In his column on this page today, Washington Post columnist William Raspberry urges former Washington, DC mayor Marion Barry to show leadership on the crisis that is engulfing America's inner cities.

Mr. Raspberry has more faith in the former mayor - who was drummed out of office after being videotaped smoking crack cocaine and is now making a comeback - than many people, but it is important to consider the message and not just the messenger and how it applies to Bermuda.

The causes of the crisis, Mr. Raspberry argues, go back to education. "Illiteracy obviously leads to unemployment, but it also leads to poor health, despair and crime," he says, adding: "You ought to check the illiteracy rates among our prison population or among the young mothers who keep our infant mortality rate embarrassingly high.

"Ignorance produces a cohort of people with no stake in the civil society, and thus is a destabilising influence. And we keep churning out more ignorance every day."

Mr. Raspberry also cites Bill Cosby's efforts to reverse this trend, noting that in his initial criticism of "knucklehead' teenagers who behave poorly and don't speak proper English didn't go over all that well except among those who didn't really need his advice".

Does Bermuda face the same levels of crime and despair that characterise inner city neighbourhoods in Washington and elsewhere in the US? Fortunately not. But the same nagging and irritating problems exist, and without leadership, they will get worse, not better.

Why do black students lag behind whites in educational attainment almost four decades after the last vestiges of formal segregation were torn down in Bermuda? And what effect does that have on economic achievement and social cohesion, not to mention the stability of civil society?

When Mr. Cosby made his comments initially, he was met with derision, both in Bermuda and in the US. But a funny thing has happened. Last month, the Congressional Black Caucus threw its weight behind Mr. Cosby, who had also moderated his message to some degree, acknowledging that racism still exists, but that parenting is the key.

At some point soon, Bermuda has to address these questions as well.

Too often, black leaders fall back on the old reliables of the legacy of slavery and segregation and institutionalised racism without looking at other causes, such as the breakdown of families, the failure of fathers to raise their children and the pervasive influence of "gangstas" in cultural life. White leaders rarely touch the issue, for fear of being labelled as racists.

There's no doubt that segregation and institutionalised racism have and do play a part in this. Part of the mystery lies in the undeniable success of black women, both in terms of educational accomplishment and in the workplace. Why don't black men achieve in the same way. And why is the overwhelming majority of the prison population made up of black men too?

There are signs that things are changing. The majority of graduates from the Adult Education School this year, as Bermuda Sun columnist Larry Burchall noted recently, were black. And there were more black and male scholarship recipients this year than in the past, a change from the recent trend that saw women alone receiving the awards.

But more needs to be done, and to do that, Bermuda (and Government is the most powerful vehicle for change in this regard), needs to come up with more and better solutions. And it needs to move away from the blame game.