[adios]

Shall We Overcome?

I think this article makes some valid points.

IMO the gist of the article is encapsulated by the following:

I'm guessing that the rationale for this weekend's gathering is identical to that of the initial march. It is a lament we have heard in one guise or another for 3 1/2 decades: Our family is in crisis; black men are an endangered species.

and

On the one hand, we are CEOs at AOL Time Warner, American Express and Merrill Lynch; we have served as secretary of state and White House national security adviser; we are mayors, police chiefs, best-selling novelists, MacArthur fellows, Nobel laureates, professors, billionaires, scientists, stockbrokers, engineers, toymakers, inventors, astronauts, chess grandmasters, dot-com millionaires, talk show hosts, actors and film directors; Protestants, Catholics, Muslims, Jews and Buddhists (as is yours truly). We are inescapable in the fabric of America's lived experience and defy easy categorization. The GDP of black America is $631 billion. Homeownership is close to 50%. The number living in poverty is 25%, which is too high, of course, but a vast improvement over indigence of the past.

But there is a second, disturbing profile that reveals too high a percentage of black men being AWOL as fathers and husbands; as disappearing from our colleges (UC Berkeley's 2004-05 freshman class had only 108 African-Americans out of 3,600 students, with less than 40 males, and not one black among the 800 entering students in engineering); as graduating from high school with an eighth-grade level of proficiency in math and reading; in prison, on probation or on parole (a third of black men in their 20s). With the HIV infection rate doubling for blacks in the past decade, as well as urban violence, hypertension, social stress and heart disease, the number of black men now trails black women by two million. And it is not as if black women are thriving; the HIV infection rate for black women is 20 times that for white women (possibly because of "down low" bisexual black males who hide the fact of their homosexuality).

and

Two things could not be more clear in 2005: First, without strong, self-sacrificing, frugal and industrious fathers as role models, our boys go astray, never learn how to be parents (or men), and perpetuate the dismal situation of single-parent homes run by tired and overworked black women. The black family as a survival unit fails, which leads to the ever-fragile community collapsing along with it. Second, our black predecessors (particularly Booker T. Washington with his corny but unfailingly correct "gospel of the toothbrush") understood from the era of Reconstruction until the late 1960s how indispensable was the black family for sustaining a fight against racism that by its very nature can only be measured in centuries, and for ensuring that our progress toward liberation, personal and political, would not be lost in but a single generation as it now threatens to be.


I also note that the "Great Society" legislation was enacted in the mid 60's and FWIW the destruction of the family unit in the black community began during this time period. Correlation or causation, you tell me.

Too bad Louis Farrakhan is a racist dog because I think that his message about black men abandoning their responsibilities as fathers and husbands has merit.