Consider also the role and responsibility of black parents and their communities in teaching their young to make different choices to deal with injustice and frustration.

Unwanted teenage pregnancies which keep young women trapped in a cycle of poverty;

Men who refuse to take responsibility for the children they father leaving many women in situations of single parenthood;

Turning to drugs, alcohol and crime are choices that did not come in the slave ships.

What do black families and their black communities offer the young who feel trapped in such choices.

If family and community support is that strong among the blacks why do the young feel so desperately helpless in their choices.

America is the most advanced superpower on earth. American blacks do not live in the society their ancestors lived, even their slave ancestors, without access to knowledge that is available to all Americans.

What can black Americans do for themselves. Are they doing whatever is in their power to deal with the internal problems in their communities.

Is focusing entirely on the past and on what others are doing to them the best way to deal with problems that many blacks face. How do some black live in the same society and make different choices and achieve different results, eg Oprah etc.

The concept of a Black and separate church is institutional racism.

A foreigner am I
The business with Rev Wright
Is political dynamite
This devil's advocate
May be right.

Senator Obama is gonna be damned if he does
And damned if he doesn't
O poor man, his dream turned nightmare
With friends like Rev Wright
Does Senator Obama need an enemy.

Is Rev Wright
Merely a man of his time,
Or is he a man who looked into his reflection
And fell in love with himself
Did power and money corrupt him,
Or is he the prophet
He claims to be.

Rev Wright could best have helped his cause
For liberation of his people
By helping Senator Obama
As best as he could.

But alas the man
His own agenda in mind
Now shoots himself in the leg
His people too.

Does a hero blame a whole people
His own
For his words of indiscretion
Driven by his illusion of prophethood.

Why does he not apologize
For misrepresented facts
AIDS by God was thought at first
To be a curse on white homosexual men
By religious folk.

Studying the natural course of a disease,
Syphilis, was bad science done in ignorance.
Ever since taught as warning against poor science
Long before Rev Wright ever heard of it.

Rev Wright is a Christian
Why does he remain in the Old Testament
Did not Jesus preach
Forgiveness and love for enemies.

Why does Rev Wright
Preach damnation and revenge
Instead of binding the wounds
And seeking reconciliation.

Why not learn from the Jews
Who take revenge by excelling
In everything they do
Too busy to be hating and cursing
Their oppressors of the past and present.

Blacks must move on
Be resilient
Leave the past behind
And look to the future
And live in the present.

The question should always be
What can we do for ourselves
Without remaining stuck
In a role of victim-hood.

May God grant you the serenity
To accept the past you cannot change
To look to the future that is bright
And do what is best in the present.

Look around and learn
How the blacks who made it big
In a white man's world did it.
Learn from the whites
Who start small and fight it to the top.

Choices, choices, choices
Lie before all.
Use it to grow
Not to stay stuck in the past
Of grievances that cannot be addressed.

"Communal faith, communal struggle, communal liberation and communal deliverance were the benchmarks of the faith of the enslaved. "

Really? Is that 'communal faith' the same one that allowed African leaders to sell other Africans into slavery? How responsible are the Arabs, who perfected the slave trade hundreds of years before Europeans ever came to Africa? They took women and children into slavery, slaughtered the men, and marched their captives across the Sahara Desert to slave markets in North Africa. They castrated African boys, with a resulting 90% death rate. It is estimated that as many or more Africans were enslaved, killed, or died on route to slave markets as in the Atlantic slave trade. BTW, only 4% of slaves from the Atlantic trade came to what is now the United States.

America has the richest blacks in the world; that says a lot.

I don't have 'white guilt', and choose to judge people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. That being said, I'm for speaking truth to idiocy, and this woman, and those who think like her, need to learn to take responsiblity and interpret the multitude of sociological studies which show that the pathology of the black community is what is holding them back, not the 'unresolved issues of racism' in America.

There is a huge white underclass in Britain which suffers from the same social pathologies as many in the black community in the US. GO FIGURE.....

Lynn,

What truth??? All I wrote is true!

Dr. Carruthers,

Thank you for a beautifully written and well-reasoned piece. Be not dismayed that some of your nonblack brothers and sisters have neither the ears to hear nor the eyes to see what it is you are saying. Truth still has to spoken, even if it is refused.

Love,
Lynn

You have to be kidding....

"The concept of community within the prophetic black church tradition is rooted in its African DNA and expressed in its African American being. Thousands of years before the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade, African culture and society have been and continues to be largely characterized as communal in nature. This means African societies have as core values the well-being of community interests, even at the subordination of one’s individual interests."

Do you read the same newspapers I do??? Africa is one of the violent continents in the world... What community are you talking about? The one in Zimbabwe, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, etc, etc....!!! Core value????? Give me a break!

I wish you would look at this link about African slavery history: http://autocww.colorado.edu/~blackmon/E64ContentFiles/AfricanHistory/SlaveryInAfrica.html

I am not a racist, never have been. I take people at their core values, individually. But I would suggest that your "Black Church" preachers should highlight the problems of the African American community and attempt to put a stop to it instead of blaming everything on "Whitey" as you call Caucasians.

I am a European immigrant to this country so I don't carry a lot of the baggage that American's seem to have in regards to race. I don't see what you describe. I have had the opportunity to work in Washington DC for 3 years and here is what I observed. There are a lot of very well educated, nice, hard working African Americans whom I am proud to call a friend and a lot of sleazebags. In the inner city “ghettos“, there are a lot of unsavory characters that include both men and women. They are drug dealers and gang members, calling each other n*ggers and their women hos, are fascinated by gansta rap, the women screech at each other in a language that most people can't understand, become pregnant at very young ages and live a miserable live having absolutely no respect for themselves. The first time I heard that "Ebonics "should be taught in school, I thought that this is the most crazy country I have ever lived in. You all grew up with the same language, the same TV, the same schools, yet you insist on not speaking proper English. One does not aks a question, one asks a question. Maybe your black church pastors should address what is wrong within the black community instead of blaming everything on covert racism.

No different than the white community. Whites certainly have the same problems....there are many whom I don't want to meet in daylight, much less at night. We call those people trailer trash.

Both black and whites in this country choose what they want to be. That some Black Church pastors, and you, want to blame all of your ills on white America’s racism is more than unfortunate and , plainly, wrong.

On Charlie Rose today, Sally Quinn alluded to the Tuskegee Syphilis experiments conducted between 1932 and 1972. She mentioned that black subjects were infected with syphilis, when this was not the case. Black subjects in fact were already infected but not treated (the treatment was not very effective, and was rather toxic)and instead were observed for 40 years to note the natural course of the disease. The real crimes in these experiments were committed years later, in 1947 and thereafter, when penicillin became available. The subjects still had treatment denied to them even though the medication was quite safe and very effective.

"The unresolved systemic nature of racism in America shapes the call of the black church to continue to speak truth to power. "

Why do parishioners of black churches expect different results this time from the same worn out message? "Speaking truth to power" is just 40 year old broken record that, in my view, is just smoke.

Ignore race. It is irrelevent. You don't have time for this anyway. You need to save your children and marriages. If the black church is truly more concerned with civil rights activism than it is towards obedience to time honored principles of fidelity and chastity that strengthen individual families, then you can be indignant, offended, or wronged all day long and you will still see the utter destruction of the black family.

In my view, you need to learn what the Mormons (www.lds.org) teach about families, and begin to grow yours in the same way.

"Communal faith, communal struggle, communal liberation and communal deliverance were the benchmarks of the faith of the enslaved. "

What's with this communal thing? Why do you have to wait for your neighbor to get out of bondage before you do? Instead of "communal" values, why not focus on INDIVIDUAL faith, INDIVIDUAL struggle, INDIVIDUAL liberation and INDIVIDUAL deliverance? If you hold out for "communal" solutions, you will always be disappointed.

Thank you Dr. Carruthers. Let's face it, we in the U.S. just don't like to hear the truth.

"Today, we now have twice as many African American young people in prisons than in colleges and universities."

Yeah, and twice as many are born without fathers as with one.

Start preaching "Don't have a kid if you don't have a spouse."

Immigrant blacks do that, and their kids turn out just fine, and don't walk around claiming racism everywhere.

The assertion that systematic institutional racism is the cause for the large number of African Americans in prison is simply rediculous. People go to prison because they commit crimes, according to 2007 FBI crime statistics African Americans commit crimes at 7 times the rate of other Americans, that is why there is a high number of us in prison.

Dr. Carruthers cannot provide support or documentation for any of his other claims like prisons being built on projections of 3rd grade reading scores. I wonder where and how he got his PHD?

Isn't that photo of James Forbes?