Family
By Patrick Hall
“To put the world in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in order; we must first cultivate our personal life; we must first set our hearts right.” Confucius
It gets down to one word. It’s family. In the case of African-Americans and specifically the black underclass, for all practical purposes, it has been on life support for quite some time. The geometric increase in violent crime, that permeates many African-American communities today has led to thousands of black-on-black homicides nationwide during the past three decades. Since 2009, in the city of Chicago alone, over 6500 blacks have been murdered. There have been more black people killed by their so-called brethren than the United States Armed Forces have suffered in the War on Terror. As cited in a previous article, blacks are roughly 13% of the United States population but are responsible for over 52% of all homicides. Those statistics have gotten worse. According to the 2021 FBI Uniform Crime Stats, blacks are responsible for 60% of all murders nationwide.
What has gone sideways within the black community in many inner-cities and not-so-inner-cities? Concurrently, stark increases in violent crime, drug abuse, welfare dependency, hostility towards law enforcement, domestic violence, rape, burglary, and a host of other culture-killing behaviors have become the norm.
As one Black pastor pointed out in a news program last week, respect for life, others, and their own don’t exist in places like Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago, and Philly to name a few. Black folks simply kill black folks and others with the attitude of a giant “so-what.” It’s just another dead negro! Except in the case of a mentally ill, crazy-ass white supremacist like in Jacksonville, Florida, who gunned down three black citizens and then took his own life. There is hardly a peep from BLM, Black politicians like Jim Clyburn (D-SC), and other Black social justice organizations concerning the mass executions by blacks in many urban areas. It’s become difficult for the Democratic Party and the Black polity to exploit the latter as another George Floyd moment.
Even since May of 2023, there have been over 1300 black-on-black murders nationwide, many of them involving the simultaneous taking of two or more lives. Unfortunately, there is nothing to see here or get vexed about in the minds of the Black Political class. It is just some ordinary, everyday, ho-hum murder of black folks killing their own. But let one crazy-ass, “living in his parent’s basement white supremacist” get in on the action and the left-of-center media and “PATERNALISTIC-SOCIAL-JUSTICE-BLEEDING-HEART LIBERALS, BOTH BLACK AND WHITE” go nuts. Here is another statistic. White Supremacists, or whacked-out individuals who identify as such, are responsible for less than .001% of all murders each year.
Regrettably, we’re a hopelessly racist nation in the thinking of Progressive Liberal standard bearers such as Barrack Obama, Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, and the Congressional Black Caucus. They need to keep the narrative of America as a systemic racist nation vibrant. They and their corporate media are constantly on the lookout for the next Michael Brown or George Floyd incident to exploit. There is a lot of fame, money, and power to be made as leading entrepreneurs in America’s Race Baiting Industry.
Urban/Public Policy wonks and other societal literati have their theories concerning the cultural anomie, that exists in a large segment of the inner-city community. But it all gets down to the word “family.”
Life is cheap. Ubiquitous Black criminality is a by-product of a perverted, tenuous, if not non-existent family structure. Many young and not-so-young Blacks act accordingly. Values and mores, or even a basic sense of “right and wrong” are not taught. Personal responsibility, you can forget about. It is not operative in the thinking of street thugs and ghetto asses, we see running out of stores, unabashedly stealing stuff, or sticking a gun in your face, for whatever reason comes into their little morally reductionist, if not nihilistic brains. Of course, we have been constantly told or brainwashed by the extraordinarily smart people at our colleges and universities that “right and wrong, good and evil” are just SOCIAL CONSTRUCTS!
There is a critical lack of intact, “civilized” households or families that teach “limits”, morality, or religious values, in what I call the “indigenous black communities”, which doesn’t include newer African immigrants.
Sidebar: In regards to Nigerians specifically, who have migrated to America with their cohort of 30 thousand by the1980s, have grown to over a quarter million. They have surpassed Post Antebellum blacks or indigenous blacks in total family income. I am sure, somewhere along the line, they were called niggers and all types of pejoratives. However, that hasn’t blinded them as a group to the opportunities America affords all its people. They are simply not trapped in this “wards of the state, racism keeps me from progressing” mentality, that black politicians and the white liberal intelligentsia seem to nurture and ambush indigenous blacks with. Black Americans and their dubious leadership continue to chase the ghost of slavery past. More succinctly, Rev Al Sharpton, former President Obama’s key advisor on race relations, flourishes by keeping the ghost of systemic racism at the forefront.
There are no social guardrails, that many of us raised in the 1930s, 40s, and 1950s were taught. To reiterate, personal responsibility is anathema. Within places like Baltimore, the black populace has incubated a generation of monsters.
But it wasn’t always this way in poor Black urban areas. Before the benefits of Johnson’s Great Society Programs and the ill-fated War on Poverty, there existed more intact black households, than there are today some 50-plus years later. Two-parent households were more common five to six decades ago. Over 70% of blacks before 1965 were raised with a mother and father present. Today there are less than 25% of households or families, that have a two-parent configuration.
Moms and dads, and especially dads, would metaphorically, as well as physically, open up a can of whoop-ass to teach us how to behave and not act like ill-mannered, uncultured fools. But then again, that would be acting “white” according to self-styled race experts like Abram X Kendi and Michael Eric Dyson.
We see on the news and at times even here in my hometown, young blacks stealing and running out of the local Walmart and other establishments. Without any sense of morality, they just steal and take what they “feel” is owed to them. It must be one of the effects of 400 years of slavery, according to lunatic professional academics and other “deep thinkers.”
One has to wonder, what on God's green earth wasn’t taught, nor communicated to these individuals who steal, murder, and make life in many inner-city communities barely livable. Once again, many of them are black and come from broken homes, where there is no responsible adult authority, much less a mom and dad. They don’t care! They haven’t been taught how to be a responsible member of society. In many ways, they’re barely human or poor replication of the latter.
I don’t want to hear the excuse of racism. Trillions of dollars, beginning with the Great Society Programs of the 60s have been pumped into Black communities to remedy the effects of the real racism many blacks had to negotiate. Blacks have been given reduced and, in many cases, free college tuition and innumerable social programs, that supposedly went to confronting the effects of the Antebellum and Post Antebellum Periods. America has bent over backward to help blacks succeed but is still treated with a kick-in-the-balls by the current Black Polity and mea culpa White Liberals, as hopelessly racist. America has to be full of some of the world’s dumbest racists, who transferred trillions of dollars to the black community to keep black people racially oppressed. Give me a break! In reality, the only people who have been more effective at impairing blacks have been other blacks. The black political class and the black literati in universities, the welfare state, K-12 educators, and even many black churches bare responsibility. They are the ones, who have a vested interest in keeping racism alive. You just have to follow the money, that goes unabated to the Black political class, to see who is the real impediment for the black underclass and their diminishing family structure. Will it change? I have my doubts since blacks will still vote overwhelmingly Democrat. Thirty years ago, as a Faculty Librarian in the California State University System, I had the privilege to talk with a Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, Shelby Steele, who was then a faculty member at San Jose State University. He said something then, that resonated with me because it explained so much about what has ravaged the black community and Black families in post-Civil Rights America. Here I’m using a direct quote from his book, The Content of Our Character, which was contemporaneous with our 1990 discussion. It was a hard statement to make. My only regret is someone like former President Barrack Obama could have emphasized this to all of America when he was President. Instead, Obama was far too accomplished at doing and saying nothing, quite well.
Shelby stated:
“Suffering can be endured and overcome. It cannot be repaid. Blacks cannot be repaid for the injustices done to the race, but we can be corrupted by society’s guilty gestures of repayment… The hardest thing for any sufferer to accept is that his suffering excuses him from very little and never has enough currency to restore. To think otherwise is to prolong the suffering.”2
That prolonged suffering has rooted itself in the devolution of family formation within a large segment of the African-American community. It is blacks and only blacks through the hard restoration of their family units, that can cure the sins of social decay, which is a pathogen, a murderous poison in far too many communities.
______________________
1. To interject, I believe the radical Transgender cabal’s insistence, that there are numerous genders is a calamitous by-product or misuse of everything is just a social construct polemic. There are only two genders. Period!
2. Steele, Shelby. (1990). The Content of our Character. New York: St. Martin’s Press. p. 199
“To put the world in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in order; we must first cultivate our personal life; we must first set our hearts right.” Confucius
It gets down to one word. It’s family. In the case of African-Americans and specifically the black underclass, for all practical purposes, it has been on life support for quite some time. The geometric increase in violent crime, that permeates many African-American communities today has led to thousands of black-on-black homicides nationwide during the past three decades. Since 2009, in the city of Chicago alone, over 6500 blacks have been murdered. There have been more black people killed by their so-called brethren than the United States Armed Forces have suffered in the War on Terror. As cited in a previous article, blacks are roughly 13% of the United States population but are responsible for over 52% of all homicides. Those statistics have gotten worse. According to the 2021 FBI Uniform Crime Stats, blacks are responsible for 60% of all murders nationwide.
What has gone sideways within the black community in many inner-cities and not-so-inner-cities? Concurrently, stark increases in violent crime, drug abuse, welfare dependency, hostility towards law enforcement, domestic violence, rape, burglary, and a host of other culture-killing behaviors have become the norm.
As one Black pastor pointed out in a news program last week, respect for life, others, and their own don’t exist in places like Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago, and Philly to name a few. Black folks simply kill black folks and others with the attitude of a giant “so-what.” It’s just another dead negro! Except in the case of a mentally ill, crazy-ass white supremacist like in Jacksonville, Florida, who gunned down three black citizens and then took his own life. There is hardly a peep from BLM, Black politicians like Jim Clyburn (D-SC), and other Black social justice organizations concerning the mass executions by blacks in many urban areas. It’s become difficult for the Democratic Party and the Black polity to exploit the latter as another George Floyd moment.
Even since May of 2023, there have been over 1300 black-on-black murders nationwide, many of them involving the simultaneous taking of two or more lives. Unfortunately, there is nothing to see here or get vexed about in the minds of the Black Political class. It is just some ordinary, everyday, ho-hum murder of black folks killing their own. But let one crazy-ass, “living in his parent’s basement white supremacist” get in on the action and the left-of-center media and “PATERNALISTIC-SOCIAL-JUSTICE-BLEEDING-HEART LIBERALS, BOTH BLACK AND WHITE” go nuts. Here is another statistic. White Supremacists, or whacked-out individuals who identify as such, are responsible for less than .001% of all murders each year.
Regrettably, we’re a hopelessly racist nation in the thinking of Progressive Liberal standard bearers such as Barrack Obama, Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, and the Congressional Black Caucus. They need to keep the narrative of America as a systemic racist nation vibrant. They and their corporate media are constantly on the lookout for the next Michael Brown or George Floyd incident to exploit. There is a lot of fame, money, and power to be made as leading entrepreneurs in America’s Race Baiting Industry.
Urban/Public Policy wonks and other societal literati have their theories concerning the cultural anomie, that exists in a large segment of the inner-city community. But it all gets down to the word “family.”
Life is cheap. Ubiquitous Black criminality is a by-product of a perverted, tenuous, if not non-existent family structure. Many young and not-so-young Blacks act accordingly. Values and mores, or even a basic sense of “right and wrong” are not taught. Personal responsibility, you can forget about. It is not operative in the thinking of street thugs and ghetto asses, we see running out of stores, unabashedly stealing stuff, or sticking a gun in your face, for whatever reason comes into their little morally reductionist, if not nihilistic brains. Of course, we have been constantly told or brainwashed by the extraordinarily smart people at our colleges and universities that “right and wrong, good and evil” are just SOCIAL CONSTRUCTS!
There is a critical lack of intact, “civilized” households or families that teach “limits”, morality, or religious values, in what I call the “indigenous black communities”, which doesn’t include newer African immigrants.
Sidebar: In regards to Nigerians specifically, who have migrated to America with their cohort of 30 thousand by the1980s, have grown to over a quarter million. They have surpassed Post Antebellum blacks or indigenous blacks in total family income. I am sure, somewhere along the line, they were called niggers and all types of pejoratives. However, that hasn’t blinded them as a group to the opportunities America affords all its people. They are simply not trapped in this “wards of the state, racism keeps me from progressing” mentality, that black politicians and the white liberal intelligentsia seem to nurture and ambush indigenous blacks with. Black Americans and their dubious leadership continue to chase the ghost of slavery past. More succinctly, Rev Al Sharpton, former President Obama’s key advisor on race relations, flourishes by keeping the ghost of systemic racism at the forefront.
There are no social guardrails, that many of us raised in the 1930s, 40s, and 1950s were taught. To reiterate, personal responsibility is anathema. Within places like Baltimore, the black populace has incubated a generation of monsters.
But it wasn’t always this way in poor Black urban areas. Before the benefits of Johnson’s Great Society Programs and the ill-fated War on Poverty, there existed more intact black households, than there are today some 50-plus years later. Two-parent households were more common five to six decades ago. Over 70% of blacks before 1965 were raised with a mother and father present. Today there are less than 25% of households or families, that have a two-parent configuration.
Moms and dads, and especially dads, would metaphorically, as well as physically, open up a can of whoop-ass to teach us how to behave and not act like ill-mannered, uncultured fools. But then again, that would be acting “white” according to self-styled race experts like Abram X Kendi and Michael Eric Dyson.
We see on the news and at times even here in my hometown, young blacks stealing and running out of the local Walmart and other establishments. Without any sense of morality, they just steal and take what they “feel” is owed to them. It must be one of the effects of 400 years of slavery, according to lunatic professional academics and other “deep thinkers.”
One has to wonder, what on God's green earth wasn’t taught, nor communicated to these individuals who steal, murder, and make life in many inner-city communities barely livable. Once again, many of them are black and come from broken homes, where there is no responsible adult authority, much less a mom and dad. They don’t care! They haven’t been taught how to be a responsible member of society. In many ways, they’re barely human or poor replication of the latter.
I don’t want to hear the excuse of racism. Trillions of dollars, beginning with the Great Society Programs of the 60s have been pumped into Black communities to remedy the effects of the real racism many blacks had to negotiate. Blacks have been given reduced and, in many cases, free college tuition and innumerable social programs, that supposedly went to confronting the effects of the Antebellum and Post Antebellum Periods. America has bent over backward to help blacks succeed but is still treated with a kick-in-the-balls by the current Black Polity and mea culpa White Liberals, as hopelessly racist. America has to be full of some of the world’s dumbest racists, who transferred trillions of dollars to the black community to keep black people racially oppressed. Give me a break! In reality, the only people who have been more effective at impairing blacks have been other blacks. The black political class and the black literati in universities, the welfare state, K-12 educators, and even many black churches bare responsibility. They are the ones, who have a vested interest in keeping racism alive. You just have to follow the money, that goes unabated to the Black political class, to see who is the real impediment for the black underclass and their diminishing family structure. Will it change? I have my doubts since blacks will still vote overwhelmingly Democrat. Thirty years ago, as a Faculty Librarian in the California State University System, I had the privilege to talk with a Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, Shelby Steele, who was then a faculty member at San Jose State University. He said something then, that resonated with me because it explained so much about what has ravaged the black community and Black families in post-Civil Rights America. Here I’m using a direct quote from his book, The Content of Our Character, which was contemporaneous with our 1990 discussion. It was a hard statement to make. My only regret is someone like former President Barrack Obama could have emphasized this to all of America when he was President. Instead, Obama was far too accomplished at doing and saying nothing, quite well.
Shelby stated:
“Suffering can be endured and overcome. It cannot be repaid. Blacks cannot be repaid for the injustices done to the race, but we can be corrupted by society’s guilty gestures of repayment… The hardest thing for any sufferer to accept is that his suffering excuses him from very little and never has enough currency to restore. To think otherwise is to prolong the suffering.”2
That prolonged suffering has rooted itself in the devolution of family formation within a large segment of the African-American community. It is blacks and only blacks through the hard restoration of their family units, that can cure the sins of social decay, which is a pathogen, a murderous poison in far too many communities.
______________________
1. To interject, I believe the radical Transgender cabal’s insistence, that there are numerous genders is a calamitous by-product or misuse of everything is just a social construct polemic. There are only two genders. Period!
2. Steele, Shelby. (1990). The Content of our Character. New York: St. Martin’s Press. p. 199
Patrick is a retired University Library Director. He is graduate of Canisius College and the University of Washington where he earned Masters Degrees in Religious Studies Education, Urban Anthropology and Library and Information Science. Mr. Hall has also completed additional course work at the University of Buffalo, Seattle University and St. John Fishers College of Rochester New York. He has published in several national publications such as Commonweal, America, Conservative Review, Headway, National Catholic Reporter, Freedom's Journal Magazine and American Libraries. He has published in the peer reviewed publications, Journal of Academic Librarianship and the Internet Reference Services Quarterly. From 1997 until his retirement in January 2014 he served on the Advisory Board of Urban Library Journal, a CUNY Publication.
Posted in Opinion
Posted in Patrick Hall, Black families Matter, African Americans, Black community, Black on Black crime, Black Democrats, systemic racism, Urban areas, inner-city, Suffering
Posted in Patrick Hall, Black families Matter, African Americans, Black community, Black on Black crime, Black Democrats, systemic racism, Urban areas, inner-city, Suffering
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