The Problem Is Jobs'
Since the demise of the Soviet Union, some Americans have been looking for an enemy. In the past week, the riots in Los Angeles and elsewhere in America have shown who the enemy is. It is us.</br></br>Our enemy is a national failure to make the commitment to produce the jobs, education, shelter, and health care for blacks and other minorities in the same degree and quality that we provide for the white majority.</br></br>But above all, the problem is jobs - dignified work without which so many black Americans, especially black men, lose their self-respect.</br></br>"Stagnation at the bottom of the income distribution, together with the poverty, disappointment, and rage of America's disadvantaged minority population, threatens our social order," wrote Tom and Mary Edsall in their brilliant book on racial polarization, "Chain Reaction."</br></br>America is really two nations divided along rigid economic class lines - the privileged who have jobs and the underclass who are denied hope because they were born with a skin of the wrong color. This ugliness has been festering for a long time: Too many of us turned our faces away from the obvious and refused to look at the reality of racism.