In Come On People: On the Path from Victims to Victors, Bill Cosby and Alvin F. Poussaint challenge black Americans, as well as all Americans, to take responsibility for their own destiny rather than playing the victim. Those of us outside of the black community see this self-defeating pattern well, but the black community has been slow to own the truth. Thank God for men like Cosby, Juan Williams, Star Parker. and John Ridley, to mention just a few who share this courage.
In A Recovery Plan for Black America, Al Mohler reviews the book, and includes these choice quotes from Cosby’s book:
We are calling on men, all men, the successful and the unsuccessful, the affluent and the poor, the married and the unmarried, to come and claim their children. You can run the biggest drug cartel in America or win the Super Bowl, but if you haven’t claimed your children, you are not a man.
Cosby joins the growing consensus (and the Christian consensus) that one of the roots of the poverty in the black community is fatherlessness.
There is one statistic that captures the bleakness. In 1950, five out of every six black children were born into a two-parent home. Today, that number is less than two out of six. In poor communities, that number is lower still. There are whole blocks with scarcely a married couple, whole blocks without responsible males to watch out for wayward boys, whole neighborhoods in which little girls and boys come of age without seeing up close a committed partnership and perhaps never having attended a wedding.
May God heal the black community, and may we help somehow.
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