The recent tragic shooting death of 24-year-old Washington Redskins football star Sean Taylor in his Florida home once again forces us to confront a distressing fact of modern Black life in the United States of America. After surviving slavery, the Ku Klux Klan, lynching, Jim Crow, Black codes, family destruction and horrendous forms of discrimination, the greatest immediate threat to Black life in America today is other Blacks. Taylor was shot by young Blacks looking to get some quick money or expensive goods by stealing.

What is most disturbing about what happened to Taylor is that it has become so typical in cities throughout this violent nation. Official figures show us to represent 13 percent of the American population but we are responsible for 46 percent of the violent crime. And toward whom is this violent crime directly? Other Blacks. In fact, better than 90 percent of Black homicide victims were killed by other Blacks. Most of those doing the killing are young Black males and most of those being killed are young Black males.

How can this fratricide be stopped or at least curtailed?

First, we must realize that we are confronting is a deep-seated social pathology with roots in history, poverty, dysfunctional families, calculated devaluation of Black life and a near animalistic view of what it means to be a man. The young men who terrorize our communities today did not create these pathologies; they are the result of them and they now perpetuate them into the present and future generations.

· Solution # 1 – A $100 billion a year “Marshal Plan” for inner city Black America. Overwhelmingly, crime in the Black community grows out of a deadly combination of poverty and amorality which says you can rob, steal, con, and hustle your way to economic success. In order to combat this deadly combination, Black communities must be flooded with jobs and legitimate financial opportunities so that people can “see” the likelihood of escaping poverty without turning to predatory crime. This “Marshall Plan” is to be financed by taking half of the roughly $200 billion a year currently being wasted on that immoral Bush administration war in Iraq.

· Solution #2 – Our schools, churches, civil rights organizations and governments must launch education campaigns and social programs which discourage (and even penalize) the having of babies outside of marriage. We must face the fact that the paradigm of the young inner city woman, living in poverty in an urban environment while attempting to raise a son has been a failure. Sure there are success stories. But in the overwhelming majority of cases young Black males raised in such environments become nothing but problems.

· Solution #3 – “Adopt” a young Black male. Every responsible adult must become a tutor, mentor or surrogate parent for at least one young inner city male. Instead of just sitting back and complaining about the problem, agree to spend at least 90 minutes a week tutoring, mentoring or in some way helping at least one child which is not your own. If you cannot do this, run for office and/or elect a local government which will establish comprehensive mentoring programs which are required for every young Black male before he can get a driver’s license or graduate from school. These programs should pay responsible adults to mentor fatherless young Black males. We must have an ongoing mechanism for instilling values of hard work, responsibility and a basic sense of morality which counters the get-over, quick-money, lazy and solve-all-problems-with-con-games-or-violence attitudes which predominate in far too many inner city neighborhoods today.

All three of these solutions must be adopted simultaneously. Trying one without the other two will lead to failure and perpetuation of the current race retarding and race destroying attitudes and behavior.

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