State of Denial: Politics and the Black Family Crisis

Orlando Patterson, in his essay today discussing Jena and contemporary black politics, cuts to the crucial racial issue of our time with his discussion of the crisis of the black family (via Memeorandum):

What exactly attracted thousands of demonstrators to the small Louisiana town? While for some it was a simple case of righting a grievous local injustice, and for others an opportunity to relive the civil rights era, for most the real motive was a long overdue cry of outrage at the use of the prison system as a means of controlling young black men.

America has more than two million citizens behind bars, the highest absolute and per capita rate of incarceration in the world. Black Americans, a mere 13 percent of the population, constitute half of this country’s prisoners. A tenth of all black men between ages 20 and 35 are in jail or prison; blacks are incarcerated at over eight times the white rate.

The effect on black communities is catastrophic: one in three male African-Americans in their 30s now has a prison record, as do nearly two-thirds of all black male high school dropouts. These numbers and rates are incomparably greater than anything achieved at the height of the Jim Crow era. What’s odd is how long it has taken the African-American community to address in a forceful and thoughtful way this racially biased and utterly counterproductive situation.

How, after decades of undeniable racial progress, did we end up with this virtual gulag of racial incarceration?

Patterson offers explanatory examples of pathological black culture, including the case of New York Knicks owner Isiah Thomas' practice of calling a former black female Knicks executive a "bitch" and a "ho," the beating of black evangelical minister Juanita Bynum by her estranged husband, and O.J. Simpson's recent run-in with the law:

These events all point to something that has been swept under the rug for too long in black America: the crisis in relations between men and women of all classes and, as a result, the catastrophic state of black family life, especially among the poor. Isiah Thomas’s outrageous double standard shocked many blacks in New York only because he had the nerve to say out loud what is a fact of life for too many black women who must daily confront indignity and abuse in hip-hop misogyny and everyday conversation.

What is done with words is merely the verbal end of a continuum of abuse that too often ends with beatings and spousal homicide. Black relationships and families fail at high rates because women increasingly refuse to put up with this abuse. The resulting absence of fathers — some 70 percent of black babies are born to single mothers — is undoubtedly a major cause of youth delinquency.

The circumstances that far too many African-Americans face — the lack of paternal support and discipline; the requirement that single mothers work regardless of the effect on their children’s care; the hypocritical refusal of conservative politicians to put their money where their mouths are on family values; the recourse by male youths to gangs as parental substitutes; the ghetto-fabulous culture of the streets; the lack of skills among black men for the jobs and pay they want; the hypersegregation of blacks into impoverished inner-city neighborhoods — all interact perversely with the prison system that simply makes hardened criminals of nonviolent drug offenders and spits out angry men who are unemployable, unreformable and unmarriageable, closing the vicious circle.

Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and other leaders of the Jena demonstration who view events there, and the racial horror of our prisons, as solely the result of white racism are living not just in the past but in a state of denial. Even after removing racial bias in our judicial and prison system — as we should and must do — disproportionate numbers of young black men will continue to be incarcerated.

Until we view this social calamity in its entirety — by also acknowledging the central role of unstable relations among the sexes and within poor families, by placing a far higher priority on moral and social reform within troubled black communities, and by greatly expanding social services for infants and children — it will persist.

I have made parallel arguments in my posts on black America. In one recent entry I argued:

Blacks do not need more policies of redistribution amid the endless cries of "institutional racism." We've seen enough of that. It's been 43 years since the passage of the Civil Rights Act, and the political system, the educational establishment, and the corporate sector have made historic efforts to promote full inclusion for African-Americans in mainstream life. The key agenda for the GOP should be to promote black independence and uplift through policies focusing on greater individual and family responsibility, excellence in educational achievement, the rebuilding of the black family structure, and opportunity-oriented economic policies, focusing on entrepreneurship and ownership.

The current crisis presents a phenomenal opportunity for the GOP to provide crucial leadership on race, and smarts too!

At least one top Democrat has already demonstrated an astounding ignorance of diversity of black America today:

We need reform of the black family in America, and we need frank discussion about the crisis of the black lower third in this presidential campaign. Democratic Party pandering on race to young, left-leaning MTV crowds represents just more of the same old victims' strategy of grievance mobilization. Blacks need high expectations, not condescension. A freedom and opportunity agenda, one the GOP is best situated to champion, offers a powerful direction for the future of black progress.

Blacks and the GOP: Toward a New Rights Agenda

The top-tier candidates in the race for the GOP nomination skipped last night's candidate forum at Morgan State Univeristy, a historically black university in Baltimore, Maryland. Each of the key Republican frontrunners - Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Fred Thomspon - claimed that prior fundraising engagements prevented their participation.

The Washington Post has the story (via Memeorandum):

"I apologize for the candidates who aren't here. I think it's a disgrace that they aren't here," Sen. Sam Brownback (Kan.), a presidential hopeful, told the audience. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry to you and I'm sorry to those who are watching that they are not here."

Asked before the debate whether he accepted his rivals' claims of scheduling conflicts, Brownback said, "If it was a high enough priority, it would get on the schedule."

Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, another candidate who made the trip, called the situation "embarrassing" for his rivals. "We've come a long way, but we have a long way to go, and we don't get there if we don't sit down and work through issues," he told the appreciative crowd.

The debate was hosted by PBS talk show host Tavis Smiley and attended by Brownback, Huckabee, Rep. Duncan Hunter (Calif.), Rep. Ron Paul (Tex.), Rep. Tom Tancredo (Colo.) and Alan Keyes, a former ambassador who has sought the presidency twice before.

Several of the candidates took pains to cater to the mostly black audience, blaming inequality in America on continuing racism. Brownback said he wants Congress to pass a formal apology for slavery and segregation. Huckabee promised he would, as president, improve housing opportunities for minorities and address unequal treatment of different races in the criminal justice system. He also pledged to support voting rights for the District of Columbia.

By contrast, Tancredo declared that economic differences have "nothing to do with race," and several candidates reiterated their desire to crack down on illegal immigrants. Paul loudly repeated his call for an end to the war in Iraq. Keyes blamed the plight of the black community on moral decay.

But the forum, which was pitched as a chance to discuss the "covenant with black America," was undercut by the absence of the party's top contenders -- an outcome criticized by black activists, Democratic candidates and some senior Republican leaders.

It's understandable why the top GOP contenders skipped the debate. The Republican Party's primary process will not reward candidates endorsing the failed policy agenda of the post-civil rights black community. Yesterday's Los Angeles Times pinned down the key issues:

Critics say the 2008 candidates' decisions [to skip the debate] reflect the reality that the Republican nomination will be decided by the party's overwhelmingly white, conservative base. Answering questions on issues such as urban blight, AIDS, the government response to Hurricane Katrina and immigration might only hurt the top candidates, all of whom have faced scrutiny over their conservative credentials.

From my perspective, whether answering such questions would hurt the candidates depends on the type of responses offered.

I think Brownback's decision to pander slavishly to the traditional victim's strategy of the black community is a disaster. The responses of Tancredo and Keyes, on the other hand, pushed the discussion on black progress in the right direction.

Blacks do not need more policies of redistribution amid the endless cries of "institutional racism." We've seen enough of that. It's been 43 years since the passage of the Civil Rights Act, and the political system, the educational establishment, and the corporate sector have made historic efforts to promote full inclusion for African-Americans in mainstream life. The key agenda for the GOP should be to promote black independence and uplift through policies focusing on greater individual and family responsibility, excellence in educational achievement, the rebuilding of the black family structure, and opportunity-oriented economic policies, focusing on entrepreneurship and ownership.

Further, I've noted recently that the epidemic of black-on-black crime - and especially the phenomenon of "witness intimidation" in the black community, which has made it harder for law enforcement to bring inner-city murderers to justice - ought to be a top Republican issue. The GOP can regain its legacy as the party of Lincoln if its top candidates seize the debate by making a new black freedom and opportunity agenda a premiere plank in the Republican platform.

Blacks Say Simpson Did It

The Washington Post reports that a majority of African-Americans believes that O.J. Simpson is guilty of murdering Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman:

In a nation that largely despised him, O.J. Simpson always had strong support within the black community, where polls showed a majority of people believed he was innocent of charges that he murdered his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her acquaintance Ronald Lyle Goldman outside her home in Los Angeles's Brentwood neighborhood in 1994.

But after a string of missteps by the former football star -- a heated 2003 argument with his teenage daughter in which she called police; a book, "If I Did It," that raised eyebrows last year; and a dispute over sports collectibles in Las Vegas this month that led to an armed-robbery arrest -- black opinion has shifted.

A Washington Post survey found that 40 percent of black respondents believe he is innocent of the murders, compared with 71 percent who felt that way around the time Simpson was acquitted in 1995. The change in black opinion brings African American views of Simpson's guilt closer to those of white people. In late 1995, 72 percent of white respondents said Simpson was guilty of murder, and 74 percent say they feel that way now.

The 31-percentage-point drop among black respondents is a head-turner, sociologists said, because African Americans were such steadfast supporters of the celebrity, cheering in some places when the verdicts were read.

Read the whole thing.

The racial divide over the Simpson verdict was said to reflect the deep societal chasm between the races on matters of equality and justice under the law. I personally never doubted Simpson's guilt (and I've always been somewhat indignant over black resistance to see straight on this issue). Now, though, for black America, Simpson's continued family difficulties and his brushes with the law have simply confirmed what many people have thought all along: The man's a killer.

Check out T. Jefferson Parker's essay on Simpson's book, If I Did It. Parker's a crime writer, and he had a chill down his spine when read the section where Simpson essentially confesses his crimes.

The Stubborn Truth of Black Social Breakdown

Heather MacDonald, in her latest column on the Jena 6 case, argues that demonstrators and the press are avoiding key facts underlying the episode. There remain serious unresolved issues surrounding the proceedings, and MacDonald's clear to suggest that if prosecutorial misconduct is found, the most serious penalties - including disbarment - should be considered appropriate.

Yet MacDonald's also clear to identify a lot of backgound information that protestors (celebrants?) are conveniently overlooking in the controversy:

The idea behind the protests and the politicians’ exploitation of them is that just as these five youths were overcharged, the hundreds of thousands of blacks in prison are also the victims of systemic abuse. But for institutional racism, the black prison population would be much smaller.

This is an old complaint, for which no proof has ever been offered, Hillary Clinton’s irresponsible statement notwithstanding. The usual evidence in support of the charge that the criminal laws discriminate against blacks is the far stiffer sentences for selling and possessing crack cocaine compared with powdered cocaine. But that colorblind sentencing regimen, which dates from 1986, was a heartfelt effort to protect the overwhelmingly black victims of crack, not to penalize them. Black liberals such as Congressman Charles Rangel were loudest in sounding the alarm about the effects of crack in the black ghetto. Not even the most deluded racial apologists have ever explicitly suggested that racial bias motivated Congress’s efforts to combat a drug that results in much higher rates of violence among dealers and users, quicker and more onerous addiction, and more emergency room visits than its powdered cousin.

The reason that the black incarceration rate is the highest in the country is that blacks have the highest crime rate—by a long shot. Don’t trust the police, prosecutors, or judges to give a fair picture of black crime? Then go where the bodies are. Los Angeles is representative. In the first seven months of 2007, blacks in Los Angeles were murdered at a rate ten times that of whites and Asians. Who’s killing them? It’s not whites and Asians. While a minor proportion of the assailants of blacks are Hispanic, the vast majority are black themselves. Nationally, blacks commit murder at about eight times the frequency of whites. In New York, any given violent crime is 13 times more likely to have been committed by a black person than by a white person, according to the reports of victims and witnesses. Though they are only 24 percent of the city’s population, blacks committed 68.5 percent of all murders, rapes, robberies, and assaults in New York last year. Whites, who make up 34.5 percent of New Yorkers, committed only 5.3 percent of violent crimes. These ratios are similar across the country. In Los Angeles, blacks committed 41 percent of all robberies in 2001, according to victims’ descriptions, though they constitute only 11 percent of the city’s population. Robbery victims identified whites, who make up 30 percent of the Los Angeles population, just 4 percent of the time.

MacDonald also points out the fundamental hypocrisies shadowing the advocates for racial justice:

No one in the Jena stampede dares whisper a word about black crime, because it undercuts the portrait of a victimized race. You can listen to every protest across the country glorifying the “Jena Six” and you will never hear an acknowledgement of the massive social breakdown that is the black crime rate: no mention of the violence in inner-city schools that black students commit overwhelmingly; no mention of the rising homicides in midsize cities that young black males commit when they feel “disrespected.” It is not racism that is putting black men in jail; it’s their own behavior.

What about the broader significance of Jena? Again, assuming for the sake of argument that this minuscule Louisiana town seethes with the crudest bigotry, held uniquely by whites against integration-seeking blacks, is Jena’s supposed state of affairs a microcosm of America? To the contrary: there is not a single elite institution in the country that is not twisting itself into knots in favor of African-Americans. Every minimally selective college is desperately seeking to enroll more black students. Boosting black enrollment requires drastically lowering a college’s admissions criteria to overcome the intractable 200-point SAT gap between black and white high school students, but every college institutes such double standards for the sake of “diversity.” Any black student who graduates from high school with decent grades and respectable SATs will leapfrog over thousands of more qualified white and Asian students right into the Ivy League. Blacks are also the hottest commodity for exclusive private schools that serve as training grounds for the Ivies. Andover, Exeter, Choate, and every other fancy prep and day school practice the same double standards in their eagerness to admit African-American students. After college, law schools, business schools, medical schools, engineering schools, and others accept black students whose test scores would disqualify them if they were white or Asian.

The preferences continue into the professions. Wall Street law firms annually flagellate themselves over their lack of proportional representation of black associates and partners, even though the number of blacks who graduate from law school with grades and bar-exam scores comparable with the firms’ white hires is negligible. The lack of comparably qualified black candidates does not stop the law partnerships from hiring black associates, though. Corporations have saddled themselves with massive “diversity” bureaucracies whose only function is to justify hiring and promoting less qualified African-Americans and Hispanics. Newspapers, TV stations, and advertisers put enormous pressure on themselves to have blacks on their staffs and to show black faces to the world.

In short, the opportunities for blacks to roar ahead in the economy if they stay out of trouble, study, and apply themselves are legion, but the numbers taking advantage of these opportunities are not. California’s state superintendent of public instruction broke a longstanding taboo this August by pointing out that middle-class black students in the state score worse on math and English than poor white and Asian students—a disparity that applies across the country. The usual poverty excuse for black underachievement does not hold up.

The Jena protesters will go home in denial of these truths. In fact, the purpose of such mass celebrations—and that is indeed what they are—is to make sure that attention stays far away from the actual problems holding blacks back. Astronomical rates of black criminality are not the only topic that the Jena rallies have obscured. No one wallowing in Jena promotion has had the courage to speak about an even more important crisis, the breakdown of marriage. The nearly 70 percent national illegitimacy rate for blacks—a number that can approach 90 percent in inner cities—is a cataclysm. Its consequences go far beyond the harm to individual black children—especially boys—who grow up without fathers. The real poison of the marriage crisis is the message it sends to young men about personal responsibility. The first duty in civil society is toward one’s own children; everything else is built around it. But when boys are raised without any expectations that they will have to support their children and marry the mother of those children, they fail to learn the most basic lesson about responsibility. They also are freed from the civilizing force of the marriage requirement, which pressures young men to become attractive mates. With enough support, individuals can overcome the moral perils of the illegitimacy culture, but given the prevalence of black crime and disaffiliation from the working world, it’s clear that not enough young men are finding ways to do so.

The race industry will try to keep Jena in the media and political spotlight for as long as possible, and to reinforce the notion that this episode exemplifies blacks’ situation in America.

Read the whole thing. I was hoping to see an analysis by MacDonald on this issue. There's virtually no analytical discussion of the Jena 6 case from an objective, big picture perspective.

In my previous post on the case ("Jena and Race Politics"), I cited a CBS News story whose title completely captured the national media's sensational obssession with race in America: "Jena and the Son of Jim Crow: Case Shows Racism Still Pervades The Nation — Not Just The South. There's very little (if any) MSM reporting offering perspectives on Jena outside of this "continuing racism" consensus.

Yet as MacDonald argues (as well as many other commentators), continuing outcries against racial discrimination reflect the ideology of victimization, and they do little to promote the kind of initiatives that will truly advance the cause of black justice and social mobility.

Jena and Race Politics

Betsy Newmark, in her post on the Jena 6, suggests that this is one of those stories "when everyone seems at fault." She also notes that racemongers - like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton - hit the streets in force to denounce the "injustice."

Newmark, though, helps one cut through the clutter of race politics by linking to Jason Whitlock's piece on the story, from the Kansas City Star:

There are undeniable racial and economic inequities in our criminal justice system, and from afar the “Jena Six” rallies certainly looked and felt like the righteous protests of the 1960s.

But the reality is Thursday’s protests are just another sign that we remain deeply locked in denial about the path we need to travel today for true American liberation, equality and power in the new millennium.

The fact that we waited to love Mychal Bell until after he’d thrown away a Division I football scholarship and nine months of his life is just as heinous as the grossly excessive attempted-murder charges that originally landed him in jail.

Reed Walters, the Jena district attorney, is being accused of racism because he didn’t show Bell compassion when the teenager was brought before the court for the third time on assault charges in a two-year span.

Where was our compassion long before Bell got into this kind of trouble?

That’s the question that needed to be asked in Jena and across the country on Thursday. But it wasn’t asked because everyone has been lied to about what really transpired in the small southern town.

There was no “schoolyard fight” as a result of nooses being hung on a whites-only tree.

Justin Barker, the white victim, was cold-cocked from behind, knocked unconscious and stomped by six black athletes. Barker, luckily, sustained no life-threatening injuries and was released from the hospital three hours after the attack.

A black U.S. attorney, Don Washington, investigated the “Jena Six” case and concluded that the attack on Barker had absolutely nothing to do with the noose-hanging incident three months before. The nooses and two off-campus incidents were tied to Barker’s assault by people wanting to gain sympathy for the “Jena Six” in reaction to Walters’ extreme charges of attempted murder.

Much has been written about Bell’s trial, the six-person all-white jury that convicted him of aggravated battery and conspiracy to commit aggravated battery and the clueless public defender who called no witnesses and offered no defense. It is rarely mentioned that no black people responded to the jury summonses and that Bell’s public defender was black.

It’s almost never mentioned that Bell’s absentee father returned from Dallas and re-entered his son’s life only after Bell faced attempted-murder charges. At a bond hearing in August, Bell’s father and a parade of local ministers promised a judge that they would supervise Bell if he was released from prison.

Where were the promises and supervision before any of this?

It’s rarely mentioned that Bell was already on probation for assault when he was accused of participating in Barker’s attack. And it’s never mentioned that white people in the “racist” town of Jena provided Bell support and protected his football career long before Jesse, Al, Bell’s father and all the others took a sincere interest in Mychal Bell.

You won’t hear about any of that because it doesn’t fit the picture we want to paint of Jena, this case, America and ourselves.

We don’t practice preventive medicine. Mychal Bell needed us long before he was cuffed and jailed. Here is another undeniable, statistical fact: The best way for a black (or white) father to ensure that his son doesn’t fall victim to a racist prosecutor is by participating in his son’s life on a daily basis.

That fact needed to be shared Thursday in Jena. The constant preaching of that message would short-circuit more potential “Jena Six” cases than attributing random acts of six-on-one violence to three-month-old nooses.

And I am in no way excusing the nooses. The responsible kids should’ve been expelled. A few years after I’d graduated, a similar incident happened at my high school involving our best football player, a future NFL tight end. He was expelled.

The Jena school board foolishly overruled its principal and suspended the kids for three days.

But the kids responsible for Barker’s beating deserve to be punished. The prosecutor needed to be challenged on his excessive charges. And we as black folks need to question ourselves about why too many of us can only get energized to help our young people once they’re in harm’s way.

Whitlock's analysis won't sit well with those advocating a "blood of martyrs" strategy of black victimology.

Over at the Washington Post, Beverly Daniel Tatum dredges up the ghosts of the 1957 Little Rock crisis to argue that nothing's changed for blacks in today's white America:

In 1957, the Little Rock 9 sat together for protection in a hostile community bent on preserving the symbols of white supremacy. In Jena today, maintaining white privilege appeared to be the priority, and the whole community suffered as a result.

We need to talk more about race, she says...

But check out Rachel Sullivan's post as well, where she notes:

The case itself is much broader, and the issues of our criminal (in)justice system are way bigger than Jena, Louisiana.

Intimidation by noose is unacceptable, however rare; but I think some folks need to consider some of the points raised by Whitlock. Despite claims to the contrary, Jena's image as a "Jim Crow" good old boys town is contested (the townspeople have rejected the media caricatures of their community). As noted above, Jena's legal system includes black public defenders, and their jobs certainly aren't made easier by a local black population indifferent to the fate of the black youths being allegedly "railroaded" through the system.

A Massacre of Innocence at Duke University

I did not follow the Duke rape case very closely. Frankly, I was late in appreciating the story, which in the end is a sad tale of miscarried justice and a deep commentary on contemporary American society.

The events of the Duke case are told in a new book by Stuart Taylor, Jr., and KC Johnson, Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case.

Abigail Thernstrom has a review of the book in today's Wall Street Journal:

Privileged, rowdy white jocks at an elite, Southern college, a poor, young black stripper, and an alleged rape: It was a juicy, made-for-the-media story of race, class and sex, and it was told and retold for months with a ferocious, moralistic intensity. Reporters and pundits ripped into Duke University, the white race and the young lacrosse players at the center of the episode, and the local justice system quickly handed up indictments. But as Stuart Taylor Jr. and KC Johnson show in "Until Proven Innocent"--and as the facts themselves would show when they finally came to light--it was a false story, a toxic controversy built on lies and bad faith.

There was plenty of wrongdoing, of course, but it had very little to do with Duke's lacrosse players. It was perpetrated instead by a rogue district attorney determined to win re-election in a racially divided, town-gown city; ideologically driven reporters and their pseudo-expert sources; censorious faculty members driven by the imperatives of political correctness; a craven university president; and black community leaders seemingly ready to believe any charge of black victimization.

"Until Proven Innocent" is a stunning book. It recounts the Duke lacrosse case in fascinating detail and offers, along the way, a damning portrait of the institutions--legal, educational and journalistic--that do so much to shape contemporary American culture. Messrs. Taylor and Johnson make it clear that the Duke affair--the rabid prosecution, the skewed commentary, the distorted media storyline--was not some odd, outlier incident but the product of an elite culture's most treasured assumptions about American life, not least about America's supposed racial divide.

Thernstrom's review provides a nice background to the totality of legal and political developments in the case. But I found the following paragraph particularly revealing, where she notes that prosector Michael Nifong's crazed legal railroading of the defendants was abetted by the university and its despicable culture of political correctness:

In this fundamental injustice, he was aided and abetted by others in Durham. Richard Brodhead, the president of Duke, condemned the lacrosse players as if they had already been found guilty, demanded the resignation of their coach and studiously ignored the mounting evidence that Ms. Mangum's charge was false. He was clearly terrified of the racial and gender activists on his own faculty. Houston Baker, a noted professor of English, called the lacrosse players "white, violent, drunken men veritably given license to rape," men who could "claim innocence . . . safe under the cover of silent whiteness." Protesters on campus and in the city itself waved "castrate" banners, put up "wanted" posters and threatened the physical safety of the lacrosse players.

It's truly a shame that the lives of three upstanding white scholar-athletes could have been nearly destroyed by a politically-corrupt district attorney and the multicultural hordes who circled the case likes sharks after the chum.

Murder Stalks Poor Minorities in L.A. County

This morning's Los Angeles Times details the findings of the paper's "Homicide Report," a study of the distribution of homicides in Los Angeles County for 2007. Here's an excerpt from the main summary:

An online project of The Times called the Homicide Report has tracked Los Angeles County homicides, as they have happened, since the beginning of the year. The project has yielded a vivid statistical outline of the county's current homicide problem -- at least 520 killings by early August. It also has chronicled some of the damage that rippled through families and communities rent by deaths that happened before their time.

Homicide is not fair, hitting hardest among Latinos and especially among blacks. Latinos are killed at more than three times the rate of whites, while blacks succumb to homicide at three times the rate of Latinos, the Times analysis shows.

Adult males are the eye of the storm. The national homicide rate is about six deaths per 100,000 people each year. But for Latino men in their 20s in Los Angeles County, the rate is 52 deaths, and for black men, 176 deaths. In human terms, that means that losing a son to homicide, a remote possibility in some neighborhoods, looms as a daily threat in others.

In South Los Angeles and Athens this year, for example, there have been at least 20 homicides within a single ZIP Code in just seven months. A few miles away, in the Woodland Hills, Tarzana and Brentwood ZIP Codes, months go by without any.

People living close to frequent violent death find refuge in denial. On the same streets where sidewalks are stained by the melted wax from homicide shrines and young men loiter in wheelchairs, people talk about being "caught slippin' " (letting one's guard down) or about friends having "passed" (not having been killed). Bereaved parents describe years of obsessively protective behavior -- children locked indoors, hourly cellphone calls to check in. Then, in the next breath, they avow that they never thought their child could be murdered.

Be sure to read the story, and check out the chronicles of the victims at the homicide report blog.

I recently posted on the tragedy of America's urban crisis.

I am deeply troubled by these statistics. Urban violence is a national crisis, and the 2008 presidential hopefuls need to address this issue more forcefully. Remedies to the crisis are not to be found solely in the realm of law enforcement, but must also come from changes at the family level.

The Urban Killing Fields: Where is the Outcry?

Stanley Crouch, in his column up today at the New York Daily News, argues that the crisis of violence in urban America cries out for public debate and discussion. Yet, the issue is a hot potato on the presidential campaign trail:

We have now developed an urban badlands which is national and troubling because of the incredible numbers of people who are murdered or suffer the physical and psychological effects of violent crime. Our presidential candidates are quick on the draw when asked about the war on terror or homeland security, but the American people have not heard a peep from them about the concrete killing fields of our cities. Perhaps, because so many of the perpetrators and the victims are "people of color," the donkeys don't want to be seen as bleeding hearts while the elephants are afraid of being called racists.

In the 19th century, murderous cowboys, rustlers and bank or train robbers had neither the arms nor the occasions presented to them that could have resulted in the kinds of carnage we now take for granted. The mob wars of the 20th century left numbers of dead that would be pointed to with pride by a mayor today as proof of how much better things have gotten.

Addressing a dilemma tantamount to terrorism, a few months ago Ben Stein wrote in the conservative American Spectator that, "In the five and a half years since Sept. 11, 2001, there have been roughly 40,000 killings by gangs and gang members in this United States of America, mostly in the African-American and Hispanic sections of large cities." In his book, "The Devil and Dave Chappelle," William Jelani Cobb writes: "Between 1976 and 2004, African-Americans, who are 13% of the population, constituted nearly 47% of the homicide cases in the United States."

Besides all of the human costs of these murders, the burden is estimated by the World Health Organization to cost an annual $300 billion. That amounts to about 150 weeks in Iraq, or three years.

This would seem a good subject for presidential debates, right? Wrong, apparently.
But just last week the news media were often given to breast-beating as they reported on the three college students who were lined up against a wall and killed execution style in Newark. Newark youth worker Shamonique Jones, who lives in the area where the three were gunned down, told The New York Times that the tragedy was a matter of "being in the wrong place at the wrong time" because the Crips, who ominously trouble the neighborhood, do much of their recruiting in the summer months. On CNN those murders were put in the context of slaughters taking place at nauseating rates in many other American cities.

One Newark man interviewed by CBS seemed to speak for all of those living under the oppression of violent crime when he said that the neighborhood where the three young people were murdered is under siege. There seemed to be more robberies, burglaries and carjackings. But Newark Police Chaplain John McClain, who is the great uncle of one of the three victims, said that the killers should be thought of as what they are, terrorists.

A New Jersey resident asked a fundamental question, "Will these knuckleheads have to join the Ku Klux Klan before this country wakes up and faces the horror of what they are doing?" I think that question should be answered by every one of those running for President because the corpses will not have stopped piling up throughout our concrete killing fields when the next commander in chief is sworn in.

Croach is perceptive in his point that those on the left avoid the bleeding heart tag and conservatives hestitate to speak truth to race politics for fear of the racist label.

I've commented before that the Democrats, at a recent debate, missed the chance to seriously address the crisis of black underclass crime. Both parties, however, have an historic opportunity to make urban policy a major platform during the 2008 race. This shift would be especially smart for the GOP, as it moves to reestablish itself as the party of competent government and the champion of traditional values.

Newark Violence Rooted in Fatherless Communities

Steven Malanga, over at City Journal, pins down the root causes in last weekend's triple murder in Newark, New Jersey:

The horrific, execution-style killing of three teens in Newark last weekend has sparked widespread outrage and promises of reform from politicians, religious leaders, and community activists, who are pledging a renewed campaign against the violence that plagues New Jersey’s largest city. But much of the reaction, though well-intentioned, misses the point. Behind Newark’s persistent violence and deep social dysfunction is a profound cultural shift that has left many of the city’s children growing up outside the two-parent family—and in particular, growing up without fathers. Decades of research tell us that such children are far likelier to fail in school and work and to fall into violence than those raised in two-parent families. In Newark, we are seeing what happens to a community when the traditional family comes close to disappearing.

According to 2005 figures from the U.S. Census Bureau, only 32 percent of Newark children are being raised by their parents in a two-adult household. The rest are distributed among families led by grandparents, foster parents, and single parents—mostly mothers. An astonishing 60 percent of the city’s kids are growing up without fathers. It isn’t that traditional families are breaking up; they aren’t even getting started. The city has one of the highest out-of-wedlock birthrates in the country, with about 65 percent of its children born to unmarried women. And 70 percent of those births are to women who are already poor, meaning that their kids are born directly into poverty.

The economic consequences of these numbers are unsettling, since single parenthood is a road to lasting poverty in America today. In Newark, single parents head 83 percent of all families living below the poverty line. If you are a child born into a single-parent family in Newark, your chances of winding up in poverty are better than one in five, but if you are born into a two-parent family, those chances drop to just one in twelve.

And the social consequences are even more disturbing. Research conducted in the 1990s found that a child born out of wedlock was three times more likely to drop out of school than the average child, and far more likely to wind up on welfare as an adult. Studies have also found that about 70 percent of the long-term prisoners in our jails, those who have committed the most violent crimes, grew up without fathers.

The starkness of these statistics makes it astonishing that our politicians and policy makers ignore the subject of single parenthood, as if it were outside the realm of civic discourse. And our religious leaders, who once preached against such behavior, now also largely avoid the issue, even as they call for prayer vigils and organize stop-the-violence campaigns in Newark. Often, in this void, the only information that our teens and young adults get on the subject of marriage, children, and family life comes through media reports about the lifestyles of our celebrity entertainers and athletes, who have increasingly shunned matrimony and traditional families. Once, such news might have been considered scandalous; today, it is reported matter-of-factly, as if these pop icons’ lives were the norm.

Malanga might have added that the break-up of the traditional family structure - especially the structure of the black American family - has been a focal point of social welfare policy analysis for more than forty years. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in his landmark study, "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action" (1965), quotes E. Franklin Frazier to summarize his case on the "tangle of pathologies" arising from black family disintegration:

As the result of family disorganization a large proportion of Negro children and youth have not undergone the socialization which only the family can provide. The disorganized families have failed to provide for their emotional needs and have not provided the discipline and habits which are necessary for personality development. Because the disorganized family has failed in its function as a socializing agency, it has handicapped the children in their relations to the institutions in the community. Moreover, family disorganization has been partially responsible for a large amount of juvenile delinquency and adult crime among Negroes. Since widespread family disorganization among Negroes has resulted from the failure of the father to play the role in the family required by American society, the mitigation of this problem must await those changes in the Negro and American society which will enable the Negro father to play the role required of him.

Frazier's quotation is from 1950. Things had not improved for the black family by the time Moynihan wrote his analysis for the Lyndon Johnson administration fifteen years later. The "Moynihan Report" generated a tremendous backlash in the black community, as it was seen as "blaming the victim," obviously not a popular reform avenue at a time when the civil rights redistributive regime was kicking into high gear. This is why single parenthood remains out of mainstream reform discourse: It's politically incorrect to focus on individual-level pathologies as the source of personal and social disorganization. Rather, structures and institutions must change - rights activists will argue - for there to be real progress toward equal opportunity and mobility.

There's something else important to note coming out of the Newark murders. I was in New York on the weekend of the killings, and this story from the New York Times mentions the phenomenon of witness intimidation in the black community as it relates to the Newark case:

Some residents told detectives that they saw a group of men running from the school just after hearing the shots, but no one saw their faces or knew exactly how many there were....

Witness intimidation and fear of retaliation has stymied law enforcement efforts to combat violence in communities across Essex County, and particularly in Newark, where drug trading and gangs fuel most of the crimes. Ms. [Essex County prosecutor, Paula T.] Dow’s office has been reluctant to file murder charges in cases with single eyewitnesses because so many of those cases have fallen apart.

The story notes that the fourth victim, Natasha Ariel, may be the key source of evidence for the prosecutor's office. As of Thursday, Ms. Ariel had identified a suspect from a photo lineup, although Ms. Dow is waiting to get a taped statement before proceeding further in the case.

I've blogged about witness intimidation here. The phenomenon represents an advanced condition of the breakdown of the black community structure. Black urban culture has deteriorated to the point where upstanding families - facing extreme threats to their safety - have little recourse but to let urban thugs take over entire neighborhoods. As long as these pathologies continue - and until black culture shifts toward privileging citizenship and responsibility over social neglect and chaos - there can be little hope for the success of more forceful public policies, at least for those social welfare approaches falling outside of aggressive anti-crime initiatives.