(hat tip: Absinthe and Cookies)
The rain had barely stopped in New Orleans when the race-baiting began. You heard it yourself, from Kanye West proclaiming on national TV that George Bush hates black people and had given the Army permission to shoot them to Jesse Jackson comparing conditions in the Superdome to a slave ship. News commentators - almost all well-to-do, white, and liberal - seem to think that they've uncovered some great secret: masses of urban poor are black. From this stunning discovery, they leap to the conclusion that, somehow, a racist America has left these people behind and that SOMETHING MUST BE DONE!
Of course, nobody ever points out that we've spent over $6 TRILLION since the War on Poverty began in the 1960s...
A few brave commentators are daring to challenge the orthodoxy that black poverty is due to white racism. Among them is John McWhorter. Writing in the Sunday Times on Sept. 11, McWhorter blames white liberals for black poverty:
In fact, white America does remain morally culpable — but because white leftists in the late 1960s, in the name of enlightenment and benevolence, encouraged the worst in human nature among blacks and even fostered it in legislation. The hordes of poor blacks stuck in the Superdome last week wound up there not because the White Man barred them from doing better, but because certain tragically influential White Men destroyed the fragile but lasting survival skills poor black communities had maintained since the end of slavery.
Ouch. McWhorter continues, pulling no punches:
Few thinking people regret the flower children’s opposition to the Vietnam war, sexism and racial discrimination. But these advances also spelt the demise of old standards of responsibility. Taught that criminality and violence must be judged in proportion to the extent to which poverty and discrimination have coloured one’s existence, the enlightened white person saw black violence as “understandable”.
...
There was a new sense that the disadvantages of being black gave one a pass on civility — or even achievement: this was when black teens started teasing black nerds for “acting white”.
Behaviour that most of a black community would have condemned as counterproductive started to seem normal. Through the late 1960s blacks burnt down their own neighbourhoods as gestures of being “fed up”. But blacks had been “fed up” for centuries: why were these the first riots initiated by blacks rather than white thugs — when the economy was flush and employment opportunities were opening up as never before? Because the culture had changed, in ways that hindered too many blacks from taking advantage of the civil rights revolution. Meanwhile, the most grievous result of the new consensus was black American history’s most under-reported event, the expansion of welfare. Until now, welfare had been a pittance intended for widows, unavailable as long as the father of one’s children was able-bodied and accounted for, and granted for as little time as possible.
Double-ouch.
McWhorter isn't really saying anything that hasn't been said before by such people as Bill Cosby and economics professors Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams. Of course, such a bald diagnoses doesn't sit well with the 'leaders' of black America, who have a vested interest in the culture of victimhood. McWhorter writes of them:
... a largely theatrical black separatist ideology, drastically short on constructive aims, had a public sanction that it had never had before. Hating whitey for its own sake now had an ear among the influential and quickly became the word on the street.
The irascible Fred Reed was also moved to comment on black America by the images of looting from New Orleans. As he writes:
Members of my tour group in China to whom I spoke assumed that the looters were black before watching. They had seen it before. I knew it before I saw the pictures. The looters are always black except when, occasionally, they are Latino. If they were looting for food it would be understandable. But that isn’t what is happening. Few of us eat television sets. Nike’s running shoes are not particularly digestible.
Triple-ouch.
Like McWhorter, Fred is very critical of the various social programs that white liberals have tried over the years: affirmative action, welfare, quotas, etc. But ultimately, he blames black people themselves for their predicament:
With the dismantling in the Fifties of apartheid in the United States, many hoped that blacks would rise, study, progress, and become genuinely as distinct from formally integrated into the country. I hoped it too, though my expectations were low. Southerners said it would never happen, but were dismissed as prejudiced. They were right.
...
Something seems inherent in the race, or perhaps embedded in the culture, that does not understand success or morals or responsibility as others understand them. Perhaps, as many suggest, a history of being wards of the state, of being given special aid and special privilege, of having nothing expected of them, has inculcated passivity. Perhaps the persistently noted difference in measured IQ is the explanation. Be that as it may, the blacks of the rioting regions seem to labor under a crippling torpor and a dull, paralyzing lack of concern for those things that define European societies. Or, for that matter, Chinese or Japanese societies. Scholarship, reading, study do not seem to appeal. In Washington, I almost never saw blacks in the art galleries, the museums, or the public libraries. The races do not appear to want the same things, do not value the same things.
Writers speaking of the looting in New Orleans regularly say that poverty causes looting, and that as a society we should do something about it. But why are blacks poor, and what could society do that it has not already tried? Blacks are always poor, in Africa, in Haiti and Jamaica, in New Orleans. It is a global pattern. Would that it were not, but it is. No one knows what to do about it.
Well, some people do, but they are derided (if white) as bigots or (if black) as Uncle Toms. Such a 'Tom' is columinst Leighton Levy. In a column linked by Fred, Levy writes:
And just what are those guys stealing the plasma television sets going to be watching when there is no power in the entire city?
Desperation? Yeah, right. I am beginning to believe that black people, no matter where in the world they are, are cursed with a genetic predisposition to steal, murder, and create mayhem.
The entire firearm department at a Wal-Mart department store, for example, was cleaned out and the looters used the stolen weapons to rob people. How low is that? Everybody is suffering and the black people would seek to rob people who are suffering just like themselves.
And it has nothing to do with poverty. Where are the white people in all this? I am sure there are poor white people living in New Orleans, Biloxi and the other towns affected by what has been going on. Is it that the media are not showing pictures of them looting and robbing? Or is it that they are too busy trying to stay alive, waiting to be rescued, and hiding from the blacks.
I'm not going to regale you now with the standard white boiler-plate of 'I have friends who are black'. It's also not just reflexive CYA born of growing up white in modern America that makes me state my opinion that the vast majority of black people in New Orleans were NOT looters or criminals. Nevertheless, McWhorter, Fred, and Levy all have a point: when police control weakens, it is generally from a single segment of our society that the looters predominately come. When welfare checks are passed out, it seems that it is from that same segment that the majority of applicants come. That same segment provides a disproportionate number of convicts and prison inmates. Why is this?
As McWhorter intimates, black society has not always been this way. Even in the darkest days of Reconstruction and Jim Crow, many black Americans clinged to the belief that education (which they'd been denied) and hard work (which they weren't afraid to do) would eventually propel them into the middle class and earn them respectability and equality with white people. They learned pretty quickly that the white ability to hate and resent 'uppity' behavior had damned few limits, but it didn't stop them from trying. Black children could be - and were - beaten or lynched for the 'crime' of being caught with school books in the Jim Crow South. Incredibly, the State of North Carolina even disbanded its public school system for a time rather than submit to the OUTRAGE of having black children in the same school rooms as white children. Through all this, blacks perservered.
Such perserverence is not unknown today, but it seems to be the exception rather than the rule, at least among poor blacks. Middle class blacks generally seem to lead the same kind of life that middle class whites, Latinos, and Asians lead: they work, they own homes, they send their kids to college.
Is it that such a large fraction of the black community is so lacking in hope that they can be upwardly mobile that they don't bother to try? Or is it that the social safety net has become a hammock for them? How 'bad' is this 'problem', anyway?
There are many questions that can be asked and need to be answered on the subject. People have for years spoken about the need for an honest dialogue on race. Unfortunately, I can't see this happening. As we saw from the treatment that Cosby received, there are those who define 'honest debate' as 'agreeing with me' and drown out any dissenting voice. It looks as though that will happen with Katrina, and so the cycle will repeat: more government spending, more dependency, and the problem will remain with us until the next disaster leaves thousands of poor black people stranded with no way to escape.
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