Replies

A man of influence - wants to rescue Aboriginal affairs from white romantics***..........................Mundine believes the land-rights and welfare policies of the past 30 years have failed to provide most Aborigines with better lives. In his view, some of the Aboriginal leaders still defending those policies "are living in the past, living off the old victories, trapped in the 1970s land-rights rhetoric". The solution? "I want to make Aboriginal communities safe and economically viable. They're the two issues I want to drive forward. We've spent 30 years trying to get economic development into Aboriginal communities through government agencies and community organisations and it just doesn't work. We need to get the private sector in there and encourage Aboriginal people to build their own businesses."

He has great faith in private industry and private ownership. "The discipline of paying off a mortgage affects your whole life. You have to be healthy so you can get an education; you have to be educated so you can get a job; and you have to keep that job. It changes everything." As for government: "It has been an enslaver of Aboriginal people for 200 years. It's time we got them out of the way so we can move on independently." .........***

Idle black men, tragically, aren't just a stereotype *** The black men I know best are all hard-working, accomplished professionals. They include my brother, a physician, and my buddies — lawyers, college professors, political consultants, journalists. I live in an insular world of middle-class affluence, rarely stumbling into the troubled universe of marginalized underachievers.

Until recently. After a contractor walked off the job, I was assigned the task of helping my mother find laborers to help complete her new house in my hometown, Monroeville, Ala., a small place with a declining textiles industry. The assignment led me into an alternative universe of black men without jobs or prospects or enthusiasm for hard labor.

My younger sister, an architect, appointed her Mexican-born father-in-law, an experienced carpenter (and American citizen), the new general contractor. I was to find men willing to help him paint, lift, scrape, fill, dig. The pay was hardly exorbitant — $6 an hour. But it seemed reasonable for unskilled labor. So I looked among unemployed high school classmates, members of my mother's church and men standing on nearby street corners.

The experience brought me face to face with every unappealing behavior that I'd heard attributed to idle black men but dismissed as stereotype. One man worked a couple of days and never came back. One young man worked 30 minutes before he deserted. Others promised to come to work but never did. ……….***