Think about the kinds of people who say they want to go back to the 50's. Do black people want to go back to the 50's? Was America great then? Not if you were black.
There was a whole lot wrong with the 50s according to black people. What happened between 1950 and today that destroyed black communities. What made black men abandon their families and disown their children? What made blacks the murderers of blacks? What destroyed their churches and burned down their homes? What made black men so disrespect black women?
I remember black people in the 50s. As bad as they had it, they still possessed joy in the way they lived their lives. They had integrity and a nobility of spirit.
What happened?
That's a great question. Back then blacks had respect/fear for the law. After the riots in the 60's that all changed. But before the hip hop revolution/era of the 80's where divorce became popular, they still had fathers in the home. It became cool to have a baby daddy or baby momma. We no longer shamed single pregnant women.
And this isn't just in the black community. This same bullshit ruined our white culture too. Even we have too many fatherless kids. But if you add fatherlessness to all the other problems that occur in the ghettos, it's a recipe for disaster.
Imagine growing up in a neighborhood where you don't feel safe, where you can’t sleep and where you worry all the time that something might happen to you.
Imagine shootings and stabbings and robberies that aren't just on TV, but happen down your street.
Imagine overwhelming distress that keeps your brain from being able to focus on learning. No third-grade reading program such as the one the state Legislature just approved is going to break through all that without help.
This is what life is like for many children in Michigan’s largest city.
Rochelle Riley: Children are not problems; they need solutions
I appreciate your honesty.
There is a disconnect between the way (some people on the) Left and most people on the Right frame this problem.
I see it as a series of institutional failures that prevented wealth accumulation and assimilation/socialization (which lead to hopelessness and increased crime). I'm guessing you see it as a character flaw, e.g., blacks are statistically over-represented in the lower class and in prison because of bad choices stemming from flawed character. Racists tend to ascribe this to genetic inferiority. In the 18 and early 1900s this was wrongly tied to benign physical features (thick skulls).
[FYI: many people think blacks face higher incarceration rates because of institutional racism, which is why they are more likely to go to prison than whites for the same behavior]
Anyway, here are what I see as the institutional failures that prevented wealth accumulation, which itself increased the likelihood of crime. (Both sides of the political spectrum are guilty.)
Slavery
Jim Crow
Welfare
Prison
(Welfare was in many ways an almost necessary response to the fact that many blacks in the 40s, 50s, 60s were denied jobs because of persistent institutional racism, but also because Slavery > Jim Crow prevented them from developing skills. When Reagan began to unwind welfare, prison became an unintentional solution to move jobless/unskilled blacks from deindustrialized inner cities into prison cells)
I'm not saying this problem can be fixed by government, and I think it's dangerous to make excuses for bad behavior. But I do think that if whites were brought here as slaves and denied a chance to accumulate wealth + assimilate for over 1/2 a century, they would be in exactly the same position.