What works? Hard work, family, mutual assistance, and a devotion to logic!

Joel Kotkin writes in the American Mind,

...The notion of America’s intrinsic evil may be popular on campuses, newsrooms and at CNN, but the ideology’s negative impact will be suffered by those left behind in these distressed communities. Diverting funds away from the police may have been seen as politically expedient, but it has not helped Baltimore, a city with a long history of police abuse, curb its astronomical murder rate. Similarly, “defunding” efforts are unlikely to bring down Chicago’s persistently high homicide rate, or in once-safe cities like New York, as it and other blue cities have emptied jails and reduced enforcement.

...In backing the Black Lives Matter movement, the corporate elite have decided to play the classic role that Lenin called “useful idiots”. Perhaps someone should let Jeff Bezos know BLM favors radical socialist economics to battle what its founders see as “racial capitalism ”. Liberals, particularly Jews, should recognize BLM condemns Israel as “genocidal”. Academic Melina Abdullah, a prominent BLM spokesperson in Los Angeles, is an open admirer of the racist, anti-Semitic Nation of Islam.

Adoption of the Black Lives Matter ideology threatens every institution it touches, imposing its will in Hollywood and the arts. Now as in the old Soviet Union or China today, culture is supposed to service the officially approved agenda. Race activists have been particularly successful in turning the education system, including primary schools, into instruments of indoctrination, through both social justice courses and activities increasingly required for both students and faculty.

Most amazing, given the enormous sacrifices for integration made by civil rights workers, some universities have embraced again segregation—what Western Washington University activists call “black student space” and even academic programs designed only for minority students. Worse yet, woke activists, white and black, denounce as “hopelessly white “behaviors that have worked for every ethnic group, including African Americans. The new notion, as the Smithsonian recently suggested, labels such things as intact family structures, frugality, and punctuality as “white” characteristics, opposed to universal keys to upward mobility.

...This is clearly destructive. Perhaps worst of all, Black Lives Matter is dismissive of the traditional family, but seeks to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure.” Given that much of the disparity between the races lies in the integrity of the family this approach seems patently self-destructive. The fact that seventy percent of Black children are born to single mothers should be seen as a critical problem, rather than celebrated as a departure from dreaded “whiteness.”

Rather than soulful sympathy and symbolic gestures aimed to redress past crimes, minorities need a program that addresses the real problems of unemployment, underemployment, rampant obesity, lack of affordable housing, and fractured families. To address these issues, minorities need to emulate the brave African-American business pioneers of the late 19th and early 20th Century, who formed a culture built around mutual assistance, family, and work.

...Whether in the Jim Crow South, the 1960s or today, what works for the aggrieved is not victimization and racial obsession, but adopting attitudes that have helped successful groups and people of all colors. Hard work, family, mutual assistance, and a devotion to logic are not constructs of Caucasian culture—many non-whites often exhibit these characteristics more than whites—but simply the surest pathways that have led even the most discriminated groups to a better future.

Read more here.