Kay Hymowitz offers the latest jottings of a liberal who cannot grasp why liberalism doesn't work. Why, oh why, are blacks, the recipients of white liberals' most compassionate attention, backsliding rather than progressing? It's a mystery -- at least, it's a mystery to those whose faith in government reconstruction of society is unshakeable. Hymowitz notes that as the Federal government acted to help blacks in the 1960s, black communities
descended into chaos:Strangely, black men were joining the labor force more, but they were marrying -- and fathering -- less.
There were other puzzling facts. In 1950, at the height of the Jim Crow era and despite the shattering legacy of slavery, the great majority of black children -- an estimated 85 percent -- were born to their two married parents. Just 15 years later, there seemed to be no obvious reason that that would change. With the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, legal barriers to equality were falling. The black middle class had grown substantially, and the first five years of the 1960s had produced 7 million new jobs. Yet 24 percent of black mothers were then bypassing marriage. [Patrick] Moynihan wrote later that he, like everyone else in the policy business, had assumed that "economic conditions determine social conditions." Now it seemed, "what everyone knew was evidently not so."
The author, like so many others, breezily assumes all black suffering can be blamed on "the shattering legacy of slavery." And fanning the flames of black resentment and white guilt is a recession-proof industry for the race hustlers. Any suggestion that blacks can improve their own lives without the tender mercies of a compassionate, ever-expanding Federal government threatens the whole racial spoils system. So when Obama told black journalists that blacks had to do a better job of raising their children, Jesse Jackson -- unaware a hot microphone sat next to him -- whispered to another panelist that Obama was talking down to blacks, and deserved -- well, you can
read for yourself what Jesse wanted to do to him.
The simple truth is that dysfunction in black communities is aggravated by the very government programs supposedly aimed at helping them. The historical record shows that blacks were making significant economic, social, and political progress before the Civil Rights movement, and started backsliding after many Civil Rights projects were implemented.
For instance, we're told that the continuing breakdown of black families is the direct legacy of slavery, since enslaved families were routinely split up and sold. In fact, slave families were almost always kept together, and in 1870, only five years after slavery was abolished, 80 percent of black children lived in two-parent homes. The black illegitimacy rate hovered around 20 percent for decades; by 1950, it had dropped to 9 percent. In 1965, however, the federal government began offering poor mothers government checks if they could prove there was no working male at home. The result? By 1975, the black illegitimacy rate had skyrocketed to 70 percent.
Historical statistics on educational performance also cast doubt on slavery as a handicap. In 1940, American blacks enjoyed an 80 percent literacy rate -- better than some European countries. In 1985, after decades of busing, which destroyed black community schools, the Educational Testing Service evaluated the literacy skills of young adults age 21-25. Only 40 percent of the blacks demonstrated prose literacy.
Incarceration rates are offered as proof of the lingering effects of slavery. The numbers are shocking. Today, one out of three black males between 16 and 29 is in prison, on probation, or within the judicial system. In 1992 there were 583,000 black men in prison and jails compared to 537,000 in college. Blacks are 44.1 percent of sentenced prisoners, while only 12 percent of the U.S. population.
And it is true that black incarceration rates are historically higher than the white incarceration rate. However, the historical direction of these disparities must trouble reparations advocates. In 1932 a black was four times more likely to be incarcerated than a white. By 1980, the disparity had risen to eight times more likely.
Certainly, disparities between the rate of incarceration for the two races persist. But is this the legacy of slavery? The state with the highest present-day disparity in the rates of black vs. white incarceration is Minnesota, which never practiced slavery, where a black is 23 times more likely to be in jail than a white. The state with the second-lowest disparity against blacks is Mississippi.
The Race Hustlers have gotten a lot of mileage out of the myth that the problems in black communities are the fault of white racism. But, as black economist Thomas Sowell has demonstrated, many assumptions by and about "civil rights" are simply wrong. Discrimination, as evidenced by studies around the world, does not lead to poverty.
For example, Chinese in Malaysia, East Indians in Africa, and Italians in Argentina faced discrimination and yet managed to build sustaining communities that enabled them to prosper. Further, economic progress for blacks was most certainly not the result of civil rights legislation. The number of blacks in professional, technical and similar high-level positions more than doubled from 1954 to 1964. Sowell also demonstrated that the percentage of employed blacks in professional jobs was the same in 1967 as it was in 1960. He concluded that "the Civil Rights Act of 1964 represented no acceleration in trends that had been going on for many years."
How do we explain that in the 1960s one out of five black children went to bed hungry, but today, after an avalanche of federal civil rights legislation, it's one out of three?
Sowell offers the most convincing explanation, that the civil rights movement hijacked historic black progress for the benefit of big government. Urban Renewal programs, welfare and busing destroyed the sustaining black communities that sheltered and nurtured black cohesion and black families. Government favors that appeared beneficial turned out to be snares that have done immeasurable harm.
This issue is not going away. It is one we must confront directly and repeatedly with the historical facts. The myth of white racism as the source of all evil is a foundational prop of the multicultural, globalist regime. Its roots stretch back to the Lincoln Cult, which proclaims a powerful leader who bypassed the Constitution as the fount of true liberty and justice. Lincoln, so goes the catechism, was a firm but compassionate healer who helped Americans recover their "true" destiny as an egalitarian, propositional nation. Today, that myth justifies DC's unlimited power to right all wrongs and manage the affairs of all of its subjects. Confronting that myth is the first step in restoring our liberty.
