Wednesday, September 10, 2014

Blame is lousy substitute for solutions

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    There is no shortage of people who think our nation has done enough, even more than enough, to help out African-Americans. They justify that view by blaming the African-American minority for its woes. Instead of assigning blame, we should be about seeking solutions
    For the last two Sundays, Nicholas Kristof, a columnist for The New York Times, has more than suggested that whites just do not understand the difficul-ties faced by African-American students in schools and even in their homes. He argues that too many of us believe Afri-can-Americans could be far better off if they would just work harder, study more, delay having children and not commit crimes.
    Fixing blame is easy. Fixing blame al-lows the portrayal of African-Americans as a national problem. It excuses assump-tions that African-American teenagers must be watched each moment, that dis-proportionate encounters with law en-forcement are justified.
    We need to acknowledge that assigning blame does not address the fact that, par-ticularly in urban areas, there are broken schools and burned-out teachers. It is sim-ply blaming the victims to suggest that the children in schools like these never study and always give into the pressures of street life.
    Assigning blame means that much of what we think we know, we do not know at all. We rarely see pictures of African-Americans charitably serving poor whites, donating blood, serving meals rather than receiving them. Where is the acknowledgement of those who do delay having children, do not commit crimes, work hard and study hard—in other words, live exactly the same lives as any other American?
    It’s easy to look at the lives and suc-cesses of those we know, and to attribute it just to hard work and perseverance. American belief in individual effort over-looks how much success derives from support received from others. For every successful person, there was at least one teacher who put in a little extra time, or one police officer chose not to make a mis-take into a crime, or parents and grand-parents who spent all kinds of time read-ing or just listening.
    There is certainly not any single an-swer to all the problems facing the United States. There is probably no single answer that will solve the tensions that inevitably exist between communities separated by culture, race, economics and simple geog-raphy. But there are answers, even good answers. What there are not are helpful answers that include only blame.

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