Atlantic.Com: As Goes the Family...

Greetings Earthlings!

While surfing the web, I found this gem about how Black folks aren't keeping up with the Joneses, and how the rest of America is (obviously) not too far behind:

Why are African-Americans more likely to be downwardly-mobile than non-blacks? Probably because of two inter-related factors: The weak cultural capital afforded by the black community's disastrous family structure, which in turn reinforces the black-white wealth gap that's a legacy of slavery and segregation.

Now consider that the first factor, the decline of marriage and the rise of illegitimacy, is increasingly visible in white and (especially) Hispanic America as well. This raises the possibility that what's true of African Americans today - that they have a hard time making it to prosperity and a harder time staying there - may be true of the rest of working-class America further down the road. The United States as a whole has a higher same out-of-wedlock birth rate at present - around 37 percent as of 2005 - that black America had in the 1960s, when Daniel Patrick Moynihan first sounded the alarm about family dissolution in the African-American community. If that number inches higher, or even if it stays constant, it's going to be harder and harder for working-class Americans to compete in the global economy, and harder, as a result, for them avoid stagnation and downward mobility at home...

Beautifully written, and reflects my thoughts exactly.

I've said many times on this blog that marriage is the premier wealth generating institution on the Micro (individual) level, for a host of reasons that any Economist can relate to.

Specialization, Distribution of Labor, and Economies of Scale are all reasons why marriage matters; not to mention that the married family of a husband and wife (or wives, as Polygamy was and is the default form of marriage in Africa, although this is changing due to modern, Western influence) is the best and most efficient environment for cultivating the most important renewable resource, Human Capital.

A single parent who is struggling to make ends meet, and by extension, her children, simply can't compete with a two parent family in most cases [i][ii]. Children of single parents (in the black context, single mothers) start out life, in all but a few instances, with huge spiritual, economic, and sometimes physiological disadvantages.

I know this, because I am the child of a single mother.

And, as the author said, if we move to a single-mother-and-government-as-father social model, this country will not survive for very long as a World Leader in anything. As a matter of fact, our upcoming economic crisis will, in my view, bankrupt the United States of Socialism, and our weakening family structure will have much to do with it.

I think that without a transition period to get folks off the government rolls, a whole lot of people are going to get hurt, and I don't want to see that happen. The realist in me (as one that depended on Food Stamps to eat when I was a youngin') understands that sometimes in life, people need a limited, temporary amount of help.

And while I totally understand the Ron Paul position that private organizations can do a better job than the government can, I am not entirely sure that ALL welfare should be eliminated, at least, not eliminated under the circumstances that we may be reading about in the newspapers in the next two to three years.

And my people, my poor, long suffering people, are neither prepared or anticipating the financial nuclear winter that is about to engulf all of us. We are too weak and divided to really do much of anything to prepare ourselves.

Feminism and the laws and policies it has championed have criminalized and demonized Black men to the point of no return. As in Hurricane Katrina [a][b], the Black women and children will be, more than likely, on their own.

It's sad that I even have to say that, but it's the God honest truth.

It should be noted, however, that this situation didn't appear overnight. It takes a long period of time to train a man not to be concerned with or even respectful towards his (former) helpmeet.

As an exhibit, here are a few modern "sonnets" concerning the feminist courts of injustice:




(Eazy E)



(Three Six Mafia - Yes, I know what the 3 sixes are all about!)




(Bone Thugs: My all time favorite Rap group. MIDWEST BIYOTCH!!)



Be it doing time for failing to cough up enough child support, getting arrested for alleged domestic violence or failure to obey a restraining order, or "empowering" unscrupulous Black women with the sole prerogative to evict the father of her child should he not live up to her standards, it's come to the point where it simply makes no sense, morally or legally, for a Black man to try to "do the right thing."

It's pretty pointless, unless you find a damn good woman with some common sense, to become husband and father and provide the children with the spiritual and moral guidance that children so desperately need. Granted, men aren't perfect beings either, and sometimes, they do things that cause women to do what they have to do in order to leave the situation. I have no qualms with that. However, statistically and on the street, everyone knows that women do the majority of the relationship ending, because they know that both the law and the culture is 100% on their side.

When the bedroom becomes a battlefield, is it any wonder that the spiritual and moral progress of young Black folk becomes severely retarded? The fact is that angry young Black men, who are feared by the larger society, broke, unemployed and unemployable, with few options, assets, and even less sympathy, who are viewed as potential rapists, sexual deviants, and batters by their own women (and quite a few other folks, in their heart of hearts), and are strung along by blind men at both the top and the bottom of society who ain't hip to what's really going down their damn selves, WILL take their rage out on themselves and the rest of society.

Is it any wonder that so many drop out of mainstream society and hustle just to get buy? Get involved in criminal gangs and commit illegal acts? End up in jail due to the triple whammy of ignorance, bad decision making, and a justice system that perceives all men (especially black men) as the enemy?

In no way am I excusing violent criminal acts. All I am saying is that if we don't want these kinds of events to take place, then we need to understand the root causes of these serious social issues. Otherwise, a new generation of Hispanic, Asian, and White thugs will join their Black cousins in an unprecedented spree of murder and mayhem.

For those who know their history, the way that many Black men, sons of Ancient Ethiopia and Kemet, live today is nothing like the way they lived long ago. In fact, the Black man was highly respected in the Classical Period for his sense of Justice, and his loyalty to God.

According to Addis Tribune:

The Ancient Greeks

The first Europeans to employ the term Ethiopia were the ancient Greeks, who used the word to designate all dark-skinned people south of Egypt. The classical authors of Greece made many references to the country. Homer, in the 9th. century BC, wrote in the Odyssey of the Ethiopians as eschatoi andron, or the most remote of men. In Book I of the Iliad he makes Zeus, the king of the gods, leave heaven for twelve days, with all the other gods, to visit the "blameless Ethiopians", while the goddess Iris goes to their country to participate in sacrificial rites to the immortal gods. In the Odyssey the sea god Poseidon is likewise said to have "lingered delighted" at one of the feasts of the Ethiopians.

Almost half a millennium later, in the 5th. century BC, the Greek dramatist Aeschylus had Io, the wandering woman of Prometheus Bound, travel to "a far-off land". It was inhabited by "a nation of black men", who lived near "the fountain of the sun" and the "river Aethiops".

Later again, in the 1st. century BC, the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus observed that the Greek hero Hercules and the Greek god of wine Bacchus were both "awed by the piety of the Ethiopians.

"Loved by the gods"

Later once again, in the 7th. century AD, the Byzantine writer Stephanus Placidus reiterated that the Ethiopians were "loved by the gods because of their justice, and adds:

"Juniper frequently leaves heaven and feasts with them [the Ethiopians] because of their justice and the equity of their customs. For the Ethiopians are said to be the justest of men and for that reason the gods love their abode frequently to visit them".

Black men do not live as they do because we are genetically doomed to become natural born killers, rapists, dope dealers, and other such nonsense. It is because, for the most part, we are MOLDED and SHAPED, by various institutions and cultural norms, from the earliest of ages, to act this way. How can it be that you blindfold a man and expect him walk a straight line?

Make no mistake, I believe that racism is still very much with us. And, I also know that our present Urban Gangsta culture is leading some of us to the road of ruination. But most of all, in the year 2007, it is the DESTRUCTION of the Black family, which is solely the fault and responsibility of our modern system of Welfare State Femi-Platonism, that is MOST responsible for the sad state of affairs in the Black community.

Once the power of Organized, Political feminism is broken, then we as Black people can begin again. But until that day comes, expect Black America, and all America, for that matter, to descend into chaos and barbarity.

Kumo X.