I Am A Statistic

I watched Black in America last night on CNN and I have to say this morning I am a little disheartened about being a black man. I don’t think Soledad O’Brien intended on making things look as bleak as they did on the show. I can’t say any of it was not true. It needed to have a little more balance. If you go by the show we are all statistics in one way or another. I just needed them to show a profile of some of the cats I know. There are regular everyday black men that have never been addicted, went to jail, been unemployed, messed over a black woman, or abandoned their kids. It doesn’t always have to go wrong. Even the successful family on the show had a son involved in a shooting. It doesn’t have to be that way. Neither I nor any of my brothers even own a gun.

The real focus for the future was on the show and didn’t get nearly enough attention. There was a brother named Roland Fryer on the show who is a professor of economics at Harvard University. During the crack section of the show it was revealed that he grew up in one of the biggest drug houses in his hometown. My inner city experience tells me that usually if you grow up in a crack house the chances you are going to have that kind of success is rare. The chances you are going to have any kind of success outside of crack is usually impossible. After they got through showing all of the failures and bad circumstances, this brother should have been the subject of the last hour. You can’t get a bigger hurdle in life than growing up in a crack house. Whatever path this brother took out of that should be the blueprint and we should be focusing on if it can be duplicated for a few million more.

We better do something because after watching that two hour show last night I feel like I should just stand on the corner and wait for police or the child support office.