The abandonment, by black leadership, of policies which preached empowerment and the switch to policies which emphasize victimization and entitlement seem bizarre and self-defeating to me. I don't find it surprising, though. We started at a post-slavery unemployment rate hovering at about 100%, and now it's about 25%. Still too high, but it shows that improvement is always possible. It's gotten harder, though. The 25% are the hard-core poor. The ones who didn't have the resources available to the Thurgood Marshall's of the old South, who were raised in segregation and fought their way out. Now these inner city neighborhoods are filled with the people who couldn't get out. Put enough of them in any public school and that public school will fail. The permanent underclass.
They are our problem. They are very expensive. We can't ship them to Liberia and we can't kill them. They've got to be trained from birth to become good citizens of a service based economy if we want to break the cycle of poverty, and their poverty is something we all pay for one way or another.
Yeah, but how to you pay for single motherhood? Ask them politely to stop?
Out of Wedlock Birth Rates by Race in 2014 (2015 data not yet complete)
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr62/nvsr62_03.pdf
Births to Unmarried Women
Whites: 2.9 out of 10 White children were born to a single mother in 2014.
Blacks: 7 out of 10 Black children were born to a single mother in 2014.
Hispanic: 5.29 out of 10 Hispanic children were born to a single mother in 2014.
2015 Welfare Demographics
Welfare Statistics – Statistic Brain
Whites made up 38.8 % of those on welfare in 2015 despite making up 63.7% of the U.S. population
Blacks made up 39.8 % of those on welfare in 2015 despite making up 12.2% of the U.S. population
Hispanics made up 15.7 % of those on welfare in 2015 despite making up 16.3% of the U.S. population
Asians made up 2.4% of those on welfare in 2015 despite making up 4.7% of the U.S. population
Yeah, but how to you pay for single motherhood? Ask them politely to stop?
You do it the same way you do it with anyone else. You educate them. You call hip-hop what it is, a culture of failure. The culture of the permanent underclass. You provide a culture in which they are respected. A culture in which they are supervised. Easier said than done, obviously, but that's the job. It starts with a recognition of just how bad an upbringing people get in the inner cities. Parenting matters. A lot. People love to go on about how much their folks did for them, and rightly so, but then they turn around and dismiss those who had no such support and failed in life as a result. People who are great-grandparents in their forties. Working three jobs to support everyone in her extended family. What can someone like that provide by way of long-term guidance? We've redefined the family in a lot of places, but in the inner cities it's been shredded. It's not easy to fix, but we all lose by ignoring it.
The trouble is that such an initiative cannot come from white people, but a cultural revolution within the black community. How in the world can you expect a people who developed themselves first and foremost as a counterculture in the 60's & 70's to suddenly adopt successful behavior patterns that they rejected long ago?
If you keep sucking all the talent from the community then you can't expect much good to come of the efforts of the talentless ones left behind. The notion that the "counterculture" attitudes of the 60's & 70's were formative of black culture is interesting, but unconvincing to me. Slavery created the strange, broken culture we suffer with today. The poor ones are hip hop culture, the poor black, Hispanic and even Indian kids in an inner city neighborhood adopt hip-hop as protective coloration. What about black middle class life? That's most black people, just as is the case with the white middle class. We know nothing about them.
Why should we expect poor people to be able to suddenly help themselves? To break the cycle of poverty they find themselves trapped in? Why should we expect help for the inner city poor to come from the middle class? That's not how it works. The government and charitable organizations have to try to do something, even if they're completely ineffective.
I dunno, the "legacy of slavery and Jim Crow" theory simply doesn't hold water, whereas during Jim Crow the black employment rate was much higher (higher than whites at some times) and the out of wedlock birth rate was much much much lower. Poor Asian refugees from Vietnam whose parents never seen the inside of the classroom saw a complete transition from rags to riches in only one generation. Southern California is full of wealthy Vietnamese businessmen today. The culture of Hip Hop you speak of is a counter cultural object. The Africanization of names is a countercultural initiative. Adopting different styles of dress that were never a part of the slave/Jim Crow culture or black history is a countercultural initiative.
The idea is to become different for no other reason than to be different whether it leads to bad outcomes or not. Generally there are two types of cultures in the world. Liberal cultures, who often drop their ills in order to adopt newly learned patterns of behavior from other cultures, and Conservative cultures, who often stringently hold on to their culture (warts and all). Black culture in the United States is largely a conservative culture. That's in part why politically they're one large Democrat voting block whereas more liberal whites tend to have various and different political voting blocks.
The Scottish, when taken over by the British, adopted British technology, culture, and education, shortly before becoming a bastion of philosophy and enlightenment. Certainly they hated the Brits, but they weren't too proud to see that the Brits had a more successful system/culture and adopted it quickly. The Japanese, in the days of Commodore Perry, chose to adopt the successful parts of American culture as opposed to resisting imperialism as so many other countries who got taken over did. They became one of the most powerful countries in the world and won a war against China, Russia, and Korea, and rivaled the US in the Pacific. These were liberal cultures. Blacks in the United States currently lack the capacity to drop their bad habits and adopt good ones for fear of selling out their "blackness." Older generation blacks don't do this of course, but they did when they were younger and they lack the ability to stop subsequent generations from following in their footsteps.
With the mountain of evidence of people both in the United States and abroad who were subjugated and oppressed only to turn around within one generation and realize success, the "Legacy of Jim Crow and Slavery" excuse is a bad one indeed. There are many cultures that are able to break the cycle of poverty and surpass the dominant culture in one generation given the environment enjoyed in the United States. There is no reason that blacks cannot do the same.
The idea that the government needs to "try to do something" even though they're failing is odd to me. part of the reason for the massive out of wedlock birth rate among blacks is that they've become comfortable in their poverty. There are no repercussions financially for someone born poor, never aspired to get out of poverty, and doesn't mind living off of the public dole. Before the rise of the welfare state both whites and blacks experienced a much lower rate of single motherhood. So when do we realize that we're feeding the beast and subsidizing bad behavior? And how do we stop subsidizing bad behavior without starving people to death?
