A Public Outing
Crisis, Curfews and the Rap on Culture

The pot continues to boil in regards to young Black men, gun violence, and the culture that has spawned the acute problems we are faced with today in inner-cities. And Cleveland is not alone: the murder rate is so high in Baltimore that officials there are debating a type of curfew — for juveniles and adults in certain areas of town — that borders on martial law.

Locally Regina Brett, who has been thankfully relentless in hammering away at the problem, did a public “outing” of sorts in her Sunday column by naming over a hundred Black leaders and potential leaders (if you count the members of the Cavs and Browns teams she threw in for good measure), calling on them to each come up with 10-point action plan to impact on the crisis.

And, while she is right to wonder why so many Blacks (leaders and followers) have remained so mute over so many years while the problems of the inner-city were festering like open sores, I can’t recall Brett ever taking to task any Whites in a similar manner when they all remained silent after cross burnings in Parma. I don’t even recall her ever writing about the incidents. Does she save up her moral outrage and indignation to use exclusively on Black inaction?

Indeed, while the current crisis is occurring almost exclusively within the Black community, Blacks were not alone — or even chiefly responsible — in terms of creating these horrible conditions. White flight in response to Brown v. Board of Education and busing, unequal school funding, redlining, discriminatory employment practices ... the list of culprits could go on and on. Blacks own very little media — and no music distribution chains — but are almost solely blamed for the contemptible content infecting all of America. Nor do we make the guns that the NRA, by its lobbying efforts, is assuring will be readily available to any Black kid with a bad attitude and a hundred bucks.

Nonetheless, in spite of Brett’s refusal to blame anyone but Blacks, she is to be thanked and lauded for keeping the issue on the radar and holding Blacks’ feet to the fire. I’ll just have to excuse her fuzzy logic and exclusive finger-pointing at Blacks... while she exculpates and absolves Whites by her failure to hold them accountable for their failures, misdeeds and inactions.

In her most recent screed she mentioned a just-released study from the Black think tank PolicyBridge, entitled “The Rap on Culture.” The study is to be applauded for its depth, its thoroughness, and its grasp of the causations of the current crisis. Nonetheless, I mildly disagree with some of the solutions, chiefly among them a call for a “Policy of Personal Responsibility.” Not that parents shouldn’t held accountable for how they raise their children, they certainly should be. Simply because, no matter how much we try to shift the responsibility to schools, the courts, and any other institutions, the main responsibility has to be the parents; it’s this way with every species God put on the Earth.

However, with that said, it’s high time we realize we are asking the impossible of some of these parents; they need real help if they are to do what we demand of them. If someone asked any of us to design and build a booster rocket for NASA we’d fail miserably — and with good reason: We have not been taught how to be rocket scientists. But we constantly ask mothers — many mere girls — to do something they have not been taught: To take newborns back to the same projects that failed them and to raise a success child. How stupid are we for asking this of someone who was ill-raised themselves?

“If only the mothers would read to their children,” we continually shout, without stopping to ask the mother if she knows how to read. The problems are generational, they’ve taken decades to reach this point, but we want fast answers — and we want them now.

If haranguing, browbeating, or beating these underclass mothers and fathers with sticks would have a salubrious effect on the situation I’d be first in line taking whacks at all and sundry. If beating up on Black leaders (while excusing White leaders, of course) would cause effective 10-point programs to be put forth, I’d put a nail in the stick I use to beat them. But the simple fact is, all they can do is express outrage; all we Black folks run in America are our mouths. Whites hold all of the purse strings, make all of the decisions, and determine and set all of the policies. Period.

So, let’s just suppose one, two, ten or twenty of the Blacks Brett outed were to come up with eminently sound proposals to solve the current crisis, and future ones to boot. What are they going to do to get their ideas funded? There is no such thing as a free lunch. Any program that is going to work is going to cost dollars to implement, and control of dollars (real dollars, enough dollars to make a difference) is something Black leaders just don’t have or control. Someone can put forth the best 10-point program in the world, but just like the Second Chance Act that has been stalled in Congress for over two years now (which would have implemented programs to help with the current situation, but was just put off for a vote once again last week), Blacks don’t control enough votes to pass any legislation; it takes Whites as well.

The fact is, there are no shortage of solutions (read what former US Senator Bill Bradley proposed over a decade ago, it still would work today), what there is a lack of is political will. We let the government off the hook and instead call for wealthy Blacks like Oprah and Bill Cosby to use their personal wealth to solve the problems said government ignores. While they may indeed be wealthy, if they devoted all of their personal money to the problem we would still come up woefully short. No other people but Blacks are asked to use their own funds to solve government-created social problems. What’s up with that?

So, while Regina Brett should be applauded for staying on the issue, she should also be calling on Whites to take their share of responsibility also. It could start with something as simple as her calling for all of the White companies in Cleveland that have never, ever hired a Black person to change their racist ways. In the end, the root cause of the problems in the Black community is still jobs, or to put it more succinctly, “It’s economics, stupid!” Only poor people prey on each other.

From Cool Cleveland contributor Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com
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