Posted on 01/14/2010 7:33:05 AM PST by AreaMan
Why decades of community organizing havent stemmed the citys youth violence
Winter 2010
Barack Obama has exploited his youthful stint as a Chicago community organizer at every stage of his political career. As someone who had worked for grassroots change, he said, he was a different kind of politician, one who could translate peoples hopes into reality. The media lapped up this conceit, presenting Obamas organizing experience as a meaningful qualification for the Oval Office.
This past September, a cell-phone video of Chicago students beating a fellow teen to death coursed over the airwaves and across the Internet. None of the news outlets that had admiringly reported on Obamas community-organizing efforts mentioned that the beating involved students from the very South Side neighborhoods where the president had once worked. Obamas connection to the area was suddenly lost in the mists of time.
Yet a critical blindness links Obamas activities on the South Side during the 1980s and the murder of Derrion Albert in 2009. Throughout his four years working for change in Chicagos Roseland and Altgeld Gardens neighborhoods, Obama ignored the primary cause of their escalating dysfunction: the disappearance of the black two-parent family. Obama wasnt the only activist to turn away from the problem of absent fathers, of course; decades of failed social policy, both before and after his time in Chicago, were just as blind. And that myopia continues today, guaranteeing that the current response to Chicagos youth violence will prove as useless as Obamas activities were 25 years ago.
One year out of college, Barack Obama took a job as a community organizer, hoping for an authentic black experience that would link him to the bygone era of civil rights protest. Few people know what a community organizer isObama didnt when he decided to become oneyet the term seduces the liberal intelligentsia with its aura of class struggle and agitation against an unjust establishment. Saul Alinsky, the self-described radical who pioneered the idea in Chicagos slaughterhouse district during the Depression, defined community organizing as creating mass organizations to seize power and give it to the people. Alinsky viewed poverty as a political condition: it stemmed from a lack of power, which societys haves withhold from the have-nots. A community organizer would open the eyes of the disenfranchised to their aggrieved status, teaching them to demand redress from the illegitimate power structure.
Alinskyite empowerment suffered its worst scandal in 1960s Chicago. The architects of the federal War on Poverty created a taxpayer-funded version of a community-organizing entity, the so-called Community Action Agency, whose function was to agitate against big-city mayors for more welfare benefits and services for blacks. Washington poverty warriors, eager to demonstrate their radical bona fides, funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars into Chicagos most notorious gangs, who were supposed to run job-training and tutoring programs under the auspices of Alinskys signature agency, the Woodlawn Organization. Instead, the gangbangers maintained their criminal waysraping and murdering while on the government payroll, and embezzling federal funds to boot.
The disaster failed to dim the romance of community organizing. But by the time Obama arrived in Chicago in 1984, an Alinskyite diagnosis of South Side poverty was doubly irrelevant. Blacks had more political power in Chicago than ever before, yet that power had no impact on the tidal wave of dysfunction that was sweeping through the largest black community in the United States. Chicago had just elected Harold Washington, the citys first black mayor; the heads of Chicagos school system and public housing were black, as were most of their employees; black power broker Emil Jones, Jr. represented the South Side in the Illinois State Senate; Jesse Jackson would launch his 1984 presidential campaign from Chicago. The notion that blacks were disenfranchised struck even some of Obamas potential organizees as ludicrous. Why we need to be protesting and carrying on at our own people? a prominent South Side minister asked Obama soon after he arrived in Chicago. Anybody sitting around this table got a direct line to City Hall.
Pace Alinsky, such political clout could not stop black Chicagos social breakdown. Crime was exploding. Gangs ran the housing projectstheir reign of thuggery aided by ACLU lawsuits, which had stripped the housing authority of its right to screen tenants. But the violence spread beyond the projects. In 1984, Obamas first year in Chicago, gang members gunned down a teenage basketball star, Benjy Wilson.
The citywide outcry that followed was heartfelt but beside the point. None of the prominent voices calling for an end to youth violencefrom Mayor Washington to Jesse Jackson to school administratorsnoted that all of Wilsons killers came from fatherless families (or that he had fathered an illegitimate child himself). Nor did the would-be reformers mention the all-important fact that a staggering 75 percent of Chicagos black children were being born out of wedlock. The sky-high illegitimacy rate meant that black boys were growing up in a world in which it was normal to impregnate a girl and then take off. When a boy is raised without any social expectation that he will support his children and marry his childrens mother, he fails to learn the most fundamental lesson of personal responsibility. The high black crime rate was one result of a culture that fails to civilize men through marriage.
Obama offers fleeting glimpses of Chicagos social breakdown in his autobiography, Dreams from My Father, but its as if he didnt really see what he recorded. An Alinskyite group from the suburbs, the Calumet Community Religious Conference, had assigned him to the Roseland community on the far South Side, in the misguided hope of strong-arming industrial jobs back to the area. Roselands bungalows and two-story homes recalled an era of stable, two-parent families that had long since passed. Obama vividly describes children who swaggered down the streetsloud congregations of teenage boys, teenage girls feeding potato chips to crying toddlers, the discarded wrappers tumbling down the block. He observes two young boys casually firing a handgun at a third. He notes that the elementary school in the Altgeld Gardens housing project had a center for the teen mothers of its students, who had themselves been raised by teen mothers.
Most tellingly, Obamas narrative is almost devoid of men. With the exception of the local ministers and the occasional semi-crazed black nationalist, Obama inhabits a female world. His organizing targets are almost all single mothers. He never wonders where and who the fathers of their children are. When Obama sees a group of boys vandalizing a building, he asks rhetorically: Who will take care of them: the alderman, the social workers? The gangs? The most appropriate candidatetheir fathersnever occurs to him.
Surrounded with daily evidence of Roselands real problem, Obama was nevertheless at a loss for a cause to embrace. Alinskyism, after all, presupposes that the problems afflicting a poor community come from the outside. Obama had come to arouse Roselands residents to take on the power structure, not to persuade them to act more responsibly. So it was with great relief that he noticed that the Mayors Office of Employment and Training (MET), which offered job training, lacked a branch in Roseland: This is it, I said. . . . We just found ourselves an issue. So much for the fiction that the community organizer merely channels the preexisting will of the community.
Obama easily procured a local MET office. It had as much effect on the mounting disorder of the far South Side as his better-known accomplishment: getting the Chicago Housing Authority to test the Altgeld Gardens project for asbestos. In an area that buses wouldnt serve at night because of fears that drivers would get robbed or hit by bricks, perhaps asbestos removal should have been a lower priority, compared with ending the anarchy choking off civilized life. In fact, there is zero legacy from when Obama was here, says Phillip Jackson, director of the Black Star Project, a community group dedicated to eliminating the academic-achievement gap. Jackson, like other local leaders, is reluctant to criticize Obama, however. I wont minimize what Obama was doing then, he says.
In 1987, during Obamas third year in Chicago, 57 children were killed in the city, reports Alex Kotlowitz in his book on Chicagos deadly housing projects, There Are No Children Here. In 1988, Obama left Chicago, after four years spent helping people in Altgeld . . . reclaim a power they had had all along, as the future president put it in Dreams from My Father. And the carnage continued.
In 1994, two particularly savage youth murders drew the usual feckless hand-wringing. An 11-year-old Black Disciples member from Roseland, Robert Yummy Sandifer (so called for his sweet tooth, the only thing childlike about him), had unintentionally killed a girl while shooting at (and paralyzing) a rival gang member. Sandifers fellow Black Disciples then executed him to prevent him from implicating them in the killing. A month later, after five-year-old Eric Morse refused to steal candy for an 11-year-old and a ten-year-old, the two dropped him from a 14th-story window in a housing complex, killing him. Erics eight-year-old brother had grabbed him to keep him from falling, but lost his hold when one of the boys bit him on the arm. None of the perpetrators or victims in either case came from two-parent families.
A year after these widely publicized killings, and on the eve of Obamas first political campaign, the aspiring state senator gave an interview to the Chicago Reader that epitomized the uselessness of Alinskyism in addressing black urban pathologyand that inaugurated the trope of community organizer as visionary politician. Obama attacks the Christian Right and the Republican Congress for hijack[ing] the higher moral ground with this language of family values and moral responsibility. Yeah, sure, family values are fine, he says, but what about collective action . . . collective institutions and organizations? Lets take these same values that are encouraged within our families, he urges, and apply them to a larger society.
Even if this jump from family values to collective action were a promising strategy, Obama overlooks a crucial fact: there are almost no traditional families in inner-city neighborhoods. Fathers arent encouraging values within our families; fathers are nowhere in sight. Moving to collective action is futile without a core of personal responsibility on which to build. Nevertheless, Obama leapfrogs over concrete individual failure to alleged collective failure: Right now we have a society that talks about the irresponsibility of teens getting pregnant, he told the Reader, not the irresponsibility of a society that fails to educate them to aspire for more.
The same rhetorical leapfrogging governs the Obama administrations and the Chicago political establishments response to current Chicago teen violence. Compared with the 1990s, that violence is way down114 children under 17 were killed both in 1993 and in 1994, while 50 were in 2008. But the proportion of gang-related murders has gone up since the late 1980s and 1990s, when the Chicago police, working with federal law enforcement, locked up the leaders of Chicagos most notorious gangs. Those strong leaders, it turns out, exercised some restraint on their members in order to protect drug profits. Back then, you knew what the killings were about, says Charles Winston, a former heroin dealer who made $50,000 a day in the early 1990s in the infamous Robert Taylor Homes. Now, its just sporadic incidents of violence. The Black Star Projects Phillip Jackson compares the anarchy in Chicagos gang territories to Somalia: There are many factions, he says, all fighting one another in unstable, shifting configurations.
In the early 2000s, the number of assaults reported in and around schools increased significantly, according to Northwestern University political scientist Wesley Skogan. School dismissal time in Chicago triggers a massive mobilization of security forces across the South and West Sides, to try to keep students from shooting one another or being shot by older gang members. Police officers in bulletproof vests ring the most violence-prone schools, and the Chicago Transit Authority rejiggers its bus schedules to try to make sure that students dont have to walk even half a block before boarding a bus.
Each street in a neighborhood possesses a mystical significance to its juvenile residents. What defines their identities isnt family, or academic accomplishments or interests, but ruthless fealty to small, otherwise indistinguishable, pieces of territory. Roselands 123rd Street is the 12-Treys turf, 119th Street belongs to the 11-9s, and 111th Street is in an area of Roseland called the Ville. Gang members from the Ville arent supposed to cross 119th Street; doing so will provoke a potentially lethal challenge. School-reform initiatives may have contributed to increasing tensions on the streets by shutting down failing schools and sending students into enemy territory; the demolition of Chicagos high-rise housing projects in the 2000s likewise disrupted existing gang groupings.
In September 2009, that now-notorious cell-phone video gave the world a glimpse of Barack Obamas former turf. Teenagerssome in an informal school uniform of khaki pants and polo shirts, others bare-chestedswarm across a desolate thoroughfare in Roseland; others congregate in the middle of it, indifferent to the SUVs that try to inch by, horns blaring. Against a background din of constant yelling, some boys lunge at one another and throw punches, while a few, in leisurely fashion, select victims to clobber on the torso and head with thick, eight-foot-long railroad ties. Derrion Albert is standing passively in the middle of a knot on the sidewalk when one boy whacks him on the head with a railroad tie and another punches him in the face. Albert falls to the ground unconscious, then comes to and tries to get up. A boy walking by gives him a desultory kick. Five more cluster around him as he lies curled up on the sidewalk; one hits him again with a railroad tie, and another stomps him on the head. Finally, workers from a nearby youth community center drag Albert inside. Throughout the video, a male companion of the videographer reacts with nervously admiring damns.
In the Alinskyite worldview, the school system was to blame, not the students who committed the violence. Several years before, Altgeld Gardenss high school, Carver High, had been converted to a charter military academy. Students who didnt want to attend were sent to Fenger High School in the Ville, several miles away. Students from Altgeld Gardens and from the Ville fought each other with knives and razors inside Fenger High and out, their territorial animosity intensified by minute class distinctions. Ville children whose mothers use federal Section Eight housing vouchers to rent homes look down upon housing-project residents like those from the Gardens. The morning of the Albert killing, someone fired a gun outside Fenger; during the school day, students sent one another text messages saying that something was likely to jump after school. When students from the Gardens, instead of immediately boarding a bus home, walked down 111th Streetthe heart of Ville territorythe fighting started. Derrion Albert had a loose affiliation with Ville students; the students who killed him were from the Gardens.
South Side aldermen and the usual race claque accused the school bureaucracy of insensitivity and worse in expecting Altgeld Gardens and Ville children to coexist without violence. In a pathetic echo of 1950s civil rights protests, Jesse Jackson, cameras in tow, rode a school bus with Altgeld Gardens students from their homes to Fenger High, demanding that Carver be converted back to a neighborhood school. No one pointed out that the threat from which Jackson the Civil Rights Avenger was protecting black students came from other black students, not from hate-filled white politicians. Obamas former organizing group, the Developing Communities Project, led noisy parent protests, demanding that Carver accept all comers from Altgeld Gardens and reduce its military component to a quarter of the school. James Meeks, a race-baiting South Side pastor and an Illinois state senator, staged his own well-photographed bus tour, taking suburban officials through Roseland and past Fenger to demonstrate the adversity that Fenger students faced compared with suburban kidsthough the greatest adversity comes from the violence that students inflict on themselves.
Other protests sent an even more muddled message. After a day when a dozen fights in Fenger High School provoked a security clampdown and five arrests, a group of parents and students staged a two-day boycott of classes, complaining of excessive discipline and harsh treatment from the guards. They put us on lockdown for two hours because of a little fight, senior DeShunna Williams told the Chicago Sun-Times. It was just an ordinary fight. Schools can only restore safety by strict discipline and zero tolerance for violence, however. If parents and students protest whenever such discipline is enforced, they undercut their own call for greater safety.
Mayor Richard Daley initially rejected the protesters demands. The day when the city of Chicago decides to divide schools by gang territory, thats a day when we have given up the city, he said. But the Chicago Public Schools soon promulgated a policy letting Fenger students transfer out of the school. Few mothers took advantage of the option for their children, despite the weeks of agitation for it. Meanwhile, the school system allocated millions of additional dollars to protect Fenger students from one another. Ten extra school buses now escort the 350 Altgeld teens to and from Fenger every day, and school administrators pressed the Chicago Transit Authority to add more public bus routes around Fenger so that students wouldnt have to wait on the sidewalk for more than a few minutes.
Who wins the award for the most Alinskyite evasion of personal and parental responsibility after Alberts death? Perhaps not the local protesters but the federal officials dispatched to Chicago for damage control. The videotaped murder, seen around the world, couldnt have come at a worse time for the Obama administrationjust over a week before the Olympic Committee was to decide on Chicagos bid to host the 2016 games. On October 1, the day before Obama was to make his last-minute pitch to the Olympic Committee in Copenhagen, the White House announced that Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan would fly to Chicago to deliver a federal response to youth violence. The next day, Chicago lost its bid in the first round of votes, but Holder and Duncan continued to Chicago the following week.
Their message picked up exactly where Obamas 1995 Chicago Reader interview left off. I came here at the direction of the president, not to place blame on anyone, but to join with Chicago, with communities across America in taking responsibility for this death and the deaths of so many other young people over the years, announced Duncan. Of course, the government has been taking responsibility for children for several decades now, at a cost of billions of dollars, without noticeable effect on inner-city dysfunction. The feds have funded countless programs in child and youth development, in antiviolence training, in poverty reduction. If collective action, as Obama put it in 1995, could compensate for the absence of fathers, the black violence problem would have ended years ago.
Holders remarks were just as irrelevant (though, to his credit, he did pledge $500,000 for beefed-up school security). We have to ask hard questions, and we have to be prepared to face tough truths, he said, and then proceeded to ignore the hard questions and duck the tough truths. Youth violence is not a Chicago problem, any more than it is a black problem, a white problem, or a Hispanic problem, he claimed. It is something that affects communities big and small, and people of all races and all colors. It is an American problem. Tough-truth quotient: maybe 20 percent. No, youth violence isnt just a Chicago problem. Urban school districts across the country flood school areas with police officers at dismissal time. But youth violence is definitely correlated with race. Though rates of youth killings and shootings varyChicago children under the age of 17 are killed at four times the rate of New York children, for exampleyouth violence is disproportionately a black problem and, to a lesser extent, a Hispanic one. According to James Alan Fox and Marc Swatt of Northeastern University, the national rate of homicide commission for black males between the ages of 14 and 17 is ten times higher than that of whites, into which category the federal government puts the vast majority of Hispanics. Black juveniles accounted for 78 percent of all juvenile arrests between 2003 and 2008 in Chicago; Hispanics were 18 percent, and whites, 3.5 percent, of those arrests. Recognizing that tough truth is the only hope for coming up with a way to change it.
In Chicago, blacks, at least 35 percent of the population, commit 76 percent of all homicides; whites, about 28 percent of the population, commit 4 percent, and Hispanics, 30 percent of the population, commit 19 percent. The most significant difference between these demographic groups is family structure. In Cook Countywhich includes both Chicago and some of its suburbs and probably therefore contains a higher proportion of middle-class black families than the city proper79 percent of all black children were born out of wedlock in 2003, compared with 15 percent of white children. Until that gap closes, the crime gap wont close, either.
Official Chicagos answer to youth violence also opts for collective, rather than paternal, responsibility. The Chicago school superintendent, Ron Huberman, has developed a whopping $60 million, two-year plan to combat youth violence. The wonky Huberman, who created highly regarded information-retrieval and accountability systems for the police department and the citys emergency response center in previous city jobs, has now applied his passion for data analysis to Chicagos violent kids. Using a profile of past shooting victims that includes such factors as school truancy rates and disciplinary records, he has identified several hundred teens as having a greater than 20 percent chance of getting shot over the next two years. The goal is to provide them with wraparound social services. (The profile of victim and perpetrator is indistinguishable, but targeting potential victims, rather than perpetrators, for such benefits as government-subsidized jobs is politically savvy.) The program will assign the 300 or so potential victims their own advocates, who will intercede on their behalf with government agencies and provide them with case management and counseling.
In some cities, its a police officer who visits a violence-prone teenager to warn him about staying out of trouble. Chicago sends a social worker. The Chicago police department has kept a low profile during the public debate over teen shootings, ceding primary accountability for the problem to the school system. This hierarchy of response may reflect Chicagos less assertive police culture compared with, say, New Yorks. Wed marvel at how the NYPD was getting mayoral support during New York mayor Rudolph Giulianis tenure, says a former Chicago deputy superintendent. Mayor Daley is not a cop supporter; its no secret that he rules the police department with an iron fist. The South Sides black ministers, whom Daley does not want to alienate, also act as a check on more proactive policing. There have been few calls in Chicago for a more aggressive stop-and-frisk policy to get illegal guns off the street, and the police department hasnt pushed to implement one.
Now, perhaps if Hubermans proposed youth advocates provided their charges with opportunities to learn self-discipline and perseverance, fired their imaginations with manly virtues, and spoke to them about honesty, courtesy, and right and wrongif they functioned, in other words, like Scoutmastersthey might make some progress in reversing the South Sides social breakdown. But the outfit that Huberman has picked to provide advocacy to the teens, at a reported cost of $5 million a year, couldnt be more mired in the assiduously nonjudgmental ethic of contemporary social work. Some modalities used in this endeavor, explains the newly hired Youth Advocates Program (YAP), include: Assess the youth and his/her family to develop an Individualized Service Plan (ISP) to address the individual needs of each youth. The Youth Advocates Programs CEO tried further to clarify the advocates function: If a family needs a new refrigerator or a father needs car insurance, its the advocates job to take care of it, Jeff Fleischer told the Chicago Tribune. The reference to a father is presumably Fleischers little joke, since almost none of the Chicago victims-in-waiting will have their fathers at home. Its not a lack of material goods that ails Chicagos gun-toting kids, however, or their mothers lack of time to procure those goods. Providing their families with a government-funded gofer to carry out basic adult tasks like getting car insurance will not compensate for a lifetime of paternal absence.
The Youth Advocates Program represents the final stage of Alinskyism: its co-optation by the government-funded social-services industry.
Obama came to Roseland and Altgeld Gardens with the fanciful intention of organizing the community to demand benefits from a hostile power structure. But heres that same power structure not just encouraging demands from below but providing the community with its own government-funded advocates to broker and advocate for each youth and family, as YAP puts it, thus ensuring constant pressure to increase government services.
Hubermans plan for ending youth violence includes other counselors and social workers who will go to work in the most dangerous public high schools. He also wants to create a culture of calm in the schools by retraining security guards and by de-emphasizing suspensions and expulsion in favor of peer mediation. Nothing new there: in 1998, Chicago schools announced plans to train students to be peer mediators and to engage in conflict resolution. In fact, there is nothing in Hubermans plan that hasnt been tried before, to no apparent effect. Youd think that someone would ask: Whats lacking in these neighborhoods that we didnt notice before? The correct answer would be: family structure.
Needless to say, everyone involved in the Albert beating came from a fatherless home. Defendant Eugene Riley hit Albert with a railroad tie as he lay unconscious on the ground in his final moments. According to 18-year-old Rileys 35-year-old mother, Sherry Smith, his father was not ready to be a strong black role model in his sons life. Nor was the different father of Rileys younger brother, Vashion Bullock, ready to be involved in his sons life. A bare-chested Bullock shows up in the video wielding a railroad tie in the middle of the street. As for Albert himself, his father saw him the day he was born, and the next time when he was in a casket, reports Bob Jackson, the worldly director of Roseland Ceasefire, an antiviolence project.
The absence of a traditional two-parent family leaves children uncertain about the scope of their blood ties. One teen who attends the Roseland Safety Net Workss after-school program thinks that she has more than ten siblings by five different fathers, but since her mother lives in North Carolina, its hard to pin down the exact number. Eight of the ten boys enrolled in Kids Off the Block, another after-school program, dont know their fathers. The other two boys, if the father came around, theyd probably kill him, says Diane Latiker, who runs the program. If children do report a remote acquaintance with their father, they dont seem to know what he does for a living.
Though teen births have dropped among blacks since the 1990s, unwed pregnancy is still a pervasive reality in Chicagos inner-city high schools. Last year at Fenger, it was all you heard aboutpregnancies or abortions, reports the youth president at Roseland Safety Net Works. In autumn 2009, one in seven girls at Chicagos Paul Robeson High School was either expecting or had already given birth to a child. Its not hard to predict where Chicagos future killers will come from.
A 15-year-old resident of Altgeld Gardens, for example, was sitting at home with her three-month-old boy during the week of Veterans Day this year, having been suspended for fighting. Youd never know it from her baby-doll voice, but this ninth-grade mother runs with a clique of girls at Fenger High who have no problem taking you out, says Bob Jackson. She lives with her 34-year-old mother, two brothers, and a sister; she sometimes sees her father when hes in town but doesnt know if he has a job. Her sons father, still playing with toys, isnt providing support. She was on her way to pick up free food from the federal WIC program when I spoke with her.
The next stage in black family disintegration may be on the horizon. According to several Chicago observers, black mothers are starting to disappear, too. Children are bouncing around, says a police officer in Altgeld Gardens. The mother says: Im done. You go stay with your father. The ladies are selling drugs with their new boyfriend, and the kids are left on their own. Alberts mother lived four hours away; he was moving among different extended family members in Chicago. Even if a mother is still in the home, she may be incapable of providing any emotional or moral support to her children. Kids will tell you: Im sleeping on the floor, theres nothing in the fridge, my mother doesnt care about me going to school, says Rogers Jones, the courtly founder of Roseland Safety Net Works. Kids are traumatized before they even get to school. Some mothers are indifferent when the physical and emotional abuses that they suffered as children recur with their own children. Weve had mothers say: I was raped as a child, so its no big deal if my daughter is raped, reports Jackson.
The official silence about illegitimacy and its relation to youth violence remains as carefully preserved in todays Chicago as it was during Obamas organizing time there. A fleeting reference to parental responsibility for children is allowed, before the speaker quickly moves on to societys more important role. But anything more specific about fathers is taboo. I have not been in too many churches lately that say: Mom, you need to find yourself a husband, this is not the norm, observes Jacksonan understandable, if lamentable, lacuna, he adds, since single heads of households constitute the vast majority of the congregation. Press coverage of teen shootings may mention a participants mother, but the shooter and victim may as well be the product of a virgin birth, for all the medias curiosity about where their fathers are. I asked John Paul Jones of Obamas old Alinskyite outfit, the Developing Communities Project, if anyone ever tries to track down the father of a teen accused of a shooting. The question threw him. Does anyone ever ask: Where are the fathers? he paraphrased me. A brief silence. Thats a good point.
Some members of Chicagos Left will argue against holding fathers or mothers responsible for their children. To blame it on the family is totally unfair, says Gwen Rice, a board member of the Developing Communities Project. Im tired of blaming the parents. The services for the poor are paltry; it boggles the mind. Historically, you cant expect a parent who cant get a job to do something that someone with resources can do. These problems have histories; there are policies that have mitigated against black progress. What needs to happen is a change in corporate greed and insensitivity. Rice corrects my use of the term illegitimacy: There are no illegitimate births, she says.
One activist, however, makes ending illegitimacy an explicit part of his work. I tell people: Unless you get married, you will perish, says the Black Star Projects Phillip Jackson. An intense, wiry man who looks like a cross between Gandhi and Spike Lee, Jackson organizes events to make fathers visible and valued again, like Take Your Child to School Day. Yet Jackson is not immune from the Alinskyite tic of looking to government for solutions to problems of personal responsibility (nor does Jackson avoid launching groundless charges of racism). He has gathered a crate of petitions to President Obama regarding Chicagos youth violence, some of whose signers are as young as four. President Obama, please send help for the sake of these young people in Chicago, reads the petition. Asked what he wants Obama to do, Jacksons answers range from a trickle-up stimulus plan to jobs to leadership.
Jobs, whether government-created or not, arent likely to make much difference in the culture of illegitimacy. As journalist Nicholas Lemann observed over two decades ago in The Atlantic Monthly, the black illegitimacy rate has only a weak correlation to employment: High illegitimacy has always been much more closely identified with blacks than with all poor people or all unemployed people. An Alinskyite approach to the related problems of illegitimacy and crime is only a distraction. Seeking redress and salvation from the power structure just puts off the essential work of culture change.
Barack Obama started that work in a startling Fathers Day speech in Chicago while running for president. If we are honest with ourselves, he said in 2008, well admit that . . . too many fathers [are] missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. . . . We know the statisticsthat children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of school and 20 times more likely to end up in prison.
But after implicitly drawing the connection between family breakdown and youth violenceHow many times in the last year has this city lost a child at the hands of another child?Obama reverted to Alinskyite bromides about school spending, preschool programs, visiting nurses, global warming, sexism, racial division, and income inequality. And he has continued to swerve from the hard truth of black family breakdown since his 2008 speech. The best thing that the president can do for Chicagos embattled children is to confront head-on the disappearance of their fathers and the consequence in lost lives.
Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor of City Journal and the John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Obama and his kind are not about helping people. They are about control and power.
It’s not just Chicago. Look to any large city, Los Angeles, Detroit, Atlanta, etc, etc, etc. You will never convince these people that if they change their lives, things will get better. They are raised on the street, don’t care about anything or anyone, life has no meaning, everyone owes them (in their mind). Now....what do you do with them, if in fact you can’t change them? If they are part of a gang, it’s blood in, blood out.
My father taught me a lot about being raised on the streets. At 16 both of his parents died. He was on the street in 1927 and joined the Whitefence gang for survival, in Los Angeles. Back then, it was not blood in, blood out. They took care of each other, but they were still a gang. Remember the Purple gang in Chicago? Whitefence was the same. Bad dudes. My father got out of Whitefence when he met and married my mother and moved out of LA. Whitefence didn’t hold it against him.
Today a gang will kill a member that leaves. Things are different today and our normal society is not willing to do what is necessary to get rid of these gangs and the black leaders will keep control of them as long as they keep their power. It’s a dead end street for these kids but they don’t see it and if they did, they won’t care. So what do you do with them?
Fantastic but very sad article!
When you look at it as being “sad”, they have you were they want you. You have to get tough with these people or it will get worse. In our society today, I can guarantee you it will get worse. We baby these people instead of making sure they fit into our society.
The legacy of FDR and generations of DemocRat "administration". All of the worst places to live in America share that shameful legacy.
Should be LBJ, although FDR did show the way
Yeah, they got a shooting on camera.
Call me heartless, but until blacks start caring about their own more than I do, why should I? (And by ‘their own’ I mean- they segregate themselves.)
Google has since scrubbed that image and sent it down the memory hole.
Excellent post.
I agree that they have institutionalized a non-productive, worthless lifestyle. But at the same time I am “sad” for the babies and children who have to grow up in such a hopeless, forever self-perpetuating environment. I am not too sure how you get “tough” with the parents who are hardly more than children themselves to break them out of it. What do you suggest?
I saw an old movie a couple of weeks ago about a kind but no-nonsense school for young boys that came from similar hopeless conditions and trained them to become responsible British merchant marine sailors, the best of them going to work on the Queen Mary. These boys were taken completely out of their deadly environment but could receive letters and visits from their families. It’s the only thing I could ever see as working to even put a bit of a dent in the toxic culture of places like southside Chicago. However it would have to be set up and run on conservative principles to work and so I see very little possibility of it ever happening. And I feel “sad” when I’m feeling pessimistic. So as I said, what do you suggest be done to break the cycle?
Not really sure about your question. I do believe though that we need to go back to some of the old values and get away from the PC stuff that is out there.
When I was a kid in LA, you didn’t ever mess with the police. You would regret it very much. But then again, those police were from a different generation and worked under different rules in society. They were not only tougher, but at the same time, more understanding of kids. I had friends that got into minor scrapes with the law. The police took them to the police station and their parents were called......at 2 or 3 in the morning to come and pick them up. If the parents didn’t pick up the kids, they were held over for court. If they did pick up the kids, they got a good lecture by the police.....for a couple of hours. The courts system held the parents responsible for the kids. If the kid was put on probation or given a warning and released to the parents, the parents best make sure that the kid stayed out of trouble or the judge would call the parents and have them appear before him. One juvenile judge was actually called a hanging judge. Some parents even went to jail. Not for long but he got their attention.
For some reason we think we can talk to these kids and things will change. Ain’t going to happen today. The kids know that if they are under 18, nothing will happen to them. This has to change. These kids in the inner city have no fear of the judical system. The fear of God needs to be put upon them. Scared straight programs worked great until the PC crowd started getting involved.
There’s a lot that can be done if the country wants to do it. Right now, these kids will shoot you and never have any regrets.
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