Kendall Qualls: Black Families Need Fathers — Not Reparations For Slavery

Leave It does Elon Musk To tweet A message that perfectly captures the truth regarding reparations for slavery At The push for reparations is gaining steam nationwide, Musk’s mid-December missive — “It is easy to fool people, but it is almost impossible to convince people that they have been fooled” — has never felt more relevant. 

Over Over the past 50 years, many have been fooled by self-proclaimed black leaders and progressives. Americans. They’ve fooled them into believing that the economic, health, and educational disparities plaguing our community are the result of racial injustices, white privilege and systemic racism. For this foolish crowd, the reparations movement — which this week gained traction with the formation of a Reparations Commission My hometown of St. Paul, Minn. — is yet another effort to obscure the real ailments impacting blacks while siphoning off billions of dollars toward themselves and an never-ending class of government dependent families. 

Rather Black must be compensated. Americans should seek legal damages from left-wing institutions — along with their allies in the media and academia — who’ve helped destroy the black family while producing a culture of pervasive victimhood. 

Because despite their very real consequences, the biggest cause of black inequality isn’t slavery or red-lining or Jim Crow — it’s our community’s dependency on social welfare programs and the fatherless families they continue to subsidize. Established As part of Pres. Johnson’s “Great Society,” These programs were instrumental in the dissolution and dissolution of the traditional black family. 

In 1965, the late New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan called the then 24% Unmarried birth rate in the Black community “crisis.” Moynihan At the time, I wrote that “a national effort towards the problems of Negro Americans must be directed towards the question of family structure . . . the object should be to strengthen the Negro family so as to enable it to raise and support its members as do other families.” 

Today, approximately 80% of black families are led by a single parent — almost always a mother without a husband. Enabled By welfare and other “Great Society” Handouts, low academic scores, high incarceration and high unemployment all confirm the negative impact that progressive policies have had upon blacks. America. They’re policies that reparations — yet another form of hand-out — will not fix until fathers once again lead black homes. 

IndeedWe cannot ignore the legacy of generations upon decades of fatherless families. It’s a reality I identify with all too well as the son a divorced mother, who lived in a Harlem In the early 1970s, public housing was available. As As a child, I was familiar with the taste of government cheese and powdered eggs. I also witnessed the cruel treatment of children and women by drug addicts, criminals and gangs. This It is a grim truth, which is conveniently ignored by old-school progressives or young liberals intoxicated with the quick-fix reparations so readily offered. 

Reparations Slavery won’t undo the harm fatherlessness has done. If This intractable crisis will only be exacerbated if there is no conditions on the financial payout. AndAs Moynihan pointed out decades ago, this is a crisis — made worse by a “woke” Black leadership is lacking vision and accountability. 

Today, while their leaders are busy acquiring multi-million property portfoliosUrban black youth are falling behind and failing. In 2019 is an example of this: Only 14% of black students are in Chicago Public Schools They were proficient in reading. In Baltimore Public Schools37% of black seniors are proficient in reading at grade level. HighWhile charter and private schools that are performing well are a good solution to these issues, school choice is still limited by, you guessed, the fact that there are no public schools. progressive groups and teachers unions. 

And So left-leaning policies have pushed school systems to produce semi-literate and under-employable young people who are trapped at the lowest levels in society and are unsure of their fault. No Wonder reparations sound so tempting. 

But Despite how difficult these challenges may seem, there is no way to get out of them. Instead, African-Americans must return to their cultural roots, including faith, family, education, and better health for their children. Regardless No matter how tidy a bow progressives tie around it, reparations to slavery cannot undo decades of fatherlessness or hand-outs. It Will only increase the tether African-Americans To the culture of dependency that must be destroyed. 

Progressives, both black and white, often like to lie to themselves — fathers don’t matter, whites want to keep blacks down, reparations for slavery can fix every black ill. But when it comes to fooling folks, it’s not just Elon Musk Giving wisdom words. As Booker T. Washington He wrote this in his 1901 autobiography “A lie doesn’t become truth, wrong doesn’t become right, and evil doesn’t become good, just because it’s accepted by a majority.” 

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