Resurgent Man Jason Riley Analyzes the Problem

If we’re talking about the importance of being the kind of people who offer a hand up and out of poverty, why would some men like the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board member Jason Riley author a book called Please Stop Helping Us? Maybe his subtitle makes it clear: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed.

I know the word Liberal and its opposite Conservative unnecessarily provoke strong emotions, so let’s just put it this way:

Resurgent men aren’t against help. Resurgent men identify the problems and sort through the solutions to find ones that work and those that don’t. They’re highly pragmatic about Resurgence regardless of labels.

Just like many of the black authors and activists covered so far, Jason Riley wants blacks to succeed period. Solutions devised by white people so whites could feel good about themselves won’t solve the problem for blacks. Riley looks at failed solutions and in Jason Riley: The RealClearReligion Interview he identifies the real problems as

bad public policies have contributed to the breakdown of the black family” and indeed a “collapse of black culture.”

Riley crystalizes the problem into the most basic unit of family as the conveyor of culture and when that’s broken, that’s what must be restored. In the interview, Riley was asked “What inspired you to write this book?” and he responded,

“I saw a need for a new generation of blacks to be saying these things about the impact of black culture — particularly in our inner cities and our ghettos — on these black outcomes that we’re seeing. I’m not breaking any new ground here. There are people like Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, and Walter Williams, and others who have been saying these things for decades. I thought it was necessary for a younger generation to continue saying these things for a younger generation of readers.”

And of course, for this Seminary Gal, what I found interesting was when Riley was asked, “Do you think the role models you found in church are missing today?” he replied,

“I don’t know that they’re missing. I’m not sure that they carry the sway with today’s young people that they did with me. But they’ve been there. The church is still there. It’s still a very important institution in the black community. More broadly speaking, you have a family breakdown issue going on. I don’t know that the church can compensate entirely for that.

The real problem is the breakdown of the black family. One of the statistics I like to remind people of is that as late as 1960, two out of three black children were raised in two-parent homes. Today, more than 70 percent of black children are not. In some of these ghettos, it runs as high as 80 or 90 percent of black kids living in single-parent homes. I think that has a lot to do with those bad outcomes we see in terms of school completion, in terms of involvement in the criminal justice system, drug use, and teen pregnancy, and so forth. It’s the lack of fathers in homes raising boys, teaching them what it means to be men, and teaching them what it means to be black. I think the breakdown of the family has been extremely detrimental to black culture.”

So what’s wrong with the policies that have been implemented to help the black community? Riley writes,

“In theory these efforts are meant to help. In practice they become barriers to moving forward. … People of goodwill want to see more black socioeconomic advancement, but time and again the empirical data show that current methods and approaches have come up short.”

The current methods and approaches have been grounded in politics, but as Riley points out, “History, in other words, provides little indication, let alone assurance, that political success is a prerequisite of upward mobility.”

In the community of Resurgent men, we need people to clearly articulate what works and what doesn’t. If the breakdown of the family is at the heart of the problem, how do we restore the importance of family to the black community? Well, first let’s just admit that it’s not a problem confined to the black community. The American family is a mess. Some like Riley, Steele, and Williams write to identify the problem. But stay tuned, the solutions are closer to home.

It’ll be found in the God-ordained family unit as recorded in the final verse of the Old Testament through the prophet Malachi (Malachi 4:1-6). The solution to distress will be with fathers just as God–our spiritual Father– foretold about the role of John the Baptist (Luke 1:13-17) before the Day of the Lord comes, it’s Resurgence!

“And he will restore the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the land with a curse.” (Malachi 4:6)

===

The full Resurgence Series was devoted to highlighting the extraordinary efforts of black men to elevate the black community and included: