How the Welfare State Inadvertently Helped Ruin Black Communities
This article jives with the conclusions of Shelby Steele's (who is black, so if you disagree, you're racist) "What Killed Michael Brown?"
If you don't have access to the film, Steele makes an excellent synopsis of its conclusions in an audio podcast here.
After systematically dismantling the assertions that the killing of Michael Brown had anything to do with racism, Steele states:
Quote:
... If it wasn't racism that killed Michael Brown, what was it?..
...The danger in poetic truth is that it always traps us into solving the wrong problem. Many argue that white supremacy, and all the customs and bigotries it gave rise to -- slavery, segregation, discrimination, and so-on -- are what led to Michael Brown's death. While those forces certainly played a role, wasn't it actually the new liberalism coming out of the 60s that shaped the world of Michael Brown?
The enormously seductive power of post-60s liberalism was and is its promise to redeem and deliver us from the evils of white supremacy. This liberalism was so transformative than even many conservatives fell under its sway. Wasn't this liberalism far more focused on assuaging white guilt than on developing blacks?
Back in the 60s we blacks made a very bad deal with America. We demanded that America help us develop. But if this was logical it also was naïve. It seduced us into putting our faith right back into the hands of the same white America that had oppressed us in the first place.
We began to live by a formula. America's racial guilt was our power. White guilt became black power.
Of course there was a catch. To milk white guilt we always had to be victims of white racism. White racism and black victimization became the heart and soul of liberal power in America....
Black America Before LBJ: How the Welfare State Inadvertently Helped Ruin Black Communities
The dust has settled and the evidence is in: The 1960s Great Society and War on Poverty programs of President Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) have been a colossal and giant failure. One might make the argument that social welfare programs are the moral path for a modern government. They cannot, however, make the argument that these are in any way effective at alleviating poverty.
In fact, there is evidence that such aggressive programs might make generational poverty worse. While the notion of a “culture of dependence” is a bit of a cliché in conservative circles, there is evidence that this is indeed the case – that, consciously or not, the welfare state creates a culture where people receive benefits rather than seeking gainful employment or business ownership.
This is not a moral or even a value judgment against the people engaged in such a culture. Again, the claim is not that people “choose to be on welfare,” but simply that social welfare programs incentivize poverty, which has an impact on communities that has nothing to do with individual intent.
We are now over 50 years into the development of the Great Society and the War on Poverty. It is time to take stock in these programs from an objective and evidence-based perspective. When one does that, it is not only clear that the programs have been a failure, but also that they have disproportionately impacted the black community in the United States. The current state of dysfunction in the black community (astronomically high crime rates, very low rates of home ownership and single motherhood as the norm) are not the natural state of the black community in the United States, but closely tied to the role that social welfare programs play. Or as Dr. Thomas Sowell stated:
“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.”
Here’s a peek into how black America has been a victim of LBJ’s Great Society and War on Poverty....
[The rest is too long and detailed to post here, and the host site might get pissy about copyrights 'n shit. Read the rest here.]
