Playing blame game isn’t a solution

As interim Memphis Police Director Michael Rallings tried to reason with a group representing different aspects of the Black Lives Matter movement blocking the Hernando DeSoto Bridge on the night of July 10, he acknowledged the protesters’ concerns and also asked the community for a 30-day moratorium on homicides.

That did not happen, of course. Frankly, no one thought it would.

Some viewed the police director’s request as a ploy to draw attention away from one of the key concerns of the Black Lives Matter movement — the disproportional killing of black men by white law enforcement officers.

I don’t think Rallings was trying to pull a fast one.

This city’s violent crime rate is appalling. As of Thursday evening, my deadline for this column, there have been 129 homicides in Memphis since Jan. 1, according to The Commercial Appeal’s Homicide Tracker.

Eight of those slayings occurred after that Sunday standoff on the bridge. In fact, one occurred the next day.

One hundred three of the victims were African-Americans; 23 were younger than 18; 61 were between the ages of 18 and 29. The Homicide Tracker map shows that most of these murders occurred in inner-city neighborhoods.

Those numbers represent the tremendous loss of potential positive a human capital for this community.

Those also are numbers that feed critics of the Black Lives Matter movement, who like to point out that more black men are being killed by other black men, than by white police officers.

The two issues are should not be thrown in the same basket.

Black Lives Matter is about a lingering history of racial injustice and racial inequality. Black-onblack violence is, in some ways, a product of that inequality that has created generational conditions — poverty, low-education attainment, for example — that spawned criminals.

Every time I write about this, the column draws comments of emails that say the cause of the problem is not having a having a father in the home, or too many teenage girls having babies, or the criminal justice system is not doing its job in keeping criminals in prison longer.

Well, the teen birthrate is declining, and state and federal authorities have statutes that mandate violent criminals serve longer prison sentences.

I cannot disagree that a stable two-parent home should be the norm. But that picture of the American family has taken a hit.

A Pew Research Center report, “The American Family Today,” released last December, took a look at parenting in America. It said:

“Family life is changing. Two-parent households are on the decline in the United States as divorce, remarriage and cohabitation are on the rise. ... Fully four-in-ten births occur to women who are single or living with a non-marital partner. At the same time that family structures have transformed, so has the role of mothers in the workplace — and in the home. As more moms have entered the labor force, more have become breadwinners — in many cases, primary breadwinners — in their families.”

The report continued: “The share of children living in a two-parent household is at the lowest point in more than half a century: 69 percent are in this type of family arrangement today, compared with 73 percent in 2000 and 87 percent in 1960.”

The Pew study pointed out, though, that children growing up in single-parent households, where the parent is well educated and earns a good income, are likely to do well.

Our problem in Memphis is that too many single-parent households are headed by women trapped in generational poverty situations that are underpinning the city’s 30 percent poverty rate.

It involves mothers who either are ill-equipped to be parents or who are so overwhelmed by trying to provide their families with the necessities of life that they fall short on the parenting front.

Low-education attainment keeps them trapped in minimum-wage jobs and substandard housing. Because they have an education deficit, they either are unable to help their children succeed in school or do not fully recognize the importance of children succeeding in school.

It is easy to say their situations are their own fault for not taking advantage of opportunities to make a better life for themselves. Playing the blame game will not fix the problem. That only can be fixed by finding effective intervention strategies that will change their life dynamic and lead to a brighter future for their children.

That eventually will stop the black-on-black violence.