How many more statistics do we need to read about how the Black community is increasingly losing men at a high velocity ratio?
How many more young Black males must go to prison before we realize that it’s time to stop supplying our young men as market products to the lucrative and booming prison industrial complex?
How many more Black mothers have to continue to live in misery, dejection and loneliness because the men that they were raising by themselves have fallen through the slippery slope of the criminal justice system?
To what extent are we willing to preside over the gradual dismantling of the Black family as an institution, once a proud example of an effective functioning family unit in society?
If we can answer these four questions, the meaning of Black history will have had a strong resonance with us this year.
If we can find answers to these troubling questions, the essence of Black history would become real and we would be able to appreciate our own existence.
What good is it to celebrate Black history if Black men are in the fast track lane to prison?
What is there to celebrate when the future is apparently unclear, unpredictable, and sorrowfully bleak because the men may not be around for a while?
And when they get out of prison armed with felony records, the job market greets them with a huge “No Jobs Available for Felons” sign. Despite serving time behind bars for crimes whether serious or petty, these men continue to pay a price in the outside world.
Yes, it is unfair.
The criminal justice system needs reform. That reform may not necessarily take place under President Barack Obama.
The kind of surgical operation Black scholars have argued for so long that needs to be performed in the criminal justice system may not happen under the watch of the first Black Attorney General, Eric Holder.
A miracle reform cannot be expected under John Conyers Jr, the first African- American chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, which has oversight of the U.S. Department of Justice and the courts in the land.
We may lack the adequate tools we need to revamp the justice system — bankrolled by tax dollars — no matter the level of philosophical discourse we engage in and high profile conferences we attend.
But one thing we do have absolute control over is our own lives and the decisions we make. It is not so much about what has happened to our community, but what we’ve been willing to accept in Detroit and other places around the country.
That is why Randall Robinson’s book, “What Blacks Owe to Each Other,” has a profound significance for any young and upcoming Black male to understand the realities and consequences of the world we live in.
Chosen as the first book for review by “Inside Detroit” AM1200 host Mildred Gaddis to kick off her book club project featured on Mondays, Robinson expounds on the maladies of the system of justice and what many see as the often abdicated role of the federal government to the people.
Like a surgeon, Robinson conducts a polemical inquisition into the responsibility of the government in meting out what it owed African Americans still haunted by a post-traumatic slavery experience. And then he dwells on our collective responsibility.
What is that responsibility?
While it is important to continue to press the issue of government being accountable for the needs of the Black community, which has historically been shown the door when it was time to share the national pie, we cannot extricate ourselves from personal responsibility.
On the Gaddis show while discussing Robinson’s book, I said our community has lost focus. We have placed premium importance on the demand for government accountability at the expense of community responsibility.
We’ve succumbed to the notion that unless government pays all it owes to the Black community, we are helpless. If that is the case we should be prepared to wait for decades.
But that theory is all the more an excuse for the current problems we face.
Such a notion only betrays the role that parents have in nurturing and raising their children to become responsible men and women who love and defend their community.
A cursory look at Detroit and other urban cities will reveal a dark side that we have all facilitated and allowed to thrive. That is why young Black men with no guidance and sense of recourse in a bid to demonstrate their manhood engage in all kinds of nefarious activities.
When confronted, these young men will quickly admit they have either come from broken homes, inadequate schooling, or a community that has surrendered to the forces that take these young men away to prison.
With no direction to aid them in expressing themselves through their God-given intellect and gifts, they show their expression through guns, drugs and other vices that will hold them hostage for a very long time.
The lack of self-internal critique and our lax attitude toward what is happening to young Black men is one of the biggest weapons impeding our progress.
At an ethnic media forum held at the University of Michigan-Dearborn last year, my friend Arthur Horwitz, publisher of The Detroit Jewish News, checked a member of the audience (a White male) who abrasively was questioning why ethnic newspapers choose to be different from the mainstream media.
Horwitz, in an unapologetic manner, informed the questioner that The Jewish News exists to maintain and protect the Jewish nation — and of course by extension, the State of Israel.
I have since been ruminating over Horwitz’s statement and the powerful connotation it carries because he made it clear that no one should mistake what his institution does for the Jewish community. It exists to protect that community.
As African Americans, what do we exist to protect? What do our institutions safeguard?
If we have any inkling of where we are headed, we’d perhaps have made the prison industrial complex the foremost issue in our community.
A generation of Black males is being lost before our very eyes and we don’t seem to be bothered by it, and neither is there is a commitment to create a deterrent to the prison pipeline.
I suggest that perhaps every young Black male should read Robinson’s book. But maybe a more effective method for dealing with the problem would be a personal commitment from parents to expose these young men to the realities of the world and what awaits them outside of their schools and homes.
Because if more and more prisons are being built based on the projection that young Black men coming from poverty-stricken homes or uncaring communities will come into contact with the criminal justice system at least once before the age of 15, then something can and must be done.
Every community has the right to self-determination and that is why Mexican Town in Southwest Detroit emerged — out of the segregationist movement when Whites refused to live side
by side with those of Hispanic descent.
The Black community has an obligation to be self-determined and that means more of what we can do for ourselves and less of what we expect others to do for us.
Those who have made it into mahogany style corporate offices as executives, comfortable in positions of influence, others fleeing the inner cities, not giving back — call them uppity Negroes — need to be shamed into action. Their hands are not clean and neither are ours.
Because the battle to maintain and protect the survival of the Black community, just as Horwitz of the Jewish News believes and works for the survival of the Jewish nation, rests in our hands.
What we do now will set the stage for things to come.
Yes, it is Black History Month. But history’s verdict will rest at our feet when there are no Black men around.
Watch senior editor Bankole Thompson’s weekly show, “Center Stage,” on WADL TV 38, Saturdays at 1 p.m. This Saturday’s program, Feb. 6, will feature an in-depth conversation about the relevance of celebrating Black History Month. E-mail bthompson@michronicle.com.