Black Americans, common sense and our future
Why do we ignore common sense when it comes to Blacks in America? I remember reading an article on Shelby Steele, one of our nation’s most insightful writers on race relations, when he said, "The only thing that makes me interesting as a writer is that I’m just talking common sense. The most ordinary, everyday sort of common sense." What he was saying here was that his writing on the pathologies facing blacks, from affirmative action to the permanent underclass, were so obvious that it was just common sense. Yet we continue to ignore or even dismiss this particular brand of common sense when it comes to blacks.
Aside from Steele, there is perhaps no greater preacher of common sense than Thomas Sowell. I preach and work on the South Side of Chicago and sometimes I feel like I’m alone or some sort of Sisyphean figure locked in a vicious cycle that moves nowhere. But when I read Sowell that feeling of negativity goes away. I come away with a clear sense that I’m not alone and that our problems, however daunting they may be, are, in the end, surmountable.
Most of all, the common sense of Sowell gives us no excuse but to act. For instance, I recently came upon this quote: "If you want to see the poor remain poor, generation after generation, just keep the standards low in their schools and make excuses for their academic shortcomings and personal misbehavior. But please don’t congratulate yourself on your compassion."
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The public school down from my church has kids in the single digits reading and doing math on grade level. This is a problem all over America. The common sense here is that we fire the administrations and teachers for their betrayal of their mission to educate our future. Yet we make excuses and the status quo worsens with every coming year. That is why I spent over 12 years pursuing my goal to build an Economic and Leadership Community Center to help these children reach their potential. Common sense leads to common sense solutions.
Sowell mentions compassion in the above quote and the question here is why do we keep being compassionate when it leads to failure? Consider this Sowell quote: "What the welfare system and other kinds of governmental programs are doing is paying people to fail. Insofar as they fail, they receive the money; insofar as they succeed, even to a moderate extent, the money is taken away."
How is this compassion? Where is the common sense in setting up policies and attitudes that perpetuate the failure of a people coming out of one of the worse oppressions known to man?
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This brings me to yet another Sowell quote: "Since wealth is the only thing that can cure poverty, you might think that the left would be as obsessed with the creation of wealth as they are with the redistribution of wealth. But you would be wrong."
I love this particular quote because it reminds me of why my work in my community is so vital. My goal is nothing less than the creation of pathways to opportunity for my youth. The common sense here is that we must develop talent in order to create wealth, whether that’s creating a forklift driver that can provide for his family or creating the next music sensation.
After all, as Shelby Steele wrote: "Opportunity follows struggle. It follows effort. It follows hard work. It doesn’t come before."
It is these words that keep me going. Common sense lets us know where we stand, the reality that we face. It is only when we are honest with ourselves that we can make true and meaningful progress. Why then do so many Americans ignore common sense when it comes to treating Blacks as equals? The short answer is power. They benefit from the goodness that comes with treating a formerly oppressed people as forever oppressed. That is why Americans on the ground like me have chosen to bypass these virtue-signaling elites and embrace common sense as our guiding light in reversing the damage done to our communities.