In an effort to gauge the overall condition of blacks in contemporary America, Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman turned yesterday to a pair of longtime haters of the United States: (a) Carl Dix, a founding member of the Revolutionary Communist Party, a Maoist vanguard dedicated to promoting civil unrest in the United States; and (b) Princeton University professor Cornel West, an avowed Marxist with close personal and ideological ties to the racial arsonist Al Sharpton and the Jew-hating leader of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan.

Dix told Goodman:

“I am a 60-year-old black man, which means I have decades of experience with white supremacy…. [A] lot of people say, look, a lot of black youth are going to get inspiration and hope from Obama being in the White House. But then the question I pose to them is, what will happen to that inspiration and hope when it collides with the continuing reality of white supremacy, male supremacy, imperialist, you know, overseas adventures that remain the defining reality of America? … [B]lack youth are more and more being blamed for the situation that the system puts them in. And you look at Obama’s last two Father’s Day speeches, he gets into this thing of you know, the youth got to pull up their pants, the absent dads got to be involved in their lives, the parents got to turn off the TV and make sure the kids do their homework. In other words, the onus for the youth not achieving is being put on the youth themselves and their parents. And what’s disappearing in that are the continuing obstacles that the system puts in the way of black, Latino, and poor youth who want to achieve.”

Professor West, for his part, concurred that “the very ugly class realities of poor and working people” remain among the many “structural institutional challenges” that conspire to prevent black Americans from succeeding economically, socially, or professionally.

As evidenced by the foregoing quotes, Dix and West are living embodiments of the leftist worldview which holds that all human pathology is rooted, ultimately, in the external world, in the society at large, rather than within the hearts and minds of individual people. This axiom leads, logically, to the leftist precept that the only way to improve the lives of the masses is not merely to tinker around the edges, but rather to structurally transform the foundational institutions of the nation – most especially its capitalist economic system.

Neither Dix nor West show the barest inclination to attribute black poverty, underachievement, or incarceration rates to the fact that some 70 percent of black American births today are to unwed mothers, a figure far surpassing that of other demographic groups. Unwed mothers, regardless of their race, are four times more likely to live in poverty than the average American; 85 percent of all black children in poverty live in single-parent, mother-child homes. No group can withstand such a calamitous breakdown of its family structure without experiencing devastating social consequences. But according to Dix and West, the fault lies entirely with America’s allegedly exploitative “system” – a system perpetuated, by their reasoning, by a continent teeming with racist whites.

Children in single-parent households are raised not only with economic, but also social, disadvantages. They are four times as likely as children from intact families to be abused or neglected, much likelier to have trouble academically, and twice as prone to drop out of school. Growing up without a father is a far better forecaster of a boy’s future criminality than either race or poverty. Regardless of race, 70 percent of all young people in state reform institutions were raised in fatherless homes, as were 60 percent of rapists, 72 percent of adolescent murderers, and 70 percent of long-term prison inmates.

“Even if white people were to become morally rejuvenated tomorrow,” writes the conservative black professor Walter E. Williams, “it would do nothing for the problems plaguing a large segment of the black community. Illegitimacy, family breakdown, crime, and fraudulent education are devastating problems, but they are not civil rights problems.”

Too bad Carl Dix, Cornel West, and the rest of the race-hustling Left refuse to acknowledge this.