As we all know, Washington, D.C. seems to be vying for the title of "the Nation's Crime Capital."  Juvenile robberies are up 95% this year.  A series of armed robberies (including two reported sexual assaults) took place in May.  Thirteen homicides were reported in just the first 11 days of July, including the murder of a British citizen in Georgetown earlier this month.  It's gotten so bad that D.C. Police Chief Charles Ramsey has instituted a city-wide crime emergency on July 11.  The D.C. City Council and Mayor Anthony Williams have instituted a 10:00pm curfew for minors until August 31. 

"Young black males, in groups of five to six, ages 13 to 15, are displaying handguns and beating their victims," says Chief Ramsey.  What is even more disturbing, he says, is that "We're dealing with adolescents who have no remorse, no regrets." 

In a recent article for Scripps Howard News Service, Star Parker discusses a letter she received from a reader who describes himself as a "white minister":

"My son was murdered by two teenage African-American boys ... . At the trial of the boy who pulled the trigger twice to kill my son, I looked into the boy's eyes. There was no remorse at all and he seemed like he didn't realize that life, anyone's life, had any value. This 19-year-old boy was a dropout of school. He had no family at the trial. It was like no one had given this boy any love."

Many D.C. residents are pessimistic that the curfew or any other crime-fighting measures instituted will have little effect.  "I think the curfew is going to help but not by itself," Henry Dozier, 74, said as reported to the Washington Times. "You have to give them some alternatives to just being in the house, something wholesome. These children don't really have anything to keep them off the streets."  "I can see the reasoning, but there needs to be some sort of long-term solution," said Alexander Hogan, an advisory neighborhood commissioner in the Columbia Heights area of Northwest. "We need more of a police presence, and they need to respond to the issues as they come up. I'm not sure what the obstacle to that is." 

Some even have little faith that the curfew will be respected.   The Times reports the feelings of one D.C. area youth:

Brandon Rollins, a 16-year-old working at Ben's Chili Bowl in Northwest, said he likely will disregard the new curfew hours.  "I won't pay it any mind," he said. "If I'm out, it's because I've got something to do. If I've got to go somewhere, I've got to go somewhere. I'm not really paying attention to the police or anything like that. I know I'm not doing anything illegal, so I know I don't have anything to worry about.   "I'm not going to be looking at my watch, like, 'Oh, it's 9:30, I better get in the house,' " Brandon said. "I'm not going to go in the house because somebody got shot. People get shot all over the world. Are they going to shut the world down, just because people get killed? That's not going to stop crime." 

This young man's I-don't-care attitude about obeying the law (no matter how it may inconvenience him), as well as the white minister's story speak volumes about the abyssmally low moral state of black America today - especially the black family.  So many black kids today are growing up with no sense of right and wrong, no moral compass (they certainly didn't learn it at home), so the idea that their actions have consequences is foreign to them.

Almost every summer violent and juvenile crime spikes in our nation's capital; and every year people are wringing their hands asking aloud "Why?" and demanding "solutions."  Chief Ramsey, Parker, Bill Cosby, and others (as well as the tight-lipped black "leadership") know why:  Violent crime in the black community is a by-product of the breakdown of the black family unit, particularly fatherlessness, precipitated and exacerbated by a 30-year legacy of open-ended welfare dependency.  Before welfare was expanded in the late-1960s over 20% of black children were born out-of-wedlock; now, the figure is 70%.  As a result, far too many black children (including law-breaking black juveniles) have been growing up without loving, nurturing and responsible fathers in their lives. 

Another reason "why" is because since the end of the civil rights movement, the modern-day black "leadership" has successfully brainwashed a large section of the black community into being perennial "victims," to blame "racism" on all of their ills (no matter how counter-productive that is), thus absolving them of taking any responsibility for their actions or changing their lives.  As the Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson has correctly said, black America suffers from a crisis of moral character, one that no government program can rectify.

Since we know the "why," we also know where the solution lies.   Chief Ramsey got it right several years ago when he said, "The African-American community has to be central in the solution because that is where the problem lies and that is the community being hurt the most by this genocide. ... You've got generations of dysfunction, and that cycle has got to be broken." It was Chief Ramsey's prescient observation that prompted Bill Cosby to embark on a personal cruscade two years ago to deliver the tough-love message of personal and parental responsibility to low-income black communities across the country.

As Ms. Parker writes:

It should be clear that the problem is that America's black community is now suspended in a moral vacuum. Life is cheap and meaningless, and murder, sex, abortion and robbery are viewed with the same gravity as ordering a Big Mac and fries. There is no accountability, only blame... There is only one hope for pulling black America out of oblivion: Re-instilling a sense of absolutes, of right and wrong, and doing this from the grass roots up, one person at a time. Anyone who thinks there is an alternative is kidding himself.  Blacks can continue to listen to the [modern black "leadership"] and the black intellectuals who have a thousand different ways to say "it's not my fault." The price will be a black community lost forever.

We as black folks have got to start getting our own collective house in order.  Here are just my thoughts:

1. Get an education;
2. Get married before you have children (and, if at all possible, stay married);
3. Before you bring a child into this world, make sure you have the financial, moral, emotional, and spiritual wherewithal to adequately provide for them;
4. Raise your kids right by setting rules (and consequences for breaking them) and teaching them right from wrong;
5. Set the example that you want your kids to follow ("Do as I say, not as I do" just doesn't cut it);
6. Most importantly, teach them the importance of self-help and personal responsibility.

Such a message is not one you hear from the modern-day civil rights establishment, as it is anathema to their very well-being.  Yet blacks must embrace this message - the message that Rev. Peterson, Parker, Ramsey, Cosby and others are working so hard to convey - if we're ever going to reverse the crime, decadence, and moral poverty that has gripped the black community, in our nation's capital and elsewhere, for far too long.



 

When I first read it in the Washington Times this morning, I thought it was a joke.  The headline itself caught me by surprise: "U.N. rips U.S. over human rights."  You gotta be kidding, I told myself.  According to the article, the U.N. Human Rights Committee, in a 12-page report, has condemned the United States for supposed "human rights abuses," and demanded the immediate closure of any secret U.S. detention facilities.

"The committee is concerned by credible and uncontested information that the state party has seen fit to engage in the practice of detaining people secretly and in secret places for months and years on end," according to the 12-page report by the committee, which held a two-day hearing last week on U.S. compliance to a major human rights treaty...  The 18 analysts on the committee, which examines on a rotating basis the record of all 156 signatories to the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, said U.S. practices violate the rights of detainees and their families.  The United States "should only detain persons in places in which they can enjoy the full protection of the law," the report said. "It should also grant prompt access by the International Committee of the Red Cross to any person detained in connection with an armed conflict."

It gets better, folks.

What other areas did the big, bad, human rights-violating United States of America get dinged on?

On U.S. domestic issues, the committee said: 

• The United States should adopt a moratorium on executions on grounds that capital punishment appears to be disproportionately imposed on minority groups and poor people. 
• In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the United States should increase its efforts to ensure that the rights of poor people and in particular blacks are fully taken into consideration in the reconstruction plans with regard to access to housing, education and health care. 
• The United States should give residents of the District the same voting rights as other Americans, allowing them to elect representatives with full voting powers to the Senate and House.

This is the same United Nations that basically legitimizes terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah by heavily criticizing Israel for defending itself against such monsters.  Alan Dershowitz nails it in a recent article for Jewish World Review when he said:

If anyone wonders why the UN has rendered itself worse than irrelevant in the Arab-Israeli conflict, all he or she need do is read UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's July 20 statement. Annan goes to great pains to suggest equal fault and moral equivalence between the rockets of Hezbollah and Hamas that specifically target innocent civilians and the self-defense efforts by Israel, which tries desperately, though not always successfully, to avoid causing civilian casualties. In his statement, Annan never condemns, or even mentions, terrorism, which is a root cause and precipitator of the conflict.

Even Annan was forced to acknowledge that "Hezbollah's provocative attack on July 12 was the trigger of this particular crisis"; that Hezbollah is "deliberate[ly] targeting ... Israeli population centers with hundreds of indiscriminate weapons"; and that Israel has the "right to defend itself under Article 51 of the UN charter." But he doesn't stop there. He goes out of his way to insist on equating Hezbollah's terrorists with Israeli military response, which he labels "disproportionate" and "collective punishment." He condemns both Hezbollah and Israel. He also criticizes Israel for its efforts at preventing Qassam rocket attacks against its civilian populations, noting that the Hamas rockets have produced no "casualties in the past month." (This, of course, is not for lack of trying.) He ignores Hamas' long history of terrorism against innocent civilians.

Deshowitz goes on to point out U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan's anti-Israeli pronouncements over the years.

In March 2004, Annan "strongly condemned" Israel's targeted killing of Sheik Ahmad Yassin, the terrorist leader of Hamas, without condemning Yassin for his murderous actions or his organization for the murder of Jewish civilians. In December 2003, Annan "strongly condemned" Israel's assault on a Palestinian refugee camp where two gunmen were thought to be hiding. And in 2005, he issued the most tepid of statements — expressing "dismay" — at threats by Iran's president to "eliminate" Israel, a member nation of the UN. The list goes on and on.

And even worse than the one-sided condemnations that ignore Hezbollah and Hamas are the numerous statements that perversely suggest moral equivalence.

The UN peacekeepers on the Lebanese border have turned out to be collaborators with Hezbollah, videotaping the Hezbollah kidnapping of three Israeli soldiers in 2000 and then refusing to release the video — which could have helped in the rescue — on the grounds that it might compromise their "neutrality."

This is the same United Nations who puts nations with long and well-documented histories of blatant, flagrant and merciless human rights abuses (e.g. Syria, Lebanon, Libya, and Sudan just to name a few) on its various U.N. bodies - yet condemns the United States of America on human rights issues! 

What nerve!

Bill O'Reilly has a great new column out on the United Nations.  Here are a few excerpts.

The United Nations is impotent. That's the only diagnosis an objective person can arrive at if you look at the facts. Time and time again, the United Nations has been called upon to protect innocent people and has failed...

Then, three weeks ago, Hezbollah attacked, killing eight Israeli soldiers and kidnapping two others inside Israel! Obviously, this was an act of war to which Israel responded by bombing Hezbollah positions throughout Lebanon.

U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan then swung into action and called for an immediate cease-fire. Annan is really good at doing that. He is an expert at giving peace a chance while innocent people are being attacked. Would Kofi want a cease-fire if thousands of missiles were pointed at his house? I don't think so. Kofi might want those weapons destroyed. Maybe I'm wrong.

Anyway, there is no question that once again the United Nations was supposed to diffuse a bad situation -- the chaos in Lebanon -- but actually made things worse. There is not enough Viagra in the world to fix the U.N.'s impotency problem.

I couldn't agree more.

On Wednesday, my wife and I had the pleasure of attending a conference co-sponsored by the Heritage Foundation and the Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny (BOND), entitled "Moral Reconstruction: A Model for Urban Transformation."  Here's a brief synosis of the purpose of the conference:

Our nation’s Gulf Coast Region continues to face serious and ongoing problems in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. This Town Hall style Conference will focus on solutions to these vexing policy issues. Transformation of the human spirit, however, is a key ingredient, because the destruction of this spirit is at the heart of the great breakdown witnessed during and following in the wake of these natural disasters. Our conference will seek to outline options and identify solutions that could serve as a model for rebuilding, not only the Gulf Coast, but also for transforming America’s inner cities and urban areas.

The conference panelists included BOND founder and President the Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson (and author of the must-read SCAM: How the Black Leadership Exploits Black America; Reverend Grant Storm, a minister and conservative activist in New Orleans; Patrick Fagan, a research fellow in Family and Cultural Issues at Heritage; John McWhorter, Manhattan Institute Fellow and one of my intellectual heroes (read his newest article); Kerr Johnson, a graduate of Rev. Peterson's BOND Home for Boys and Character Building Program; and Ward Connerly, author of Creating Equal: My Fight Against Race Preferences (read a review here), and founder of the American Civil Rights Institute.

LaShawn Barber has a great report on the conference on her website, so I won't rehash what she's already done.  I'll just discuss what I personally got out of the conference.  

First, I must say how inspired I was by Kerr Johnson's story.  He is living proof of how the cycle of poverty, fatherlessness and pathological nihilism can be broken for those who really want to change their lives for the better.  Kerr went to BOND as a 15-year-old troubled teen, angry and fatherless.  Thanks to Rev. Peterson's intervention in helping him deal with his anger caused by his father's abandonment and teaching him the importance of forgiveness, Kerr is now a loving and committed husband and father, successful businessman, and devout Christian.  God bless ya, brother.  Talk about setting a great example!

Rev. Peterson went straight to the heart of the Katrina problem in a blisteringly honest article, where he took black New Orleans residents to task for their incessant reliance on the government to help them instead of helping themselves.  He, as did the panelists, expounded on this point, emphasizing the need for blacks to become more morally upright, spiritually grounded, and economically independent.

Particularly, Revs. Peterson and Storm touched on a very controversial but important social issue: the utter failure of the black church to teach the importance of Christian morality, marriage and family, particularly of having and raising children within the institution of marriage.  I can remember going to church as a kid and seeing mostly women and their children in the congregation, but hardly any men.  Where were the husbands and fathers?  In fact, the only men in the church were the pastor, associate minister(s), deacons, and members of the Usher Board, as well as few scattered boyfriends whose girlfriends occasionally drag them to church on Sunday morning (after partying the previous Saturday night).

Rev. Storm told the story of a black female deacon of a church in New Orleans, whom he called Deaconess Debbie (a pseudonym).  Deaconess Debbie, who was pregnant, was having a baby shower thrown for her by the other "sisters" of her church.  There was just one slight problem: Deaconess Debbie was not married.  This woman was a deacon of her church, yet members of her church were planning to basically celebrate her status as a single, unwed mother.  

Rev. Storm, who is white, was gutsy enough to speak out publicly about this in a sermon, pointing out that unwed parenthood goes against biblical principles and, thus, should never be celebrated.  Not surprisingly, he was immediately attacked and accused of being a "racist."  How dare he call out a black woman - an upstanding member of her church, no less - on the immoral example she was setting, and the rest of her church for celebrating it!  Yet in doing so, Rev. Storm did exactly what black churches across the country have failed to do for far too long: teach the biblical importance of getting married, staying married, and, most importantly, that having children out of wedlock is wrong.  Period.  Furthermore, Rev. Storm was not judging this woman, or any unwed mother for that matter.  He was simply pointing out a moral truth and way of living that should be obvious to all Christians.

What separates Revs. Storm and Peterson from other men of God is that they are truly men of God.  They were called by God to preach His Word and how it should be applied to daily living, whereas many of today's black preachers were, as Rev. Peterson has so beautifully put it, "called by their mommas."  Revs. Storm and Peterson don't mind taking risks and stepping out on faith to tell the truth, even if it hurts.  If more black ministers did the same, then maybe we would begin to see the kind of moral and spiritual turnaround that the black community so desperately needs.

I had a chat with LaShawn Barber after the conference, and she had this to say:

"If you're a woman going to church every Sunday, and you're shacking up with a man..., and you have children but are not married,... and you don't think there's anything wrong with that, then there's something wrong with the church."

Amen, sister.

Fox News contributor Juan Williams takes the modern-day black establishment, as well as the many unsavory aspects of black American culture, to task in his new book, Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America--and What We Can Do About It (Crown, 2006). Here is what Publishers Weekly has to say about it:

When Bill Cosby addressed a 50th-anniversary celebration of Brown v. Board of Education, he created a major controversy with seemingly inoffensive counsel ("begin with getting a high school education, not having children until one is twenty-one and married, working hard at any job, and being good parents"). Building from Cosby's speech, NPR/Fox journalist Williams offers his ballast to Cosby's position. Williams starts with the question, "Why are so many black Americans, people born inside the gates of American opportunity, still living as if they were locked out from all America has to offer?" His answers include the debacle of big-city politics under self-serving black politicians; reparations as "a divisive dead-end idea"; the parlous state of city schools "under the alliance between the civil rights leaders and the teachers' unions"; and the transformation of rap from "its willingness to confront establishment and stereotypes" to "America's late-night masturbatory fantasy." A sense of the erosion of "the high moral standing of civil rights" underlies Cosby's anguish and Williams's anger. Politically interested readers of a mildly conservative bent will find this book sheer dynamite.

Ronald Kessler of Newsmax.com has penned an article on the book and Mr. Williams's reasons for writing it.

I have always viewed Juan Williams as a well-intentioned, "middle of the road" reporter, though he has been known occasionally to give black "leadership" a little too much credit (and black conservatives not enough). Thanks to Bill Cosby, I'm glad to see that he finally sees the light. Expect a book review/blog from yours truly upon reading his new book.

If there is anyone out there who has ever wondered why we are at war and how many times (before 9/11) Islamic terrorist have attacked us over the years, Ann Coulter has the answers in her new article.  Here are the highlights:

• November 1979: Muslim extremists (Iranian variety) seized the U.S. embassy in Iran and held 52 American hostages for 444 days, following Democrat Jimmy Carter's masterful foreign policy granting Islamic fanaticism its first real foothold in the Middle East.
• 1982: Muslim extremists (mostly Hezbollah) began a nearly decade-long habit of taking Americans and Europeans hostage in Lebanon, killing William Buckley and holding Terry Anderson for 6 1/2 years.
• April 1983: Muslim extremists (Islamic Jihad or possibly Hezbollah) bombed the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, killing 16 Americans.
• October 1983: Muslim extremists (Hezbollah) blew up the U.S. Marine barracks at the Beirut airport, killing 241 Marines.
• December 1983: Muslim extremists (al-Dawa) blew up the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait, killing five and injuring 80.
• September 1984: Muslim extremists (Hezbollah) exploded a truck bomb at the U.S. Embassy annex in Beirut, killing 24 people, including two U.S. servicemen.
• December 1984: Muslim extremists (probably Hezbollah) hijacked a Kuwait Airways airplane, landed in Iran and demanded the release of the 17 members of al-Dawa who had been arrested for the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait, killing two Americans before the siege was over.
• June 14, 1985: Muslim extremists (Hezbollah) hijacked TWA Flight 847 out of Athens, diverting it to Beirut, taking the passengers hostage in return for the release of the Kuwait 17 as well as another 700 prisoners held by Israel. When their demands were not met, the Muslims shot U.S. Navy diver Robert Dean Stethem and dumped his body on the tarmac.
• October 1985: Muslim extremists (Palestine Liberation Front backed by Libya) seized an Italian cruise ship, the Achille Lauro, killing 69-year-old American Leon Klinghoffer by shooting him and then tossing his body overboard.
• December 1985: Muslim extremists (backed by Libya) bombed airports in Rome and Vienna, killing 20 people, including five Americans.
• April 1986: Muslim extremists (backed by Libya) bombed a discotheque frequented by U.S. servicemen in West Berlin, injuring hundreds and killing two, including a U.S. soldier.
• December 1988: Muslim extremists (backed by Libya) bombed Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 259 on board and 11 on the ground.

Then, there was an almost five-year pause between terrorist attacks.  Why?  Ann answers that question:

(Then came an amazing, historic pause in Muslim extremists' relentless war on America after Ronald Reagan won the Cold War by doing the opposite of everything recommended by Democrats, depriving Islamic terrorists of their Soviet sponsors. This confuses liberals because they don't understand the concept of terror sponsors, whether it's the Soviet Union or Iraq.)

Then, they resume their atrocities:

• February 1993: Muslim extremists (al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya, possibly with involvement of friendly rival al Qaeda) set off a bomb in the basement of the World Trade Center, killing six and wounding more than 1,000.
• Spring 1993: Muslim extremists (al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya, the Sudanese Islamic Front and at least one member of Hamas) plot to blow up the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, the U.N. complex, and the FBI's lower Manhattan headquarters.
• November 1995: Muslim extremists (possibly Iranian "Party of God") explode a car bomb at U.S. military headquarters in Saudi Arabia, killing five U.S. military servicemen.
• June 1996: Muslim extremists (13 Saudis and a Lebanese member of Hezbollah, probably with involvement of al Qaeda) explode a truck bomb outside the Khobar Towers military complex, killing 19 American servicemen and injuring hundreds.
• August 1998: Muslim extremists (al Qaeda) explode truck bombs at U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224 and injuring thousands.
• October 2000: Muslim extremists (al Qaeda) blow up the U.S. Navy destroyer USS Cole, killing 17 U.S. sailors.
• Sept. 11, 2001: Muslim extremists (al Qaeda) hijack commercial aircraft and fly planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania, killing nearly 3,000 Americans.

For those out there in this post-9/11 age, given the facts above, who have a problem with "racial profiling," Think about this:  When 100% of all terrorist attacks against the United States of America (at home and abroad) over the last three decades have been perpetrated by Arab Muslim extremists, keeping a watchful eye on Arab men transitting U.S. airports, trainstations and other transportation hubs is not "profiling"; it's common sense.  (Or, as Ms. Coulter put it in a speech at Johns Hopkins University a few years back, "... it ceases to be a 'profile'; it's called a description of the suspect.")

 

Those who know me know how important the subject of family (especially fatherhood) is to me.  So I was very intrigued when I read the headline in Sunday's Washington Times' Special Report: "Shoring up 'fragile families.'"  The report discusses a new federally funded project called Building Strong Families (BSF), whose goal is to help low-income unmarried couples foster the necessary relationship skills that will ultimately lead to marriage, as well as helping poor newlywed couples stay married.  According to the BSF website:

The Building Strong Families (BSF) project is an important opportunity to learn whether well-designed interventions can help couples fulfill their aspirations for a healthy marriage and a strong family. The project will test interventions with low-income, unwed couples who are interested in marriage, beginning during pregnancy or around the time of their child’s birth. The programs will be designed to help such couples strengthen their relationship, achieve a healthy marriage if that is the path they choose, and thus enhance child and family well-being. They will be designed around two main components. First, the programs will provide marriage and relationship skills education; this focus is the distinctive component of the BSF project. In addition, BSF programs will provide a variety of family support services that could help low-income couples sustain a healthy relationship. These services might, for example, help to improve parenting skills or help identify services to address problems with employment, health and mental health, or substance abuse.

Washington Times writer Cheryl Wetzstein looks at low-income and mostly unmarried couples with children participating in the pilot program in Baltimore, Maryland, which has a 65 percent out-of-wedlock birthrate.  The Baltimore program will collect information from 650 couples between 2005 to 2010 to gauge its overall success in helping couples make a long-term commit to each other and their children.   As Ms. Wetzstein writes, however, " The trick will be doing this in neighborhoods where trust is low, talk is cheap, sex is plentiful and weddings are rare."

Unlike most mainstream newspaper reporters, Ms. Wetzstein points out the negative effect of the legacy of welfare on low-income black families in particular:

For more than 60 years, the nation offered public assistance to single mothers -- with an emphasis on the word "single." Generations of welfare mothers warned each other about letting a man stay too long -- "a man in the house" meant forfeiture of a mother's public housing, cash benefits, Medicaid and other government benefits. 
    
Not surprisingly, marriage all but disappeared in poor communities. Welfare mothers had boyfriends, not husbands; their children had visiting "daddies" who showed up with Pampers, not fathers who came home from work every day, played with them and protected them. 
    
In 1996, Congress reformed the welfare system by adopting the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. Single mothers who seek assistance receive help finding a job. And they receive temporary benefits, with an emphasis on the word "temporary." 
    
The 1996 reform also clarified the government's interest in discouraging unwed childbearing and strengthening two-parent families. State welfare systems responded by jettisoning their "no-man-in-the-house" rules and offering welfare to poor married parents. 
    
But that wasn't enough to change the welfare system's bias against two-parent families, said social conservatives. Dozens of groups, including the Heritage Foundation, Family Research Council and an umbrella group called the Fatherhood and Marriage Leadership Institute, urged Congress to allocate funds for pro-marriage and "responsible fatherhood" programs. The Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 authorized $150 million a year for these activities, and funds will start flowing to communities this fall. 
    
Still, huge questions remain about how to promote stable, monogamous relationships and married childbearing in communities with high rates of single-parenting. 
    
Research from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, sponsored by Columbia and Princeton universities, found that when young, low-income, unwed couples have a baby, more than 80 percent are romantically involved and more than half expect to get married, said Wade F. Horn, assistant secretary for children and families at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).  Researchers call this "a magic moment," he said. 
    
However, the Fragile Families study also found that, despite these good intentions, "most of those couples eventually break up, and even those who do go on to get married have a very high divorce rate," Mr. Horn said. 
    
So the central question becomes: What if a carefully designed intervention was provided to couples when they're in the "magic moment"? Mr. Horn asked. 
    
Enter the BSF experiment, which is backed by HHS' Administration for Children and Families. 
    
Since early 2005, BSF sites in seven states -- Georgia, Maryland, Louisiana, Florida, Indiana, Oklahoma and Texas -- have been targeting hundreds of "fragile families" with relationship-skills curricula, services and follow-up interviews. 
    
The initial findings should be out in 2009, said Alan Hershey, a BSF project director at Mathematica Policy Research.

Citing the fact that one-third of all U.S. births are to unwed parents (and upwards of 70% among blacks), BSF offers guidelines centered around fostering healthy marriages, family support services, and reducing marriage disincentives created by government programs and policies, for sponsors interested in developing their own BSF programs.  There is also an informative issue brief outlining the charactistics of fragile families and the implications for BSF programs.

Admittedly, I am skeptical of any government-funded "social service" program, especially since such programs were the root cause of all of the problems associated with the legacy of welfare, which affected blacks disproportionately.  However, given its noble goal of reversing this legacy by encouraging, fostering and strengthening marriage, I'll give BSF the benefit of the doubt, and hope that it succeeds.  We'll just have to wait and see. 

"Go into any inner-city neighborhood, and folks will tell you that government alone can't teach kids to learn.  They know that parents have to parent, that children can't achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white."

- Barack Obama, Keynote Address, Democratic National Convention, 2004

By know, everyone is familiar with what acting white means.  It basically describes minority adolescent students who get good grades as being shunned by their peers.  It also means that such academically conscientious minority students are considerably less popular than white adolescent students who do well academically.

This is the conclusion of research done by Harvard economist and research fellow Roland G. Fryer.  Writing in an article for Education Next, Fryer acknowledges the pervasiveness of the "acting white" stigma:

"My analysis confirms that acting white is a vexing reality within a subset of American schools... The evidence indicates that the social disease,whatever its cause, is most prevalent in racially integrated public schools. It’s less of a problem in the private sector and in predominantly black public schools."

Fryer begins by looking at prevailing research on how negative peer pressure adversely affects black (and Hispanic) academic achievement.   He examines the "oppositional culture" thesis of the late John Ogbu and Sinithia Fordham, as well as the work of John McWhorter dealing with anti-intellectualism as a form of black cultural self-sabotage.  The author also looks at studies that claim to show that anti-intellectualism is no more severe a problem among black and Hispanic youth than it is among whites, but points out that these latter studies depend solely on self-reported (and, thus, far more subjective) measures of personal popularity.  "Unfortunately," Fryer says, "when students are asked to judge their own popularity, they can be expected to provide a rosier scenario than is warranted."

Fryer then goes on to describe his own research metholody in examine the "acting white" stigma among students.  He poses the following questions:

1. Do high-achieving black and Hispanic students have fewer, less-popular friends than their lower-achieving peers?
2. How does this compare with the experience of white students?

The results of his research confirm pervasiveness of the problem.

"At low GPAs, there is little difference among ethnic groups in the relationship between grades and popularity, and high-achieving blacks are actually more popular within their ethnic group than high-achieving whites are within theirs.  But when a student achieves a 2.5 GPA (an even mix of Bs and Cs), clear differences start to emerge.

As grades improve beyond this level, Hispanic students lose popularity at an alarming rate. Although African Americans with GPAs as high as 3.5 continue to have more friends than those with lower grades, the rate of increase is no longer as great as among white students.

The experience of black and white students diverges as GPAs climb above 3.5. As the GPAs of black students increase beyond this level, they tend to have fewer and fewer friends. A black student with a 4.0 has, on average, 1.5 fewer friends of the same ethnicity than a white student with the same GPA. Put differently, a black student with straight As is no more popular than a black student with a 2.9 GPA, but high-achieving whites are at the top of the popularity pyramid.

My findings with respect to Hispanics are even more discouraging. A Hispanic student with a 4.0 GPA is the least popular of all Hispanic students, and Hispanic-white differences among high achievers are the most extreme.

The social costs of a high GPA are most pronounced for adolescent males. Popularity begins to decrease at lower GPAs for young black men than young black women (3.25 GPA compared with a 3.5), and the rate at which males lose friends after this point is far greater. As a result, black male high achievers have notably fewer friends than do female ones. I observe a similar pattern among Hispanics, with males beginning to lose friends at lower GPAs and at a faster clip, though the male-female differences are not statistically significant... Indeed, when minority students reach the very highest levels of academic performance, even the number of cross-ethnic friendships declines. Black and Hispanic students with a GPA above 3.5 actually have fewer cross-ethnic friendships than those with lower grades, a finding that seems particularly troubling." 

Fryer also shows that, for black and Hispanic students, the adverse effect of good grades on popularity disappears in private schools, and that, surprisingly, white private school students with the highest grades were less popular than their low-achieving counterparts.  He shows, further, that the adverse correlation between academic achievement and social popularity is twice as pronounced is more racially integrated schools.

"Among the highest achievers (3.5 GPA or higher), the differences are even more stark, with the effect of acting white almost five times as great in settings with more cross-ethnic friendships than expected. Black males in such schools fare the worst, penalized seven times as harshly as my estimate of the average effect of acting white on all black students!

This finding, along with the fact that I find no evidence of acting white in predominantly black schools, adds to the evidence of a “Shaker Heights” syndrome, in which racially integrated settings only reinforce pressures to toe the ethnic line."

Why is the "acting white" stigma a bigger problem in more racially integrated schools?  Fryer attempts to answer this question by discussing anthrological research in group dynamics:

"Anthropologists have long observed that social groups seek to preserve their identity, an activity that accelerates when threats to internal cohesion intensify. Within a group, the more successful individuals can be expected to enhance the power and cohesion of the group as long as their loyalty is not in question. But if the group risks losing its most successful members to outsiders, then the group will seek to prevent the outflow. Cohesive yet threatened groups—the Amish, for example—are known for limiting their children’s education for fear that too much contact with the outside world risks the community’s survival.

In an achievement-based society where two groups, for historical reasons, achieve at noticeably different levels, the group with lower achievement levels is at risk of losing its most successful members, especially in situations where successful individuals have opportunities to establish contacts with outsiders. Over the long run, the group faces the danger that its most successful members will no longer identify with its interests, and group identity will itself erode. To forestall such erosion, groups may try to reinforce their identity by penalizing members for differentiating themselves from the group. The penalties are likely to increase whenever the threats to group cohesion intensify.

Applying this model of behavior to minority and white students yields two important predictions: A positive relationship between academic achievement and peer-group acceptance (popularity) will erode and turn negative, whenever the group as a whole has lower levels of achievement. And that erosion will be exacerbated in contexts that foster more interethnic contact. This, of course, is exactly what I found with regard to acting white.

Understanding acting white in this way places the concept within a broader conceptual framework that transcends specific cultural contexts and lifts the topic beyond pointless ideological exchanges. There is necessarily a trade-off between doing well and rejection by your peers when you come from a traditionally low-achieving group, especially when that group comes into contact with more outsiders."

The author favors this anthropological explanation more so than the theories of Ogbu/Fordham and McWhorter:

"However plausible it sounds, the oppositional culture theory cannot explain why the acting-white problem is greatest in integrated settings. If Fordham and Ogbu were correct, the social sanctions for acting white should be most severe in places like the segregated school, where opportunities are most limited. The results of my studies, of course, point in precisely the opposite direction.

The notion that acting white is simply attributable to self-sabotage is even less persuasive. According to its proponents, black and Hispanic cultures are dysfunctional, punishing successful members of their group rather than rewarding their success. That theory is more a judgment than an explanation. A universal, it cannot explain the kinds of variations from one school setting to another that are so apparent in the data I have explored."

What does the Dutchmeister think?

Roland Fryer's work is a welcomed contribution to the burgeoning research into the adverse relationship between high academic achievement and social popularity in explaining the "acting white" stigma.  However, I do not agree with his criticism of McWhorter's thesis as being "more of a judgement than an explanation," and not being able to "explain the kinds of variations from one school setting to another that are so apparent in the data I have explored."

First, based on studying his work and my own observations and experiences, I believe that McWhorter's work is indeed an accurate explanation of the problem.  In addition to studying Ogbu's work, McWhorter repeatedly noticed a distinctive and pervasive anti-intellectual attitude among middle- and upper-middle class black students while teaching at Berkeley.  As much as he tried not to "stereotype" them and despite his efforts to attribute it to other factors, he kept noticing the same cultural aversion toward the scholarly over and over again.  Many of the black students he taught at Berkeley felt (and a few even openly expressed) that being zealous about learning for learning's sake made one less "authentically black," as he quotes a black female junior commenting in 1998 on the minority freshman class post-Prop 209: 

"We are concerned that black students who achieve at such a high level [i.e. whose academic credentials were so impressive that they gained admission to Berkeley without affirmative action] are not going to be concerned with fostering an authentic African-American presence at Berkeley."

This young lady's attitude about high-achieving black students as basically being "not really black" is one of the most negative, dysfunctional and self-defeating aspects of modern black American culture, and transcends class.  McWhorter is not "judging" blacks; he is simply stating a very hard-to-swallow fact of black life.  I myself experienced this anti-intellectual attitude throughout K-12, high school, and graduate school.

In any event, Fryer's conclusion as to what needs to be done is instructive:

"As long as distressed communities provide minorities with their identities, the social costs of breaking free will remain high. To increase the likelihood that more can do so, society must find ways for these high achievers to thrive in settings where adverse social pressures are less intense. The integrated school, by itself, apparently cannot achieve that end." 




 

 

Of all the academic disciplines out there to study, I must say that I respect economics the most.  Although not an economist by training (although I took a few economics courses in college and graduate school - and survived, thank you very much), I respect the fact that it uses real-world data (and some ingenious and oftentimes mind-boggling numbers-crunching) to show why people do what they do.  Thanks to reading Thomas Sowell's easy-to-read books on basic and applied economics, I have a much greater understanding and appreciation for it.  It all boils down to two things: incentives and constraints.  Incentives cause people to behave in ways that they feel, given the constraints under which they live, will benefit them, whether economically, personally, socially, or in other ways.

In his new column entitled "A disproportionate response?", Townhall.com columnist Mark M. Alexander ingeniously uses an economics analogy to describe the current and never-ending Arab-Israeli conflict.  Here's an excerpt:

In economics, "transaction costs" are defined as the non-monetary expense associated with a trade in goods or services. For example, when the corner grocer sells an apple, he has to consider not only his direct cost per unit for apples, but also the associated costs he incurred in transporting his apples to market, stocking his apples, maintaining a store to conduct the transaction, and so on. Then there's the additional cost of unmarketable product -- bad apples. If our friendly neighborhood grocer is to stay in the black, all of these factors -- these transaction costs -- are factored into the price paid for the apple.

The concept of transaction costs (and of bad apples, for that matter) is not limited to economics. There are plenty of both in politics too.

Nowhere is this reality seen more clearly than in the Middle East. Here, for nearly sixty years, the democratic state of Israel has been pressed to barter with Sunni Arabs, Palestinians and most recently Shi'ite Persians -- their would-be "trading partners" -- for a solution to the "Middle East Conflict." Among the other morally enigmatic names we're told to use for this trade, we might add "Land for Peace," "the Roadmap to Peace" and, of course, "the Dayton Accords."

Regardless of the blame-free nom de paix, the economic pattern behind Middle East violence is markedly similar: Israel is attacked or threatened with attack by those intent on annexing Israeli territory. Israel raises the transaction costs by retaliating in proportion to the threat (what's currently known in international parlance as a "disproportionate response") and, backed with a nuclear arsenal it's prepared to use, unceremoniously cuts the camel out from under the would-be Pan-Arabist, Ba'athist or Jihadist aggressor. Backed into a corner, the aggressor appeals to the United Nations, the Carter Center, Bill Clinton, France or the Presbyterian Church USA to "urge calm and restraint" on "all sides." That's the pattern every time. Wash, rinse, repeat. 

He takes the economic analogy further vis-a-vis the U.S. and the international community's response the conflict:

When the international community leverages sufficient pressure on Israel, negotiations commence and the aggressor may get some of what he wants: Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai, the Golan Heights, or lawless southern Lebanon, or self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza. From these new strongholds, the same aggressors -- in the latest case Hizballah and Hamas, supported by the rogue regimes of Iran and Syria -- then mount new campaigns of aggression against Israel, hoping to get a little more out of their "partners in peace" each time.

At other times, thanks in no small part to U.S. support for Israel, the international community can't leverage sufficient pressure to curtail Israeli retaliation. Under these circumstances, particularly the present situation, transaction costs continue to rise for Hizballah, Hamas and their state sponsors. If the costs of the transaction exceed real or imagined gains, state sponsors will retract their resources, and terrorist aggressors will be forced to employ other methods for effecting the transaction.

This is why Israel's response to this crisis is anything but "disproportionate." When international pressure limits Israel's response to aggression, the terrorists win. They're encouraged to elevate the level of the trade, targeting civilians and generally operating at will in the belief that a truly proportional response -- disabling the threat -- will not ensue. However, when the costs of attacking Israel are raised beyond what the terrorists can tolerate, then we're really giving peace a chance.

This article is a great piece of writing.



 

 

Two articles have come out that show why, in world wars throughout history and in light of the current Israeli offensive against Hezbollah, "peace movements" never work, and how they in fact help the enemies of peace.

In "Pacifists versus peace," Thomas Sowell briefly goes through the history of "peace movements" and shows how counter-productive they have been:

As promised, President Bush vetoed the first bill of his presidency, rejecting an attempt to overturn his limits on federal support for embryonic-stem cell (ESC) research, while also criticizing members of Congress who blocked an alternative measure that would have funded nonembryonic-stem-cell research, such as on adult stem cells (ASCs).

Supporters of ESC research claim that, with additional government funding, ESC's have the "potential" to cure many diseases.  I use the word "claim" and put "potential" in quotations because ESC supporters have no supporting evidence to point to.  However, suppporters of ASC research can point to a proven track record of curing and/or effectively treating diseases for many years- a track record that ESC supporters are loathe to acknowledge.

Science writer and Townhall.com columnist Michael Fumento has written extensively on stem cell research.  He points out the politics behind why ESC supporters and the mainstream media have been trying to sell ESC without any supporting scientific evidence of its effectiveness in curing diseases, while also trying to prevent the public from knowing about the proven breakthroughs of ASC research.

If ESC research has proven to be so unsucessful, then why are supporters nonetheless so hungry for increased federal funding for it?  According to Fumento:

It's precisely because ASCs are superior, and private investors know it. Hence they plow their money into ASC research. Starved for funding, ESC researchers – who operated for years under the false belief that their path held more promise – may find their hopes dashed. They need to feed at the federal trough. So they've waged a high-profile disinformation campaign to exaggerate any possible ESC development, even as they pooh-pooh or ignore all ASC breakthroughs. The media, convinced that the debate is between religious zealots on one side and scientists on the other, are crucial to the ploy. Time and again, astonishing ASC research is simply referred to as "stem cell," whereas any potential advance with ESCs is carefully identified as such. Influential science journals such as Science and Nature have repeatedly published utterly nonsensical attacks on ASC research.

Thanks to writers like Michael Fumento (and no thanks to the partisan MSM), the public can now know the facts behind stem cell research and make its own conclusions.

 

According to the Washington Times, President Bush will speak at the NAACP's annual convention tomorrow.  This will be the first time in his presidency that he will address the organization that has done nothing but criticize and malign him over the past five years. 

"There's a moment of opportunity here. I think the president wants to make the argument that he has had a career that reflects a strong commitment to civil rights," says White House spokesman Tony Snow.  Former Bush administration and author of "Black in the White House," Ronald Christie, also sees a positive opportunity.  "The president is putting himself in a position where he can be heard and where people can get the chance to weigh in and let the president know what they're thinking," he said.

Given the NAACP's anti-Bush stance throughout his entire presidency, I believe the group has already made its thinking about George W. Bush abundantly clear.  Remember how the NAACP responded after then-presidential candidate Bush address the group in 2000? It ran a harsh and unfairly critical TV ad equating Bush's policies as Governor of Texas to the dragging death of James Byrd, Jr. - and used the deceased man's daughter for good measure!  TV ad went a little something like this:

Renee Mullins (voice over):  I’m Renee Mullins, James Byrd’s daughter.

On June 7, 1998 in Texas my father was killed.  He was beaten, chained, and then dragged 3 miles to his death, all because he was black.

So when Governor George W. Bush refused to support hate-crime legislation, it was like my father was killed all over again.

Call Governor George W. Bush and tell him to support hate-crime legislation.

We won’t be dragged away from our future.

Let us also not forget the venomous comments that NAACP Chairman Julian Bond has made against the Bush administration in particular, and Republicans in general:

"The Republican Party would have the American flag and the swastika flying side by side...  [Bush] has selected [judicial] nominees from the Taliban wing of American politics, appeased the wretched appetites of the extreme right wing, and chosen Cabinet officials whose devotion to the Confederacy is nearly canine in its uncritical affection."

In 2004, former NAACP president Kweisi Mfume called black supporters of President Bush "ventrilopquists' dummies."

And I thought the oldest and largest civil rights organization in these United States of America was supposed to be "non-partisan."

The Times article goes on to quote delegates to the convention who feel that Bush has made the right decision to speak tomorrow.  "It's more about respect. If an organization comes to D.C., you should at least come and speak with them," said Frances L. Gilchreast, president of the Flint, Mich., chapter. "If he went to Coretta Scott King's funeral in Atlanta, but then couldn't come a few blocks to see us, that is unacceptable."

Well, if I recall, Ms. Gilchreast, President Bush did attend Coretta Scott King's funeral - which, in a flagrant show of disrespect to the President and the memory of Mrs. King, was shamefully turned into a vicious anti-Bush administration political rally led by the Rev. Joseph Lowery and former President Jimmy Carter.  When conservatives rightfully called Rev. Lowery on the carpet for his grossly inappropriate political diatribe, he responded with following lame excuse:  "The Republicans who are criticizing me don't understand the [tradition] of a black funeral.  At a black funeral we always celebrate the life of the deceased and take up the causes that the decedent championed. Mrs. King's cause was peace and racial justice, and I challenged the living to do likewise."

Using the occasion of the passing of the civil rights icon that Coretta Scott King was by bashing a presidential administration - while the president was in attendance - whose policies he doesn't agree with does NOT "celebrate the life of the deceased" nor "take up the causes" that Mrs. King championed.   (Apparently, Rev. Lowery never got the memo.)

Finally, the Democratic National Committee called President Bush's appearance "too little too late," adding that the president will have some explaining to do about his administration's response to Hurricane Katrina.  

I believe that the newly re-elected Democratic Mayor of New Orleans, C. Ray Nagin, and Democratic Governor Kathleen Blanco, both have much to explain.  Mayor Nagin failed to follow through on his own city's emergency-response plan - a plan that acknowledged that thousands of the city's poorest residents would have no way to evacuate the city.  As the Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, in a September 21, 2005 article for World Net Daily, a