March 24^th

Today Mona Charen’s column is all about race. She begins by attempting to establish her bona fides on the topic; as a child she grew up in a black neighborhood and had black friends and neighbors. She even had a black “much adored second grade teacher” so clearly there couldn’t be a racist bone in her body. She then tells us how she was chased and beaten up in this same neighborhood when she was nine years old. Of course she was; if she had been a lone black kid in a poor white neighborhood or even a strange white kid in a white neighborhood the same thing would have happened.

Mona claims that when we are asked to engage in a conversation about race what is wanted is a confession of sin by white people and, despite vastly diminishing levels of racism the old stain continues to poison the lives of minorities. This, she tells us, is a fiction. Really, tell that to the parents of a demented black kid who waved a screwdriver at a white cop in Madison and was shot dead five seconds later.

Then she claims that she is extra polite and considerate toward black people in an attempt to make up for our racist past. She maintains that the entire quota of social programs including trillions of dollars and even the election of “Barack Hussein Obama testifies to how badly America yearns to prove its racial bona fides.” Absurdities will multiply when they go unchallenged. Tell us Mona what is your reference is for these trillions of dollars in social programs designed to compensate blacks for past discrimination? I thought our social programs were race neutral and not specifically aimed at African Americans. If I was wrong then which programs were designed specifically to help African Americans and make up for our past sins?

Then we have the bizarre notion that whites elected President Obama from a sense of guilt. That remark comes close to being delusional. Obama lost the white vote by 20 percentage points, a statistic Charen could have obtained in 30 seconds on the internet. Never mind if Charen was concerned about truth she would never had said “trillions” were being spent on social programs to compensate blacks for racial injustices.

Finally Mona gets to what she sees as the nub of the issue, the kernel that proves no amount of help can improve the black community; it’s because of absent fathers. She claims that family structure is a far better predictor of poverty than is race, but the correlation between family structure and poverty is exactly the same as the correlation between poverty and family structure. Any high school student can tell you that the correlation between “A” and “B” is exactly the same as the correlation between “B” and “A.” Mona is in well over her head.

She speaks glowingly of Pat Moynihan and claims that we haven’t had an honest conversation about race since; nor does she provide one here.