Broken Family, Broken Civilization
July 12, 2022
My contribution to the conversation was to relate an anecdote I've shared with you readers before: something I heard from an older white friend who lived in north Baton Rouge until fairly recently, the only white person in his neighborhood. He told me that the collapse of the family was at the root of all the problems he saw in his neighborhood. He was close to the grandmothers and grandfathers of his own generation who lived in the block, and said that those elderly men and women are the last things standing between the community and anarchy. And they are dying out. I asked this older white man what white Baton Rougeans can do to help. He said that he was at a loss to know, saying that whatever solution is going to have to come from within the black community, because whites have zero authority or trust among black folks.
The other day, sociologist Brad Wilcox noted:
