b) Having noted that there are all kinds of funky colors and cultures in this country, it’s also necessary to acknowledge that black Americans are, statistically speaking, losing out.

Then, we can talk about why so many black children are growing up fatherless, black men are filling prisons, and black students are dropping out of college. What we need to do to address problems that stunt many black lives are things we need to do anyway, things we would need to do if everyone in America were green with purple spots. There aren’t “necessary evils” here.

So, stuff that needs a fixin’: Education. This is where the CalPundit and I agree, as I said. We probably disagree on how to do this. I’ve given my various pitches for vouchers many a time, though I don’t think that they’re magic bullets. I could talk more about this–there’s all kinds of fun stuff going on in educational technology, for instance, potentially super-exciting stuff–but I’m tired and you probably already have your own pet plan to fix the schools. I do think competition is key; public school choice is one option, not a stellar one but better than nothing. I’ve heard very mixed things about charter schools; I tend to be skeptical of them because it seems like charter school plans are attempts to build a whole new school system from scratch very fast, rather than integrating students into existing and slowly-growing private schools a la vouchers. Public report cards for schools are something I’m hopeful about–adding transparency and accountability to the system. I hope all of us can agree that the Children’s Scholarship Fund is a pretty basic, immediate way to help, regardless of policy differences.

Marriage. This is hard, obviously–for everybody, of every race. There are ways to do good at many levels: Get out the word, culturally, that marriage is the best way to raise a kid; that the best way to care for your kids is to love their mother; that sex can wait. Women need to know that they can require more from a man before they sleep with him; men need to know that they can live up to a higher standard. With the women I counsel, generally, the woman wants to get married eventually or is at least willing to consider it, but she isn’t making the kinds of choices that will prepare her for a good marriage decision. Often, as Jennifer Hamer discussed in her study of black non-custodial fathers, men want to meet a higher standard for love and fatherhood. They want to be heroes, just as women want to make good marriages. But there’s generally not a lot of realistic sense of how one can get from point A (“I’m in high school and there’s this awesome, funny guy I met at Union Station, he’s six years older than me…”/”I’m taking care of my baby and my baby’s mama but I’m with this other girl now…”) to point B (married, kids, basically happy). Higher standards on both ends of the gender game are key.

On a personal level, mentoring is also key; it’s kind of shocking the way some of the women I’ve counseled have no one to encourage or guide them as they seek to live godly lives and/or make good decisions about men. So, if you want to do something about this, seek out ways (church groups, youth centers, Big Brothers/Sisters, pregnancy center parenting classes, Mentor Moms programs) you can be a guide.

Finally, on the “macro” level, we can have all kinds of arguments about the ways in which the structure of welfare benefits do or don’t affect family structure; I think welfare makes possible a kids-no-husband lifestyle that’s very obviously attractive in the short run but damaging in the long run, but for the moment my view isn’t important. What’s important is that we agree to analyze welfare, employment, job-training, and inner-city economic development policies with an understanding that these policies’ effects on marriage are crucially important.

End the Drug War. Man, I could write a book about this item, but for the moment I’ll just say: Prisons make jobs in rural districts and empty cities of fathers and workers. There’s an incentive structure in which the people benefiting economically from prison expansion are culturally very different and geographically often distant from the people being imprisoned. This fairly obviously reduces the incentives to figure out whether our drug policies are insanely stringent and whether we’re doing harm to prisoners and their communities by locking up nonviolent drug offenders. William Raspberry has pointed out that the Drug War has created neighborhoods where going to prison is common–almost a rite of passage–rather than unusual and stigmatized. Prohibition breeds thugs and thug culture; it wrecks offenders’ employability; it likely leads to increased drug potency; it seriously messes up the economic incentives for poor people. Here, why don’t I just give you this Reason piece on “Battlefield Conversions” and you can see for yourself? Oh, and did I mention, the people adversely affected by the Drug War, whether because they’re nonviolent drug criminals or because they live in the neighborhoods devastated by the black market, are disproportionately likely to be black.

Entrepreneurship–more on this below.

And finally, we need to seek out and laud the people who are doing things right. Praise families who stick together despite tough times. Honor people who create new businesses, devote themselves to teaching sixth-graders, even–hey, it couldn’t hurt–become National Security Advisors and Supreme Court justices. (Kind of obviously, you don’t have to agree with Rice or Thomas to respect their achievements.) Praise people who overcome the odds, teach us what’s possible, and thereby expand our imaginations.