The New Segregationists

By Mario Loyola

Thursday, August 20, 2020

 

The Black Lives Matter movement, we are told, has heralded a “national reckoning” on race. Every example of racial disparities — from arrest rates to income inequality — is now proof of systemic racism, with guilt apportioned by social category, on a cui bono basis. That bodes ill for this reckoning, because many and perhaps most racial disparities today arise not from racial discrimination, but rather from the very policies that progressives are now insisting we need more of.

 

Just like “Black Lives Matter,” the phrase “systemic racism” means different things to different people. For the more radical activists, those slogans are meant to highlight a whole system of oppression and power that produces racially disparate outcomes. BLM’s founders claim that in America black lives “are systematically targeted for demise.” For them inequality is an inescapable part of the evil of capitalism. Hence their demands are almost uniformly Marxist.

 

Meanwhile, most ordinary BLM supporters, particularly those who live in affluent suburbs, use the phrase “systemic racism” in a much vaguer way, often just to highlight the racist attitudes that allegedly persist subconsciously in our institutions and habits. Of course, they have also succumbed to the bigotry that defines conservatives as “racists” and “white supremacists” and “fascists,” so they think they’re standing against all of that. But they themselves are often paragons of privilege: Despite the BLM signs on their professionally manicured front lawns, they have no intention of changing their hiring practices, or of donating a percentage of their income to BLM organizations every year, or of doing without police when they need them, or of giving in to any other BLM demand. According to various Pew polls, while 61 percent of American whites support the BLM movement, only 35 percent have a positive view of socialism, only 7 percent have a “very positive” view of socialism, and fully 65 percent view capitalism favorably.

 

Clearly, there is a considerable disconnect among the various factions of the BLM movement. But these disparate factions have several important things in common. They want to help black people, and they think progressive policies will help. They also ignore how often those policies are the very cause of the systemic racism that they think they’re fighting. And they increasingly support the frankly segregationist idea that discrimination on the basis of race is okay if it results in equity — the argument of the best-selling book How to Be an Antiracist. Most have only the best of intentions, but their tendency to imagine racism everywhere leaves them blind to all of the ways that progressive policies foment and entrench the very racial disparities they abhor.

 

If it is bad to have racial disparities in virtually every metric of social wellbeing, is it not vital to uncover the cause? Wouldn’t people who are truly committed to improving black lives want to be honest in acknowledging root causes, even if they themselves may be partly to blame?

 

Let’s start with the disparities in arrest rates and police brutality. The disparities are not just real, but astonishing.  According to reports from the New York Police Department, black men are arrested and prosecuted in about 60 to 70 percent of every category of violent crime, though they are just over 10 percent of the city’s population.  One major reason for this disparity is the disproportionate number of 911 calls from black neighborhoods. BLM supporters claim that police are unfairly targeting black neighborhoods and black lives because they are racist. The necessary implication is that 911 calls are evenly distributed but the police are largely ignoring those that come from white neighborhoods. That is patently absurd, and even if true would only show preferential treatment for black victims of crime.

 

It is indeed horrible that police in many cities spend most of their time chasing after suspects who are black. It is horrible that more than 5 percent of black males are in prison at any given time, well over five times the incarceration rate of whites. But criminal suspects in New York City are disproportionately black for the simple reason that victims of crime in the city are disproportionately black and most crime in the United States is intraracial. Laying the blame for this state of affairs on racism is contradicted by obvious facts.

 

Someone who is really interested in solving these problems might start by asking this question: Why are so many of our country’s most crime-ridden neighborhoods black? High rates of crime and vagrancy are highly correlated with other social dysfunctions, such as dependency on welfare, low labor-force participation, and family breakdown. Of course, these are the very failures that conservatives have spent generations criticizing the welfare state for. Nicholas Eberstadt takes a hard look at those failures in his 2014 pamphlet The Great Society at 50 and astutely notes that, if welfare policies are not the exclusive cause of the social dysfunctions of the Great Society, welfare is at the very least financing them.

 

This was all widely predicted at the dawn of the Great Society by, among others, one of Lyndon Johnson’s assistant secretaries of labor, the future Democratic senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The 1965 Moynihan Report was particularly pessimistic in looking at the impact of welfare on families. Not only does welfare seek to protect women from having to depend on a husband, it in effect disincentivizes marriage. The report proved all too prophetic, as the proportion of black children born to unwed mothers has soared to 80 percent in the decades since.

 

The dysfunctions of the welfare state are well understood, at least among conservatives and some of the more courageous progressives. What is less well understood about welfare is perhaps its most reprehensible aspect: It replaced the state segregation laws of Jim Crow with an enormous federal program of segregation, albeit one that is indirect and unwitting.

 

Welfare benefits set the bait, luring the lowest-skilled part of the labor force away from jobs, forcing children into single-parent homes, and depriving millions of adults of the greatest vehicle of upward social mobility available to them: the workplace.

 

These are no mere carrots. There’s a stick as well. If you lose some part of an entitlement because of something you’ve done, that loss is the economic equivalent of a tax penalty on your behavior. Poor people are not merely enticed into dependency; they are severely punished when they try to get out of it. Thus welfare, the crown jewel of the progressive agenda, levies a punitive tax on poor women who stay married, on poor parents who work, and on poor workers who acquire new skills and look to increase their household’s income.

 

By virtually every measure of human welfare (except perhaps the government’s official poverty rate), American society has made enormous gains since the 1960s, and that includes blacks. Though the main driver has been America’s amazing economic growth over the last half century, the anti-poverty programs and — more important — the civil-rights movement have certainly contributed to a more equitable distribution of gains. Yet, as Thomas Sowell has pointed out, black household incomes rose more in the decades before the Great Society programs than they have since.

 

At the creation of these programs, Lyndon Johnson made clear that the purpose of welfare was “not to make the poor more secure in their poverty but to reach down and to help them lift themselves out of the ruts of poverty.” To the extent the Great Society was meant to enhance upward social mobility, it has not only abjectly failed, it has accomplished the opposite. In fact it pays to accomplish the opposite: The U.S. spends more per capita on social welfare than any country in the socialist paradise of Scandinavia, a solution that creates the very problem that it is supposed to solve.

 

Arguably the worst impacts of the welfare state arise from the systematic exclusion of the least-skilled quintile of working-age people from the workforce. Because families that depend on welfare tend to remain on it for generations, tend to live in government-sponsored affordable housing, and tend to stay out of the productive economy except as consumers, one little-noticed consequence of welfare is the long-term segregation of the poor. And because poor people tend to be disproportionately black, the chief victims of this insidious new segregation are black. If the civil-rights movement triumphed in ending many racist practices, including the discrimination in housing that had kept blacks marginalized for generations, the new welfare programs often cut the other way.

 

It is a stark reminder of the dangers of judging policies by their intentions rather than their results. This is how Democrats, though perhaps with the best of intentions, keep blacks in a state of political dependency — dependent on the benevolence and charity of affluent whites who live somewhere else, a dark and shameful tradition that has survived in one form or another for more than 200 years.