Milwaukee's black leaders say the enemy is within

MILWAUKEE (Reuters) - Two days before the oldest and best-known U.S. civil rights group holds its yearly convention in Milwaukee, black leaders in the city say their community is being torn apart from the inside.

Civil rights leaders like 57-year-old Prentice McKinney, who fought to free Milwaukee's blacks from the ghetto, say gangs, drugs and violence have left those who still live in the nation's urban cores in fear of the next generation.

"Back then, the enemy was clear, it was white racists, and racist police officers," said McKinney, who was a black teen-age "commando" in the 1960s and now runs a tavern once frequented by fellow activists.

"It was a legalized system of segregation. And so, the challenge was between the white establishment and the African-American population. Today, the African-American population is being destroyed by its own youth ... an enemy from within."

I don't understand your whole spiel about dogs and shocks. What does that have to do with the black community today? Who is administering such terrible treatment to them? I'm not saying racism has evaportated, but it is a tiny fragment of what it used to be. You can't possibly be saying that that is what racism is doing to blacks today! Besides, humans are not animals, and the U.S. is not a laboratory. Everyone has the freedom to do as they choose, so your analogy, while interesting from a scientific perspective, is flawed in its application to the black community.

As for the recent cross burnings you mention - those things rarely happen nowadays... everyone knows that there are still a few fringe lunatics that do such things, however they are universally condemned.

Here's what it all boils down to - the black community needs to change their hearts/culture. They have to stop glorifying the pimp/gangsta lifestyle. They have to speak out against treating black women as sex objects. They have to start condemning casual sex. (Fatherless children are an epidemic in the black community, and the prisons are filled with them as you know). They have to stop denigrating those who try to succeed in school for trying to "be white". This all needs to come from the top. Their "spokespeople" need to quit running around looking for "racism" and playing victim, and start concentrating their efforts on what the black community really needs - a change of heart/culture. Once that change starts to permeate the community the rest will follow.

If you want to dwell on the past and continue to make excuses that's fine. You're just not helping the situation any. People are capable of overcoming adversity - that's what we need to talk about, instead of "learned helplessness" theory.

Oh yes. Back when I was doing sociology reports in high school it was the "best of the best" of welfare systems. Not only would Chicagoans move to Milwaukee for the checks, but the welfare system paid more for each kid you had on welfare!!!

It should not have come as a shock when out of wedlock welfare kids were being born in great numbers throughout the 80's.

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