I have a hypothesis. I wonder what you think of it. I went to very diverse schools outside of DC and observed that there were huge differences in culture between African refugees and black Americans in my classes. The African immigrants (refugees from countries like Ethiopia and Somalia) seemed to have families that expected more of them (despite language issues) and seemed to have more ambition and hope for the future. In watching the stories of successful blacks in America, I have been struck by how many are first or second generation Americans ( from Barack Obama and Kamala Harris to Sunny Houston to Colin Powell and many more). Amongst my peers in school, high achievement among black students was frowned on by other black students - to the point that one very smart and hardworking black girl was bullied into becoming sexually active in middle school to get a pass on being an honor student. I have heard it described as the “ghetto mentality” where no one wants you to achieve because they don’t believe they can.
Here’s the part where my hypothesis comes in… I have seen a similar situation in poor, rural, white communities where there used to be blue collar jobs and now there aren’t. Recently, the right wing has started bemoaning white boys not going to college or working, and instead staying home and playing video games and looking at porn. I have also heard reports of middle class kids feeling such climate dread that they don’t know why one would put time or energy into school, getting married, or having kids.
Here’s my question: is it possible these all have the same root? A lack of faith that there is actually a conceivable better future, a lack of vision of what that would be, and a sense of powerlessness at being able to get there?
I hypothesize that is the issue. If you don’t see a future, how do you teach your kids to reach for it? If this is the real root all the fixes in the world, would at best, just scratch the surface.
What do you think? (Apologies if this is completely off base, naive, or painfully over simplistic)
I must've missed the part about the huge role that mass incarceration via the school-to-prison pipeline plays in the oppression of black families in America. Black families have been targeted for destruction by the system since the beginning, due to white folks' fears of "replacement".
All problem-solving begins with recognition of what causes the problem. Government programs drove the man from dependent black families. We need to foster programs that encourage them to return.
If you can borrow from economics, I can borrow from family therapy theory
in psychology. Blacks have been given - and have accepted - the role of the "identified patient." The "family" has agreed that it has one member who is acting out, and if that member will just straighten up, all will be well. the "patient" serves the family and dutifully does its part to carry and distill the family's pathology, thereby relieving the greater family of any duty to change. Whats the payoff for the identified patient? They often gain an extraordinary amount of attention and resources thrown at them, even sometimes developing an "extended family" of caretakers, fixers and helpers - social workers, psychs, judges, agencies, grants, etc. Another reinforcer is that the caretakers get a "mission" and self satisfaction for delivering the care to the identified patient.
The theme of family therapy is that the entire system is self-sustaining and resistant to any change because the payoffs are so significant.
Perhaps one quick suggestion: stop voting for political party whose failed policies have predominated in the cities and--most importantly--schools that contribute so heavily to the dysfunction? Why does the party so vehemently opposed to school choice continue to receive an outsized share of black votes? I realize that there are many historical reasons for this, but at some point voters do reap what they sow.
For five years in Pittsburgh I was a part-time Uber driver. As an ex-journalist, a white libertarian journalist around 70 years old, I gently interrogated my estimated 11,000 passengers, who came in all colors, classes and lifestyles. At least 1,000 of my riders were blacks -- from 16 year old boys with fishing poles and single teen-age mothers to strippers and low-level dope dealers to sophisticated businessmen in Brooks Brothers suits. Except for a handful of exceptions, every black person I took to the airport or to their homes in Pittsburgh's segregated neighborhoods or housing projects was unique. But like virtually every white passenger I carried to the city's tony suburbs or trashy white parts of town, black passengers were polite, pleasant, respectful and appreciative of Uber's quick, efficient and non-racist car service. Often times, at first, the black kids in the front or back seat were quiet, bordering on sullen. But usually it turned out they were more shy than pissed off or unfriendly. My gentle, journalism 101 interrogations -- what school do you go to? where we you born? how do they treat you at school or at your job? will you be going to college? -- invariably revealed a nice kid who was much smarter or sensible than anyone would have guessed based on their appearance or their grammatical deficiencies. I was not naive or sheltered -- I was a former newspaper reporter who'd done plenty of feature stories about black people in Pittsburgh (25 percent of the city). Unlike 98 percent of my colleagues, I was also well-acquainted with the work and ideas of superstars like Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams. I had even interviewed Derrick Bell and Al Sharpton. But being an Uber driver reminded me of a truth I knew very well: it is the media -- where I made my living for almost 40 years -- who are responsible for slandering and stereotyping blacks in America. The mainstream media have spent the last 50 years horribly misrepresenting and distorting America's highly diverse and culturally differentiated black population. The liberal media have made a race-hustler like Al Sharpton a national hero and ignored Robert Woodson. They have portrayed 35 million blacks as a monolithic race of helpless victims, a race of impoverished urban welfare recipients, a race of violent people, a race of unhappy and bitter people who, absent a few hundred sports and music super stars we've all seen, are overwhelmingly poor, unemployed and oppressed by a cruel and permanently racist society. The blacks I randomly met in my car -- in the real world -- were nothing like the blacks you see every day on the news or in the movies. They didn't sound or think like Al Sharpton or a gang-banger or a BLM activist. The women, especially older ones going to or from work, were generally sweet, wise and confident. The young single moms from the projects with their babies in tow, were tough and independent. We know blacks have serious social and cultural problems -- self-inflicted ones and many that are a result of bad government welfare, housing and education policies that created and perpetuated segregation (See Rothstein's "The Color of Law" for a century of details). But what I saw as an Uber driver again and again was the real black world the media never show us -- where 95 percent of blacks have jobs, where 75 percent of blacks live above the poverty line. Where the vast majority of blacks young and old -- despite still being segregated in lousy neighborhoods, living in falling-down public housing and stuck in third-class city schools -- are good, decent, hard-working, church-going people. Having to point out these screamingly obvious facts about blacks in America is absurd, but sadly necessary, thanks to the biases and ignorance of the mainstream media.
Agreed, the destruction of the family is the root cause of our societal dysfunction. I think building individual capacity is the way forward in trying our best to duplicate the family structure, using vouchers PK-12 and then training programs that are similarly socially all-encompassing for post-secondary education. I have found more support for vouchers in my online reading than ever, but it does not seem to translate into political campaigns. In a closely divided electorate the path to victory is motivating your side, so I see righty politicians preaching to the choir instead of addressing the most important issue of our time. I think Larry Elder should run for President on the single issue of rebuilding the family if you want to give him a call. Thanks for the article, you are one of my favorite writers and I appreciate your effort in addressing this issue.
Thank you Sir. I agree, like a team, we all have to recognize the challenges, work together and support each other in our most important task of giving the next generation of all our children the best chance possible.
went through every conceivable type of Civil Rights, Race Relations and Holocaust brainwashing and training in the 60's, 70's, 80's, and unlike that lying bitsch Kamala Harris, I actually was bussed for 5 years from 1972-1977, and I can tell you it was all Affirmative Action trickery and data manipulation then and it's even worse now. Blacks and Democrats have made their dysfunctional and criminal beds, now let those racist, treasonous sycophants and parasites finally pay the piper. FU Joe Biden and to he11 with your army of racist, murdering streetni@@ers. They never change.
Have no fear; they are a dead-end gene pool, cut off from their mother race in Africa and steadily being absorbed by the fringes and lowest parts of the EuroAmerican society. Coupled with their systematic use of industrial abortion and their absolute rejection of the family unit, they are sinking into a state of savagery that signifies their end. 100 years tops, and they will be an historical footnote in our long and glorious civilization.
Would say that Racism hurts the African American Community but also agree too much self destructive behavior. I put much of the blame on the "Great Society" programs. Too much emphasis on enabling people to live without jobs rather than getting them jobs so that they can live. The provision of monies without responsibilities has eroded the African American community. The surface intent might have been to help people deal with bad economic circumstances, but wound up creating a dependent class tied too much to the desires of certain politicians.
What would help. More opportunities for the people on the low end to actually work to support themselves. The problem is kind of Chicken and egg so the government may need to step in to start the ball rolling on getting jobs into the inner city. But it is jobs not social spending that will push people out of this hole the fastest and most solidly.
Sorry but there will never NOT be crisis and turmoil in the black community and no, it’s not my problem.
It’s their problem and problem of the people they have picked to lead their community for the last 60 years.
When the black community takes responsibility and blame for their own actions there will be hope. Until then articles like this are just the same old tired noise we’ve heard since the 60s.
Economic thinking is incredibly valuable to this issue, and completely misunderstood within the social and behavioral theories that currently occupy the zeitgeist. I love the question, “What is the active ingredient/poison?” And more to your resource distribution point, “Who is getting more of it, who is getting less of it?” If I had to pick one, just one, I’d say it is: the shift away from a Knowledge-based (aka content) pedagogy to a How-ism one. And this primacy of How over Knowledge has leaked into every corner of American ability-transfer institutions, including parenting and education. I.e. Knowledge = bottom-up, scripted, repeatable, practicable; How = conceptual, top-down, highly variable. However, ability-transfer--at a deep functional neuroanatomical level--is almost always done via repeated Knowledge exposure and practice, especially in the initial stages. And successful parents and teachers, even if they think they are doing the How and teaching kids how to be independent complex thinkers, are in reality imparting and reinforcing crucial shared Knowledge and they just don’t realize it.
Here’s a specific illustration. My second grader brought home a canned letter to parents about math and “math tricks.” In one example, it encouraged parents to help their kids use the math trick of 5+5+3 (How) to remember 5+8=13 (Knowledge). Now, the functional neuroanatomist in me had a complete silent fit, because that is a terrible overcomplication of a basic math fact. I get the pedagogical impulse, 5+8=13 is just semantically weird and doesn’t tuck neatly into the verbal brain at first glance. However, this is all the more reason to just drill-and-kill and create a fast-thinking subcortical pathway. 5+5+3 is by no means a shortcut or a trick, because that type of drawing-out and anchoring to 5+5=10 requires the slow-thinking cortex to get overly involved. Sure, that is great as a higher-order method for slowing down and double-checking the drilled-and-killed math fact. But when initially learning, the slow method is always a poor substitute for the fast fact. Further, you need a treasure trove of easy-to-recall knowledge to build true higher order and synthesized thinking. And this is where disparities in resource distribution (homelife) get unintentionally amplified by the romantic glorification of How-ism and the vilification of Knowledge. My second grader has the privilege of a house filled with math flash cards, math games, non-math games that require math to calculate scores, and--most importantly--parents that know these math facts and frequently model them. So, where the educational pedagogy has potentially become misdirected with How-ism during school hours, our second grader’s homelife compensates with plentiful knowledge. John McWhorter speaks excellently to this disparity-amplification in regard to phonics vs. whole word reading in early reading pedagogy. This is passionately emphasized by the work of E.D. Hirsch: https://medium.com/park-recommendations/a-death-knell-for-the-child-centered-classroom-3da704c468d2https://www.city-journal.org/html/e-d-hirsch%E2%80%99s-curriculum-democracy-13234.html;
The real quagmire is that the How-ism vs. Knowledge has become completely politicized across institutions. Knowledge has become maligned. At best, having to memorize 5+8=13 is boring and old-fashioned. Somewhere in the middle it is paternalistic and unnatural. At worst, it is the hallmark of a conspiratorial patriarchal supremacy hellbent on withholding the privileges of higher-order thinking from the oppressed. And it is heartbreaking! So many disadvantaged children are denied the real privileges of content-mastery and knowledge-building that come from dedicated practice. And it is the cruelest of ironies to kids that are already under-resourced in their homelife. And they are under-resourced for multiple reasons, some of which have nothing to do with the parent aptitude, it's just that race/ethnicity, SES, and locale are signals for those reasons. But whatever the reasons, they don’t get it knowledge-building at home and then they don’t get much of it at school.
Seems a very simple solution. Black men and women can step up and use birth control. Raising small children is so important, nobody should begin this project without thinking about a 25 year commitment. Not sure I ever see that suggestion in your pieces. Mostly you point the finger at "women without husbands". So, in particular, I think you, as a Black Man, could ask Black men step up and use birth control.
When you write about the increasing out-of-wedlock births specifically with black mothers, what is the age breakdown among them? And do we have data regarding their education levels?
I have a hypothesis. I wonder what you think of it. I went to very diverse schools outside of DC and observed that there were huge differences in culture between African refugees and black Americans in my classes. The African immigrants (refugees from countries like Ethiopia and Somalia) seemed to have families that expected more of them (despite language issues) and seemed to have more ambition and hope for the future. In watching the stories of successful blacks in America, I have been struck by how many are first or second generation Americans ( from Barack Obama and Kamala Harris to Sunny Houston to Colin Powell and many more). Amongst my peers in school, high achievement among black students was frowned on by other black students - to the point that one very smart and hardworking black girl was bullied into becoming sexually active in middle school to get a pass on being an honor student. I have heard it described as the “ghetto mentality” where no one wants you to achieve because they don’t believe they can.
Here’s the part where my hypothesis comes in… I have seen a similar situation in poor, rural, white communities where there used to be blue collar jobs and now there aren’t. Recently, the right wing has started bemoaning white boys not going to college or working, and instead staying home and playing video games and looking at porn. I have also heard reports of middle class kids feeling such climate dread that they don’t know why one would put time or energy into school, getting married, or having kids.
Here’s my question: is it possible these all have the same root? A lack of faith that there is actually a conceivable better future, a lack of vision of what that would be, and a sense of powerlessness at being able to get there?
I hypothesize that is the issue. If you don’t see a future, how do you teach your kids to reach for it? If this is the real root all the fixes in the world, would at best, just scratch the surface.
What do you think? (Apologies if this is completely off base, naive, or painfully over simplistic)
I must've missed the part about the huge role that mass incarceration via the school-to-prison pipeline plays in the oppression of black families in America. Black families have been targeted for destruction by the system since the beginning, due to white folks' fears of "replacement".
All problem-solving begins with recognition of what causes the problem. Government programs drove the man from dependent black families. We need to foster programs that encourage them to return.
If you can borrow from economics, I can borrow from family therapy theory
in psychology. Blacks have been given - and have accepted - the role of the "identified patient." The "family" has agreed that it has one member who is acting out, and if that member will just straighten up, all will be well. the "patient" serves the family and dutifully does its part to carry and distill the family's pathology, thereby relieving the greater family of any duty to change. Whats the payoff for the identified patient? They often gain an extraordinary amount of attention and resources thrown at them, even sometimes developing an "extended family" of caretakers, fixers and helpers - social workers, psychs, judges, agencies, grants, etc. Another reinforcer is that the caretakers get a "mission" and self satisfaction for delivering the care to the identified patient.
The theme of family therapy is that the entire system is self-sustaining and resistant to any change because the payoffs are so significant.
David H.
Perhaps one quick suggestion: stop voting for political party whose failed policies have predominated in the cities and--most importantly--schools that contribute so heavily to the dysfunction? Why does the party so vehemently opposed to school choice continue to receive an outsized share of black votes? I realize that there are many historical reasons for this, but at some point voters do reap what they sow.
For five years in Pittsburgh I was a part-time Uber driver. As an ex-journalist, a white libertarian journalist around 70 years old, I gently interrogated my estimated 11,000 passengers, who came in all colors, classes and lifestyles. At least 1,000 of my riders were blacks -- from 16 year old boys with fishing poles and single teen-age mothers to strippers and low-level dope dealers to sophisticated businessmen in Brooks Brothers suits. Except for a handful of exceptions, every black person I took to the airport or to their homes in Pittsburgh's segregated neighborhoods or housing projects was unique. But like virtually every white passenger I carried to the city's tony suburbs or trashy white parts of town, black passengers were polite, pleasant, respectful and appreciative of Uber's quick, efficient and non-racist car service. Often times, at first, the black kids in the front or back seat were quiet, bordering on sullen. But usually it turned out they were more shy than pissed off or unfriendly. My gentle, journalism 101 interrogations -- what school do you go to? where we you born? how do they treat you at school or at your job? will you be going to college? -- invariably revealed a nice kid who was much smarter or sensible than anyone would have guessed based on their appearance or their grammatical deficiencies. I was not naive or sheltered -- I was a former newspaper reporter who'd done plenty of feature stories about black people in Pittsburgh (25 percent of the city). Unlike 98 percent of my colleagues, I was also well-acquainted with the work and ideas of superstars like Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams. I had even interviewed Derrick Bell and Al Sharpton. But being an Uber driver reminded me of a truth I knew very well: it is the media -- where I made my living for almost 40 years -- who are responsible for slandering and stereotyping blacks in America. The mainstream media have spent the last 50 years horribly misrepresenting and distorting America's highly diverse and culturally differentiated black population. The liberal media have made a race-hustler like Al Sharpton a national hero and ignored Robert Woodson. They have portrayed 35 million blacks as a monolithic race of helpless victims, a race of impoverished urban welfare recipients, a race of violent people, a race of unhappy and bitter people who, absent a few hundred sports and music super stars we've all seen, are overwhelmingly poor, unemployed and oppressed by a cruel and permanently racist society. The blacks I randomly met in my car -- in the real world -- were nothing like the blacks you see every day on the news or in the movies. They didn't sound or think like Al Sharpton or a gang-banger or a BLM activist. The women, especially older ones going to or from work, were generally sweet, wise and confident. The young single moms from the projects with their babies in tow, were tough and independent. We know blacks have serious social and cultural problems -- self-inflicted ones and many that are a result of bad government welfare, housing and education policies that created and perpetuated segregation (See Rothstein's "The Color of Law" for a century of details). But what I saw as an Uber driver again and again was the real black world the media never show us -- where 95 percent of blacks have jobs, where 75 percent of blacks live above the poverty line. Where the vast majority of blacks young and old -- despite still being segregated in lousy neighborhoods, living in falling-down public housing and stuck in third-class city schools -- are good, decent, hard-working, church-going people. Having to point out these screamingly obvious facts about blacks in America is absurd, but sadly necessary, thanks to the biases and ignorance of the mainstream media.
Agreed, the destruction of the family is the root cause of our societal dysfunction. I think building individual capacity is the way forward in trying our best to duplicate the family structure, using vouchers PK-12 and then training programs that are similarly socially all-encompassing for post-secondary education. I have found more support for vouchers in my online reading than ever, but it does not seem to translate into political campaigns. In a closely divided electorate the path to victory is motivating your side, so I see righty politicians preaching to the choir instead of addressing the most important issue of our time. I think Larry Elder should run for President on the single issue of rebuilding the family if you want to give him a call. Thanks for the article, you are one of my favorite writers and I appreciate your effort in addressing this issue.
Thank you Sir. I agree, like a team, we all have to recognize the challenges, work together and support each other in our most important task of giving the next generation of all our children the best chance possible.
I hate blacks because they support amnesty
went through every conceivable type of Civil Rights, Race Relations and Holocaust brainwashing and training in the 60's, 70's, 80's, and unlike that lying bitsch Kamala Harris, I actually was bussed for 5 years from 1972-1977, and I can tell you it was all Affirmative Action trickery and data manipulation then and it's even worse now. Blacks and Democrats have made their dysfunctional and criminal beds, now let those racist, treasonous sycophants and parasites finally pay the piper. FU Joe Biden and to he11 with your army of racist, murdering streetni@@ers. They never change.
Have no fear; they are a dead-end gene pool, cut off from their mother race in Africa and steadily being absorbed by the fringes and lowest parts of the EuroAmerican society. Coupled with their systematic use of industrial abortion and their absolute rejection of the family unit, they are sinking into a state of savagery that signifies their end. 100 years tops, and they will be an historical footnote in our long and glorious civilization.
Would say that Racism hurts the African American Community but also agree too much self destructive behavior. I put much of the blame on the "Great Society" programs. Too much emphasis on enabling people to live without jobs rather than getting them jobs so that they can live. The provision of monies without responsibilities has eroded the African American community. The surface intent might have been to help people deal with bad economic circumstances, but wound up creating a dependent class tied too much to the desires of certain politicians.
What would help. More opportunities for the people on the low end to actually work to support themselves. The problem is kind of Chicken and egg so the government may need to step in to start the ball rolling on getting jobs into the inner city. But it is jobs not social spending that will push people out of this hole the fastest and most solidly.
Sorry but there will never NOT be crisis and turmoil in the black community and no, it’s not my problem.
It’s their problem and problem of the people they have picked to lead their community for the last 60 years.
When the black community takes responsibility and blame for their own actions there will be hope. Until then articles like this are just the same old tired noise we’ve heard since the 60s.
Economic thinking is incredibly valuable to this issue, and completely misunderstood within the social and behavioral theories that currently occupy the zeitgeist. I love the question, “What is the active ingredient/poison?” And more to your resource distribution point, “Who is getting more of it, who is getting less of it?” If I had to pick one, just one, I’d say it is: the shift away from a Knowledge-based (aka content) pedagogy to a How-ism one. And this primacy of How over Knowledge has leaked into every corner of American ability-transfer institutions, including parenting and education. I.e. Knowledge = bottom-up, scripted, repeatable, practicable; How = conceptual, top-down, highly variable. However, ability-transfer--at a deep functional neuroanatomical level--is almost always done via repeated Knowledge exposure and practice, especially in the initial stages. And successful parents and teachers, even if they think they are doing the How and teaching kids how to be independent complex thinkers, are in reality imparting and reinforcing crucial shared Knowledge and they just don’t realize it.
Here’s a specific illustration. My second grader brought home a canned letter to parents about math and “math tricks.” In one example, it encouraged parents to help their kids use the math trick of 5+5+3 (How) to remember 5+8=13 (Knowledge). Now, the functional neuroanatomist in me had a complete silent fit, because that is a terrible overcomplication of a basic math fact. I get the pedagogical impulse, 5+8=13 is just semantically weird and doesn’t tuck neatly into the verbal brain at first glance. However, this is all the more reason to just drill-and-kill and create a fast-thinking subcortical pathway. 5+5+3 is by no means a shortcut or a trick, because that type of drawing-out and anchoring to 5+5=10 requires the slow-thinking cortex to get overly involved. Sure, that is great as a higher-order method for slowing down and double-checking the drilled-and-killed math fact. But when initially learning, the slow method is always a poor substitute for the fast fact. Further, you need a treasure trove of easy-to-recall knowledge to build true higher order and synthesized thinking. And this is where disparities in resource distribution (homelife) get unintentionally amplified by the romantic glorification of How-ism and the vilification of Knowledge. My second grader has the privilege of a house filled with math flash cards, math games, non-math games that require math to calculate scores, and--most importantly--parents that know these math facts and frequently model them. So, where the educational pedagogy has potentially become misdirected with How-ism during school hours, our second grader’s homelife compensates with plentiful knowledge. John McWhorter speaks excellently to this disparity-amplification in regard to phonics vs. whole word reading in early reading pedagogy. This is passionately emphasized by the work of E.D. Hirsch: https://medium.com/park-recommendations/a-death-knell-for-the-child-centered-classroom-3da704c468d2 https://www.city-journal.org/html/e-d-hirsch%E2%80%99s-curriculum-democracy-13234.html;
The real quagmire is that the How-ism vs. Knowledge has become completely politicized across institutions. Knowledge has become maligned. At best, having to memorize 5+8=13 is boring and old-fashioned. Somewhere in the middle it is paternalistic and unnatural. At worst, it is the hallmark of a conspiratorial patriarchal supremacy hellbent on withholding the privileges of higher-order thinking from the oppressed. And it is heartbreaking! So many disadvantaged children are denied the real privileges of content-mastery and knowledge-building that come from dedicated practice. And it is the cruelest of ironies to kids that are already under-resourced in their homelife. And they are under-resourced for multiple reasons, some of which have nothing to do with the parent aptitude, it's just that race/ethnicity, SES, and locale are signals for those reasons. But whatever the reasons, they don’t get it knowledge-building at home and then they don’t get much of it at school.
Seems a very simple solution. Black men and women can step up and use birth control. Raising small children is so important, nobody should begin this project without thinking about a 25 year commitment. Not sure I ever see that suggestion in your pieces. Mostly you point the finger at "women without husbands". So, in particular, I think you, as a Black Man, could ask Black men step up and use birth control.
When you write about the increasing out-of-wedlock births specifically with black mothers, what is the age breakdown among them? And do we have data regarding their education levels?