Young Black Men and Authority
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Dan Popp
on 21 August, 2016 at 11:00
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From the wild Irish slums of the 19th century eastern seaboard, to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in American history: A community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any rational expectations about the future — that community asks for and gets chaos.
Now that I’ve sent all the “progressive” (barbarian) bloggers to their keyboards, I’ll tell the rest of you that the words in the first paragraph aren’t mine. They were spoken by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a prominent Democrat, in 1965.
I thought about this when I heard that an African American celebrity had said that he felt degraded by having to say, “Yes, officer” and “No, officer” to a policeman. And I wondered why anyone would feel diminished in status for showing the proper respect to someone in authority. After all, my white father taught my white self to address law enforcement officers in exactly that way.
