Will any good come out of Trayvon Martin's death? Final thoughts.

Sooner or later, Trayvon Martin's death will fade from the headlines. Not in the next few weeks when a determination should be forthcoming as to whether George Zimmerman should be charged with a crime--and the certain backlash if he isn't--but eventually, it will be old news.

When that happens, will the utterly shameful Sharpton and Jackson, and others who have incited violence in the name of 'justice,' recognize their hypocrisy and perfidy and have a genuine change of heart? Highly doubtful, given that their past rushes to judgment (Tawana Brawley, the Duke lacrosse incident, etc.) have had no discernible chastening effect, and no apparent effect on the media's eagerness to give them a megaphone.

Will NBC think twice, next time, before they edit something to deliberately misrepresent and deceive? Will the rest of the media pack hold back and wait for the facts before they sensationalize the next big story in order to scoop their competitors and keep on top of the 24/7 news cycle? I think we all know the answer to those questions.

So who might actually learn some lesson of value, going forward? Consumers of news, hopefully, but it will only be those with some intelligence and discrimination. But those whom one would really like to see profit are the people--both black and white--who genuinely desire to see the black community flourish and fulfill its enormous potential.

Here is one of the things writer and professor Shelby Steele (who, like Barack Obama, is a product of a black father and a white mother) had to say about the exploitation of the Martin situation: "After the '60s—-in a society guilty for its long abuse of us—-we took our historical victimization as the central theme of our group identity. We could not have made a worse mistake. It has given us a generation of ambulance-chasing leaders, and the illusion that our greatest power lies in the manipulation of white guilt."

It is hard not to agree that those who have fanned the flames in this situation have done so with that goal of manipulating white guilt. How else could they claim, with straight faces, that young black men are being 'hunted down in the streets,' as several have put it, by whites? The numbers are there, and they don't lie. As Steele said--"blacks today are nine times more likely to be killed by other blacks than by whites...the absurdity of Messrs. Jackson and Sharpton is that they want to make a movement out of an anomaly. Black teenagers today are afraid of other black teenagers, not whites." (Writers on the left are attacking Steele, of course, largely on the basis that he is a black conservative, and therefore not worthy of any consideration.)

Someone they would dismiss even more on matters of race (as a white, Jewish conservative) is Mona Charen, who zeroed in on what is probably the most important takeaway in this whole thing. She asks the question, "Why do African-Americans, 12.6 percent of the nation’s population, account for 50 percent of the murder victims?" (And as Steele and a host of others have reminded us, they are overwhelmingly the victims of other blacks--not whites.)

Her answer? "Because fatherlessness is most pervasive among blacks."

She goes on to say that "among blacks, 72 percent of births are to unmarried women. And while some unmarried mothers go on to marry the fathers of their babies, it’s rare in the African-American community, where only 31 percent of couples are married (in 1960, it was 61 percent)...a full 85 percent of youths in prison come from fatherless homes, as do 80 percent of rapists, 71 percent of high-school drop-outs, and 63 percent of teen suicides..."

This statement of hers is the one that should really make people sit up and take notice: "In The Atlantic Monthly, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead wrote that the 'relationship [between single-parent families and crime] is so strong that controlling for family configuration erases the relationship between race and crime and between low income and crime. This conclusion shows up time and again in the literature.'"

_Erases_ the connection. That's big.

So while this will have to be the subject of another post, I have to comment that there is a tie-in here, for sure, with the latest canard of those who are trying to shore up the women's vote for Obama--the so-called 'war on women.' The illogical equation being posited is that opposition to forcing the Catholic Church to pay for contraception is the same as trying to take away contraception, or that the mere mention of the fact that sexual freedom hasn't been an unalloyed good indicates the desire to send women back into the kitchen, barefoot. It's absurd, of course, but as I said above, there are many credulous people.

But how can it be a matter of dispute between people of good will, whatever their political persuasions, that fathers and family structure matter. As a letter writer to the WSJ rather succinctly put it: "I have nothing to say about whether the sexual revolution has been good for women or not. But I think an important question is, has it been good for children?" Wouldn't it be great if the Sharptons and Jacksons asked that question about black children?