The current problems facing blacks in America owe more to the Great
Society than to slavery.
Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said there were “phrases
that serve as an excuse for not thinking.” One of these phrases that
substitute for thought today is one that depicts the current problems of
blacks in America as “a legacy of slavery.”
New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof asserts that there is
“overwhelming evidence that centuries of racial subjugation still shape
inequity in the 21st century” and he mentions “the lingering effects of
slavery.” But before we become overwhelmed, that evidence should be
checked out.
The evidence offered by Mr. Kristof in the November 16 issue of the New
York Times seems considerably short of overwhelming, to put it
charitably. He cites a study showing that “counties in America that had a
higher proportion of slaves in 1860 are still more unequal today.” Has
he never heard statisticians’ repeated warnings that correlation is not
causation?
The South long remained a region that blacks fled by the millions — for
very good reasons. But, in more recent years, the net migration of
blacks has been from the North to the South. No doubt they have good
reasons for that as well.
But there is no reason to believe that blacks today are unaware of the
history of slavery or of the Jim Crow era in the South. Indeed, there
are black “leaders” who seem to talk about nothing else. Yet blacks who
are moving back to the South seem more concerned with the present and
the future than with the past.
Kristof’s other “overwhelming” evidence of the current effects of past
slavery is that blacks do not have as much income as whites. But Puerto
Ricans do not have as much income as Japanese Americans. Mexican
Americans do not have as much income as Cuban Americans. All sorts of
people do not have as much income as all sorts of other people, not only
in the United States, but in countries around the world. And most of
these people were never enslaved.
If we wanted to be serious about evidence, we might compare where blacks
stood a hundred years after the end of slavery with where they stood
after 30 years of the liberal welfare state. In other words, we could
compare hard evidence on “the legacy of slavery” with hard evidence on
the legacy of liberals.
Despite the grand myth that black economic progress began or accelerated
with the passage of the Civil Rights laws and “War on Poverty” programs
of the 1960s, the cold fact is that the poverty rate among blacks fell
from 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent by 1960. This was before any of
those programs began.
Over the next 20 years, the poverty rate among blacks fell another 18
percentage points, compared to the 40-point drop in the previous 20
years. This was the continuation of a previous economic trend, at a
slower rate of progress, not the economic grand deliverance proclaimed
by liberals and self-serving black “leaders.”
Ending the Jim Crow laws was a landmark achievement. But, despite the
great proliferation of black political and other “leaders” that resulted
from the laws and policies of the 1960s, nothing comparable happened
economically. And there were serious retrogressions socially.
Nearly a hundred years of the supposed “legacy of slavery” found most
black children being raised in two-parent families in 1960. But thirty
years after the liberal welfare state found the great majority of black
children being raised by a single parent.
The murder rate among blacks in 1960 was one-half of what it became 20
years later, after a legacy of liberals’ law-enforcement policies.
Public-housing projects in the first half of the 20th century were
clean, safe places, where people slept outside on hot summer nights,
when they were too poor to afford air conditioning. That was before
admissions standards for public-housing projects were lowered or
abandoned, in the euphoria of liberal non-judgmental notions. And it was
before the toxic message of victimhood was spread by liberals. We all
know what hell holes public housing has become in our times. The same
toxic message produced similar social results among lower-income people
in England, despite an absence of a “legacy of slavery” there.
If we are to go by evidence of social retrogression, liberals have
wreaked more havoc on blacks than the supposed “legacy of slavery” they
talk about. Liberals should heed the title of Jason Riley’s insightful
new book, Please Stop Helping Us.
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