THE REAL SOURCE OF GHETTO CRIME

Summer is coming. Here in Toronto, this means the murder season will
soon be upon us. Young men, most of them black, will kill each other
in nightclubs, at housing-project BBQs, and sometimes in broad
daylight out on the street.

By the standards of other major cities, Toronto is a safe place: As
Colby Cosh noted in a recent column, even Edmonton has a higher
per-capita murder rate. But agonizing over each new corpse is a local
media ritual, supplying a chance for everyone to take a crop to their
hobby-horses -- lax sentencing; the pointless gun registry; gun
imports; gangs; and, most popular of all, racism. Amid the heat, there
is little light.

This past weekend brought a notable exception -- and from an
unexpected source.

On Saturday, Toronto Star writer Moira Welsh delivered an in-depth
report on one "Steven Reid," a 16-year-old Jamaican-Canadian gang
member accused of participation in 13 robberies, one of which included
the beating of a store owner. Through interviews with those around
him, Welsh shows how a normal teenager drifted into gang culture and
violent crime.

I admit taking a wary eye to the piece. Traditionally, one of the
defining features of the Star's coverage of ghetto crime has been an
obsessive desire to pin the problem on white racism or the policies of
Mike Harris's 1990s-era government. Not so this piece. Though it gives
vague lip service to an alleged lack of "programs" available to youth,
the article makes it clear that blame lies primarily with two groups:
the boys themselves, and the fathers who abandon them.

Welsh praises the "heroic" efforts of family members who try to save
adolescents from gang life. And Steven's mother, "Isabel," certainly
falls into that category. But there's a limit to how much a single
working woman can do. The saddest part of the story is the pair's trip
to Jamaica, where Steven tries to convince his dad to come back into
his life. When Steven gets brushed off, Isabel recounts, "It was like
he didn't care anymore."

But it wasn't Steven's dad who decided to reject school and honest
employment. It was Steven. In Toronto's poorest (read: blackest)
communities, being a working stiff is viewed widely with contempt.
Instead, youths want the instant status that comes from dealing drugs,
packing a gun and flashing a lot of garish jewellery.

The key point that is too often missed in Toronto and elsewhere is that such
self-destruction is the product of a conscious choice. Canadian adolescents
are not powerless inheritors of a legacy of slavery or Jim Crow: Most of the
city's black families immigrated in recent decades, when anti-discrimination
already was well-established in law. Yet we persist in patronizing minority
communities by treating their youth as helpless pawns in the thrall of
"alienation," "racism," "marginalization" and the like. In her Sept. 27,
2005, installation speech, the Governor-General gave voice to this vague
received wisdom when she declared, "nothing in today's society is more
disgraceful than the marginalization of some young people who are driven to
isolation and despair."

It is not "isolation and despair" that cause men to abandon their
children -- but rather the disgraceful fact that such behaviour is
accepted by certain sub-cultures. The enormous discrepancy in crime
rates among Toronto's ethnic communities is matched closely by
discrepancies in fatherlessness. Overall, the percentage of Toronto
households containing young children that are headed by a single
parent is about 19%. Among economically successful minorities, such as
Jews, it is closer to 10%. But among Jamaican-Canadians, the figure is
an astounding 54%.

Nor is it "isolation and despair" that is causing young Black Toronto
men to join gangs -- but rather a cult of violence and perverse
consumerism.

This truth may be politically incorrect by Toronto's lights. But that
is not the case in the United States, which has been dealing with such
problems for far longer. On March 26, Orlando Patterson, an
African-American Harvard sociology professor, wrote an extraordinary
op-ed in The New York Times -- hardly a conservative outlet -- in
which he laid blame at the feet of a " 'cool-pose culture' of young
black men [that is] simply too gratifying to give up. For these young
men, it was almost like a drug, hanging out on the street after
school, shopping and dressing sharply, sexual conquests, party drugs
[and] hip-hop music."

That's exactly the warped ghetto world Welsh is describing on this
side of the border -- though there are few Canadian writers who'd put
things that plainly.

Between our G-G and Patterson, it is Patterson who gives ghetto
gangsters more respect. At least he treats them as autonomous
decision-makers, not unthinking pawns of Whitey.

If even the Toronto Star is beginning to realize the truth in that
approach, perhaps there is hope for this city after all.