I had posted a recent youth violence story out of South Florida, where a teenager was set on fire by five of his classmates. The violence was done by youth, and not on racial lines. Then there is the young blackteenager who was brutally beat to death in Chicago by a group of black teenagers.
Paul White, writing in the Christian Science Monitor, says that racism is not the issue, but parenting:
The question is not whether young blacks, particularly males, get involved in violent incidents more frequently than other races. The question is why.
White and black liberals blame this disparity on a racist society that misinterprets and discriminates against black culture.
White and black conservatives explain these statistics as the result of less respect for the law, caused solely by poor parenting. They cite as proof that high-achieving blacks have been well-parented.
This is not a new problem. Consider a memo written in 1965 to President Lyndon Johnson from Assistant Labor Secretary Daniel Moynihan in which the secretary expressed his great concern over the high rate of out-of-wedlock births among blacks (25 percent at that time). Unaddressed, Mr. Moynihan predicted, this large number of fatherless children would result in increasing school failure, criminal delinquency, and joblessness. Sadly, because liberals across the board condemned this call for action as racist propaganda, President Johnson didn’t want to risk heated public debate and so did nothing.
The recent Chicago incident, and countless others that occur daily, are the result of not heeding Moynihan’s warning 44 years ago. The previous out-of-wedlock birthrate has almost tripled, and 7 out of 10 black children now grow up not only without a father, but also in disproportionate poverty. That means millions of young kids lack adequate parental guidance to make the transition to become successful adults.
See the article in the Christian Science Monitor: http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20091022/cm_csm/ywhite
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