He’s 17 and has a juvenile offender record that runs back to when he was 10 years old; she’s 16 and the mother of his 8-month-old daughter.
His name is Lamont Harris. Marylanders in the Baltimore-Washington area first learned of this hopeless cretin in early July, when he was charged with firing the shot on a street in south Baltimore that left 5-year-old Raven Wyatt struggling for her life with a head wound. Harris’ arrest in the Raven Wyatt shooting was his 15th in seven years.
Her name is Dynashaya Hall. We first met her when she, with no trace of shame, consented to give a television interview about where Harris was when Baltimore cops finally caught up to him.
Her comment should have set off an even greater controversy than the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. At least it would have, if we lived in a country that cherishes family values and morality as much as it does victimhood.
“We was in bed together,” Hall told a reporter about where Harris was when he was arrested.
He’s 17 and already a career screw-up; she’s 16 and clueless. Both are black, which is pertinent to this story. They have an 8-month-old child and, assuming they were in bed to do what two heterosexuals do in that situation, were probably about to make another one.
Do you get the feeling that Obama passed on the really teachable moment that has presented itself in the last month or so? Do you get the feeling he invited the wrong people to the White House for a beer summit? He should have a dressing down summit at the White House, and the people he should have invited are Harris, Hall and whatever four people pass as their pathetic excuses for parents.
No such lectures from the president will be forthcoming, except in the most general sense to the most general audience. So we shouldn’t be surprised that the president told delegates at the NAACP convention last month:
“To parents, we can’t tell our kids to do well in school and then fail to support them when they get home. You can’t just contract out parenting. For our kids to excel, we have to accept our responsibility to help them learn. That means putting away the Xbox, putting our kids to bed at a reasonable hour. It means attending those parent-teacher conferences and reading to our children and helping them with their homework.”
Noble words, ones the delegates applauded. But they – and Barack Hussein Obama – know that people like Harris and Hall aren’t likely to be such parents, and that their parents more than likely weren’t either. So Obama made sure in his speech to fall back on the old standby: White racism.
He didn’t say the words exactly, of course. He used the new lib-think code term: “structural inequality.”
“WeÉknow that prejudice and discrimination – at least the most blatant types of prejudice and discrimination – are not even the steepest barriers to opportunity today,” Obama told the delegates. “The most difficult barriers include structural inequalities that our nation’s legacy of discrimination has left behind, inequalities still plaguing too many communities and too often the object of national neglect.”
I’ll not mince words: even if by some wave of the magic wand “structural inequality” were eliminated tomorrow, that would help people like Harris and Hall not one iota. By having a child way too young and with few to no parenting skills themselves – and with daddy likely on his way to doing a lengthy stretch in prison – they’ve more or less assured that their child will grow up poor and disadvantaged.
When Obama pointed out in his speech that black American students lag behind whites in reading and math, he failed to make this connection: The disparity starts as early as kindergarten, with parents who send their kids to school not knowing shapes, primary colors or possessing a vocabulary that will assure that they won’t fall behind.
I did a story on one Baltimore daycare center whose director told me some children there didn’t know basic words like “fork,” “spoon” or “plate.”
Black children forced to live in such environments are the victims more of bad parenting than of any “structural inequality.”
Examiner columnist Gregory Kane is a journalist who lives in Baltimore.
