n 2011 2/3 of every black child was born into a single parent household. White children, while having a higher number in total, only have a 1/4 chance of being born to a single parent. Here’s the thing: if you opened up the prisons and released the non-violent drug offenders, those numbers will look quite different as prisoners return home to raise their kids.

First, nice job moving the goalposts. I say “born out of wedlock,” you respond by conflating it with “Daddy’s in prison.”

Second, citation needed. The difference between 2/3 and 1/4 is about 42%. If I were to take your argument at face value–implying that parity could be achieved, or mostly achieved by this one step–you’re saying that approximately 40% of all black kids being born these days have at least one parent in prison due to “non-violent drug offenses.” I’ve never seen statistics anywhere like that published anywhere.

Third, you’re building on a horrendously mistaken premise, a lie that costs lives: that drugs aren’t a “real” problem. That’s an idea that’s in vogue lately in certain political circles, and it’s malicious and false. Look into it, follow the money, and what you’ll find is that it’s being pushed by people who either are now or would end up making obscene amounts of money selling drugs that are currently illegal.

Meanwhile, drugs kill, and do worse than kill. If there is anything in this world worse than murder, it’s drug dealing. A murderer kills you and you’re dead, and it’s over. A drug dealer strings you along for years or decades, extracting every last drop of wealth that he can, along the way dragging you, your family and your loved ones into misery (and frequently abject poverty,) often forcing you to turn to crime to feed the habit, and only when every last good thing in your life has been crushed are you finally discarded and left to die.

As Mother Teresa once said about the poor, it’s very fashionable to talk about drug addicts, and much less so to actually talk with them. I’ve done that. I’ve worked in rehab. I’ve seen first-hand what it does to people, and they were the lucky ones, the ones who managed to get out at some point, or at least to reach a point where they sincerely wanted to try to. There are plenty more who don’t, who have it even worse.

The only drug policy that makes any sense is one we’ve never actually contemplated: call a spade a spade. Prosecute, convict, and execute drug dealers as the mass-murderers they are, and treat addicts as victims, not criminals, getting them into treatment and counseling.

It’s not, because on this one you’re just making things up.

Translation: I haven’t done any actual research like you have, and it doesn’t fit my preconceived biases, so I’m dismissing it out of hand.

White people are twice as likely to abuse drugs than blacks, it’s just that blacks are 300% more likely to get some/more/longer jail time than whites.

http://healthland.time.com/2011/11/07/study-whites-more-likely-to-abuse-drugs-than-blacks/

Yet another example of lying with statistics. Nowhere in that entire article does it mention the elephant in this particular room: cocaine. Cocaine, particularly crack, has far more severe soul-destroying and family-destroying effects than most common drugs. (Though meth can give it a run for its money.) It’s also disproportionately popular among black drug addicts, and much less so among white drug addicts. And again, this is consistent with what I’ve personally seen working in treating these problems.

“Wh en black parents literally teach their children to actively not strive for success because they’d be “acting too white,” thereby trapping them in a cycle of failure, poverty and misery, is that the fault of white racists?”

Citation please.

My mistake. When going back and looking this up again, it seems I mis-remembered, and most (but not all) of the pressure in this particular issue comes from black peers, not black parents. But that doesn’t make it not a pervasive, self-sabotaging cultural issue.

“Go into any inner-city neighborhood, and folks will tell you that government alone can’t teach kids to learn.They know that parents have to parent, that children can’t achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white.”
—Barack Obama, Keynote Address, Democratic National Convention, 2004
(Cited in http://educationnext.org/actingwhite/. The entire article is worth reading, particularly the graph about two pages down that shows starkly just how bad the issue is, both among black and hispanic students.)

“[One] generation gap, for instance, is that a lot of black youth now are anti-education and anti-intellectualism, who feel that getting an education is being white, is acting white. We never had that in previous generations, this is something new. I think this is very, very disconcerting that black youth are culturally adapting such postures when the high school dropout rate is so high, when they’re going to jail at increasing rates, it’s in fact really very high, and in jail about 70 percent of inmates have not graduated from high school.”
Dr. Alvin Poussaint, explaining the real problem behind high black incarceration rates, and it’s not drugs.

50 percent drop out rate, I’m telling you, and people in jail, and women having children by five, six different men. Under what excuse, I want somebody to love me, and as soon as you have it, you forget to parent. Grandmother, mother, and great grandmother in the same room, raising children, and the child knows nothing about love or respect of any one of the three of them. All this child knows is “gimme, gimme, gimme.” These people want to buy the friendship of a child, and the child couldn’t care less. Those of us sitting out here who have gone on to some college or whatever we’ve done, we still fear our parents. And these people are not parenting. They’re buying things for the kid. $500 sneakers, for what? They won’t buy or spend $250 on Hooked on Phonics.

…

Brown Versus the Board of Education is no longer the white person’s problem. We’ve got to take the neighborhood back. We’ve got to go in there. Just forget telling your child to go to the Peace Corps. It’s right around the corner. It’s standing on the corner. It can’t speak English. It doesn’t want to speak English. I can’t even talk the way these people talk. “Why you ain’t where you is go, ra,” I don’t know who these people are. And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. Then I heard the father talk. This is all in the house. You used to talk a certain way on the corner and you got into the house and switched to English. Everybody knows it’s important to speak English except these knuckleheads. You can’t land a plane with “why you ain’t…” You can’t be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth. There is no Bible that has that kind of language. Where did these people get the idea that they’re moving ahead on this. Well, they know they’re not, they’re just hanging out in the same place, five or six generations sitting in the projects when you’re just supposed to stay there long enough to get a job and move out.

Now look, I’m telling you. It’s not what they’re doing to us. It’s what we’re not doing. 50 percent drop out. Look, we’re raising our own ingrown immigrants. These people are fighting hard to be ignorant.

— Bill Cosby, speaking at the 50th Anniversary commemoration of Brown v. Board of Education. The entire thing is worth reading.

See also http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/52025/

By the way, anyone reading this exchange, this part in particular, still want to defend Mason the racist?

How typical of the intellectually dishonest. Anyone with an apposing viewpoint, especially if he should dare to back it up with hard facts, must immediately be countered with ridicule and portrayed as not only wrong but malicious. Anything to keep the audience from actually thinking about what he has to say and possibly taking it seriously!

I’m about the least racist person you’ll ever meet. I’ve lived in too many places, known and formed close friendships with too many people of too many distinct backgrounds, to ever buy into the pernicious lies that tell you that certain people are worth less as people because of who their ancestors were. But people like this guy are so desperate to make reality fit the preconceived narrative that they call the facts themselves–and by extension anyone who dares to bring them up–racist should the facts be inconvenient.

The only serious racists I see today are the people who blame the faceless “White Man” for perpetrating made-up oppression because it’s simpler than facing the fact that they are responsible for their own failure by not putting forth the effort necessary to become successful. If that’s not racist, what is?