The original draft of the first email below was sent to Washington Post Metro reporter Clarence Williams, several of his Post colleagues, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine, acting Metropolitan Police Chief Robert Contee III, all members of the D.C. Council, all seven Advisory Neighborhood Commissioners representing D.C.’s Ward 8, a number of community activists quoted in the story at issue, and other select media personalities who blame “systemic racism,” instead of “systemic fatherless,” for virtually all that ails black America. The second email came from one of the community activists quoted by Mr. Williams, proving that he withheld crucial if politically incorrect information from Post readers.
Dear Clarence, (10:56 am)
Your B5 story this morning makes no mention of it, so readers can fairly assume that no one participating in Monday night’s Ward 8 community meeting breathed a word about the systemic fatherlessness at the root of chaos in high-crime neighborhoods [“Ward 8 residents discuss ways to reduce crime without relying on police“].
The simplest, most holistic way of reducing soulless mayhem and restoring urban ghettos to the civilized if modest communities they used to be would be to restore the once proud black nuclear families that predominated during the childhoods of your senior colleagues Colbert King and Courtland Milloy, among countless others of a certain age.
They’ll remind you of my late Pulitzer-winning friend Bill Raspberry‘s once famous if now never-mentioned column about adolescent male elephants effectively left fatherless by a preservation program that moved much of herd but not the mature bull elephants. The troubled teens ran amok, killing rhinos and other wildlife until game wardens managed to bring in bulls from other herds to impose discipline on the orphaned punks and restore order.
Human development and behavior aren’t much different. When a boy’s voice starts to change and he’s peer pressured by older fatherless dopes to cause trouble, it’s the rare single mother who’ll successfully ride herd on her son to keep him on the straight and narrow. The loving discipline of an appropriately hard-ass dad is missing from far too many boys’ (and girls’) lives in Ward 8 and elsewhere around our city. And only when communities decide that it’s not in their interest to bear and raise the vast majority of their children willy-nilly out of wedlock will anything change for the better.
You and every one of your educated Post colleagues know this is immutably true. Yet you steadfastly refuse to speak the truth, presumably out of fear of being expelled from the wokesphere. Shame on the whole lot of you.
Darren McKinney, Washington, D.C.
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Good afternoon Darren, (2:04 pm)
Thank you for your comments. The writer [Clarence Williams] did not list ALL of the root causes identified during our session, nor all of the recommendations derived, but simply provided a high-level overview of the meeting. Notwithstanding, your comment is RIGHT ON POINT and was raised during our meeting. I will share with you the presentation and our notes with you to give you some idea of our conversation.
As a follow up to our chat on Monday, we will take a deeper dive into each root cause separately. I would love to have your voice in the conversation on the “Break down of the family” and any others that may interest you.
Monica Ray
President, Congress Heights Community Association
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Great to hear from you, Ms. Ray. (3:02 pm)
I’m relieved to know that some folks in largely fatherless Ward 8 are willing to speak obvious truths about urban chaos, even if our Mayor, Council, AG, Police Chief, and virtually every Post reporter, columnist and editor seems determined to suppress those truths.
So I’m at your disposal for follow-up as you see fit. But be advised that I’m a straight white male over 60 with roughly zero white guilt. Mandela sent a boys choir to sing at my dad’s memorial service to honor his work against apartheid. As my father’s son, I served a member of the Congressional Black Caucus and was later the first person in the Clinton administration to insist that federal law enforcement be more forthcoming to the public about ongoing investigations into a rash of black church arsons throughout the South in the mid-1990s. And on two occasions in my physical prime I came to the aid of women of color — one a Howard coed and both strangers to me — being assaulted by armed criminals. “The White Jackie Chan,” as my neighbors called me back in the day, was unarmed in both instances but dispatched the thugs and held them for police. Before and since on countless occasions I’ve stood firmly against and deterred without violence uncivilized punks harassing weaker innocents on Metro, on sidewalks, in small businesses and elsewhere. Thus it seems to me I’ve earned the “privilege” to speak my mind, and I won’t be cowed by any loudmouth radical who irresponsibly tries to blame the Blue-Eyed Devil for all that ails our imperfect union.
Respectfully, Darren