Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
BLM and the “Village”
[Hat tip to Ricochet member @housebroken for alerting us to this content.]
Fifty-five years ago Daniel Patrick Moynihan published The Negro Family: The Case For National Action in which he posited that the decline in the number of black two-parent households was a barrier to economic advancement, that welfare policies created disincentives to family formation and that restoration of the family should be a policy goal.
The negative reaction was fierce. The phrase “blaming the victim” was invented to attack the Moynihan Report. To focus on choices and behaviors, especially when choices were constrained by external factors was to miss the Real Problem. (We did not have “systemic” racism in those days, only actual, overt racism.) Feminists were appalled at the patriarchal overtones. Moreover, single mothers should not be stigmatized in the name of preserving an oppressive, outmoded social institution. Virtually all homosexual rights advocates were also highly critical of marriage as an institution in those days as well. (Who knew that gays would be the first to desert the anti-marriage side?)
In particular, the reaction tried to popularize the notion that it is preferable to replace the nuclear family with a collective of some kind. The now-tiresome nostrum “It takes a village” is meant to conjure an image of a loving neighborhood of connected households with shared values and a mission to care for the young when in practice it really means atomized people lining up at the county office once a month to renew their benefits eligibility or to vote to re-elect the charlatans who imposed this outcome on them.
I question whether the idealized “village” approach has ever worked. It does not appear to be the key to success in America. The nicest neighborhoods everywhere seem to be composed entirely of buildings designed and arranged to be conducive to nuclear family-centered life rather than village living. And after careful sociological and economic research, I have painstakingly assembled the following data comparing outcomes for certain classes of persons raised in nuclear families in communities based on the nuclear family model versus persons raised by a village:
It is certainly true that African American poverty is not solely attributable to family dysfunction or that the absence of marriage and family is not also a result of other significant adverse factors. But to celebrate dysfunction or to massage fantasies of a “village” is far more likely to worsen rather than help matters.
The entire blacklivesmatter.com website reads as if it were drafted on campus by white undergraduates of a “Studies” department. It would be an understatement to say that it seems a bit detached from what would expect to hear from African Americans of one’s own acquaintance. And it turns out one cannot contribute directly to Black Lives Matter. Instead, all funds go the immensely well-funded white liberal mothership ActBlue.com, a financial structure that perfectly fits the leftist face model. Black people must not live, act or organize to help each other independently of beneficent white oversight but must instead await the outcome of the angelic battle overhead between the good white people and the bad white people.
The ongoing attempt to make African Americans mere extras in the fantasy life of white narcissists is more brazen than ever. When not Changing America from a position of power in super-savior mode, white people must beg forgiveness on bended knee while in Clark Kent mode. Clark Kent mode does not involve parting with tenure, job, home, second home, or personal cash–just oodles of expressions of guilt while knowing that the real power and safety is always still there, much like Daddy’s investment portfolio.
Even if we don’t have clear easy solutions to big issues can we still not make things worse with utter and complete BS derived from the rich fantasy lives of woke white people? I think there needs to be a movement named “Black Lives Matter So Act Like It” that does not require inputs of fake white guilt to effect needed change.
Published in General
To which I say,
Weird that BLM (Black Lesbian Marxists) would leave fathers out of their perverse vision for society.
Have to nit-pick on this one. They simply appropriated the word “marriage” to use for homosexual pairings. They seek to abolish the concept of marriage by destroying the specificity of the word.
I think you mean ActBlue. Here is an explanation Of where a donation goes.
I expressly share your reservations but emulation of natural marriage instead of an expressly Marxist ambition of replacing family altogether is a change in the right direction. Andrew Sullivan has written about the change. I will take whatever positives I can glean in this dark age.
Weird mistake by me. I had looked at the stuff. What a rogues gallery. I made the change thanks.
I suspect that BLM supporters would object that you are looking in the wrong place for children successfully raised by a village. You must look to pre colonial Africa. It worked great for a society of goat herders, subsistence farmers and hunter-gatherers. Not going to get you into Yale, or a Nobel prize, but who needs that?
We would also have to overlook the fact that patrimony, kinship, and marriage were not exactly missing from the village structure. The notion that a village was an accidental collective of adults sharing childcare duties in a non-sexist vegan collective is rather different from the traditional reality.
I’m with CJ on this one. I think that the perversion of marriage is even worse than the prior attack on marriage.
Is the data table real or a joke.
The gay Marxists want to abolish marriage in a similar fashion that the black Marxists want to abolish the nuclear family. Maybe the problem is with the Marxist part? Just guessing.
I wondered the same. Renaissance Fair Craft Sellers seem underrepresented from the “Village.”
I have always believed that we should have supported families–fathers, mothers, children, and sometimes disabled grandparents–living in poverty instead of just mothers and their children. I understand the fear that drove the country to not do this, but I believe telling mothers that they could not receive welfare help if the father was living in the home caused more pain and suffering than doing it the right way, the way G-d would have wanted. The “nuclear family” should be called that because it is the nucleus–that is, the most basic element–of our just and good society. Without its strength, nothing else works. We should have supported the existence of the family in and of itself and used our resources–education, healthcare, jobs–to help the family live. The family members need each other.
Black families were improving their lots substantially before the Great Society. They were progressing on several measures and many were clearly in the middle class with two-parent families. We did them no favors when we began welfare.
Great Post Bathos.
The destruction of the Black Nuclear Family and after that All American Nuclear families has been a goal of the Marxist Left for nearly a hundred years. Back in the day in the early thirties black men would work for less than white men, so starting with Davis Bacon in 1931 the Progressives created a employment system where the minimum wage Whites would work for was the minimum for everyone, thereby cutting out the Blacks who work for less in the employment picture. The percentage of black children born without a father started to rise immediately from just above the 3% of white families to 24% at the time Moynihan wrote his book and issued the Moynihan report, which balloons after the “Great Society” to 74% today. After Davis Bacon, came the first minimum wage, then the Taft Hartley Act and then another huge rise in the minimum wage in 1951. All these compassionate government “do gooder” acts were in fact acts to cut blacks our of a job. And they did. With disastrous consequences for the black family.
I know many would argue that there is no “Systemic Racism” built into our government structure. I would argue, however, that since blacks and other minorities have significantly less power and resources to defend themselves against the blatantly corrosive effects of the many Democrat/Progressive acts to over-regulate society to destroy working and middle class jobs, to destroy the private sector’s ability to build less expensive housing, to deny young men appropriate education, to build and maintain appropriate infrastructure and to destroy the nuclear family which hurts the young male children worst of all, among other atrocities, that all these taken together form a purposeful strategy of “systematic racism” to ruin the black family and to create a permanent black underclass that feels that the discouraging bondage of the Welfare State is their only way out.
My sense is that government structures are systems of oppression, and they have hurt blacks worse because as an out group that did suffer from racism, they were more vulnerable. As Charles Murray chronicles, white people are not immune from the effects of bad government policies and their attendant pathologies.
Nearly every victory marxists have had lately has come from inversion. The current march through corporations is their inversion of conservative values such as free speech, free association, and capitalism. So I’d be careful what you count as blessing.
Try to make that argument with a leftist. It requires previous historical knowledge, a basic understanding of economics, and you have to point out that different groups are… well… different and have different experiences. Systematic racism requires no knowledge of anything, your argument requires knowledge of several things and doesn’t immediately appeal to emotion.
Keep in mind that what existed in the “village” of absent fathers was a result of war and capture. It does demand a heavy reliance on extended and contrived familial connections.
Why those same problems exist here needs to be addressed.
I think that you’re right, CJ, though I’d add that there may have been reasons, other than (or in addition to) racism, for greater black vulnerability to the welfare trap.
Unsk, I agree with your observations about the corrosive effects of the welfare state. I’m not sure whether this is a purposeful strategy of the Left that is specifically aimed at blacks. It is possible.
I’ve actually hypothesized along these lines, about LBJ in particular. I don’t know whether he was an incorrigible racist, or whether he had a genuine conversion on the issue. But if you assume that he was utterly devoted to the suffering of black Americans, and given the politics of the time in which the Jim Crow system was no longer sustainable in the face of public opposition, I don’t see how he could have come up with a strategy more effective than the combination of the “Great Society” welfare state and the anti-discrimination/racial preference laws.
And there it is.
There’s almost no point in trying to make an argument with a leftist, except to the extent it persuades an audience. There aren’t really that many leftists. The vast majority of people aren’t “leftist,” they’re normal people who simply don’t hear a coherent conservative message. Ever.
So by all means, do, make that argument with a leftist. Make it calmly, politely, and firmly. The leftist will be unpersuaded, because leftists are, for the most part, unpersuadable. But normal people will hear it.
And that’s exactly what we have to be doing, and doing more often: making the conservative case where normal people can hear it, in tones that normal people don’t find off-putting.
Unsk, I agree with your observations about the corrosive effects of the welfare state. I’m not sure whether this is a purposeful strategy of the Left that is specifically aimed at blacks. It is possible.
Jerry ,after the lockdowns and the fawning over the BLM by the Dems, it’s no longer debatable. The Dems simply do not care about Average Americans, and simply use Blacks as pawns in their schemes to enslave the entire country, because most blacks in their present state are the most dependent on the Welfare State and are afraid of change.
As CJ points out:
As Charles Murray chronicles, white people are not immune from the effects of bad government policies and their attendant pathologies.
The corrosive effects of these policies hurt all American one way or another, but the Democrats know and have known for decades that the Blacks will be hurt by far the most since they are the most vulnerable. As Bathos pointed out, Daniel Patrick Moynihan was ripped apart for rightly predicting the dire effects of the Great Society on the black community . So it’s not like no one has ever told the Dems that these policies would hurt blacks a ton- it has been said from the very beginning of the Great Society over 50 years ago by their own people.
Ah, @unsk, but the wrong people have reached those conclusions! Anyone who takes exception to the Dems are clearly wrong and hateful! This was even true back in the 50’s and 60’s. It’s not wise to assume that because the information is out there, the Dems have learned anything. If you contradict them, you must be wrong.
Those numbers are authentic fabrications.
I was told that the impetus for Social Security/welfare was the image of a coal miner’s wife and children’s struggle after his untimely death. The system was based on the assumption that women can’t make significant money and that father’s would support their children unless they truly could not.
What it wasn’t intended to be was an optional way of living.
I think we are forgetting that culturally more and more people just want free stuff. And since no one knows where money comes from, they feel they are entitled to their share.
I have a exceptionally skilled, hardworking, divorced coworker who knows I am a conservative, though the title has never been mentioned, and one day out of the blue she said, “You know, if it weren’t for government programs, a lot of people wouldn’t have as much as they have.” I didn’t immediately understand what she was getting at, but later it occurred to me that she was justifying taxation and redistribution, as a good thing that gives people free stuff.
I think that, generally speaking, everyone wants free stuff, but some realize that it’s not theirs to have. And others are not willing to pay a hit man to take out their neighbor, or to plan a burglary for a share of the loot, are willing to, in essence, ‘pay’ someone (with votes) to take from their neighbor and redistribute it to other people, and let the taker keep a portion for himself, and get a little of the stuff themselves. This is because there is no downside to ‘getting caught’ because it’s completely legal.
This is just coveting and theft. Rioters are simply more daring about it. And the politicians do it on a grander scale, becoming millionaires.
It’s just greed all the way around.
That and, people believe in the zero-sum fallacy. People are genetically inclined to believe that the rich are rich because they stole something from poorer groups. That makes it OK to take from the productive.
Milton Friedman once mentioned, one of the hardest things to convince people of is that the poor are not poor because there are rich people.
This is why we should genetically change humanity to enable them to like capitalism.
There’s certainly that. But in my example (and maybe I’m once again being naive here) my coworker never seemed envious of the station of the rich; it’s as if she assumed that they could lose 20 or 30% of what they had and not feel it.
It’s as if they consider money not to be a zero-sum game, and that to take from the rich leaves them still, well, rich. It’s almost innocently juvenile, to my thinking.
The thinking is almost reminiscent of your father, who always had the wherewithal to give you something, a never ending font of stuff, before you got out on your own and had to work for it.
Susan: “It’s not wise to assume that because the information is out there, the Dems have learned anything. If you contradict them, you must be wrong.”
Those in control of the Democratic Party – the Hard Leftists of the Frankfurt School did not need to learn anything. They knew what they were doing. They wanted to create deep hardship in the black community and then exploit it. They were not liberals in the old fashioned sense; they did not want to help right the plight of the black community, no matter what was said. Yes, there were those then in the Democratic party that genuinely wanted to help the poor, but they have been turned and conditioned over these last few decades to believe the lies of the Frankfurt School and only now want to further the interests of Democrats in power. These dedicated Marxists wanted to create the conditions for a revolution- meaning making the lives of millions a hell on earth, in order to overthrow the government and they now so close to that goal they can taste it. That is why all hell is breaking loose.
Comment of the week?
I am actually a huge fan of the extended family, I think it’s superior to the “nuclear” one. I don’t mean a village, just Grandparents, Aunts, Uncles, and Cousins. It’s unfortunate that the concept has been hijacked by molesters. These are frauds and they shouldn’t be trusted, but the resident evil specializes in misconstruing; look at all of the racists nowadays who shamelessly use that word like a cudgel against the decent.
Now I have to do what I always do: ruin a perfectly good convo by throwing in a wrench. I recommend sticking through the first verse of the tune below – it’s brutal (language warning! Like, super-duper language warning), but if any of you fogies want to understand the confusion of the generation of divorce, I think this is place to start.
There is not much of a racial divide, but there is little unity. Unfortunately, nobody wants to answer for it.