SO MUCH FOR AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

Another of the Left's routine policy failures

A batch of new studies suggesting that black males in the United States are falling ever further behind other groups in health, education and employment has ignited a debate within the black community about who is to blame and what can be done. "There's a major discussion within the community about what we need to do about black males," said Peter Groff, a Colorado state senator and director of the Center for African American Policy at the University of Denver.

Traditionally, many black leaders have blamed the legacy of slavery, institutional racism and poverty for the problems faced by blacks in general and men in particular. But comedian Bill Cosby rejected that approach in two provocative speeches last summer, in which he called on fellow blacks to stop blaming society for their troubles and start looking at themselves. Attacking urban "hip hop" culture and the collapse of the two-parent family, Cosby challenged those within the black community who opposed "washing their dirty laundry in public." "Your dirty laundry gets out of school at 2:30 every day, it's cursing and calling each other nigger as they're walking up and down the street. They think they're hip. They can't read; they can't write. They're laughing and giggling, and they're going nowhere," Cosby said.....

Whatever the causes, the latest figures paint a bleak picture. For example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in December that 51 percent of all HIV diagnoses were among blacks, who make up less than 13 percent of the population..... Black men live an average of 7.1 years less than other racial groups and experience disproportionately higher mortality in every single leading causes of death..... Over the past decade, the high school graduation rate for black men has fallen to 43 percent, while that of black women has risen to 56 percent..... A report in June for the Alternative Schools Network found that in 2002 one in every four black men in the United States was permanently unemployed, a rate double that of white men and 70 percent higher than among Asian and Hispanic men.... In its most recent report on the nation's prison population, the Department of Justice found that at the end of 2003, over 9 percent of all black males aged 26 to 29 were incarcerated, compared to 2.6 percent of Hispanics and 1.1 percent of whites.

And nobody mentions that welfare might be part of the problem. See here

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