MLK should be honored with more substantial progress

The black community currently faces, collectively, a series of problems, each related to the others, intertwined, each compounding one another, and we must face them all together; we as a nation cannot ignore any of them.

Interest groups, fundraisers and politicians would like most to believe that circumstances can be changed with retooling underprivileged areas, as though people were robots, without any study of behaviors and free choices, which is about as effective as bringing a tennis racket to a baseball field.

Those in authority have their own agenda; they treat moral transgressions like food they pass over in a buffet line — they don’t want to hear or think about them, so they don’t. Against these well-funded politicians and interest groups feasting on the “social ills” of the black community, as though they are inanimate objects unable to make their own choices, we must affirm their freedom and look at the choices many of them make.

First, there is the family. The percentage of poor black children who live in single-mother households is 85 percent; such children are four times more likely to live in poverty as those with two parents. Since a majority of black youth is being raised by single mothers, we must study these mothers. I have found that 38 percent of these mothers live below the poverty line, 62 percent of these mothers had never been married and almost half of them were also raised by single mothers! The lack of a proper family structure has become a revolving door of ill behavior. Is it possible that a horrible family structure could spill over to other areas of life, including employment and education?

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