Heather Mac Donald hits another one out of the park with a parsing of a New York Times article about the “youth crisis” of rising murder rates among blacks. Nothing new. Young black men kill each other and will continue doing so, fueled by factors like fatherlessness and family instability.
Generally speaking, there’s no one around to teach them how to be decent men and take responsibility for themselves and offspring they produce. The women in the family can’t or apparently don’t want to socialize them with the expectation of getting married and making a home of their own for themselves and their wives and children. They don’t learn how to master their impulses or direct their natural aggression to productive pursuits. And on and on.
You know my views on the matter. If not, check the archives. Search “fatherless,” “fatherlessness,” and variations on the theme.
I wanted to point you to Mac Donald’s column. Her critiques are always devastating, from my perspective. Too bad she doesn’t pop up in mainstream publications more often. In her latest City Journal article, “The Times’s Crime Confusions Persist,” she advises President-elect Barack Obama to take a new approach to reducing crime rates. If your time is short today, don’t waste it reading this post. Go straight to the article.
Mac Donald points out something I’m sure a lot of people know: the disparity between white and black homicides (10-to-1) actually is greater than the numbers show. That’s because the government includes hispanics in the “white” crime perpetrator rate category. “Hispanic crime rates are between three and four times that of whites—meaning that if one excluded the Hispanic homicides from the white rate, the black-white differential would be even larger than ten to one,” she writes.
Curiously, hispanic victims of crime are broken out into a separate category. This tactic masks the real horror (substitute sadness, atrocity, whatever works for you) of violent crime among blacks (and hispanics). That’s the point, I suspect.
Mac Donald also gets to the root of the problem, one so many people tend to ignore or downplay: marriage. A stabilizing and civilizing influence on men and boys and the conduit through which values and valuable life/family lessons are passed down, marriage is a rarity among young blacks with children. They don’t even expect to be married. They have sex, make babies and excuses, and pass this sorry and disrespectful behavior on to their children.
But talking about it won’t change anything, It makes for interesting conversation, though. It’s like looking at a train about to wreck. Terrible. Awful. But what can you do to stop it? It’s going too fast, and it’s a lot bigger than you are.
“Liberal policymakers and pundits have spilled buckets of ink over the years promoting social-service programs as the solution to crime, yet—like the Times’s recent editorial—those opinion-setters cannot squeeze out one word about the most effective anticrime (and antipoverty) strategy: marriage. The marriage imperative civilizes boys. By contrast, in a world where it is unusual for a man to marry the mother of his children, boys fail to learn the most basic lesson of personal responsibility: you are responsible for your children. Freed of the social expectation that they will have to provide a stable home for their offspring, boys have little incentive to restrain their impulses and develop bourgeois habits. In 2005, the national black illegitimacy rate was 70 percent, and it approached 90 percent in many inner cities (compared with a white illegitimacy rate of 25 percent, and as low as 6 percent in some urban areas, like the District of Columbia). The disappearance of marriage from the black community is a social cataclysm.
“Some highly structured, values-based youth programs, like the Boy Scouts, can provide boys a surrogate for the paternal authority that they lack at home; society is right to support these lifelines. But they cannot possibly bring crime down significantly among blacks in the absence of a cultural shift toward marriage. True, no one knows yet how to revive marriage in the black community. But given the imperative of doing so, you would think that somewhere in the flood of recommendations for more useless government social programs, a little space could be reserved for promoting the idea of a marriage movement.”
Mac Donald has and isn’t afraid to use common sense and put her thoughts down on paper for public consumption. Obviously, being called a racist doesn’t intimidate her in the least. Courageous and honest people are needed in a crisis, people, and but too many of us are faint-hearted.
The standard liberal solution to society’s problems in general and social pathology among blacks in particular strays far away from confronting the individual. Well-intentioned but ultimately useless social programs funded by taxpayers make liberals feel like they’re doing something. The truth is, we’re just spinning our wheels like hamsters. The character of individuals, not so much the dynamics of the group, must change.
P.S.: Instead of sending “dissenting” e-mail to me or Heather Mac Donald, send it to the men doing the killing and the men and women dooming black babies to fatherless childhoods. They deserve your scorn. We don’t.
How much do people really care that in California, illegal aliens are not only not kicked out of the country, but they receive in-state tuition to tax-supported colleges and universities? At the very least, it’s something to blog about. 
As you may know, illegal aliens are in the U.S. illegally. That is, they’ve broken the law to get here and their continued presence is a violation of that law. In 2001, the California legislature passed a law that allowed in-state tuition rates for illegal aliens who attend a California high school for at least three years and graduate. American citizens who live outside the state and wish to attend school here must pay out-of-state tuition.
A group has sued, calling the law unconstitutional on the grounds that it unlawfully discriminates against out-of-state students. The California Supreme Court will hear the case. (Source)
Nicholas Espiritu, a lawyer for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said these illegal alien students “have earned the right to be there” because they come from “very low-income areas and underperforming schools” but they’ve found ways “to really achieve and succeed in education despite almost every roadblock imaginable being put in their path.”
Comments like that would have sent me over the edge a couple of years ago (the right to be there?) Today, I can’t generate much ire. In the scheme of things, is it worth getting upset over? After I’ve shuffled off this mortal coil after my three score and ten, who’ll remember or even care about my views on the country’s illegal immigration mess? Why raise my blood pressure about something over which I have no control?
In March, the same court will hear arguments on Proposition 8, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman, is unconstitutional. Now that’s something to get worked up over. Isn’t it? What would happen if the court rules the law unconstitutional, allowing homosexual “marriage” in California? Will the sky fall? No. Such a decision would represent a mere cog in the wheel of degradation. God isn’t preserving his judgment until a certain point in the future. It’s happening now. Be prepared, and don’t forget about what’s really important.
Update: Reader Matthew J. e-mails: “California has a lot of military personnel who have kids who attend California public schools for three years. Unless that military member changes his/her residency to California (which some don’t want to do for say, tax reasons), their child—a legal child—must pay out of state tuition if they attend a California university.”
When I was a younger woman, I fled my home state of South Carolina like a bat out of hell. But the older I get, the more I like it. Especially after reading this.
There’s a law in SC that requires child killing “providers” to give women the option of seeing an ultrasound of their unborn babies before the slaughter. (SC isn’t the only state with this requirement.)
SC lawmakers now want to make sure women have in hand a list of clinics that provide free ultrasounds (including the cool new four-dimensional ones?). They’ve “prefiled” a bill.
I’m sure it’s much more difficult to be casual about killing the baby once the woman sees the little life inside her. Technology has illuminated what once was covered in darkness. The “clump of cells” and “blob of tissue” are revealed to be recognizable human beings. I’m grateful for it. Women who don’t want their babies surely can endure nine months of gestation to bless a couple who desperately wants a child. Exercise that choice.
Update: Wow. Somebody posted this link on Stumble Upon. I didn’t know kids were living like that. Mad traffic. Thanks to whoever (whomever? whatever!). 
Rest easy this weekend, everybody.
Looks like major Christian book publisher Thomas Nelson is hitching a ride on the powerful Disney-esque marketing machine. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
I just think it’s…wild, weird, and smart!
Young stars like “American Idol” winner Jordin Sparks, Sean Astin of “Lord of the Rings,” (Astin’s only a few years younger than I am - does that mean I’m young, too?) curly-haired cutie Corbin Bleu of Disney’s “High School Musical,” and Emily Osment and Cody Linley of Disney’s “Hannah Montana” (which my 10-year-old niece can’t get enough of) read the New Testament in the recording “The Word of Promise: Next Generation - New Testament.”
What TN’s doing certainly isn’t new. Dramatic readings of the Bible, especially by well-known celebrities, must be hot sellers. If this product encourages more young people to “read” the Bible, I’m all for it. No doubt some of the audio Bible’s participants are Christians, though I won’t assume all are what we Bible thumpers call “born again.”
Included in the set of 20 CDs is a 75-minute “behind the scenes” DVD with interviews.
Speaking of Jordin Sparks, she earned major kudos from me after she defended “purity” rings on the Video Music Awards show. Some Brit joked about the Jonas Brothers wearing them, and Sparks (who wears one herself) reportedly said, “I just have one thing to say about promise rings. It’s not bad to wear a promise ring…because not everybody – guy or girl – wants to be a slut.” Some in the audience cheered.
I noticed the muted responses from homosexual and feminist bloggers to the gang-rape of a lesbian. I wondered why they weren’t up in arms, ravenously ready to hurl stinging yet passionate words dripping with anger, denouncing this brutal and senseless act of violence against one of their own.
Then it dawned on me. The races of the gang-raping thugs: three hispanic and one black. I’d venture a guess that the victim is white.
At this point in my blogging “career” (five years and counting), it’s sort of tedious to do this, but I’ll do it anyway. Can you imagine the national…no forget that…the international outrage over this gang-rape if the perpetrators had been fair-haired and white? (That it’s national news at all is surprising.) Throw in a pair or two of blue eyes for good measure. Man, that’s all we’d be reading and hearing for the next several months. (How fast can you say Duke Lacrosse?) Diatribes against the white racist patriarchy, white supremacists, how California’s Proposition 8 is to blame for the “backlash” against homosexuals, and on and on.
But the reactions I’ve read so far in the media and on blogs are stunningly restrained. The facts, and hardly any emotion. By next week, nobody will be talking or writing about this story.
Human nature never ceases to amaze me. Even though it’s mind-numbingly predictable, I’m always amazed that I know it so well.
May I interrupt the suicide and phony love story blogging for a few seconds of pop culture/music?
I “discovered” Coldplay a few years ago. Nice sound, but too hyped. When the new album came out, I avoided listening to it. Why? Kinda juvenile, I guess, but I try to avoid following the crowd. I favor non-hyped-but-should-be-hyped artists (hint, hint). I heard “Viva La Vida” while driving one day but didn’t know it was “Viva La Vida” and said, “I dig it.”
I like the sound of this thing:
Oh, how I wish I’d blogged about the latest literary hoax last week before the publisher canceled the contract! Feet-dragging is a bad habit, boys and girls.
The air’s out of the balloon now. A man named Herman Rosenblat claimed that while he was in a concentration camp, a Jewish girl whose family was pretending to be Christian gave him apples over a fence. One day he asked her not to come back because he had an “appointment” with the gas chamber. He wasn’t killed; he was transferred to another camp.
Years later, he went on a blind date with a woman who turned out to be the girl who’d given him apples lo those many years ago.
Critics cried foul. First, the concentration camp where Rosenblat said he was detained didn’t have gas chambers. Second, the Nazi’s didn’t tell prisoners when they were going to the gas chamber. The point was to trick them into going. Third, there’s no way Herman or Roma could have gotten close to the fence without the guards seeing them. Fourth, it was highly unlikely that a Jewish family who feared the Nazi’s wouldn’t know about their nine-year-old daughter’s daily visits to a concentration camp fence, for crying out loud, or would allow her to continue once they found out. And on and on.
Herman Rosenblat and his wife Roma ended up on Oprah, and Berkley Books offered him a deal for his memoirs, Angel at the Fence: The True Story of a Love That Survived. And you know Hollywood is partial to Holocaust stories. The book is set to be made into a movie.
Continue reading Holocaust Couple’s Love Story Exposed As Lie
A 22-year-old man killed himself because, according to WND, he lost his belief in God after reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. Young Jesse Kilgore blew his brains out, convinced that God and faith in God are delusions. (I became a Christian some 10 years ago. Unlike young Christians today, I didn’t have to deal with unbelieving college professors challenging my faith or making me question my beliefs. I was just as much a heathen as they were.)
His father told WND that a biology professor was “really challenging my son, his faith…They didn’t like him as a Republican, as a Christian, and as a conservative who believed in intelligent design.”
First, I take a hard stand when it comes to suicide. It’s the work of inconsiderate and self-centered cowards, whatever the reason. But we’ve all had suicidal thoughts – from mild “what if I just offed myself right now” to actually taking a weapon in hand (bottle of pills, gun, whatever) to attempting suicide and ending up in the hospital. If you say you haven’t, you’re probably lying.
[Update: Did she write “inconsiderate and self-centered cowards”? There I go again, being too harsh. Christians aren’t allowed, so I’ve heard. What about the mentally ill, you ask? Well, if someone isn’t in his “right mind” when he commits suicide, I suppose that’s a different story. In some cases. Generally, my opinion of suicide, which I’ve contemplated in my younger years, stands. More sympathy for those left behind, please.]
