Chronic economic conditions such as these in any area will lead to a reduction in private investment, increased flight of the middle class, and eventually impoverished neighborhoods. Although there has been much speculation as to how these communities have become what they are, few theories have much empirical evidence, if any at all. Social isolation, however, is a hypothesis that has been tested and has been shown to be a plausible explanation for one of the root causes of conditions in African-American communities (Rankin and Quane 2000). Social Isolation is a phenomenon where persons have a “lack of contact or of sustained interaction with individuals and institutions that represent mainstream society”, as defined by William Julius Wilson (Wilson 1989). Essentially, everyone has a network that they use to locate job or other pertinent resources, and Wilson argues that this became broken in the African-American community. Prolonged unemployment permeated through the network, causing African-Americans to not only lose access to work, but also to lose programs that invest in human capital. This is primarily due to a massive outflow of factory jobs and similar lines of work occurred in the 1970’s and 80’s when the economy shifted to …show more content…
Policy plays a crucial role in maintaining the racial constructs of White supremacy, exemplified by organizations such as the American Legislative Exchange Council. In short, ALEC acts as a platform for private companies to collaborate with legislators to introduce model bills, which act as “models” for anyone to implement in their respective state. One of the members of ALEC is CCA (Corrections Corporation of America), which houses a majority of the demographic of this study in their prisons: African-Americans, between the ages of 18-49. Indeed, ALEC has a track record of contributing to the racial constructs that sustain White supremacy, notably in distorting education statistics and strengthening voter identification mechanisms (Lubienski and Brewer 2013, American Legislative Exchange Council 2009). However, they have given the African-American population a model to take control of the politics of their respective communities. Private-Public partnerships (especially with the government) can give business owners of African-American communities legislative power to introduce bills that can reduce the effects of the School to Prison pipeline, enforce mandatory sentencing for police brutality, and invest in infrastructure in impoverished communities. Beeckman illustrates the political impact the Black Panther Party had on the predominantly African-American