This is a guest opinion column

It is unrealistic to expect results in an effort where there has been no investment. It is also equally unscientific to expect a solution to be developed outside the environment from which the problem arose.

There have been more Black men killed by other Black men in the major cities of the United States in the past year than those lynched by the Klan during the entire period of reconstruction.

Special interest groups and grass roots organizations mobilize when a white cop kills a Black man, but there is utter silence when Black men kill each other. This is no accident. We have known of the growing crisis in the Black community, but rather than seek solutions like we did COVID 19 or other areas we chose to set up an entire infrastructure that maintains and controls the problem.

We have shown total disregard to the research of great thinkers of the early 20th Century like W.E.B DuBois, Carter G. Woodson and Booker T Washington — whose prophecies foretold our day.

The work of Daniel Patrick Moynihan in his 1965 Study of the Negro Family revealed the deterioration of the Black family as being America’s number one social crisis. Moynihan described the deteriorating Black family as a tangle of pathology and blamed slavery for the Black man’s effeminacy and sexual irresponsibility. However, it is much deeper than this observation.

The crisis in the Black community as exemplified by the constant murder of Blacks by Blacks is as much spiritual, political and economic as it is social. But to address the issue in a political light would cause serious strategic problems for both sides who seem to benefit from the problem.

Today’s political leaders, Black or white, have no idea how to address the problem because they have not been educated to do so and those who do know have been silenced, neglected, intimidated or ignored. Not only have vulnerable groups within the Black community — pregnant teen girls and young Black males — been exploited and showcased by the very organizations and industries that claim to be their advocates, but Black leadership as a whole is falling in line with the same baseless solutions offered by the bourgeoisie elite a century past who were no better equipped to address the problems in the hood than their white colleagues.

The problem has more to do with the social gap within the Black community than it is between Blacks and whites. Some have observed that Black people have simply stopped investing in the lives of their children, a sign of impending extinction.

Du Bois thought that the Black intellectual of the early 20th Century would look back and help their struggling kith and kin in the ghetto. However, Du Bois eventually recanted his thesis observing that rather than helping, the Talented Tenth as he called them assumed the same posture as the liberal whites when addressing the Negro question. At the time of the passage of the Voting Rights Act, inner city ghettos were in a Third World state.

The civil rights movement taught the Black community how to address a nation of savages but it did not teach Black people how to relate to each other and the result is a violent, angry and misguided generation who could remain indefinitely stuck in an adolescent stage of development.

Today’s Black culture is not only corrupt but it is a corporate- and government-driven monstrosity. We have the money and capability to change our trajectory but we lack one major component: desire.

The destruction of the Black mind and the failure to study Black history in a redeeming manner is the single biggest crime of the century because it has robbed the community of the destiny-defining, life producing lessons that are so desperately needed. And if those who have so diligently tried to stop the teaching of Black history have their way, the solution will remain mystified.

The redemption of the Black community will not come from government funding or building bigger prisons. Instead, redemption will come from serious conversations with those who are both responsible for the problems and the solutions: Black men themselves.

For a people who invested life and limb in the metaphysics of non-violent self-sacrifice, a practice for which they have been most applauded, their grandchildren have become the most violent and accepted monstrosity. The only solution to solving the problem of Black male violence is that he must no longer be a target population and must be reenergized into a political unit that can manage itself without outside help.

Yet in doing this the entire political system would be turned upside down. And with all the capital going into maintaining the current system, I think this is a price too costly to pay.

Just think, America got its first Black president and perhaps will get its first female president while leaving the current situation intact. Some see no reason to change things now.

Until Black men see themselves as the solution, the problem will remain.

Dr. Robert White is a faculty member in the Humanities Department at Alabama State University.