The Left's lame attempt to assign abstract class causes to black poverty

I'm seeing a meme develop in response to two recent events.  The events are the MEC's introduction of the My Brother's keeper initiative, and Paul Ryan's remark on Bill Bennett's radio show that inner-city black culture is "in a tailspin."

An article at Think Progress.org, the broad scope of which is the parental governing style of the MEC, discusses Dr. Brittney Cooper's concerns that the MEC is putting too much emphasis on the problem of family breakdown and not enough on - well, let's let her explain it:

When writing about the program, Salon’s Dr. Brittney Cooper described himas “donning the role of father-in-chief” for black people while introducing My Brother’s Keeper.

But there are potential pitfalls in playing the role of America’s dad, too. Obama has drawn some criticism for over-emphasizing black men’s responsibility to step up. “Like many African-American men, the president has bought into the narrative about the problems of absentee black fathers and about the potential danger and destructiveness of fatherless black sons,” Cooper notes in Salon. Cooper wrote about these concerns earlier for Ebony last year, lamenting Obama’s decision to blame “broken black families” for much the much larger structural issues of poverty and violence. And even though Cooper is quoted here, she’s hardly the only person to make this point.

Well, sheesh, where does she think the poverty and violence come from?  Oh, that's right.  Systemic racism!  Structural bigotry!

I have to say that, while, in the last few years, Andrew Sullivan has written very little I've found admirable, in his piece today he sticks up for Paul Ryan against accusations of racism.  He even sticks up for Charles Murray in the process:

He noted that “Charles Murray or Bob Putnam over at Harvard – those guys have written books on this.” Cue liberal freakout. Josh Marshall focuses on the citation of Murray:
When you start off by basing your arguments around the work of Charles Murray you just lose your credibility from the start as someone actually interested in addressing poverty or joblessness or really doing anything other than coming up with reasons to cut off what little assistance society provides for its most marginalized members or, alternatively, pumping up people with racial resentments against black people and giving them ersatz ‘scholarship’ to justify their racial antipathies.
That’s because Murray’s public career has been based on pushing the idea that black urban poverty is primarily the fault of black people and their diseased ‘culture.’ Relatedly, and more controversially, he has argued that black people are genetically inferior to white people and other notional races with regards to intelligence. Yes, that last part should be crystal clear: Murray is best known for attempting to marshal social science evidence to argue that black people are genetically not as smart as white people.
Sigh. Josh seems to be arguing that Murray blames all resilient urban black poverty on culture …. and then blames it all on genes! Pick one canard, would be my advice. And the truth is: in The Bell Curve, Murray was concerned about the role of genes andenvironment in the resilient IQ differentials among different ethnic groups, as anyone who actually read his book (I did, most liberals wouldn’t) would know. As And it is simply untrue that Murray has argued that “black people aregenetically inferior to white people and other notional races with regards to intelligence.” Murray’s work specifically insists that there are countless African-Americans with higher IQs than countless whites and Asians and Hispanics. (He has recently focused his efforts on white poverty as well – which would seem to disprove some of Josh’s claims.) It’s just that the bell curve (which was the title of the whole fricking book) starts at a slightly different place for different racial groupings – something that drives blank slate liberals nuts with cognitive dissonance. Years later, the differentials still exist. Why do you think there are de facto quotas to prevent brainy Asians from dominating the Ivy League? But of course, nothing drives ideologues nuts like reality.
One more thing: I’m sure Murray has gotten used to this distortion of his work. But it still strikes me as outrageous that a scholar like Murray is subjected to being called a racist of the worst sort and a dishonest scholar – simply because the resilient data support his core point, and because he dares to cite genetics. (It’s an old and great line that liberals believe nothing is genetic but homosexuality, while conservatives believe everything is genetic except homosexuality. For my part, it seems pretty damn obvious that almost all human behavior is a function of both – and the interaction between them.) 

All this makes the task of deeply concerned black thinkers and activists focused on eradicating the cycle of the aforementioned poverty and violence - people like Star Parker and  Robert Woodson - all the more daunting.  They aren't interested in abstract smokescreens that perpetuate dependence.  They would genuinely like to solve the problems of their community.

It will be interesting to see how long this Brother's Keeper program stays true to its original mission.  Will its champions, including, ostensibly, the Most Equal Comrade, feel compelled to dilute the focus in order to appease the class-warfare stormtroopers?  I'd say the clock is ticking.  The program had better show some results early on, so as to have some substantiation with which to hold the hardest-core pro-dependency forces at bay.