Should Blacks Join The Culture War - Road to the Middle Class

THE URBAN LEAGUE just issued its annual “State of Black America.” The state, writes Errol Louis in the New York Daily News is “Not so great, could be better.” What is needed, he writes, “is a culture war,”

Specifically, we need aggressive, concerted action by members and institutions of the respectable black middle class to do open combat against the rise of an ancient enemy: a bold, seductive street culture that exalts lawlessness, addiction and anti-family behavior like pimping, sexual promiscuity, ignorance and personal selfishness.

Indeed. We need a war to combat the problem, as Jonah Goldberg writes, that

Black men, particularly those who do not finish high school, have been falling off a cliff for decades. If you include blacks in prison or not seeking work — which conventional unemployment surveys don't — the true jobless rate for black men in their 20s without a high school diploma is 72 percent.

We know how to solve this problem. Have done for ages. For sure, as Louis argues;

More teachers, preachers, politicians, journalists and other black Americans with a pulpit need to enlist in the battle against the self-defeating lure of street culture... [and the] purveyors of vulgarity and irresponsibility.

But there’s another way, one that blacks already possess in their churches. It is through the miracle of the Christian god, “a lover,” as Spengler writes in the Asia Times, “who demands love in return.”

This is the paradoxical offer that Christianity makes to the drug-addled homeboy and his rage. God loves you, even you, the least and the lowest. He only asks that you love him in return. It is a startling offer, when made to the down-and-outer who has just spent ten years spiralling downwards into rage and self-hatred.

The amazing thing is that it works.

Sphere: Related Content |

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.