Why won’t America ever see a government program that teaches white men how to live responsibly? Because society expects whites to take responsibility for their lives. Even the progressive black politics of a progressive black president seem to hold whites to a standard of excellence – and blacks to an all too familiar standard of inferiority. That kind of underlying assumption, Steele writes, inevitably leads blacks toward feeling “entitled to irresponsibility”.

“We all have a job to do,” Obama said on Thursday. “And we can do it together – black and white, urban rural, Democrat and Republican.” He should have told black Americans – directly – what Steele prescribes: that they “must be agents of their own fate”.

It’s not everyone else’s problem to ensure black and Hispanic kids go to school, stay out of trouble and finish high school. That’s the job of parents. And if Obama was really serious about fixing the troubles facing black men, from childhood all the way through to a crime crisis later in life, he would advance policies that reward responsible behavior, not more out-of-wedlock births.