Finding the right categories and the right instruments of each category.

In his book, Rights Gone Wrong: How Law Corrupts the Struggle for Equality, Richard Thompson Ford focuses on the need for other approaches as well as legal means to secure human rights. I am not surprised that law enforcement is not the best way to win the hearts and minds. Indeed, I am reminded that the United States government seemed to believe that invasion and occupation was the approach to introduce democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan.

It seems to me that there might be two related problems. Ford mentioned in his appearance of CSPAN that the upper and middle economic class African Americans have different problems than the African Americans of the underclass. If one focuses on "the problems of African Americans" one might have great difficulty in finding solutions to their disparate sets of problems. It might be better to focus on the problems of the underclass, combining European Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans and Native Americans who belong to that underclass. and similarly to focus on the problems of the middle class.

To consider programs that might help all of the people in the underclass to deal with their problems more effectively, and to consider separate but simultaneous programs that might help the middle class is not "class warfare", it is simply a possible means of finding better solutions to people's problems.

The problems of the underclass might be a related cluster of poverty, segregated neighborhoods, poor educational and health services, being forced to live in high crime areas, class-based job discrimination, etc. It seems to me that integrating neighborhoods would be a good start, although I recognize that in some cases neighborhoods are self-segregated by people choosing to live together. (I live in a neighborhood with two good private schools primarily serving Jewish families, and it seems that more Jewish families are moving here to be close to the schools.)

While it seems to me that it might be possible to identify a limited number of cultural changes that could help poor people to solve a lot of these problems, and a limited number of tools to promote those cultural changes efficiently, I have no idea of how to do so. I am glad to see that there are efforts to improve educational services to the children of the poor in the hope that the schools will serve to integrate them into the mainstream society as the schools helped to integrate the children of immigrants for so many decades in America's past.