Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen writes:

…one in every nine black men ages 20 to 34 was behind bars? What if the red phone rang at 3 a.m. and the president was told that among black men 18 or older, the figure was one in 15? If the president was like any of his (or her) predecessors, he’d pull the blankets over his face and go right back to sleep.

…and that only Barack Obama can deal with the problem, because, well, he’s half-black.

…those incarceration figures represent an enormous challenge to the next president. It is a challenge Barack Obama, for obvious reasons, is uniquely qualified to meet. This is not just because he can be a role model for young black men, who as a group are in a perilous state. It is because he sees himself playing exactly that role.

Is this really a presidential matter? Are not state craft, national security etc. federal priorities? Are not the problems he describes properly the purview of governors and mayors?

“I can say certain truths that might be more difficult for other candidates to say,” he said last year. “I’ve talked about the need for more responsibility among black fathers. I’ve talked about the need for parents to do more to instill a sense of educational achievement in black kids.”

Now that’s Obama playing the race card. Only a black person can speak truth to black failure? Ask Bill Cosby or Juan Williams how well that goes.

If you stipulate, as I am willing to do, that some black men have been jailed unfairly and some because of the disproportionate penalties regarding crack cocaine (as opposed to powder cocaine), that still leaves a lot of criminals. And where there are criminals, there are victims — and blighted neighborhoods, and unruly schools and sections of town that you, dear reader, will avoid regardless of your race, religion or national origin. The costs of this phenomenon — social, human and economic — are beyond calculation.

Agreed on the crack issue. Fortunately, the rules have been fixed. This was indeed a federal issue.

It is a subtle but pernicious form of racism to turn one’s back on this problem and not face what is happening to young black men — and even to young black women. It is a subtle but pernicious form of racism not to recognize that a kind of cultural malignancy has taken root in parts of the African American underclass — not, by any means, in black America in general. It takes a cold indifference not to notice that lives are being wasted and that, really, the only difference between the perp and his victim is timing. Soon the former will be the latter. Count on it.

Exactly what and how much are middle-class families working through their busy lives expected to do? And what is the root of the problem?

Daniel Patrick Moynihan predicted in the early 1960’s that illegitimate births would decimate the social fabric of black communities. He was right. What did government do? Enable the problem with its welfare policies.

Thus the malignancy Cohen describes.

What did the mainstream media do? Remove the stigma from illegitimate births. Rappers and movie stars broadcast their anti-social (yes, it is) behavior and get written up on magazine covers.

Government and big media have been the biggest enablers of the social corrosion that besets us, and it’s not just inner cities. There’s your true “pernicious racism.”