This is applicable to only a few. The overall cause is not racism or the failure of the system. It is the absolute and utter failure of the black family structure. This is something we can fix, but we have to do it ourselves and soon.
"
Both explanations are true. But black men aren't born incarcerated, crime-prone dropouts. What principally renders them vulnerable to such a plight is the absence of fathers and their stabilizing influence.
Fatherless boys (as a general rule) become ineligible to be husbands -- though no less likely to become fathers -- and their children fall into the patterns that render them ineligible to be husbands.
The absence of fathers means, as well, that girls lack both a pattern against which to measure the boys who pursue them and an example of sacrificial love between a man and a woman. As the ministers were at pains to say last week, it isn't the incompetence of mothers that is at issue but the absence of half of the adult support needed for families to be most effective." -
William Raspberry - Why Our Black Families Are Failing - washingtonpost.com
"
Read through the megazillion words on class, income mobility, and poverty in the recent New York Times series “Class Matters” and you still won’t grasp two of the most basic truths on the subject: 1. entrenched, multigenerational poverty is largely black; and 2. it is intricately intertwined with the collapse of the nuclear family in the inner city." -
The Black Family: 40 Years of Lies by Kay S. Hymowitz, City Journal Summer 2005
How can a problem be fixed when every time it is mentioned it is somehow racist?
the stigma, the shame of being an unwed mother no longer exists - at least to the point that it seems to dissuade women from becoming pregnant without a husband
Nearly 40 percent of babies born in the United States in 2007 were delivered by unwed mothers, according to data released last month by the National Center for Health Statistics. The 1.7 million out-of-wedlock births, of 4.3 million total births, marked a more than 25 percent jump from five years before.
Out-of-wedlock births hit record high - CNN.com
Nearly 72 percent of the births to black women were out of wedlock. Mothers were unmarried in about 51 percent of Hispanic births and 28 percent of non-Hispanic white births.
Unwed birth rate reaches all-time high - Women's health- msnbc.com
i share your observation that individuals having children they cannot afford to raise is irresponsible. and while the growing problem is more epidemic in the minority populations, it is not exclusively theirs, as the data indicates
but we have a problem without a solution - at least a solution more effective than wishing irresponsible people would start behaving responsibly
as i see it there are but two options to stem this long-term, growing problem:
1. end the incentivization of having more children out off wedlock; each child adds to the government check received for those who require public assistance
but to do that and deny additional assistance also hurts the child, who did not ask to be born a bastard into poverty. so, to reach the cause we adversely impact the innocent
2. license people to have children. hell, we license someone to do something as common as fish in public waters or drive a vehicle
but that would upset those whose knee-jerk response would be that such licensing encroaches on one's right to self determination ... tho these are very often the same folks who object to the public burden of subsidizing the rearing of the out-of-wedlock kids
and possibly, there is a third solution, which is to take away the children from parents who are unable to provide for them. but that would not stifle the future opportunity for the same people to have more out-of-wedlock children for the government to have to provide for
if you have another solution, please offer it up; otherwise, identify which of those above you could support and why
Exemplifying gangsta's as hero's and the blatant excuse giving for failure is not helping. We don't need excuses, we need people to accept responsibility for their own actions.
what are the role models for success in the poor minority communities other than the baller, the dealer, the rapper ... who else do these kids have to emulate in their own behavior to attain "success" as they understand it
i don't think we actually disagree much about the problem. it is the solution which evades us both. and this is a major reason why i believe that poor parenting is the second worst problem in America which needs to be addressed