At the end of last year’s long, hot, flash-mob summer, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter stood at a church pulpit in the City of Brotherly Love doing his best Bill Cosby impersonation. Nutter chided young black kids to “Take those God-darn hoodies down, especially in the summer….You have damaged your own race.” He also flayed parents for not keeping a watchful eye on their kids after a string of random violence in the Center City shopping and entertainment district.

A recent Pew survey found that while Nutter enjoys a high overall favorability rating, 74% believe that crime is a very serious problem in the city. In response, Nutter has embarked on a “Fun Safe Summer” PSA campaign which a Philadelphia blogger suggests is basically a plea against flash mobs.

Philadelphia’s only the flagship. Rahm Emanuel used tough talk against a spate of wildings in downtown Chicago last year, and other cities are trying to defuse these powder kegs. After widespread violence at last year’s Coventry Arts Festival, Cleveland Heights, OH city officials have canceled this year’s events.

In Kansas City, a team of researchers studied the scourge of flash mobs that culminated last summer in a shooting in the city’s prestigious Plaza shopping district. They suggested that violent flash mobs arise from boredom and a lack of entertainment options. The researchers suggested that activities such as a “College Basketball Experience” or underground rap venues would help squash the problem.

A friend of mine who was passing through the Plaza district on the night of a flash mob told me that businesses in the Plaza area had threatened to close up shop if the city or Plaza management didn’t do something about the violence. The city responded by instituting a curfew, much as Mayor Nutter has done in Philadelphia.

Violent flash mobs are indicative of several long-term social trends. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s warnings from the 1960s about the disintegration of the family—particularly the black family—have come true. Charles Murray has suggested something similar could be happening among whites. Decades of this social shift away from active paternalistic influence have led to a cultural sickness.

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When the parents don’t handle their kids, the burden falls on the community. And in the nanny-state era, “the community” is just another term for the local government. Taxes are funneled toward handling this problem, further straining an already weakened economic base.

Managing youthful exuberance—which sometimes shows up as violence—is nothing new. Teddy Roosevelt, the first progressive president, wrote in the first edition of the Boy Scouts Handbook:

The movement is one for efficiency and patriotism. It does not try to make soldiers of boy scouts, but to make boys who will turn out as men to be fine citizens, and who will, if their country needs them, make better soldiers for having been scouts.

Modern city leaders, community organizers, and academics would recoil at such a suggestion’s patriarchal authority. Such goals are different than those of a “Fun Safe Summer.” The Boy Scouts sought to actively teach—to impart some sort of culture-wide wisdom onto its young participants. A “Fun Safe Summer” isn’t so proactive. It is purely responsive. Such gimmicks accept the fact that these kids are a problem but that they cannot be improved, shaped, or molded—only temporarily distracted.

Christopher Lasch wrote in his book The New Radicalism in America that the tension between youth and age “worked itself out within the institutions of the larger culture, and the claims of class, religion, and family exercised a countervailing influence over the natural rebelliousness of the young, and in the end overrode it.”

But those institutions are now toothless. We no longer aim to shape our youth. We don’t have the manpower or the will. We only try to distract them, hoping it keeps them off our yard for just a little bit longer.

Another day, another person fired from a prestigious writing gig for perceived racism.

This time it’s Naomi Schaefer Riley, who was recently fired from her position at the Chronicle of Higher Education for calling the recent crop of dissertations coming out of Northwestern University’s African American Studies Ph.D. program “a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap.”

Riley’s comments came in response to a Chronicle piece on Northwestern’s program and the journey the academic discipline has made since its birth amid late-1960s campus protests.

Riley’s colleagues, OpEd contributors, commenters, websites, and, as of this writing, 6,157 petitioners have called for her ouster. One of Northwestern’s graduate students wrote that “one can only assume that in a bid to not be “out-n*******” by her right-wing cohort, Riley found some black women graduate students to beat up on.”

Criticisms similar to Riley’s aren’t new. Academics have long debated African American Studies’ legitimacy and rigor.

John McWhorter, a black academic critical of the discipline, wrote for the Manhattan Institute that the mission of most of these departments “is to teach students about the eternal power of racism past and present.” He added, “however, too often the curriculum of African American Studies departments gives the impression that racism and disadvantage are the most important things to note and study about being black.”

McWhorter has also argued that African American Studies explores the contributions of black intellectuals but largely ignores the contributions of black conservatives.

Naomi Riley pointed to a dissertation written by LaTaSha B. Levy who, the Chronicle said, “is interested in examining the long tradition of black Republicanism, especially the rightward ideological shift it took in the 1980s after the election of Ronald Reagan.” She criticizes black conservatives such as Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, and McWhorter for playing “one of the most significant roles in the assault on the civil rights legacy that benefited them.”

Writing in the Encyclopedia of African American Studies under the “Black Conservatism” entry, Levy accuses black conservatives of using anecdotes to “legitimize anti-black rhetoric and political stances.”

African American Studies has a leaden foot on the victimhood pedal, and its premise is rarely questioned.

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A case in point is Zachary Brewster and Sarah Nell Rusche’s article in The Journal of Black Studies titled “Quantitative Evidence of the Continuing Significance of Race: Tableside Racism in Full-Service Restaurants.” Brewster and Rusche analyze the “culture of white servers” in which white waitstaff allegedly infringe on black patrons’ civil rights by profiling them and providing them with poor service. The authors surveyed waiters and waitresses—people who earn most of their income through tips—and found that many of them assume that black patrons tip worse and display worse behavior than other groups.

This research documents a legitimate concern, but it is incomplete and typical of Black Studies research. A more complete study would consider black patrons’ actual tipping behavior.

Research such as that from Cornell’s Michael Lynn has shown that black patrons do, on average, tip less than other groups—even when controlling for other factors such as income, education, and service quality. Lynn pointed out in a meta-analysis that black patrons tipped between three and six percentage points lower than other groups. And seven percent of black patrons were reported “stiffing” their servers compared to only one percent of white patrons.

A larger understanding of so-called “tableside racism” would discuss both sides of the table. This vicious cycle is not begun and ended by white racism.

In another article for The Journal of Black Studies, Jason Gainous wrote of “The New ‘New” Racism.” The abstract reads, “the author suggests that an even more subtle form of racism may exist. Racism may actually be expressed in opposition to big government.”

Is there any escape? The Founding Fathers’ small-government ideal is “an inherently subtle form of racism” according to this view.

When Black Studies programs explore the causes of economic and social disparities, they always begin with the conclusion that white racism is the root of the problem. It assumes that all-pervasive racism is tucked behind every political, social, or economic interaction in which blacks participate and that blacks are always the victims. The discipline seems to borrow the format of the popular game show Jeopardy! It begins at the end and works back toward the question. That’s not how academic inquiry should work. And Naomi Schaefer Riley’s ouster suggests that it probably won’t change.