“White liberals, instead of comparing what has happened to the black family since the liberal welfare policies of the 1960s were put into practice, compare black families to white families and conclude that the higher rates of broken homes and unwed motherhood among blacks are due to “a legacy of slavery.”
But why the large-scale disintegration of the black family should have begun a hundred years after slavery is left unexplained. Whatever the situation of the black family relative to the white family, in the past or the present, it is clear that broken homes were far more common among blacks at the end of the twentieth century than they were in the middle of that century or at the beginning of that century-even though blacks at the beginning of the twentieth century were just one generation out of slavery.
The widespread and casual abandonment of their children, and the women who bore them, by black fathers in the ghettos of the late twentieth century was in fact a painfully ironic contrast with what happened in the immediate aftermath of slavery a hundred years earlier, when observers in the South reported desperate efforts of freed blacks to find family members who have been separated from them during the era of slavery. A contemporary journalist reported meeting black men walking along the roads of Virginia and North Carolina, many of whom had walked across the state-looking for their families. Others reported similar strenuous and even desperate efforts of newly freed blacks to find members of their families.”
Thomas Sowell
“By projecting a vision of a world in which the problems of blacks are the consequences of the actions of whites, either immediately or in times past, white liberals have provided a blanket excuse for shortcomings and even crimes by blacks. The very possibility of any internal cultural sources of the problems of blacks has been banished from consideration by the fashionable phrase “blaming the victim.” “
Thomas Sowell
“The general orientation of white liberals has been one of “What can we do for them?” What blacks can do for themselves has not only been of lesser interest, much of what blacks have in fact already done for themselves has been overshadowed by liberal attempts to get them special dispensations-whether affirmative action, reparations for slavery, or other race-based benefits-even when the net effect of these has been much less than the effects of blacks own self-advancement.”
Thomas Sowell
