The Sambo Thesis.

By the time this goes to print the Super Bowl will be history and the controversy over the contention that some lives are seen to matter more than others will have played itself out in the modern world of commercialism and entertainment.

Many of us have heard and seen enough and we will quietly voice our disapproval by not watching any pregame coverage and not turning the game on until the first play. This will deny advertisers millions of eyeballs and send a financial message that Saul Alinsky will never replace Abraham Lincoln.

Those of us who were around fifty years ago are not surprised at how things have unfolded. There are two names that come to mind, Stanley Elkins and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Elkins was a Harvard educated intellectual and a PhD whose doctoral dissertation at Columbia University produced Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (1959). This work, later characterized as the “Sambo Thesis”, arrived at the insulting conclusion that black Americans had been made culturally and intellectually inferior by slavery.

Elkin’s racially demeaning work was opposed by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a democrat and Assistant Secretary of Labor in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Moynihan was a trained sociologist and he argued that paying healthy, able-bodied young men to breed like wild animals with no personal responsibility for offspring was a bad idea.

Today, thanks to bad social engineering, seventy percent of black households are fractured with no paternal guidance leading to multi-generational government dependence, poverty and a circular existence of hopelessness, criminal activity and significantly shortened lifespans in comparison to all other demographics.

In spite of Moynihan’s objections, the War on Poverty and the Great Society adopted Elkin’s Sambo Thesis wholesale because white intellectuals in academia and politics did not see the colors black or white; they were blinded by the color green at the end an all-encompassing government rainbow.

Today the scorn and disrespect demonstrated by white intellectuals for black Americans is alive in Affirmative Action programs on college campuses and throughout our society in a metastasizing, discordant narrative of blame inciting post-modern racism that benefits the growth of government.

This did not come about by mistake. The Republican Party is no prize but the Democratic Party went to the dark side in 1964-1965 and today it is the epitome of pure evil. The kneeling is a genuflection to the negative forces of the Sambo Thesis.

I don't see how Elkins' thesis -- the culturally-debilitating effects of slavery -- either demeans the victims of slavery, or their descendants, or justifies a profligate welfare system.

In any case, we don't have a profligate welfare system now. Bill Clinton, pushed by the Republicans, saw to that.

The problem we have is the persistence of a depraved culture.

And what we should be arguing about is the solution to the problem, if any. (I would like to explore the ideas of Robert Cherry, as outlined in this book. )

But since this solution might require action by the state, and higher taxes, we can count on most Republicans not even to consider it. And since it would recognize that in the Black ghetto there is a 'cultural deficit', to put it politely, we can count on most Democrats not even to consider it.

So we're not going to see a solution. Just do what white liberals do: praise Black culture, and live as far away from it as you can get.