As I’ve visited our nation’s urban centers
and predominantly white, impoverished rural areas, I sense an undercurrent of unease. It’s not just lack of justice, but also a cycle of poverty, to crime, and back to poverty again. There is a sense of helplessness. To be sure, we all hold a certain degree of responsibility for our lives and it’s a mistake to simply blame others for our problems.
Reforming criminal justice to make it racially blind is imperative, but that won’t lift up these young men from poverty. In fact, I don’t believe any law will. For too long, we’ve attached some mythic notion to government solutions and yet, 40 years after we began the War on Poverty, poverty still abounds.
When you look at statistics for the white community alone, you see that we’ve become two separate worlds in which the successful are educated and wait to have children until they are married, and those in poverty are primarily those without higher education and with children outside of marriage.
This message is not a racial one. The link between poverty, lack of education, and children outside of marriage is staggering and cuts across all racial groups. Statistics uniformly show that waiting to have children in marriage and obtaining an education are an invaluable part of escaping poverty.
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