It sounds like I’m tripping on you. I’m not. You talk to any number of brothers and sisters about this issue this is the type of response you’d get. But the words are literally meaningless, and that is a sign that rather than thinking through these issues logically you are falling back on worn language because you don’t have anything else left.

I say this as one who grew up in the South, where my working class parents and grandparents, reared on the farm, would freely talk about who “weren’t raised right.” They’d also police and discipline other neighborhood children, knowing that the parent(s) would support them in this. Now, this situation is turned on its head. A disintegration of community and the loss of a sense of mutal accountability is a sign of a deep malaise. To kill (or malign!) the messenger, whether it’s Bill Cosby or Barack Obama, is a sign of weakness, not love or racial solidarity.

and the second point gets right to the heart of the matter, given the population of predominantly working class black men that we’re talking about. even if we were to reconstruct families they’d still be poor.

Does the proportion of unwed births become equal between blacks and whites when you control for income? I looked around for stats on this for awhile, but I didn’t find anything.

Also, one issue I’ve heard (from a friend in child support enforcement) that comes up with tougher child support enforcement is that it’s not all that hard to father enough kids that you *can’t* support them all with your available skills. Apparently, it’s not all that uncommon to have some guys with three or more judgements against them, and even garnishing the maximum amount they can from those guys’ paychecks (at bottom-tier jobs), they are going further in the hole with every month. I have no idea how to address that. You can kind-of imagine trying to help the fathers get better jobs (we’d want to do that anyway!), but there’s no way to get every guy who manages to knock a few women up into a good enough income that he can pay all that child support and still make ends meet.

That’s only logical.

If the source of the pathology is outside of us, but is powerful enough to manipulate us against our interests, then that source is extremely powerful indeed.

If it does not exist then we, on the average, are extremely dumb indeed.

In any case, I’ve tried to address the question logically.

I would appreciate seeing some of your thinking on this.

Instead of (1) devoting all of one’s time mercilessly tearing down black folks or (2) devoting all of one’s time dismissing individual responsiblity, why not seek an equlibrium?

1. It isn’t “our” lifestyle. It’s an American lifestyle. We all know professional women who have either decided to have children on their own, and applauded them, or who have decided to terminate pregnancies because they neither wanted nor were ready for children. Just as we all know people who have significant issues balancing their checkbooks. Given this, it is absurd to point to a single group and blame them for behavior that most other groups exhibit.

2. You are implicitly connecting poverty and economic hardship to lifestyle. Lifestyle doesn’t cause poverty…poverty influences lifestyle. Which means that dealing with poverty should be the central issue, not influencing lifestyle. Families are constructs of the state–as evidenced by the recent attempt to make gay marriages legal. The disintegration of the black family can be traced to any number of political decisions, from zoning laws that privilege “the nuclear family” and punish extended families, to tax laws that allow married individuals to claim exceptions, to decisions about tax breaks that cause manufacturers to leave the country…hamstringing the ability of fathers to serve as breadwinners.

3. Your comparison to the Jim Crow era signals a belief that racism is no longer the problem, cultural behavior is. But you neglect another possibility–that CLASSISM is the problem. Dropping out of high school is something that poor students (without hope, without good teachers, without good schools) tend to do. We’ve organized to fight poverty before, with great success. Why do we blame the black poor for their circumstance now rather than organizing around poverty again?

Rather than recreating the wheel and trying to come up with a better comment, I’ll repost my response on Racism Review:

“

I understand why we black folks are sensitive to criticism about our lifestyles; albeit constructive. When analyses and cultural criticisms appear to be unbalanced and conveniently discount social, economic, and political deficiencies that create the problem, the ‘victim’ tends to get more offended when the blame is placed squarely on them. The unfortunate consequence of this type of critical analysis from Obama — though somewhat on point — is that it can get lost if it isn’t balanced by an understanding and an appreciation of the systemic problems (indiscriminate arrests and sentencing, inequities in pay, etc.) that contribute just as much to this plight. I get that.

Still, I think that critics of Obama should stop and really listen to the message he was trying to convey; regardless to how poor and incomplete the delivery might be. Being a child whose father bailed on him, I can see why he internalizes this so much. Besides that, I think he’s ultimately saying that some of the self-destructive behavior we engage in contributes to the disintegration of the Black family just as much as the other nefarious forces that exist in this society. It’s no longer Jim Crowism. Now it’s B.E.T. It’s no longer the Klan terrorizing black folks. Now it’s young black teenagers. It’s no longer the racist power structure that works assiduously to keep blacks out of college. We’re the ones voluntarily dropping out of high school. Simply put, in many cases, we’re the ones self-imposing things that threaten our advancement and indeed our very survival.

Rather than painting black folks as sad and pathetic victims of circumstance, Obama’s speech (at least I think) seeks to empower us to control our own lives. He lays out a challenge for parents to play a more active role in determining how their children are raised. Further, the way I see it is that he’s trying to urge us to be more actively engaged in promoting our OWN development. Frankly, I see nothing about as being Uncle Tom-ish. If anything, I’d say he’s using his “bully pulpit” in a responsible and necessary manner.

I’m just sayin…