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Blacks’ White Problem
Before the 1960s, American blacks suffered from white people who actively tried to oppress them. After the ’60s, blacks suffered from white people who actively tried to help them. It was the latter who have, by far, hurt blacks the most.
Progressive policies such as:
- Minimum wage laws, which hurt the least employable workers (i.e., the least educated, least experienced, and most discriminated against)
- Occupational licensing, which reduces jobs and makes relocating to another state more difficult
- Rent control, which reduces low-income housing
- Welfare restrictions that favor single-parent families
- High marginal tax rates on earnings by welfare recipients
- Zoning restrictions, which reduce low-income housing
…hurt black Americans far more than did the infamous Jim Crow laws.
Insane? Look at the numbers:
- Between 1940 and 1960 – when Jim Crow was in full force – the black poverty rate dropped from 87% to 47%.
- Between 1972 and 2011 – when the Civil Rights Acts, the Great Society programs, and Affirmative Action firmly in place – the rate dropped from 32% to 28%.
- In 1948, the unemployment rate for blacks aged 16-17 years was 9.4% and for blacks aged 18-19 it was 10.5 percent. The rates for whites of the same ages were 10.2% and 9.4%.
- Today, the unemployment rate for young blacks is 35% – three times higher than it was in 1948.
- In 1960, 22% of black children were being raised without a father.
- In 1995, 85% of black children were being raised without a father.
African Americans were harmed far less by the systemic racism of the past than they are by today’s systemic paternalism.
In the words of Frederick Douglass:
Published in GeneralEverybody 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. Do nothing with us!
When I kneel to BLM, do I raise black people up? If so, do I not continue to have power over you? If I kneel because you have power over me, then how are we equals?
Great quote.
It was said this way, in France in 1681: Laissez-nous faire. Leave it to us. The phrase was shortened to “laissez faire”, which is the political aspect of the American philosophy.
Teachers unions and police unions can also be added to the list of burdens that progressives have piled on the backs of African Americans.
When do white people get to be part of the solution?
When we get the @#&%! out of the way.
Economist, Thomas Sowell, studied the impact of affirmative action in five countries: India (with the oldest such program), Malaysia, Sri Lanka, and the U.S. His book, Affirmative Action Around the World: An Empirical Study, documents the results of his research. He found similar outcomes across the nations studied:
I agree that welfare is destructive of families, and of other good values. It is not a racial thing. It is a problem for all races.
I do have two disagreements.
First of all, I don’t like this we-they thing. Are black Americans our fellow Americans, or not? Frankly, it often appears that they don’t want to be. This is the impression I always get when anyone talks about the “black community.”
Second of all, if we’re going to assign some collective guilt to white people for establishing unwise welfare policies, then we should assign the same guilt to black people. Actually, we should probably assign more guilt to black people, insofar as they generally provided disproportionate political support to the Democrats who put these policies in place.
True. The Progressive’s paternalist policies have had the same horrific impacts on Native Americans, Rust Belt whites, and African Americans. The policies are equal opportunity destroyers.
Thank you for mentioning that book; somehow I missed hearing about it.
The title of my piece implies collective white guilt and that implication is flat wrong. Guilt lies with the individual people who pushed for the policies I listed. Those individuals included whites and blacks and every shade in between; Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Druids, and atheists; men and women; and straights, gays, and everyone in between. The one thing that most of those people had in common was that they were Progressive.
For whites who feel guilty about their “privilege” and therefore feel the need to do something to help black Americans (even if their helping hurts), Walter E. Williams has granted a full pardon:
Mr. Riley’s book was the first thought that came to my mind, but you beat me to it!
Walter E. Williams has also noted:
Was this an exact quote, or just a paraphrase?
Williams is a careful writer and there is (I think) a glaring usage error in the case of “grievances”, which never refers as far as I know to grievously wrong acts (the intended meaning), but only to complaints.
His meaning is clear in any case. I am just curious: the mistake, which ruins the beauty of the quote, is so unexpected in the case of Williams.
Exact. Here’s the full quote:
I reject this statement if by “Americans of European ancestry,” he means people living today. If he’s simply referring to the slave owners of European ancestry, then I agree. I believe in individual guilt but not collective guilt, and certainly not collective guilt for what long-dead people did over a century ago to other long-dead people.
I’m missing soemthing here.
I agree with the substance of almost all of the items you posted. A great collection, and it is appreciated.
However, when did California colleges and universities stop the practice of Affirmative Action? Was it stopped and then re-started? Because as a Californian, I can tell you that over the past few years, the Univ of Calif system has let the Asian American community know that in order to help out with newly arrived immigrants and/or their children being given free tuition to that system, at least 6 percent fewer Asian Americans young adults will be accepted.
So maybe Affirmative Action for African Americans has been ended. But hispanic minorities who are newly arrived, they are being helped in every way conceivable.
1996 via Proposition 209
I’ve heard and read that the prohibition on pro-black and pro-Hispanic discrimination was evaded and ignored by CA colleges.
Time for a couple of anecdotes: I am old. When my sister came home from the hospital in 1941, a black nursemaid came to live with us. Her name was Louise Reese and she had been a nursemaid to white families in the South since age 16. Her people owned land and though I never met them, my impression was that they were literate and cultured. She stayed with us until she died at age 95 in about 1995. In her last years, my sister took care of her. She had converted to Catholicism and died in a Catholic nursing home south of Chicago. My sister was colicky (you would never know it now) and Louise had a big rocker where we would both sit.
It was common for middle class white families to have “colored” help at the time. One neighbor had a woman named “Bertha” to do the ironing. She did not live in, as Louise did. In 1956, I went off to college and Louise got her own little apartment near the U of Chicago, in Hyde Park near where Obama lived. Louise was a gentle soul and the young (black) supermarket manager saw to it that the freezer we got for her was always full.
When I was a senior in high school, my best friend and I used to spend Friday evenings in an all black tavern called “Ella Mae Reed’s Hideaway” at 67 th and South Chicago Avenue. We were the only two whites in the place. My buddy had worked as a helper on a beer truck that summer and Ella Mae assumed we were 21. We played bumper pool every Friday night for beers and we were very good at bumper pool. Beers were 25 cents and guys would line up to play us. You did that by putting your quarters in the table rim. Everyone was drinking and we never bought a beer. No anger. No hostility. I would never dream of doing anything like that now.
When I was in college in Los Angeles in 1958, I was walking back to my apartment one night around New Years and g]there was a party going on in a house just down the street. I walked in. I was the only white face. USC is in a largely black neighborhood then and now. I had a drink and went on my way. I would not dream of doing that now. Times have changed.
Louise holding my son who was 55 this year. She also held my youngest daughter who was 30 this year.
When Thomas Sowell was growing up in Harlem, people slept out on the roofs and fire escapes on hot summer nights. When he told this story to his university students, they looked at him like he was crazy.
Sowell started teaching before Affirmative Action. Students were lining up to take the first class he taught. He asked another professor why students would be anxious to take a class from an new and unknown professor. His colleague explained that, because he was black, he must be something special to have gotten a job teaching at Harvard. After Affirmative Action kicked in, the assumptions were reversed.
Charles Murray mentioned that when he saw black people in his Ivy League college, he assumed they were smarter than him because they had a harder road to hoe. It makes sense not to think that now.
Air conditioning wasn’t common until the 1960’s. Sowell was 20 years old in 1950.
I’m sure that when he was growing up, that New York City habit wasn’t limited to Harlem.
Gardener’s correction: row to hoe.
Juan Williams made a great point in his book Enough that Fredrick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Dubois, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X had quite varied political visions but all agreed that what ultimately mattered was black self-reliance, without which there is no true freedom. BLM is a front and wholly-owned subsidiary of the leftwing of the Democratic Party and wants permanent African-American dependence in exchange for lifetime season tickets to White Guilt Theater.