Musings about racial disparities and what to do about them

I'm just an armchair daydreamer, no earthly good to anyone unless my blogs might have some value and as far as I know they don't. So maybe I'm just writing to myself. Oh I knew there are a few people who read it but I don't know if they are friend or foe, foe meaning people who like to see what the idiots on the other side of issues are saying so they can be armed against them, with answers or just mockery. I don't know, but since there's nothing else I can do these days I go on writing anyway. It's in God's hands. If I'm in His will all is well no matter what. If I'm not, at the moment He's not giving me something else to do anyyway. I spend a lot of time just listening to You Tube videos, about the current social and political situations, some through Christian ministries, also John MacArthur's sermons, but also a scattering of commentaries from here and there. I've been listening to the black point of view quite a bit recently, mostly more or less liberal but anti-Woke, and some of the conservatives like Larry Elder. Although some of them don't completely discount the role of the residual effects of racism and slavery on the continuing economic and cultural disparities between blacks and other groups, they mostly reject solutions such as reparations and are critical of the Woke movement. Most of them point to problems such as fatherlessness and educational deficiencies in the black communities as the main cause of the disparities. Larry Elder points to government interventions as causing more harm than good, such as the minimum wage which deprives unskilled workers of all races of job opportunities. Glenn Loury said on one of his podcasts that he agrees with Malcolm X that the black comkmunities are going to have to solve their own problems. Loury didn't get specific about how that would be done, at least not in that podcast, maybe he does somewhere else but if so I've missed it so far. Anyway, all that is preamble to my own daydreams about some things that could possibly be done within the communities. I admit to total ignorance of what would actually help and I know it's probably empty chutzpah to say anything at all, even offensive. I'm an armchair dilletante, good for nothing. All that said, I have these daydreams. I usually think in terms of the churches getting involved. Black churches but even white churches if God so leads. The first thing I thought of was the ministry of Rosaria Butterfield and her pastor husband who started opening their home to their neighbors for Bible reading and prayer and shared meals, sometimes cookouts, always with an aim to getting to know them and understand their problems. I'll put a link below to one of her talks where she focuses on discovering that a neighbor was running a meth lab. She also goes into her own personal testimony of having been a lesbian professor of English and gay rights activist who got saved after years of hospitality from a pastor and his wife. My thoughts ran far afield of that first inspiration, trying to understand what sorts of problems might be encountered in black neighbor hoods. Gangs are one I know, the murder rate among young black men is scary in cities like chicago. What sort of hospitality could make a dent in that? Since it's probably related to the problem of fatherless homes I had to imagine men stepping in somehow to befriend these kids and try to steer them into something productive. Black men from the churches perhaps. What would it look like? I'm not sure. Cookouts and other kinds of gatherings maybe? Maybe gospel focused -- I remember how pastor David Wilkerson went from his miswest church to New York City to work with the Hispanic gangs there, which he wrote about in his book The Cross and the Switchblade. but if nonChristians got inspired to do something the focus would be different, just focused on the problems of the individual kids. Since deficient education is a problem what about illiteracy. Can that be addressed in some way on the neighborhood level? Simple edcuation around the kitchen table? What about one-on-one mentoring? There's the Big Brother program. Is that in these neibhrohoods? Often efforts that start small can grow into effective programs, but this kind of thing can get too big to be effective, better to keep it on a small local and personal scale I think. A few years ago I heard about a woman in a town near where I live who felt God calling her to help the homeless people in her community, people living in the cheap motels particularly. She would take them a bag of groceries, fix a meal and share it with them to get to know them, then try to find agencies in the community that could help them with various problems, getting a job or whatever. Eventually her personal efforts attracted others until it grow into an agency in its own right. Big enough to remain effective, not too big to become a cold complicated bureaucratic labyrinth. Maybe a useless daydream. I'm in no position to go out and actually DO anything of the sort, all I can do is daydream. I'm too old, I don't get around very well, I'm losing my eyesight, etc etc etc. And besides, I'm white. Although there's no reason whites couldn't also be involved, it's probably best if the majority are black. And if daydreams are useless, oh well. Here's a talk by Rosaria Butterfield about her hospitality ministry. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YmZlCvCGJ4 And I also googled "daily life in a black neighborhood and got some interesting hits. The first one is a black guy going into inner city Chicago and interviewing a gang. The second one is about black cultural attitudes that allow others to rip them off.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqgO7-fRiXg&t=21s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_Hd9gPx5Z8&t=32s Although these ponderings are about the black situation there are certainly problems among all groups of people that could use more neighborly involvment. I was also thinking how much desperation I felt in my own life where some neighborly interest and help might have made a difference. ///////////I must have done something that changed the format so I'm not getting paragraphs and I don't know how to fix it. Sorry.