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Sunday, Nov. 01, 2009

Solutions, part 1

Last week, I said I was going to start offering solutions to pull us out of the deep pit we find ourselves in, particularly among young black males. While our society is flowing around the toilet clockwise, many in the black community have already been flushed.

I offer these suggestions with a caveat. I’m not an expert. My Ph.D is nonexistent. At times I think I’m barely literate when trying to address these serious societal problems.

Here’s the deal we all know: There are too many fatherless babies growing up without the guidance they need to become productive adults. Too many fathers are MIA, and too many young mothers are without the wherewithal to raise their children to be contributing members of the community.

Many of the mothers just don’t know what to do or how to do it. They are, generally speaking, the offspring of single mothers. Many young mothers would have to go back to their great-great-grandmothers before finding a stable man in the home. Around 70 percent of black children are born to single mothers. And, as a general rule, the children from those families grow up poor. And it’s not just a question of wealth.

The solutions I’m going to present are daunting, and I don’t expect to live long enough to see them have a permanent effect, but we can move the needle. It hasn’t always been this way and the situation can be addressed, “if” we really care.

First, let me say that not all of our black young men are thugs or our women hootchie mommas. And it’s not their fault if they are. They are simply modeling what they see in their environments. That’s what we must change.

The majority of our black youth are not out gang-banging, robbing people and creating mayhem. However, even the good ones are in danger. The shadow of the bad ones hangs over them like a low fog.

I know what people are thinking when they see a group of black teenagers walking down the street minding their own business. I know what people are thinking because I’m a people, too, and I know what I’m thinking, and it ain’t good.

There used to be an old joke about a white woman in her car who sees a black man approaching. She locks her doors. He wanted to tell her that her right rear tire was going flat. The truth is, many of us are locking our doors.

Good, bad, thug or A student, all black males are seen in the same prism. Take me out of my work-a-day wear of a shirt and tie and put me in my weekend wardrobe of a T-shirt and shorts, and I become just another dangerous black face, and while that’s grossly unfair, it is, reality.

So what do we do about it? There have been less sophisticated efforts to change a child’s environment throughout history. In Austraila, they took aborigine children away from their parents because the government thought it could take the aborigine out of the aborigine. Guess what? It didn’t work.

So how do we teach young men not attracted to the thug life how to cope? The same way we taught young people of my generation what to do and what not to do. And what of those not so inclined to lead a productive life? There are places for people like that: prison.

The moral education we are capable of delivering in our schools is not happening because we have a singular focus on test scores. It comes from an education culture that takes three decades to turn around. We have to speed that change up to a matter of months. It can be done. If we don’t act, and act now, we will be setting thousands of children up for failure.

Next week, I’ll tell you how to change the culture.

Charles E. Richardson is the Telegraph’s editorial page editor. He can be reached at (478)-744-4342 or via e-mail at crichardson@macon.com.