Biggest Problem Facing Black People - Is Black People

Is name was Dwayne Douglas. He was only 15. According to his grieving mother he was good at school and aiming to go to university. He wanted to become a teacher. However, like many black teenagers before him he was stabbed to death by a group of other black boys. As the saying inevitable goes he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. This sadly follows a number of other stabbings of teenagers that have occurred in my own area of south London, which have become so frequent over the years that it hardly makes the local press let alone the national newspapers. You don’t have to be a contestant on Mastermind to know that the one incontrovertible factor that these violent incidents have in common is, as in the case of Dwayne, that the perpetuators and the victims are black. For me it is become clear that the cause of this escalating knife problem in London is due to the devastating social consequences of illegitimacy within the Afro-Caribbean community. The last official census figures revealed that lone parents form the majority of Afro-Caribbean families. The family structure is increasingly disappearing – where drugs, crime, murder and social anarchy are evaporating once stable black communities. Black commentators would argue that problems facing the black community can be laid at the door of Institutionalised racism as outlined in the Macpherson’s Inquiry into the Death of Stephen Lawrence. There is no doubt that there is a good deal of residual discrimination in society and in the police, but not enough to explain the over representation of black people in prisons, crime figures, and school exclusions. Racism in itself is not the sole explanation. The absence of fathers as role models for young black males is critically important in the genesis of delinquency. We know that some single mothers succeed better than some couples at raising well-adjusted children but the downward spiral of deprivation among lone-parent families is far more pronounced than among comparably poor two-parent ones. The stronger the family unit, the better the economic and social progress, as witness with British Chinese and Asian families. Today, Black people found themselves at the precipice, as a result of the unwillingness among its ranks to tackle this single most important issue facing the community – it is more critical than crime, drugs, poverty, welfare or homelessness because the disintegration of the Afro-Caribbean family structure lies behind and drives them all. The Black community desperately need a debate on this issue if we are to avoid repeated scenes of inconsolable parents like the mother of Dwayne Douglas appearing on our TV screens mourning their loss of their children in such a violent and appalling manner.