Quit Using Slavery as a Scapegoat for Poverty in Black Communities

For decades, we have been told that all of the poverty and social issues present in black communities are legacies of slavery.  The story goes that slavery and the systems of racism that followed led to oppressing black communities, leading to high unemployment, fatherlessness, crime, and other problems.

But is that really true? Do the facts really lead to this conclusion?  Thomas Sowell at National Review doesn’t buy this, and neither do I!

Sowell believes that slavery is the scapegoat of strife in the black community. He writes:

Another cliché that has come into vogue is that slavery is “America‘s original sin.” The great Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said that a good catch phrase could stop thinking for 50 years. Catch phrases about slavery have stopped people from thinking for even longer than that.

Were children raised with only one parent as common at any time during the first 100 years after slavery as in the first 30 years after the great expansion of the welfare state in the 1960s? As of 1960, 22 percent of black children were raised with only one parent, usually the mother. Thirty years later, two-thirds of black children were being raised without a father present.

What about ghetto riots, crimes in general and murder in particular? What about low levels of labor force participation and high levels of welfare dependency? None of those things was as bad in the first 100 years after slavery as they became in the wake of the policies and notions of the 1960s.

It is time to be honest about why black communities are suffering today.  Now that we are 150 years away from the end of slavery, can we please stop making excuses and actually talk about what the welfare state is doing to our neighbors, friends, and families?!?

Can the progressives who unquestioningly worship the welfare state ask tough questions about the policies that have done absolutely nothing to solve the problems of poverty in the black community?

Most importantly, can progressives admit their policies are more about making themselves feel self-righteous without any self-sacrifice, doing so very little to solve the problems that need to be solved?

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