS,” tweeted @GodGunsGoodTime.

Then, as if they turned the channel, the video fills with static, and then the hashtag #ChangeChallenge appears. One by one, these students tell who they are and what their vision is for their city.

“I am a patient, confident, love-giving leader,” says BrookLynn White, a 16-year-old senior at St. Benedict at Auburndale High School.

“I am a Memphian, and I am ambitious,” says Akin Bruce, a 17-year-old senior at White Station High. “Ambitious, dedicated, and determined to produce success not only for myself but also for my community.”

“I am someone who is not afraid to stand out against the crowd,” says Thomas Wynn, 17, also a White Station senior.

“I envision a future in Memphis where youth especially are involved and given opportunities to rise to a higher standard than the one that is present,” says Mary Allen, 17, a senior at St. Mary’s Episcopal School.

But kids who meet three times a week are no match for four local TV stations and the fear-mongers.

As of early this week, the Bridge Builders Change video had 75 views on YouTube. One of the many YouTube videos of the Kroger attack had more than 555,000 views and, inexplicably, more than 330 thumbs up.

Wynn said when he saw the Kroger video, “I was hurt because I knew the backlash was going to be awful.”

And it was. The comments White saw on Facebook stunned and scared her. Posters assumed all teens in Memphis were out of control. “Should we be carrying guns?” she wondered. “It wasn’t me,” on the Kroger video, White said, “but because of what happened, I’m being seen differently.”

It’s ironic, they say, that they’re taught not to stereotype, but that’s exactly what adults are doing to them, based on the actions of a relatively small number of kids.

Before the extermination comes the dehumanization. It happened in Rwanda when Hutu propagandists deemed the Tutsis cockroaches. It happened in Germany when Nazis called Jews rats. And these teens worry that it’s happening again, when adults call them animals and savages, and other adults leave those assessments unchallenged. When all that politicians and criminal justice officials have in the way of solutions are law enforcement hammers, the teens become nails.

“Being a black teen, a male, everything is on the line 100 percent of the time,” said Regi Worles, 16, a junior at White Station High. “I have dreams. I want my dreams to come true. I don’t want anything to … ” He fished for the word. “Ruin you,” finished Emma Donnelly-Bullington, 17, a senior at Central High School.

The media shapes the perception of adults and sometimes teens themselves.

“A lot of people don’t realize the power the media has,” said Wynn, who worries about a self-fulfilling prophecy. “What they see is ultimately what they believe.”

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News News Feature

What Happens Next?

If women have no access to abortion in Tennessee, what happens next?

What happens to women, pregnant as the result of rape, who don’t want to carry the trauma inside them for nine months? What happens to women who simply can’t afford another child – financially or emotionally?

Those who back the first constitutional amendment on the November 4th ballot do not want you to consider what happens next.

If Amendment 1 passes, Tennessee’s Republican-controlled legislature will enact enough abortion restrictions to make Roe v. Wade meaningless.

Whether it’s mandatory waiting periods or medically unnecessary hurdles for a procedure with a lower rate of complications than a colonoscopy, draconian measures adopted in other states would surely find a home here.

“If this passes, it opens the floodgates,” said Allison Glass, state director of Healthy and Free Tennessee, which promotes reproductive rights.

The fight over Amendment 1 exposes the hypocrisy of pro-fetus, anti-child conservatives who bark for smaller, less intrusive government while maneuvering their way into women’s personal affairs.

What the legislature won’t do is abandon a foolhardy commitment to abstinence-only sex ed in public schools, find money for universal pre-K, or persuade Governor Bill Haslam to save more than 800 lives annually by accepting federal money to expand Medicaid.

Here’s what the proposed amendment says: “Nothing in this Constitution secures or protects a right to abortion or require the funding of an abortion. The people retain the right through their elected state representatives and state senators to enact, amend, or repeal statutes regarding abortion, including, but not limited to, circumstances of pregnancy resulting from rape or incest or when necessary to save the life of the mother.”

You read that right. The decision to outlaw abortion even in the stomach-churning case of incest would be left in the hands of state legislators, 83 percent of whom are men.

That prospect worries Rebecca Terrell, executive director of the reproductive health center, Choices. Terrell spends a good bit of her time these days debunking “Yes on 1’s” talking points, which include the fact that 25 percent of abortions in Tennessee are performed on women who live out of state. 

In Mississippi, which has just one abortion provider, 2 percent of abortions were obtained by women who live out of state. The reason why women come to Tennessee to get an abortion is no different than the reason why children with cancer come from around the globe to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

“They say it’s an abortion destination,” Terrell said. “It’s really a health-care destination.”

On Saturday, Terrell was among 200 people gathered in First Presbyterian Church’s parking lot for what was billed as a get out the vote rally, complete with a bounce house for kids and toe-tapping music. At a break in the music, “No on 1” field director Gail Tyree took to the stage and led the crowd in a call-and-response.

“All you need to know,” she yelled. “No on 1!” the crowd yelled back.

More energy, money (nearly $2 million raised so far), and national attention have been directed at the Amendment 1 battle than at any other constitutional amendment in recent history. Terrell and others are trying to be sure they stay on the right side of the line that prohibits 501(c)3s from lobbying.

A healthy roster of Christian ministers and other faith leaders, both white and black, are firmly in the “No on 1” camp.

“As people of faith, we are and should be concerned about the impact of any legislation that might limit access to basic needs for survival for people who are already at risk,” said Rev. Faye London, interfaith coordinator for SisterReach, a reproductive rights organization. “As I’ve traveled across the state, most of the clergy I’ve encountered, whether they’ve been able to say it out loud or not, feel the same way.”

London is careful not to directly advocate against Amendment 1, but is frank about the high stakes. Access to abortion, she says, is a basic need. “The ability to build the life that is going to be healthiest for you and your family is a basic need.”

A May poll by Vanderbilt University found that 71 percent of voters opposed giving the state legislature authority to regulate abortions.

A No vote on Amendment 1 gives women facing an unintended pregnancy, not legislators, the right to decide what happens next.

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Opinion Viewpoint

Husband Wanted. Unemployed Need Not Apply.

If you want to destroy a community, someone once told me, take away the men’s jobs. To make a man’s job search nearly impossible, burden him with a criminal record.

The baggage from a stint in a correctional institution can bleed into the institution of marriage in ways that don’t bode well for single women or the economic strength of a city.

In a recent Pew Research Center survey, never-married women were asked what they wanted most in a spouse. Nearly 80 percent answered that tops on their list was a partner with a steady job. But in the Memphis metro area, there are only 59 employed young men for every 100 young single women, making this one of the worst places to find a marriageable (read: employed) man.

Money can’t buy love, but it can provide the economic stability that’s in short supply here in the nation’s poorest metro area.

“You got to have a J-O-B if you want to be with me,” sang Gwen Guthrie in the 1980s pop hit “Ain’t Nothin’ Goin’ On But The Rent.” For better or worse, our society still draws a straight line between manhood and the ability to provide, financially. When men have a criminal record, they are far more likely to be unemployed, which makes them less likely to be married. Their children are more likely to grow up poor, in a household run by a single mother.

That is where the public discussion of the family usually starts, with a hypercritical analysis of single mothers and how they raise their children. Rarely do we explore what societal pressures contribute to the rise in single motherhood or how public policy perpetuates poverty.

One obvious answer: A national obsession with mass incarceration that has only recently started to wither, as a growing body of evidence erodes the theory that higher imprisonment rates lower the crime rates.

Between 1994 and 2012, New York, which has banned for-profit prisons, cut its imprisonment rate by 24 percent and its crime rate by 54 percent, according to a September report from the Pew Charitable Trusts. During that same time period in Tennessee, where prisons are run for profit, the imprisonment rate soared 59 percent and the crime rate fell by 22 percent.

Shelby County is second only to Davidson County (Nashville) in the share of inmates it sends to state prisons. A tough-on-crime stance might win the district attorney another term, but it doesn’t guarantee public safety. It does, however, help guarantee a permanent underclass.

Ex-offenders can’t obtain many professional licenses and even some student loans, both of which would increase their odds of employment and better-paying jobs. And ex-offenders are barred from voting, including an estimated 19 percent of blacks in Tennessee, which gives state legislators little incentive to remake state law.

In 2010, the city of Memphis began to “ban the box” on city job applications that required men and women to state whether they had been convicted of a felony. In 2012, two Memphis Democrats managed to pass a bill that would expunge the criminal records of some ex-offenders with a single nonviolent conviction.

Every tiny step forward is met with several steps back. In its last session, the Republican-controlled legislature stiffened the penalties for a growing number of crimes and passed new laws to criminalize more behavior.

The impact is that “large numbers of men in their prime adult years are removed from their communities,” said Nicole Porter, director of advocacy for The Sentencing Project. States must “create the atmosphere in which people can thrive versus people being caught in systems that weaken communities and then weaken their families,” Porter said.

Since the criminal justice system disproportionately ensnares black men, it has an outsized effect on a predominately African-American metro area such as Memphis. The causes of the area’s endemic poverty are many, but employment for ex-offenders is essential to the metro area’s success.

“There are people who have records who have skills and drive and intelligence, who made a mistake and won’t make it again,” said Reid Dulberger, CEO of EDGE, Memphis’ and Shelby County’s economic development organization. “We can’t afford to exclude them going forward. We need all hands on deck.”

But unless we overhaul our criminal justice system, the Memphis area is wedded to failure.