What Is The Answer To Black Proverty?

I've been reading several articles about the impoverished in New Orleans. It disturbs me greatly that the underlying reasons of poverty among African Americans has not changed since I grew up in an integrated area in Jackson Mississippi. Lifestyle choices of low income black women are a large contributing factor. In all the articles I read (not to mention personal experience) you see the same tale of a young girl getting pregnant at 16 or 17 and dropping out of school, not to marry, but to continue on as a young unwed mother with little hope of a better job or a better life. Despite the untold number of programs that have been tried over the past 30 yrs, little has changed. I see programs that allow young girls to continue their education, giving free transportation, free education, and free daycare, and yet these girls still drop out. I see programs with after school activities and care for young African Americans, yet they still join gangs. I see programs that give food stamps and free health care, yet so many still live unhealthy lifestyles that lead to obesity and other health problems. I see programs that give better housing options, but still no change in lifestyle. Despite the billions and billions of dollars we have thrown at this problem through government social programs, we still have the highest poverty rate in the developed world. Clearly what we are doing isn't working.

The fundamental difference in how Democrats and Republicans approach these problems is this. Democrats feel that the programs I listed above would allow people an opportunity to rise above their circumstances, but what Republicans understand is that people are not going to rise above their circumstances unless we teach them the principles of responsibility.

This applies to the rich as well, of course. I can't tell you how many rich kids I knew at Ole Miss who were given everything they could want, but still squandered it all. Drinking and partying and never going to class. Money is not the answer to raising a responsible child. Social programs aren't either. Bill Cosby is the only high profile black I am aware of that actually gives us the answers to so many of the black community's problems. If you don't remember some his remarks from 2004, here are a few:

"People marched and were hit in the face with rocks to get an education, and now we've got these knuckleheads walking around. ... The lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal. These people are not parenting,"

"Brown versus the Board of Education is no longer the white person's problem. We have got to take the neighborhood back. ... They are standing on the corner and they can't speak English."



"Let me tell you something, your dirty laundry gets out of school at 2:30 every day. It's cursing and calling each other 'nigger' as they're walking up and down the street. They think they hip -- can't read, can't write -- 50 percent of them,"

"We got too many young girls who don't know how to parent, turning themselves into parents. Ladies and gentlemen, our little eight-year-old boys, nine-year-old boys, having erections and only acting out that which they see and hear on some CD. They're acting that out and they don't know the damage that they are doing when they rape some little girl nine years old and what they have done to her whole life. It's time to stop!"

"Education, ladies and gentleman, respect the elderly, respect for yourselves, respect for others,"

One thing I heard while volunteering at the Astrodome was how glad so many were to be out of New Orleans. I thought they meant to be out of a flooded New Orleans, but the more I read interviews with them, I realize they meant out of the a place where they felt trapped. Trapped in substandard schools, dilapidated housing, and a world of gangs and drugs. More than once I read that many felt like they were "incarcerated."

How sad to feel so trapped in life. An article in Newsweek, interviewing evacuees, explains how they felt so trapped they felt they couldn't even leave to get away from a dangerous hurricane:

"Like almost all poor evacuees interviewed by NEWSWEEK, she has no bank account. Before the storm, she did own a stereo, refrigerator, washer and dryer, two color TV's and a 1992 Chevy Lumina with more than 100,000 miles on it. This, too, is common among the poor; like more comfortable Americans, they spend on consumer goods beyond their means. But these are often their only assets. The reason that more African-Americans didn't heed warnings to leave New Orleans before the hurricane hit goes beyond the much-publicized lack of cars. They were reluctant to abandon their entire net worth to looters."

I can see now why so many didn't leave. Who wants to allow thugs to take everything you have from you???

Bill Cosby understands what most Republicans have been trying to get across for years. Blacks should not, and have no need to, depend on white liberal government programs to get a head in life. Bill Cosby believes that the focus should be on education. Period. Democrats have decried Bush's cuts to the social programs I mentioned above as proof that he doesn't care about the black community, but Bush's approach is what Bill Cosby has been asking for. As the article in Newsweek points out:

"His (Bush's) main involvement with poverty issues has been on education, where he sharply increased aid to poor schools as part of his No Child Left Behind initiative. Democrats have offered little on education beyond opposition to NCLB. They've shown more allegiance to the teachers unions (whose contracts are models of unaccountability) than to poor kids."

This is the difference that we all need to understand. This message is not being put out to the black community. Too many high profile Democrats don't want it to be. It's time for Republicans to make sure that it does.