By Walter E. Williams
Wednesday, July 31, 2013
If we put ourselves into the shoes of racists who seek to
sabotage black upward mobility, we couldn't develop a more effective agenda
than that followed by civil rights organizations, black politicians, academics,
liberals and the news media. Let's look at it.
First, weaken the black family, but don't blame it on
individual choices. You have to preach that today's weak black family is a
legacy of slavery, Jim Crow and racism. The truth is that black female-headed
households were just 18 percent of households in 1950, as opposed to about 68
percent today. In fact, from 1890 to 1940, the black marriage rate was slightly
higher than that of whites. Even during slavery, when marriage was forbidden
for blacks, most black children lived in biological two-parent families. In New
York City, in 1925, 85 percent of black households were two-parent households.
A study of 1880 family structure in Philadelphia shows that three-quarters of
black families were two-parent households.
During the 1960s, devastating nonsense emerged,
exemplified by a Johns Hopkins University sociology professor who argued,
"It has yet to be shown that the absence of a father was directly
responsible for any of the supposed deficiencies of broken homes." The
real issue, he went on to say, "is not the lack of male presence but the
lack of male income." That suggests marriage and fatherhood can be
replaced by a welfare check.
The poverty rate among blacks is 36 percent. Most black
poverty is found in female-headed households. The poverty rate among black
married couples has been in single digits since 1994 and is about 8 percent
today. The black illegitimacy rate is 75 percent, and in some cities, it's 90
percent. But if that's a legacy of slavery, it must have skipped several
generations, because in the 1940s, unwed births hovered around 14 percent.
Along with the decline of the black family comes
anti-social behavior, manifested by high crime rates. Each year, roughly 7,000
blacks are murdered. Ninety-four percent of the time, the murderer is another
black person. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, between 1976 and
2011, there were 279,384 black murder victims. Using the 94 percent figure
means that 262,621 were murdered by other blacks. Though blacks are 13 percent
of the nation's population, they account for more than 50 percent of homicide
victims. Nationally, the black homicide victimization rate is six times that of
whites, and in some cities, it's 22 times that of whites. I'd like for the
president, the civil rights establishment, white liberals and the news media,
who spent massive resources protesting the George Zimmerman trial's verdict, to
tell the nation whether they believe that the major murder problem blacks face
is murder by whites. There are no such protests against the thousands of black
murders.
There's an organization called NeighborhoodScout. Using
2011 population data from the U.S. Census Bureau, 2011 crime statistics from
the FBI and information from 17,000 local law enforcement agencies in the
country, it came up with a report titled "Top 25 Most Dangerous
Neighborhoods in America." (http://tinyurl.com/cdqrev4) They include
neighborhoods in Detroit, Chicago, Houston, St. Louis and other major cities.
What's common to all 25 neighborhoods is that their makeup is described as
"Black" or "Mostly Black." The high crime rates have
several outcomes that are not in the best interests of the overwhelmingly
law-abiding people in these neighborhoods. There can't be much economic
development. Property has a lower value, but worst of all, people can't live
with the kind of personal security that most Americans enjoy.
Disgustingly, black politicians, civil rights leaders,
liberals and the president are talking nonsense about "having a
conversation about race." That's beyond useless. Tell me how a
conversation with white people is going to stop black predators from preying on
blacks. How is such a conversation going to eliminate the 75 percent
illegitimacy rate? What will such a conversation do about the breakdown of the
black family (though "breakdown" is not the correct word, as the
family doesn't form in the first place)? Only black people can solve our
problems.
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