The Welfare State’s Legacy

Guest Post by Walter E. Williams

That the problems of today’s black Americans are a result of a legacy of slavery, racial discrimination and poverty has achieved an axiomatic status, thought to be self-evident and beyond question. This is what academics and the civil rights establishment have taught. But as with so much of what’s claimed by leftists, there is little evidence to support it.


The No. 1 problem among blacks is the effects stemming from a very weak family structure. Children from fatherless homes are likelier to drop out of high school, die by suicide, have behavioral disorders, join gangs, commit crimes and end up in prison. They are also likelier to live in poverty-stricken households. But is the weak black family a legacy of slavery? In 1960, just 22 percent of black children were raised in single-parent families. Fifty years later, more than 70 percent of black children were raised in single-parent families. Here’s my question: Was the increase in single-parent black families after 1960 a legacy of slavery, or might it be a legacy of the welfare state ushered in by the War on Poverty?

According to the 1938 Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, that year 11 percent of black children were born to unwed mothers. Today about 75 percent of black children are born to unwed mothers. Is that supposed to be a delayed response to the legacy of slavery? The bottom line is that the black family was stronger the first 100 years after slavery than during what will be the second 100 years.

At one time, almost all black families were poor, regardless of whether one or both parents were present. Today roughly 30 percent of blacks are poor. However, two-parent black families are rarely poor. Only 8 percent of black married-couple families live in poverty. Among black families in which both the husband and wife work full-time, the poverty rate is under 5 percent. Poverty in black families headed by single women is 37 percent. The undeniable truth is that neither slavery nor Jim Crow nor the harshest racism has decimated the black family the way the welfare state has.

The black family structure is not the only retrogression suffered by blacks in the age of racial enlightenment. In every census from 1890 to 1954, blacks were either just as active as or more so than whites in the labor market.

During that earlier period, black teen unemployment was roughly equal to or less than white teen unemployment. As early as 1900, the duration of black unemployment was 15 percent shorter than that of whites; today it’s about 30 percent longer. Would anyone suggest that during earlier periods, there was less racial discrimination? What goes a long way toward an explanation of yesteryear and today are the various labor laws and regulations promoted by liberals and their union allies that cut off the bottom rungs of the economic ladder and encourage racial discrimination.

Labor unions have a long history of discrimination against blacks. Frederick Douglass wrote about this in his 1874 essay titled “The Folly, Tyranny, and Wickedness of Labor Unions,” and Booker T. Washington did so in his 1913 essay titled “The Negro and the Labor Unions.” To the detriment of their constituents, most of today’s black politicians give unquestioning support to labor laws pushed by unions and white liberal organizations.

Then there’s education. Many black 12th-graders deal with scientific problems at the level of whites in the sixth grade. They write and do math about as well as white seventh- and eighth-graders. All of this means that an employer hiring or a college admitting the typical black high school graduate is in effect hiring or admitting an eighth-grader. Thus, one should not be surprised by the outcomes.

The most damage done to black Americans is inflicted by those politicians, civil rights leaders, and academics who assert that every problem confronting blacks is a result of a legacy of slavery and discrimination. That’s a vision that guarantees perpetuity for the problems.

22
Leave a Reply

avatar
  Subscribe  
Notify of
carnac the insignificant
carnac the insignificant

Another reason to end all social welfare programs

Roy

Replace social welfare programs with Eugenics.

cz
cz

i really like walter, but im as tired of this type of article as much as the kind from the victim idiots he’s disputing. i believe for his own peace of mind walter should stop beating this long-dead horse. he should focus his intellect elsewhere.
the peeps that need to figure this crap out obviously never will, so feeding them anything like common sense and the virtues of responsibility is a waste of time.
move on…

card802
card802

Move on and what cz? $22 Trillion of taxpayers dollars since the welfare state was created, and the results are worse?

Move on and just keep spending more and more and more? When and how does it end?

Martin
Martin

The flaw in the logic of both WW and cz is the same: treating all blacks as ‘the blacks’. Its not as if all blacks are exactly equal. Its not as if finding smart blacks who can be educated is all that hard. What is hard is the culture change that a smart black person needs to find a place in a mixed race non-hood middle class world.

MN Steel
MN Steel

What’s long and hard on a negro?

An IQ test, depending on white admixture.

And don’t give me the BS about cultural bias, many black families have been in the US longer than my little Finn tribe.

LLPOH

Black families disintegrated when welfare came in. The author should have been more pointed on that reality.

Card802
Card802

In previous articles, Walter, has bemoaned the fact that the welfare state destroyed the black family by replacing a father.
He’s 81 years old now, he saw the slow rise of the black race working to proudly owning their own business’s, people flocking to Harlem to see the shows, to the demise starting in the 60’s to today. Why educate yourself, or work, or live as a family unit when the state pays to keep you on the new plantation.

I don’t consider myself racist as if I believe myself to be superior to blacks, but goddam, in my dealings with blacks in construction or the blacks living in the projects we painted a few years ago, this new welfare created black breed is a lost race.

In a predominantly black school we had to renovate the boys locker room because the boys were pissing on the heat registers creating a smell that would close the school.
The registers were placed on the ceiling.
After we did the boys, two weeks later we were back to do the girls because they started pissing on the resisters.
This Michigan school ranks one of the states highest per student taxpayer spending and also enjoys the worst graduation rate.
The school was also bankrupt and the white republican governor put a black democrat in charge of finances, the state wiped the slate clean under the charge of racism in the media.

But we keep paying more and more for less and less results.

Hank Rearden
Hank Rearden

> The No. 1 problem among blacks is…

They’re black.

“Studies find that darker pigmented people average higher levels of aggression and sexual activity (and also lower IQ).”
sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886912000840

“Scholars have noted that mean levels of self-regulation differ across racial categories with Black respondents tending to score higher on measures of impulsivity compared to Asians and Whites.”
researchgate.net/publication/295097415

Blacks are more likely than Whites to be narcissistic.
sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092656611000912

“…the mean IQ of sub-Saharan black Africans is about 70 – at the borderline of mental retardation.”
journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/008124630603600101

> The most damage done to black Americans is inflicted by…

Black genetics.

Black genetics cannot be fixed by Christian faith or Libertarian economics or Progressive education or Conservative values.

Anonymous
Anonymous

LBJ created the welfare state, shortly after the execution of JFK. He did it for votes, during the civil rights era. I am sure nobody thought this would be a solution, only a temporary fix for those down on their luck.

But like every federal program, it grows, and becomes more of a political machine, and thus can never be unfunded or removed.

The simple fact of allowing young girls to determine their own fate, and providing them income for each bonobo the pop out, creates the current conditions we now see, which is a dog eat dog, jungle mentality of ghetto dwellers.

our only hope is more people like Margret Sanger.

Crawfish
Crawfish

1. You can’t use facts and logic with today’s liberal / SJW idiots.
2. I posted this video on another TBF article, the #1 cause of failure is not personally ‘owning it’.
3. Like Hillary, it’s always everyone else’s fault

hardscrabble farmer

I don’t know if I said it on the other thread, but I showed that clip to my wife who has a friend suffering from the “it can’t be my fault” syndrome.

Personal responsibility cannot be overstated. It changes everything when the first place that you look for improvement is yourself because it is one of the few things in life you actually have a shot at influencing. More people should see this, maybe as a stand alone post?

Anonymous
Anonymous

TV also came into existence. Blacks IQs were just too low to distinguish reality from fantasy.

Any hope for blacks resides in separating themselves from the Joos.

Anonymous
Anonymous

I get tired of slavery being blamed entirely on the US and the condition of Blacks today blamed on their ancestors having been slaves once.

You’d be hard pressed to find many peoples that haven’t had slavery in their ethnic background to some degree at some point in history, yet the only ones blaming their failure on that past experience are the Blacks.

And, in Muslim Africa, Blacks still practice slavery and enslave other Blacks under conditions every bit as bad (and probably far worse) than the American slaves suffered in America.

I’ve had it with the Blacks, let them start taking some advantage of all the opportunities they are presented with in America because they are Black and that I’ve been denied because I’m White.

rhs jr
rhs jr

The Welfare Will Have To End because it has already Bankrupted the USA (about $20 trillion of Treasury Debt now and $200 trillion due); the Profligate US’s Fiat Dollar’s Black Swan landed 1Sep2017 when China made the Yuan convertible to gold at their Shanghai Exchange. In months (probably not years), inflation will take off and ultimately destroy the US dollar, Economy, Treasury and the 100 million Welfare Maggots as if a Cat 5 Economic Hurricane had stretched from Puerto Rico to Hawaii. The Welfare crash will be like the passenger jets on 9/11: a sudden stop, fire, blood & body parts and a big hole. The Great Socialist Societies’ Welfare Heist was one giant Misstep for Mankind that will cause one giant hyperinflation Black Hole for the Productive Working Taxpayers/Consumers; and another Communist Revolution that We The People better win or White-Asian America will look like another Communist Killing Field.

BSHJ
BSHJ

It will take something violent and drastic to make any significant and lasting change…..there is no ‘political will’ to fix anything.

DC Sunsets

When i rates rise and borrowing collapses, also will collapse
–Welfare spending.
–Medical spending.
–Military spending.
–Higher Ed spending.
–The FIRE economy will implode entirely.

What aspect of US industry is not now heavily dependent upon borrowing? It’s going to be apocalyptic, and when All the King’s Horses and All the King’s Men try to fix it, they’ll be like fire-fighters whose hoses are filled with napalm.

Boat Guy
Boat Guy

Made some good decisions and bad decisions in my life and profited from the good and experienced lose from the bad !
One fact that I know in my 63 years every black person I have meet has had the same or better job and education oppurtunities that I had so don’t give me that white privilege nonsense . You want black Lives to matter , pick up a book and read it and another and another . Worked several shitty jobs in my time and went to night school when I could swing it . Now for the genetics the IQ factors are true and you cannot fix stupid but you can train yourself to be less stupid ! It will require you to be honest with yourself find something you can do well and go for it . If that doesn’t work try again . We all fell of a bike and we all had to get back on ! Marching in the street because a cop shot some loser does not help your situation or any injustice that may have occurred but educating yourself can work wonders

Llpoh
Llpoh

Boat guy – if every black person you have met has had the same or better education and job opportunities you have had, you either 1) came from a severely, and I mean severely, disadvantage circumstance, or 2) have not met many blacks.

If you think a poor black kid in the slums of Detroit has the same opportunities as anyone else, you are out of your mind. Getting out of there requires extraordinary luck, perseverence, and character.

I am no apologist for the general black culture. I find it despicable. They need to focus on family, education, etc., and quit making excuses. Same goes for Native Americans. But never underestimate the challenges they as individuals are faced with when born into abject poverty, ignorance, and broken or non-existent families.

DC Sunsets

I’m a bright guy, but I find life pushing me to (and beyond) my abilities to thrive at times.

I can’t imagine facing life with an IQ of 90. Or 80. Or 70.

Such people must certainly be like street urchins in Oliver Twist, shivering in the cold with their faces pressed against the window to the candy shop. They are smart enough to know what they don’t have and (if they were honest with themselves) could never hope to have.

Modern life, this world of PLENITUDE, is just a 360 degree 24/7 mocking of their inabilities. I can think of nothing more hellish. No wonder they are mindlessly enraged every waking moment and throughout their dreams.

Llpoh
Llpoh

Amen, Barnum.

Iconoclast421
Iconoclast421

“a delayed response to the legacy of slavery”

Well put. This is why education is so important. Most of these people dont know anything about the black family structure of the 50’s and 60’s. It’s not like public schools are going to teach facts like that. They only teach crap that will increase the out of wedlock birth rate.

Discover more from The Burning Platform

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading