Heather Mac Donald is a John M. Olin fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a Contributing Editor to City Journal. According to the website for the Manhattan Institute, which publishes City Journal, her work at City Journal has canvassed a range of topics including homeland security, immigration, policing and "racial" profiling, homelessness and homeless advocacy, educational policy, the New York courts, and business improvement districts. This piece appears in the Winter 2010 Edition of City Journal. In it, she explores what happens when a city such as Chicago looks to the government for assistance in the rearing of children rather than to the missing fathers who have abandoned those children - along with any semblance of individual responsibility. It's not a pretty picture.
She does not fail to mention the brief tenure of our president as a community organizer in one of the worst areas of Chicago.
Yet a critical blindness links Obama’s activities on the South Side during the 1980s and the murder of Derrion Albert in 2009. Throughout his four years working for “change” in Chicago’s Roseland and Altgeld Gardens neighborhoods, Obama ignored the primary cause of their escalating dysfunction: the disappearance of the black two-parent family. Obama wasn’t the only activist to turn away from the problem of absent fathers, of course; decades of failed social policy, both before and after his time in Chicago, were just as blind. And that myopia continues today, guaranteeing that the current response to Chicago’s youth violence will prove as useless as Obama’s activities were 25 years ago.
Chicago's Real Crime Story by Heather Mac Donald, City Journal Winter 2010
A previous piece by Heather MacDonald appeared on this Blog in July 2009. It can be found here.
