Recently, a community activist, minister and businessman told me how frustrated he gets when he attempts to encourage more people in closest proximity to black children to accept responsibility and accountability for children’s current failures, as well as for their future outcomes.
His immediate concern was prompted when he learned that black students had just been denied admission to a formerly black university. I understood-my most painful squabbles ensued when I sought to change outcomes for poor black children in areas near the black colleges I was heading. Some of my fiercest challengers-and least willing to engage directly in prevention efforts-were people who claimed a commitment to black students and were employed by the colleges. Fortunately, a precious few redoubled their efforts and we made progress.
Antagonists claim we are “blaming the victim” when we ask people in families and neighborhoods to help stop the most lethal of black child abuse-e.g., poor, uneducated and unemployed young people producing children they can’t support. But who are the victims today? Young black children know nothing about slavery and racism, but they are inflicted with competitive disadvantages from birth which they learn about as they mature.
How many generations removed from slavery and blatant racism do we have to be to accurately affix culpability when black preschoolers suffer physical, psychological, spiritual and academic deprivation, which makes them slaves today? Black children who are not able to meet college admission requirements, or succeed when they do enroll, cannot alleviate their pain by blaming 400-year-old issues, as misguided people attempt to get them to do. Instead, they should be told that across America many poor black kids are doing very well, as has been true forever. Both open and subtle racism are defeated by the same force: Intellectual and behavioral excellence.
The notion that a person who was abused can use that experience as a mitigating factor when he abuses others is widely known. This defense has been used in courtrooms by alleged prior victims after they commit a crime; however, I’m not sure this excuse has not been considered before the fact by sociopaths who victimize others. I am aware that youngsters know they can commit crimes as juveniles-deal drugs and even murder-and not have to pay any serious price.
To me, the real victims were my great-grandparents, grandparents and parents; but, they, as the military saying goes, knocked down the barbed wire so I could storm the beach and gain the high ground. I would have been the victimizer of myself and my own wife and children if I had not used available resources to qualify myself to succeed in America.
It may be too late for “old-school blacks” like me to win the struggle to save more black youngsters from lives of misery with sharp-edged truths directed at the people, and their defenders, who claim to be “victims” and who now victimize children through decimation by procreation and then neglect. The facts are clear: there is a considerably higher percentage of black children under 18 in poverty, and black youngsters under 18 make up a greater percentage of the black population relative to white children and the white population.
My zillion-dollar question is: Can entities external to black communities stop the decimation through procreation of black children born into poverty? The answer is a resounding no. Remedies imposed from outside would be an intrusion into women’s reproductive rights. Moreover, any external remedy would trigger extremely negative reactions because black females have been subjected to race-based sterilization procedures in the past.
The same “no” would apply if “enemies” were substituted for “entities,” despite their claims that America gives black people too much welfare money. The enemies, no matter how one defines the term, would not stop a hated population from self-destruction, especially since upper classes profit from black failures.
As increasing numbers of black children slip into poverty of such form that their chances of escaping are remote, I am driven to maintain the position I adopted soon after I emigrated from black America to compete in the American mainstream: We should have been tougher on ourselves, each other, our families, and our local communities in our struggle to lift black Americans, including our poor, from the vestiges of slavery.
After desegregation, many of us adopted America’s indulgent attitudes on child-rearing and embraced the notion that unearned suffering would be redemptive in the here and now.
But worst of all, we abandoned the six black cultural tenets Martin Luther King talked about in the 1950s that had brought about such monumental achievements by the mid-’60s, even to the least among us. In case you have forgotten them, they were workplace excellence, educational superiority, financial frugality, opposition to black crime and disorderly behavior, self-/community-reliance and respect for black women and the traditional family.
How soon we forget!
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Lloyd V. Hackley is the former chancellor of the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff.
Editorial, Pages 17 on 05/23/2013