Yes, and intellectual honesty requires that such discussion should include the fact that slavery is a minimal or perhaps not a factor in the black experience in America today. It also has to include a myriad of well-intended but disastrous government programs of 'reparations' that were supposed to help black people but instead have forced too many into permanent second class citizen status entrenched in permanent unemployablility and generations of crime ridden poverty that perpetuate themselves. And now, in 2014, THAT is what has harmed black people for the last 60 years.
And because those disastrous policies have so enriched and empowered the permanent political class, they are not about to change their spots and do anything differently. So look to those folks for any reparations due.
PEOPLE LOVE THE PAST. It provides convenient excuses for all manner of individual or group shortcomings. Academic "experts," politicians and race hustlers use history as a cover-up. They point to the ugly facts of slavery, Jim Crow and discrimination as explanations for the high rates of black illegitimacy, crime and family breakdown. The connection between slavery and discrimination, and what we see today, is hardly ever challenged. But challenge it we must.
Only 40 percent of black children live in two-parent households. The illegitimacy rate among blacks stands close to 70 percent. The "legacy of slavery" explanation for today's weak black family structure loses all manner of credibility when one examines evidence from the past.
Even during slavery, most black children lived in biological two-parent families. One study of 19th-century slave families (Herbert Gutman, "The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom: 1750-1925") found that in up to three-fourths of the families, all the children had the same mother and father. In New York City in 1925, 85 percent of kin-related black households were double-headed. In fact, "Five in six children under the age of six lived with both parents.". . . .
. . . .Both during slavery and as late as 1920, a black teen-age girl raising a child without a man was rare among blacks. Gutman, also found in analyzing data on black families in Harlem between 1905 and 1925 that only 3 percent of all families "were headed by a woman under 30.". . . .
. . . .The "politically correct" theory is that poverty and discrimination is the cause of high crime rates. During my youth in the 1930s and 1940s, black neighborhoods were far safer than today. It would be preposterous to suggest back then there was less poverty and discrimination.
The level of social pathology seen in many black communities is unprecedented and has nothing to do with a so-called legacy of slavery, unless we're willing to say that slavery has a delayed reaction of four or five generations.
--Walter Williams PhD 1999
Walter Williams
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. . .There has been much documented racial progress since 1963. But there has also been much retrogression, of which the disintegration of the black family has been central, especially among those at the bottom of the social pyramid.
Many people — especially politicians and activists — want to take credit for the economic and other advancement of blacks, even though a larger proportion of blacks rose out of poverty in the 20 years before 1960 than in the 20 years afterwards.
But no one wants to take responsibility for the policies and ideologies that led to the breakup of the black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and generations of discrimination. . . .
. . . Civil rights were necessary, but far from sufficient. Education and job skills are crucial, and the government cannot give you these things. All it can do is make them available.
Race hustlers who blame all lags on the racism of others are among the obstacles to taking the fullest advantage of education and other opportunities. What does that say about the content of their character? . . . .
A Poignant Anniversary by Thomas Sowell on Creators.com - A Syndicate Of Talent