Tuesday, July 14, 2015

Slavery didn't cause "strife in the black community"

Thomas Sowel, who is a very successful black man by the way, wrote a nice column explaining why people need to quit blaming slavery for "strife in the black community."

He wrote:
Were children raised with one parent as common at any time during the first 100 years after slavery as in the first 30 years after the great expansion of the welfare state in the 1960s? As of 1960, 22 percent of black children were raised with only one parent, usually the mother. Thirty years later, two-thirds of black children were being raised without a father present. What about ghetto riots, crimes in general and murder in particular? What about low levels of labor force participation and high levels of welfare dependency? None of those things was as bad in the first 100 years after slavery as they became in the wake of the policies and notions of the 1960s. To many on the left, the 1960s were the glory days of their movements, and for some the days of their youth as well. They have a heavy emotional investment and ego investment in the ideas, aspirations, and policies of the 1960s. It might never occur to many of them to check their beliefs against some hard facts about what actually happened after their ideas and policies were put into effect. It certainly would not be pleasant to admit, even to yourself, that after promising progress toward “social justice,” what you actually delivered was a retrogression toward barbarism. The principal victims of these retrogressions are the decent, law-abiding members of black communities across the country who are prey to hoodlums and criminals. Back in the 19th century Frederick Douglass saw the dangers from well-meaning whites. He said: “Everybody has asked the question, ‘What shall we do with the Negro?’ I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us.” Amen.
It should be noted here that blacks are responsible for over half of homicides despite making up only 13 percent of the population.  It's a fact that despite being outnumbered by whites five to one, blacks commit eight times more crimes against whites than vice-versa.  It's a fact that interracial rapes are almost exclusively black on white?  It's a also a fact that Barbary slave trade resulted in over 1 million white Christian Europeans being enslaved in North Africa until the middle of the 18th century.  The result of which did not result in an increase in crimes.

The creation and expansion of the welfare and nanny state has moved the nation away from an opportunity society to a dependency society.  This was when the government started sending checks to women who have children out of wedlock.  This did not work well for the back community, where the government became the dad.  When the welfare state started, 77 of black family homes were two-parent households, and today that number has shrunk to 25 percent, meaning that the government has replaced the dad.  One of the unintended consequences was that the government does not teach the morals needed to keep kids out of trouble, hence the increased rate in crimes.

It is a fact that the black unemployment rate for February was 10.4 percent, or double the overall unemployment rate.  The unemployment rate for black teenagers is a whopping 40 percent.  Either these kids aren't being educated, or they don't have the dads to teach them how to get a job and keep it.  Yes, that is something I learned from my dad.

I think it is clearly evident, that lacking a father, black teenagers turn to gangs, which encourage them to turn to guns and violence.  Another replacement for the father becomes the government, which does not teach culture the way fathers do.

Further reading:
  1. Allen West: Five facts we must share with every liberal
  2. Thomas Sowell: The scapegoat for strife in the black community
  3. Human Events:  Black America's real problem is not 'white racism'
  4. Wikepedia: Barbary Slave Trade

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