BY David Bowen

  The Delta has problems which outsiders, South and North, like to write about, for which they have very few solutions.
Some say we need better schools, which is true of many places in America. Getting students to stay in school, getting them to study, and having ambition is indeed a Delta problem, as for many others.
Some say we need more capital, but capital goes where there is a stable, disciplined labor force. If the Delta had the same work ethic and skill level as Middle Tennessee, then Honda and Nissan and GM would be pounding a path to our door.
The problem is not racial. It is cultural. But it affects one racial group disproportionately. Our majority population, African American, has, on average, many of the same problems as other depressed minorities in America, whether Hispanics in the Southwest and East, Native Americans in the West or Appalachian whites in pockets of the Southeast.
These problems often originated with discrimination, sometimes with isolation, but the result is the same; social and cultural values which severely inhibit progress and opportunity. Even when external repression is gone, as it is now, a new kind of self-repression holds down economic growth.
Some black political leaders find it expedient to blame white racism for their problems. That has long since been replaced by a new barrier to progress, a new-style discrimination in favor of blacks as a kind of reparations or compensation for the sins of the past. This has taken the form of contract set-asides, preferential educational treatment, and job quotas.
Instead of equal opportunity and equal access sought by earlier civil rights leaders, a new generation wants and has largely achieved a racial spoils system, benefiting a small number of blacks.
When a black majority took control of the Jackson City Council, some of its members took the view that, according to them, since white folks had been stealing for years, it was time for them to get their share. Two of them did receive their share-federal prison sentences.
Black leaders today would be better advised to address problems which seriously restrict state and regional prosperity: crime, illegitimacy, weak academic performance, school dropouts and broken families.
I was pleased to be the first Member of Congress from Mississippi in 100 years to hire black staff and send African Americans to the service academies. In years past, when I said black and white people should be treated the same, and no one should receive special benefits or be subjected to discrimination because of race, I was called a liberal. Today, when I say the same thing, I am called a conservative.
When white leaders today call for merit, excellence, hard work, deferred gratification, individual achievement, and personal responsibility, some blacks (and guilt-ridden whites) say that is "blaming the victims."
That is why black leadership is so badly needed today to change the cultural values that are restricting economic progress in the Delta, in the state and in the nation.

(David Bowen is from Cleveland, Miss, and served as 2nd District U.S. Congressman from 1973-1983. He now lives in Jackson.)