‘Crisis in Black America’

George Will should be told that there is no gene for irresponsibility. This and other unlovely characteristics are bred into people by their culture.

A young black girl, confident that she will graduate from high school (chiefly because the public schools taught her how to read), who has every expectation of a job and money to buy pretty clothes and the right to dream of a nice home of her own, isn’t going to have one baby after another. She will figure out for herself that all these babies will interfere with the good life she knows can be hers.

As for the young black male, nobody chooses deliberately to be a bum on a street corner, a felon, with nothing to boast about but the number of children he has sired, if he has something better to anticipate such as status, regular income, and society’s respect.

But what if you see no choice but to live in an ever narrowing vortex of despair? What do you do ? What would George Will do?

The problem is awesome, a terrible failure of our society. One way not solve it is by assigning blame to one group. Let Will amend his sentence: Not “The problem is that millions of blacks are victims of irresponsible blacks,” but : “The problem is that millions of blacks are victims of many irresponsible blacks and needlessly arrogant whites.”

There is no such thing as a superior race. If Will believed this with his whole heart and soul, he would have written a very different column.

RUTH E. STOUT

Claremont