From the 1970s on, I taught in a college whose student body was almost entirely black. At first, men outnumbered women. Most were veterans getting GI benefits, and they were familiar with the world in a way that high-school grads often are not. It was a pleasure to teach them. By the time I retired, a couple years ago, almost all the students were women. It was rare to have even a single male student in a class. The women were sometimes older but very, very limited in life-experience. Teaching them was a struggle.
During those same years, the African-American family essentially collapsed. The illegitimacy rate went from about 25% to 70% and most of the students were coming up in single-parent female-headed households. The Times, of course, would not dare speak about this as the cause of anything bad, but I think it really accounts for most of the ills in black America today, including the failure of young men to aspire to anything much in life--and to whine like women about every little setback, as the losers in this article do.
Q: What is the media image of a successful black man? If you were to turn on programs frequently watched by young black men, how would success be measured by that media?