A few weeks ago, I was listening to a radio talk show when a black man called in to take Barack Obama to task for suggesting that black men were sloughing off their responsibility as fathers. The caller didn’t deny recent data that indicated that 80% of black babies were being born to unwed mothers. Instead, he said that this dire situation wasn’t the fault of irresponsible young men and women, but, instead, was the logical result of rampant racism in our country. He claimed that black American males simply can’t find jobs, and that’s the reason they don’t support their families.
I waited for the talk show host to set him straight, but it never happened. So I guess, as is so often the case in this cowardly, politically correct, age, I’ll have to do it myself.
First of all if I had been hosting the show, I probably would have laughed in the caller’s face. Which may very well explain why I’m not hosting a radio talk show.
The notion that in 2008, anyone can seriously suggest that it is whitey’s fault that millions of black men are abrogating their responsibility to get married and help raise their children would be laughable if the results weren’t so tragic both for the black community and for America at large.
How is it, I would have challenged the caller, that his grandparents and their grandparents managed to get married and bring up their youngsters in spite of Jim Crow laws, separate-but-definitely-unequal schools and rampant racism that kept them in menial jobs, but that all these years later, in spite of decades of Affirmative Action, government-enforced equal opportunity in the workplace and quota systems that benefit minorities, black men lack the ability to do the same? And how is it that people all over the world who are much poorer than American blacks manage to pull it off?
It’s obvious that millions of black men simply prefer shirking their responsibilities, while simultaneously insisting that they’re the victims of white society. They make a huge deal of demanding respect, of insisting they’re men and not boys, but all the while millions of them do precious little to earn anybody’s respect or to prove that they are anything but irresponsible brats.
How can I be so certain that I’m right and that the angry caller wasn’t? Simple. After all, how can it be possible that all these millions of black men are unable to support their babies, but millions of single black women somehow manage to do it?