Black people duped

03/07/2014

People in the media and academia are mostly leftists hellbent on growing government and controlling our lives. Black people, their politicians and civil rights organizations have become unwitting accomplices.

Ordinary black people have been sold on the importance of electing blacks to high public office. After centuries of black people having been barred from high elected office, no decent American can have anything against their wider participation in our political system.

For several decades, blacks have held significant political power. They have been mayors and dominant forces on city councils in major cities such as Philadelphia, Detroit, Washington, Memphis, Atlanta, Baltimore and New Orleans. Blacks have held administrative offices such as school superintendent and chief of police. Plus, there are 44 black members of Congress and a black president.

What has this political power meant for the socioeconomic problems faced by a large segment of the black community? Clearly, it has done little or nothing for academic achievement; the number of black students scoring proficient is far below the national average. It is a disgrace that the average white seventh- or eighth-grader can run circles around the average black 12th-grader in most academic subjects. The political and education establishment tells us that the solution lies in larger budgets, but some of the worst public school districts have the highest spending per student.

Each year, roughly 7,000 blacks are murdered. Ninety-four percent of the time, the murderer is another black person. Young black males have a greater chance of reaching maturity on the battlefield than on the streets of some cities. Black political power and massive city budgets have done absolutely nothing to ameliorate this problem of black insecurity.

Most of the problems faced by the black community have their roots in a black culture that differs significantly from the black culture of yesteryear. Today only 35 percent of black children are raised in two-parent households, but as far back as 1880, in Philadelphia 75 percent of black children were raised in two-parent households — and it was as high as 85 percent in other places. Even during slavery, in which marriage was forbidden, most black children were raised with two biological parents.

The black family managed to survive centuries of slavery and generations of the harshest racism and Jim Crow to ultimately become destroyed by the welfare state. The black family has fallen victim to the vision fostered by some intellectuals that, in the words of a sociology professor in the 1960s, “it has yet to be shown that the absence of a father was directly responsible for any of the supposed deficiencies of broken homes.” The real issue to these intellectuals “is not the lack of male presence but the lack of male income.” That suggests that fathers can be replaced by a welfare check. The weakened black family gives rise to problems such as high crime, predation and other forms of anti-social behavior.

The cultural problems that affect many black people are challenging and not pleasant to talk about, but incorrectly attributing those problems to racism and racial discrimination, a need for more political power, and a need for greater public spending condemns millions of blacks to the degradation and despair of the welfare state.

Walter Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.