Here’s the link to my column in Sunday’s Dallas Morning News. (The long version is a few paragraphs down on this page below the dotted line.)

And here’s a link to Shawn Williams’ column on much the same topic, from a different angle but not as dissimilar as I expected. In fact, they’re going  to the same point from two approaches. (We talked as we submitted them but didn’t go into detail.) Here’s a link to Shawn’s blog. Shawn’s column is really pointed, and mentions a book I just finished a few months back as well — Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. Both Shawn’s column and the book are must-reads.

Regarding my column; I’m a long writer, and good editors keep me trimmed down. Sharon Grigsby did a great job cutting my column down to newspaper size. So, hat tip to Sharon and Mike Hashimoto.

However, if you’re interested in reading the long version that includes some points that didn’t make the final cut — and no, I never said “you people” — anyway, here she is.

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Growing up with my dad was like being Daniel Larusso to Mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid. There were all these rules that made no sense. Paint the fence. Wax on, wax off. Study. Control yourself. Clean up your mess. Focus, Daniel-san.

I didn’t get it at the time, but I’ve come to learn it wasn’t to make me miserable. It was to try to make me into a man.

No easy task. A man is honest, fair and just. He has an honest — and not posturing — sense of self-respect. He’s self-reliant and he’s responsible for his family. He has humility, grace and respect for others. He practices chivalry even when it’s considered out of fashion. Above all, he has a sense of humor — especially about himself — and a sense of perspective. The software install is rough; often takes two decades before they’re retail ready.

No one likes to hear this because we’re all supposed to pretend that there’s no real difference between men and women, but there’s a politically incorrect fact of life: it takes a man to raise a man. (Stick to the truth even when it’s not popular — dad’s life lesson No. 3.)

A boy at birth is an intelligent, tool-using primate with natural instincts of aggression, competition, and, yes, violence. The potential danger and damage is manifest – look at history. Savagery is in our nature. You have to shape, curb and refine those natural instincts, so that they serve the boy in ways that are positive for him and all around him. With rare exceptions, what that requires is a father or other strong male role model in the home, every day.

This is the first thing that came to mind when, after another round of murders, I was asked why there’s so much violence in southern Dallas, especially in the black community.

Before I go any further, let’s make this clear: “Violence within the black community” doesn’t mean the majority are perpetrators or victims of violence. I’m talking about a group within a group. If you talk about the left-handed kids in a classroom, you’re talking about the five who are left-handed, not the other 30 righties. To speak of a problem within a group is not to say the whole group has a problem. Are we clear? Because study after study shows that kids – especially boys – from single-parent households are twice as likely to crimes as kids from families where the father is present, regardless of ethnicity.

So why so much violence in the black community in Southern Dallas? My answer: I think too many black males aren’t black men.

Look at the numbers. More than 70 percent births to black women are out-of-wedlock, according to the Centers for Disease Control. That means you have boys growing up never learning even the basics of manhood. Not just this house or that – whole neighborhoods.

It wasn’t always like this. Before we started killing the black family with kindness through welfare, single-parent black households were the exception in this country.

In 1960, just 22 percent of black households were headed by a single mother — less than the percentage of single-parent white households today. By 1970, it was 29 percent. By 1990, 40 percent. Today? Seven of every 10.

Call it the “Not-So-Great Society.”

Absent a father in the home, these boys don’t have a clue what manhood is, so they hide behind false, emotional and violent bravado. They think violence is an assertion of manhood. Minor insults become fighting words when your manhood is faux and fragile. What two men with confidence would let be just an argument becomes a fight. What should just be a fight becomes a shootout. Inmate logic. Be the baddest or be on the bottom bunk, so to speak. (Real men know insults come from small people not worth noticing — another lesson from dad. No. 23, I think.)

The numbers from the U.S. Department of Justice don’t lie, and you’re fooling yourself if you think it has nothing to do with the culture of false manhood that’s risen in the absence of fathers. Almost half of all violent crimes are committed by black males even though they represent just seven percent of the U.S. population. In 2005, homicide victimization rates for blacks were six times higher than the rates for whites, and offending rates for blacks were more than seven times higher than the rates for whites.

That doesn’t make it a black thing. It’s neither a race thing nor a poverty thing.

It’s a man thing.

Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, co-director of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University, cited exhaustive studies when she wrote in The Atlantic Monthly that the “relationship [between single-parent families and crime] is so strong that controlling for family configuration erases the relationship between race and crime and between low income and crime.”

If you want to stop the violence, you have to get fathers back to raising their kids. Period. Full stop.

I don’t know how to do this, but we can’t talk solutions until we’re honest about what the problem is. (Lesson No. 15 from dad.)

No matter what the flaws in the thinking of the welfare state advocates, they didn’t set out to destroy the black family. But they did. So whatever is done going forward, we’re going to have to watch for unintended consequences. And we’re going to have to accept that the welfare state is not a family value.

If you want to look at my mug shot above and discount what I’m saying because of the color you see, fine. Listen to what this other guy had to say:

“We know the statistics – that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and twenty times more likely to end up in prison… We need fathers to realize that responsibility does not end at conception. We need them to realize that what makes you a man is not the ability to have a child – it’s the courage to raise one.”

If you don’t agree with that, send him a letter. He, it turns out, is the rare exception to the usual outcome of growing up in a fatherless home. His current address is 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., Washington D.C. He lives there with his wife and his two kids.