But why is this? The root cause of the problem is the breakdown of the black family. When the great majority of black children are born to single mothers, the kids' chances of being poor and ending up in prison greatly increase.
"I don’t think you have to be racialist in order to be particularly concerned about helping them to improve their situation."
How do you help people who apparently aren't willing to help themselves? Since the Great Society, we've spent $17 trillion on social programs. What good has it done? To rectify the situation blacks find themselves in, they need to decide they are going to wait until marriage to have children, and black men need to stick around to be fathers to those children. Returning to the pre-Great Society morality, along with getting off the government teat, is absolutely necessary if black people wish to succeed. Until then, with all respect to you, I'm tired of being told the responsibility to help blacks lies with me (or anyone, except themselves).
Nowhere did I say that the responsibility to help blacks relies with you or anyone other than blacks ourselves. I prefaced my comment by stating that this is a conversation between blacks about whether or not I’m a traitor to my race for not supporting Barack Obama. I think a good defense to that charge is to point out the ways in which Obama’s policies have been harmful to blacks.
I would agree that a major part of the problems facing blacks have to do with the breakdown of the black family, but there is a lot of literature, much of it by conservative scholars, that addresses the ways in which government policies have contributed to that problem. The same things are starting to happen to white families more and more, and you would ignore the role government policy plays in that to your detriment.
There’s also a basic reality that economic opportunity and prosperity contribute to family formation, and vice-versa, government policy that hurts the private sector and prioritizes government dependence, detract from family formation. It’s a basic fact that men who see no economic future for themselves are not generally included to sign up for the role of family breadwinner; women who think they can get by with government assistance are less likely to get married. Conservative policies make it easier for men to make a living and harder for women to survive on government benefits; the result is likely to be more family formation and preservation.
The vast majority of that $17 trillion that you refer to has been directed toward encouraging ever more government dependence and family breakdown; very little of it has been spent “teaching a man to fish” so to speak.
But I do absolutely agree that no matter what government policies are in place, black men failing to take responsibility for their children is a moral crisis that needs to be addressed by blacks ourselves. For the record, my son was born into a family where his father is married to his mother, both of his grandfathers are married to his grandmothers, and so on and so forth as far back as I’m aware. Black men taking care of their families will be the only thing my son knows about until he ventures outside of his family.