White Men

THE MURDER rate among young African-American men is so high that little notice has been given the dramatic increase in suicide among the same group. But it makes sense. Young black men are growing up in environments, urban and suburban, where mass culture exhorts them to be either star athletes or the ill-educated caricatures of the poster children for violence, drug abuse and risky sexual behavior they see in music videos and hip-hop magazines. Unable to be "all that," many become alienated and depressed.

We're in the car, my son and I, and the radio is on. This is Friday. The guy on the radio is talking about the announcement that Supreme Court Justice Byron R. White will retire at the end of the current session.The guy on the radio notes that when the conservative justice steps down, President Clinton will have the opportunity to make his first appointment to the nation's highest court."I wonder who the president will appoint?" says my 12-year-old son.We often chat about the news or sports or ancient history, as we motor along.

U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson got only half of it right when he socked it to D.C. Mayor Marion Barry last month.Jackson gave Barry six months in prison and a $5,000 fine -- a fairly hefty penalty for a first conviction on a misdemeanor drug-possession charge. To add insult to injury, Barry also must reimburse the government an estimated $9,653 for his prison upkeep.The judge explained that Barry deserved such a stiff sentence because he had betrayed his position as a role model to the city's youth.

MIAMI - The first thing we see is a black man curled up in a womb. The first thing we hear is a voice-over explaining a psychologist's theory that black men are babies. That because of racism, the African-American man remains an unformed person - infantilized, immature and incapable of exploiting his own fullest potential. Thus begins the new movie, Baby Boy. In it, we are introduced to Jody, a jobless, aimless 20-year-old from South-Central L.A. Though he has fathered two children by two women, he flees commitment, whether that means marriage or just cohabitation.

White Men Have Weak ArgumentI have been following the debate over affirmative action for the past several months and it has left me with a sense of disbelief in the amount of hypocrisy with which its opponents have argued for its demise. For the life of me, I cannot understand the direction the debate has taken.White men are approximately 39 percent of the population, yet they make up at least 77 percent of every desirable area of employment (except sports).That is an over-representation of almost 200 percent.

ATLANTA -- Americans have never stormed their prisons as the fed-up Parisians eventually stormed the Bastille, but you have to wonder if some day ... This story, in one form or another, comes around pretty regularly. Newspapers and newscasts, some of them anyway, pay dutiful heed. Then someone from a conservative think tank -- sorry for the oxymoron -- allows as how the figures don't really mean what they seem to and wouldn't matter anyway even if they did, and that's good enough for the white folks, who move on to something else.

FORT WORTH, Texas -- Six men yelling white supremacist slogans went on a rampage downtown yesterday morning, beat a 26-year-old salesman unconscious, harassed several other African-Americans and then tried to pick a fight with an elderly street person, police said.Six men were in jail last night on charges of assault with bodily injury in the attack on Gary Dan Ali, police said.As police transported the men to jail they referred to a black officer by a common racially contemptuous term, police reports said.

Two Anne Arundel County men were charged Friday after an altercation in the early morning outside a Towson pizza parlor, police said. Glen Kyle Staley, 27, of the 1600 block of Wall Drive in Pasadena and Jamar Rashad Patterson, 22, of the 900 block of Mago Vista Road in Arnold have been charged with second-degree assault after getting in a fight near Pizan's Pizza in the 100 block of York Road about 2:35 a.m. Friday, according to a statement from...

HERE I AM, all dressed up and nowhere to go. A man without a party. Two years after my hopes were raised by the Democrats -- they threatened to rehabilitate themselves by not nominating another Yankee liberal for president -- I find myself alone again in the political middle.I was warned. Polls taken before the recent elections indicated that very few white men identified themselves as Democrats. The figure was extremely low for white males in the South. Their granddaddies, of course, were spinning in their graves, but the fact is that a lot of white men believe that it has been open season on white men, and they blame Democrats and minorities in general (even when one minority is women, who are a majority)

While Republican leaders console themselves that they salvaged control of the House from the defeat of Mitt Romney, they need to ponder the long-term future of the party of Lincoln and of Ronald Reagan. The course of the Grand Old Party from the Great Emancipator to the Great Communicator took some very twisted turns - from Theodore Roosevelt, the great trust-buster; to Dwight Eisenhower, the great highway builder; to Richard Nixon, the great corrupter. Through it all, it has largely been the party of white men, then of white men and women, and more recently of white Christian evangelicals and tea party naysayers.