The Wages of Blaming Racism for Everything : Inner city: A new kind of expert is needed to stem the violence in black communities: Someone who has firsthand experience, not degrees.
In his Memphis address to black ministers last week, President Bill Clinton boldly challenged the African-American community to seek indigenous solutions to the indigenous problem of crime. Speaking from the pulpit used by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to deliver his last sermon, Clinton, while affirming the nation’s civil-rights gains, urged African-Americans to finish the unfinished business of the civil-rights movement.
That unfinished business has less to do with civil-rights laws and more to do with civil behavior. Following King’s assassination, the movement gradually slid from the moral high ground established by King into the abyss of race-based victimization, in which all manner of indiscretion and wrongdoing by blacks is absolved. This blame-racism syndrome has resulted in the abdication of personal responsibility.
The message of the drumbeat of victimization is clear: “If you rape and kill one another, it’s not your fault. If you drop out of school, it’s not your fault. If you become mothers and fathers before you become women and men, it’s not your fault. After all, you live in a racist society in which the injustice visited upon your forefathers continues to be visited upon you.”
These misguided messages have played out in street dramas of tragic proportions and are symptomatic of a spiritual crisis that needs--demands--a spiritual response. The black church can be--and has been--that beacon of enlightenment that awakens us from moral malaise. In America’s inner cities, it is often the church that is leading the way in developing value-based strategies for stabilizing families, educating children and creating opportunities for employment and self-sufficiency.
The victimization rhetoric, by contrast, ignores the African-American tradition of self-reliance and poisons our culture. It must not be forgotten that even during the eras of the worst oppression under slavery and legalized discrimination, the black community exhibited the industriousness and innovative capacity to succeed and prosper. In Durham, N.C., and in Tulsa, Okla., thriving black business districts survived even the devastation wrought by the Great Depression. Through associations of mutual support, not one black business closed in these districts. To assume that progress is totally dependent on external support is to deny an inspiring legacy of entrepreneurship and self-sufficiency in the black community.
Clinton is right in saying that while it is the job of government to make changes from the outside, “there are some changes we’re going to have to make from the inside-out, or the others won’t matter.” Throughout the country, there is a literal army of grass-roots leaders and neighborhood activists who have worked ceaselessly to salvage the future of the next generation--challenging young people to live up to their responsibilities and reviving in them a belief in their own potential.
In South-Central Los Angeles, there is a man who has walked the streets for 20 years, undeterred by the dangers of gang territory, to save young men from the lure of gangs. In a public-housing development in Florida, there is a low-income mother who has opened the doors of her home to the children of the community and created a safe-haven in which more than 500 boys and girls have been nurtured to maturity. In a neighborhood once ridden with crime and drugs in Washington, there is a woman who saw star performers where others only saw misguided youths--a woman who used her own meager resources to launch a drama and dance institute that has been a stepping stone to a college education or a successful career for the children of her community.
These unheralded grass-roots activists have shown what impact commitment and personal investment can have on “intractable” problems of youth violence. They are working on the front-lines, inspiring an internal, value-based conversion that is the fundamental cornerstone for any substantial and enduring change. They are not the people who are standing at podiums or signing book contracts, but they are individuals who have made a difference in the lives of thousands of young people.
If the President is serious about his desire to end the violence that the upcoming generation is wielding against itself, he must look to a new brand of “expert” whose credentials are not awarded by universities and institutions but by those whose lives they have reached and changed. He must call upon the same courage he exhibited in championing his North American Free Trade Agreement, in spite of organized and powerful opposition, to challenge our nation’s conventional response to the problems of the inner cities. We can no longer afford to spend critical resources and time simply lobbing basketballs and programs over chain-link fences.
We must work to channel resources and authority to those with a track record of success--those with a firsthand knowledge of the problems our young people face, a heartfelt personal commitment to work together to solve them, and an unwavering faith in their potential.