Despite my massive brainpower, I will admit to being unable to understand some people. Philadelphia Inquirer columnist, and WURD radio host Solomon Jones would be one of those who baffles me.

Of the twenty Inquirer columns you will see if you click on the link in the above paragraph, sixteen are about race and racism. Mr Jones is an educated and successful man having been graduated, cum laude, with Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism from Temple University in 1997. He went on to be published in Essence, Newsday, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Magazine, and the Philadelphia Weekly. It doesn’t surprise me that his June 11^th column is, again, about race, but what he wrote certainly does:

It’s time to support the Black men in Philadelphia being destroyed by gun violence

Our city needs to pay for job training, therapy, and other resources so that the streets aren’t young men’s only option.

By Solomon Jones | Friday, June 11, 2021

In the streets of Philadelphia, young Black men are the likeliest victims of gun violence, and they are dying at the hands of men who look like them. Some say this is evidence that racism has no role in the murders that have spread through our community like a virus. But that’s not true. Racism is at the core. It’s just hard to see that truth through all the blood.

I know this because I run the non-profit ManUpPHL. Through a simple initiative called Listening to the Streets, we’ve spent weeks talking to some of the men who come from the Philadelphia neighborhoods that are beset by gun violence. To put it more accurately, we’ve spent weeks listening to them. In doing so I have been humbled, because they’ve taught me how much I don’t know about what’s happening in the streets of my city. They’ve taught me the underlying reasons for the gun violence, and they’ve shown me that many of the solutions being bandied about will not work.

This is not to say no one is trying. In fact, the opposite is true. Many people and organizations are trying, including city officials seeking to spend $100 million to address gun violence. But not even that much funding will stop the bloodshed if it is simply thrown into old solutions that are not drawn from the streets.

There’s a lot more at the original, but one thing is clear: Mr Jones is an articulate man. It was what came next that surprised me:

What we see now is the end result of systemic racism. The most glaring example of that is the billions spent on segregated schools that hold back the Black community. Naicere Simmons, a 26-year-old man from North Philly who participated in Listening to the Streets, explained it this way.

“It’s like I go to school, I graduate school, the only job I can get is McDonald’s? For real? No, I’m cool. I’m going to the block. Ain’t nobody trying to finish all them years of school, and then they say, ‘Yeah, you got to go to a trade school and do two years over here, and then maybe you can get a job over there, or maybe you can do another two years and maybe you can get a job again.’

“Then these white companies and big construction companies, they got nephews, brothers, uncles, all that, that they grandfather went to school and just taught them that s–t. They didn’t go to trade school and all that. They was taught it. We don’t have it. Our mentors and father figures either dead or in jail.”

You know how you get a job in a construction company? You go to a jobsite and ask for one! You’ll start out as a laborer, but if you pay attention, if you try, you’ll learn, you’ll pick up things, and you can become something more than a manual laborer.^[1]In Philadelphia’s heavily unionized environment, this might be more barriers to advancement. How do I know? That’s what I did!

So, Mr Simmons went to school, and was graduated from high school, but he can’t speak English! The only job he can get is working for McDonald’s? McDonald’s isn’t that bad; the turnover is high, so someone with drive and ambition can get ahead working for McDonald’s, if he’ll just try. Really, just what kind of better job will give him an opportunity if all he speaks is a pidgin English? And the articulate Mr Jones, in his column, told us why Mr Simmons wasn’t successful, simply by quoting him directly.

Mr Jones is not all wrong in his column. He contends that the money poured into Philadelphia’s schools is misspent, not stressing the right things.

So how do we solve the problem right now? Not by pouring money into recreation centers. Our participants told us that in the most violent neighborhoods, those centers are not safe. Not by pouring more money into schools that have failed repeatedly, no matter how much money they’ve received. Not by putting the money into traditional approaches that have done precious little to measurably reduce gun violence.

If we are to decrease gun violence, we must start by listening to the men who are living it. And then we must spend the money where it belongs — on them. Pay them to do on-the-job training in careers where there is room for advancement. Pay them to attend the therapy they need to overcome the trauma of the gun violence they have witnessed. Pay them to show their scars to the generations coming up behind them. Pay them to live.

An old friend of mine who had a plumbing business told me his secret to being able to make good money: it was because he was willing to stick his hands into other people’s [insert slang term for feces here]. That’s a nasty job, but by being willing to do that nasty work, he was earning what would today be six figures. Electricians? Electrical work isn’t fun; it can mean working out in the sun when it’s 100º or in unheated buildings when it’s 12º F outside. Pulling wire is no joke, and the detail work of connecting switches and circuit breaker boxes when your finger are numb from the cold is difficult, but if you can learn that trade, you can make decent money, and you’ll never be out of work.

And the most important skill of all is a simple one: the ability to go to work, on time, every day. It seems so simple, but it’s amazing how many people can’t do that.

Mr Jones is wrong about one thing: the education of children, regardless of sex or race, begins not at school but in the home. If the kids need to be ‘fixed’ by the time they get to school, it is almost always too late. The schools are not designed to fix kids; the schools are supposed to provide students who are already trying to take the right path with the tools they need to succeed on that path. Children need their fathers, living with and married to their mothers. The ones who don’t have that are behind from the very start.