Well, I certainly get why folks are disagreeing with Ymra. As archangel points out, however hard I've worked individually in my own life, suddenly it's a collective "we" who aren't up to snuff for the black community.
Unfortunately, though we could quibble with him endlessly over the details, there is some validity to what he's saying. For all the accomplishments of individual black men, as a group "we" have seemed to struggle some with the provider/protector role. Now, the danger of being accused of finger-pointing aside for a moment, I think it is valid and even important to note that no statistical result comes to exist in a vacuum. This is to say, if black men have failed our communities in the past, this is not something that came to pass due solely to us, with outside influence whatsoever.
I tend towards being pretty long-winded and I have some pretty strong opinions on political stuff, but I'm gonna try to cover a lot in a few words, explaining my opinion on this. In short, a capitalist economic system needs an underclass. It's the only way the system can balance out to a small upper-class who get increasingly richer with minimal effort -- there must be a large underclass who merely subsist, despite working itself literally to death.
Now, make no mistake, of course there are lots of poor white people and other kinds of poor people. And there's black people who are not poor. Nonetheless, I say to you that a "permanent" underclass is needed for a stable capitalist society, and black people were designated that, here. It's true, that since the Civil Rights Movement, much of the official and sanctioned enforcement of this designation has become illegal. But one, that doesn't mean that centuries of outright and deliberate effort to harm the black family would lose impact overnight.
And two, just look at our legal/prison system. Really, it might as well be called, "We Don't Like Black Men, Inc."
But to avoid being as long-winded as I normally would be, to sum up: As the US has had a somewhat unique role in the history of the world, so have black people had a unique role in America. We've had some interesting challenges put to us as a people, and honestly one of the things that bugs me is when some people seem to consider African culture as somehow more legitimate or worthy of pride than African-American ... yeah, I'm not going to go off too much on that, but I'm just gonna say that I think the people that we are is amazing, especially considering those "unique challenges" put to us as a group. In short, if black men as a group don't seem to behave exactly as groups of other men, I'd guess this is at least in part due to the unique circumstances that have defined black men in relation to the greater society.
And if more of us fail at the provide/protect role, exactly because the system is designed so that we do? What does this mean for the rest of us?
If you listen to some, it means your overall responsibility to the community is increased, because you have to take up the slack left by those men who are absent (be that physically, or just economically/legally). For myself, I'm afraid that's about where my militancy runs out...
