I am glad someone is talking about improving academic achievement of young black men. I heard a depressing projection the other day: At the present rate of incarceration, by the year 2020, the United States will have more black men in prison than were ever in slavery. I am tracking down the source of that statement. It was made the other day at the presentation of a state panel's plan for getting more African-American boys to graduate from high school and go off to college. So many of these children grow up in poor, dysfunctional, fatherless homes -- so many of their fathers irresponsible or incarcerated, or both -- that we need a small army of social soldiers to get into their lives (mentors are just part of it) to point them in the right direction. Their fathers, uncles and older brothers might be lost, but there's still hope for them. They could still grow up to be responsible, law-abiding citizens and good fathers and husbands -- but it will take a generation to fix a generation.

I mentioned this on WBAL Radio, and a listener named Flame agreed by e-mail:

"You had it right when you suggest that we need to fix a generation in order to fix the problem. It seems to me that while society moved forward with the gains made by social equality for all in the 60s we took a step backwards with the upheaval created by the Vietnam War and my generations quest to be different from the generations of our parents and grandparents. The events our parents generation lived through(WW II and depression) made them, as Tom Brokaw remarked, "the greatest generation." A tough act to follow. The excesses of the 60s while quite a lot of fun at the time have taken a toll on future generations. Society fractured in the 60s and many of the social
problems we see today are the result. How to fix the problem and who takes the point is the burning question."

I don't necessarily attribute the problem of black male academic failure to the excesses of the 60s. In the case of Baltimore, there was a seismic loss of manufacturing jobs for unskilled workers -- good, union jobs that could pave the way to a middle class lifestyle. Part of our culture never recovered from that and it became bogged down in problems such as drug addiction. The de facto segregation of the city from its more affluent suburbs contributed to it. There is a long litany of reasons, some of which have to do with lifestyle choices and a failings of values, but most of which rests in big, structural factors like the shifting of economic opportunity, the ever-widening chasm between the rich and the poor, the stressing of the middle class.

But you know what? The reasons no longer matter. We know what the problems are and we have known them for a long time -- we just haven't treated these problems (related juvenile crime, school failure, recidivism, children mired in poverty) as if they constituted a national emergency. In fact, we have gone the other way -- abiding a diminished role of government in the social safety net, in giving citizens who need it a boost. We seem to be content with losing so many human lives to prison. It's time we did something about this. Time we stopped building new prisons and improved reading and math scores. But we will need time  -- a generation to fix a generation.