trikingly, habits and beliefs can become so engrained that they persist in the face overwhelming evidence that shows their inadequacy.  Typically, these beliefs become a very deep part of our self-identity.  Accordingly, we find ourselves attracted to the behavior or belief in question even when we can see, via rational argument, their manifest inadequacies.  There is a term for this sort of behavior.  It is called dysfunctionality.  In a word, then, we have dysfunctional behavior when the wrong beliefs or behavior patterns become an integral part of our self-identity. 

Everyone makes mistakes.  So making a mistake does not render a person dysfunctional.  With dysfunctionality, what we have is a pattern of bad behavior or beliefs that, quite simply, defies commonsense.  Unless the behavior or beliefs are dislodged from the person’s self-identity, then the dysfunctionality will continue. 

I think that we can have dysfunctionality at both the individual and the group level. My thesis is the following:

At this point in time, dysfunctionality among blacks will do more to destroy black people than racism on the part of this or that non-black group could possibly do.

Indeed, I can put the point in a more forceful and, perhaps, alarming way:

If all racism on the part of non-blacks were to stop tomorrow, the dysfunctionality that prevails among blacks would suffice to do enormous if not irreparable damage to blacks.

To my knowledge, no other ethnic group on the face of this earth has earned this distinction. 

Anyone who is honest will acknowledge the substance of the point that I have just made in the preceding paragraph.  But its implications are staggering.  For if I am right, then blacks under slavery were far less dysfunctional than blacks are nowadays.  And that is simply a most astounding truth.  There is no evidence at all that, under slavery, blacks had a self-identity that was tied to an ideology of self-destruction akin to what we see now among blacks. 

I have been lead to believe that the civil rights warrior Angela Davis would attribute the existence of this self-destructive behavior on the part of blacks to the persistence of racism.  The problem with this line of reasoning is that there is far less racism today than there was during the slavery era and the Jim Crow era.  Yet, there was far less self-destructive behavior on the part of blacks during either period. 

Indeed, the extraordinary success of the Selma boycott proves just how wholesome the black community was under quite harsh racial conditions.  In fact, the cooperation exhibited on the part of blacks stunned whites.

If anything is poignant, it is truly poignant that we cannot find a like measure of constructive cooperation among blacks nowadays—some 40 years later.

Part of the explanation for the horrendous self-destruction that prevails among blacks is the success of the “No snitching” rhetoric on the part of black rappers.  What these rappers have done is forged a conception of black self-identity in the black community that effectively gives crime free reign.  In other words, what rappers have done is rendered blacks dysfunctional in a very fundamental way. 

The “No snitching” mantra among blacks is a KKK person’s dream come true.  From a KKK perspective, the only thing that could possibly be better than whites ridding America of blacks is blacks ridding America of blacks.  Had anyone dared suggest 40 years ago to a KKK that one day blacks would be doing just that, the KKK person would surely have supposed that the interlocutor was hallucinating. 

Plato noted that there needs to be a measure of justice even among thieves.  Blacks will not be the exception to that insight.

Now I have asked myself: Where is Al Sharpton?  Where is Jesse Jackson?  Where is Cornel West?  Of course, if Condoleezza Rice or Colin Powell were to say something they would be dismissed as folks under the control of white folks.

But not Sharpton or Jackson or West.  Yet, if there is anything that each one knows, it is that the “No snitching” policy is wreaking havoc among blacks.

Unfortunately, their silence is easy enough to explain: Better to be seen as 100% right than to do what is right for the black community.  By the time the 90s had ended, the self-identity of blacks had transmogrified into the view that nothing critical should be said anyone who, by mannerisms, ostensibly presents herself or himself as being proud of being from the hood. 

A most striking thing about dysfunctionality is that it almost always comes about for quite legitimate reasons.  There was a time when indeed poor blacks were wrongly criticized, as being uncouth, by whites and upper-class blacks alike.  Whites were merely being racist and upper-class blacks were being racist in a different way by being ashamed of less fortunate blacks.  Both lost sight of the truth that refinement is not a matter of color, but of upbringing and exposure. 

Now, from the truth that being from the hood should not itself be a source of shame there was a transmutation to the horrendously false view that any criticism of anything that takes place in the hood is a form of racism.  The idea of “No snitching” embodies that mistaken view.  Thus, in the name of black self-identity, what we now have is rampant self-destructive behavior in the black community. 

Let us not confuse issues.  I have not argued for a moment that racism does not still exist.  My point, rather, is that the prevalence of self-destructive behavior in the black community has a life that is entirely independent of racism. 

In the New York Times today, we find an article entitled “A Little Girl Got Shot, and a Crowd that Didn’t See”.  This is the second article on this very same topic.  The first article is entitled “With Witnesses at Risk, Murder Suspects Go Free”.  In the name of being black, hoodlums from the hood claim the right to kill anyone who would dare give authorities pertinent useful information that would lead to the apprehension of gang member.  It is this mode of thought that has been sanctified by black rappers in the name of black identity. 

So here we are some 40 years after the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement with the most astonishing truth that at this point in time blacks, especially those who are poor, are less free in their own neighborhoods than they were in the past. 

The chilling truth is that nothing—not even ethnic identity—can replace the good of morality.  Any widespread conception of self-identity that goes against this truth invariably turns out to be dysfunctional for the community of individuals that embrace it.  The flagrant destruction of black life in the black community is proof par excellence of this truth. 

And the proof of the dysfunctionality lies in the fact that blacks continue to proffer racism as the explanation as if there were a KKK member on each corner in the hood shooting blacks when, alas, there is no need for the KKK to do so, since the present killing rampage of blacks by blacks in the black community is a KKK person’s dream come true. 

There is no need at all for white KKK folks to yell "Kill the nigger", when there are enough blacks yelling those very words and committing that very act of gratuitous violence against blacks.  Once more: A KKK person's dream come true.