Boys as young as 14 years old should not have to worry about being shot in the street. Unfortunately, this is exactly what young men and their parents have to worry about in the city of Chicago. A 14-year-old boy, Christopher Travis, was murdered this Tuesday in a drive-by shooting in the Woodlawn section of the city. The boy and two of his friends were shot, and he died in the hospital.

One of the other shooting victims was 12 years old; he was shot in his leg and ear. A 19-year-old boy was shot in the knee. After the shooting occurred, the car sped off. There are no suspects in custody.

The boy who died was described as a "school boy" who liked to ride his bike every day. He was a student at Emmett Till Elementary School.

Stories like this one are both incredibly tragic and so reflective of the frightening challenges of black males in America today. Homicide is the leading cause of death for black men between the ages of 15 and 34. There is also a multiplicative effect of black-on-black homicide, given that both the victim and the perpetrators are typically African-American males.

When a black male is killed by another black male, one goes to the morgue and the other goes to the penitentiary. A family is then nearly bankrupted by expensive legal fees, as they try to fight for the freedom of the man who's been convicted. This goes on for years, after going through numerous appeals, giving the perpetrator's family false hope in the process.

The victim's family experiences obvious misery of its own, as one of the sole providers of a household might be gone, leading to the man's children being raised without their father. The same is true for the children of the perpetrator, who must now spend the next 20 years visiting their dad in prison.

Of course the Mother of these children won't be receiving financial support, given that the person who helped create her children is working for slave wages. As a result, the kids are more likely than not going to end up as statistics, being caught in the web of miseducation, unemployment, death and incarceration that defines the experience of millions of black men in America.

My goal here is not to paint a doom and gloom picture of black male life. The objective is for all of us to see and clearly understand that if our children are going to have different outcomes, we must choose a different path. If we do what everyone else is doing, we're going to get what everyone else is getting.

I talked to a young woman who had three black male children in a three-year period. All of the kids had different fathers, none of whom were paying child support. I talked to the young woman about her future and the futures of her children. The painful point I had to make to her was that if she didn't change the course of her son's lives, they would end up in the same risk categories of every black male in America.

She'd already started them off without their primary male role models by not being careful about who she chose to sleep with. She was then bringing them in to a situation where she herself was not educated enough to provide for her children financially. So a lack of educational foundation creates economic problems, which for black men typically leads to unemployment, incarceration or death.

When I talk to my daughters, I tell them to understand that when you share your body with a man, you should realize he might end up becoming the father of your children. If you don't know him very well or don't see him behaving responsibly in other areas of his life, you risk bringing a child in to the world without having the love of his/her father.

If we want our black men to be successful, we must be strategic in how we introduce our black boys to the world. At the same time, black men who are not being responsible in their sexual choices should realize that every bad decision they make affects quite a few other people. In fact, even black men who make good choices must realize that they are also put at risk by spending their time with people who make bad ones.

I would love to meet the parents of the young man responsible for shooting this 14-year-old boy.

I am sure that most of us would only take 10 seconds to determine where and when this child's upbringing went wrong. Most of us can probably predict that he failed in school and there is a good chance he didn't have his father around. The point here is not to reduce black men to mere statistics. It is to say that we all need to be fully aware of the warning signs, so that we can find deliberate ways to steer our boys in the right direction. Success does not usually happen by accident.



Dr. Boyce Watkins is the founder of the Your Black World Coalition and a Scholarship in Action Resident of the Institute for Black Public Policy. To have Dr. Boyce commentary delivered to your email, please click here.