Start with this:
The black family was far more stable 50 years ago, when conditions for blacks were far worse than they are today. Black out-of-wedlock births started to climb and marriage rates started to fall around 1960, long after slavery was abolished and just as the civil rights movement gained momentum. Perhaps a more nuanced explanation for the recent deterioration is that the legacy of slavery made the black family more vulnerable to the cultural subversions of the 1960s. But what does this tell us that is useful today? The answer is: nothing.
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. . . . If you finish high school and keep a job without having children before marriage, you will almost certainly not be poor. Period. I have repeatedly felt the air go out of the room upon putting this to black audiences. No one of any political stripe can deny it. It is human truth on view. In 2004, the poverty rate among blacks who followed that formula was less than 6 percent, as opposed to the overall rate of 24.7 percent. . . .
. . . .
The government cannot make people watch less television, talk to their children, or read more books. It cannot ordain domestic order, harmony, tranquility, stability, or other conditions conducive to academic success and the development of sound character. Nor can it determine how families structure their interactions and routines or how family resources -- including time and money -- are expended. Large-scale programs are especially ineffective in changing attitudes and values toward learning, work, and marriage.
(John McWhorter, "What Hope?" New Republic, August 10, 2010, reviewing Amy Wax, Race, Wrongs, and Remedies: Group Justice in the 21st Century (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2009))
Mr. McWhorter declares the book "depressing because it is so persuasive."
Wax is well aware that past discrimination created black-white disparities in education, wealth, and employment. Still, she argues that discrimination today is no longer the "brick wall" obstacle it once was, and that the main problems for poor and working-class blacks today are cultural ones that they alone can fix. Not that they alone should fix -- Wax is making no moral argument -- but that they alone can fix.
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The weakness -- and sadness -- of this fine book is that it has no prescription. Wax makes a series of arguments -- stop focusing on the past, think about culture rather than structure, criticize failure and emulate success -- but she does not tell us how to accomplish these goals. . . .
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. . . . To the extent that our ideology about race is more about studied radicalism than about a healthy brand of what Wax calls an internal locus of control, her book provokes, at least in this reader, a certain hopelessness. If she is right, then the bulk of today's discussion of black America is performance art. Tragically, and for the most part, she is right.
Unca D has a suggestion: Restore the black church.
Not the destructive and hateful Jeremiah Wright kind.
The kind that worships Jesus Christ and teaches congregants to marry their mates and take care of their children. The kind that builds character, families, and social capital in the currency of young men and women who finish high school and keep a job without having children before marriage.
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