The article mentions Charles Murray's Losing Ground - American Social Policy, 1950-1980. I read that book when it came out in the mid-80s; you obviously have not. Murray showed that when welfare became a "right," blacks decided not to work. He showed the statistics, and they tell the tale.That isn't racism, it is just to recognize the reality that black men were cut out of the loop by the "Great Society." What the minimum wage does is to outlaw the first rung of the economic ladder, for the people with the least ability to get a good job. Thomas Sowell will tell you that the minimum wage law was first proposed by and for white racists. Sowell himself once thought the "minimum wage" law was a good idea, but he did an economic analysis of how much good it was doing - and realized that it was pernicious.
Some other poster said that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a disaster for blacks. I won't go that far, but the rest of the "Great Society" program was. Because it was socialism, and socialism is mismanagement. The fundamental principle of management has to be that a person can only be responsible for something if he has authority over it. IOW, if the plumbing leaks, kicking the cat will not make it stop leaking because that cat had no control over it in the first place. But socialism gives the authority to the government, and the individual still has to bear the results without being in control.
I'm not an Ayn Rand fan in general, but the Atlas Shrugged principle is true in the case of the black man and the "Great Society" - the black man just disappeared. And what you have in the matriachial black family is the result. The black man doesn't support and protect the black family because the government co opted him - effectively seduced the black woman into throwing him over for the government welfare check.
And what is the consequence? Half of the black children are boys - but far too often they have no positive role model not only in their own home but even in their neighborhood, to inspire them to grow up to be providing and protecting fathers. And the other half, the girls, don't have a role model for being a mother who can select and be loyal to a man who will grow (as men do) into that role.
All very well to blame "the legacy of slavery," but that is in very important ways a half-truth. For all the travails along the generations, blacks are Americans. And the truth is that if they were given the right to sell their American citizenship to foreigners and, say, move to Africa, they would be able to afford "forty acres and a mule" - but what fool would take that deal? If the Democrats had been willing to allow the process of the 1950s to extend through the 1980s, blacks wouldn't have become - become the "underclass" which this article describes. They were not the "underclass" in 1960 that they were in 1990 for the simple reason that the black family (although "scandalously" unstable by reputation at the time) was about as solid then as the white American family is now.
If you looked at the trendlines of statistics in Losing Ground, and covered up all the data after 1960, you would predict on that basis that blacks would have essentially caught up with whites within a couple of generations - i.e., about now. But the "Great Society" prevented that from happening. The "Great Society" was in its own way a horror to be compared with slavery. It is a blot on American - and Democratic Party - history.
And while you are expanding the scope of your knowledge of the history of blacks in America, take a moment to expand your knowledge of the general history of slavery. All very well to sit comfortably in your study and pound out denumciations of slavery in other times, but throughout history (and worldwide) real people were involved not only as slaves but as slave masters.
Slaves were stolen by whoever could take them, from whoever could not prevent it, by whoever could get away with it. That started a very long time ago (see for example the book of Exodus in the Bible), and (it is true) it did not end with the advent of Christianity. It did not end with the advent of Islam. In fact, when did it end? It actually still exists in places. Christians didn't take it upon themselves to end the institution of slavery until basically the lifetime of Queen Victoria (1819-1901). Up until that era not only the Christians in particular but humanity in general had tried to avoid being slaves but had not lifted a finger to prevent strangers from being enslaved.
What happened? First, European polities coalesced into states which were powerful enough to prevent slavers from stealing citizens from their countries, at least on a commercial scale. Then - concommitant with such novelties as the Declaration of Independence - Christians began to actually question the virtue of peole who held slaves or even tolerated the holding of slaves. Only then, in all of history, do you see anyone (i.e., American Southerners) attempting to justify slavery because only then was the institution under serious attack.
There was a shift in the Christian paradigm. That didn't happen in Islam, or anywhere else. What happened was that Christians, and not anyone else, came to feel a responsibility to behave toward the slave as the Good Samaritan of the Bible behaved toward the man who "fell among thieves." The result was that Christians in general, and English-speaking people in particular, actually fought for the liberty of strangers. Certainly the southerners who fought the Union Army opposed that, and they were Christians. But they were in different circumstances than those who did not have a huge racial population with the motive to start a race war - they had a tiger by the tail, and not only had a reason to hold on but a positive dread of letting go.
Net - net, slavery was abolished in North America through the Civil War, which was over secession - but secession was over slavery. Slavery was abolished elsewhere, due more than any other Christians to the influence of the British who controlled up to a quarter of the world - and to no one other than Christians. The abolition of slavery was essentially the British equivalent of putting a man on the moon. During the Victorian era, whatever else the British had on their plate they also kept a squadron of warships off the west coast of Africa to hunt down slave ships - for no other reason than (Victorian-era) Christian scruples.
And that was just some of the highlights of Thomas Sowell's Black Rednecks and White Liberals, at a bookstore near you.
To assume that black women prefer a welfare check to a long term supportive, protective relationship with a man is somewhat ridiculous from my point of view as a woman (though not black). Experience indicates that it is men who have chosen to make themselves irrelevant in the lives of their children, not women.
My own white husband decided, after six and a half years of marriage, when our daughter was three, that he didn't want to be married anymore. First he met with my mother to try and convince her that his responsibilities as a father should be assumed by her and my father (needless to say his name is mud in their house) then, failing that, he told me that as a self-respecting woman, I shouldn't accept child support from him.
The issues are complex, but have nothing to do with government or welfare except that welfare inadequately fills a gap where a man refuses to step up to the plate and take responsibility for his family. Without welfare, he would be the same irresponsible man, but his children would be in worse shape.
Marriage rates have consistently been lower for blacks than whites, even before welfare. It is also interesting to note that illegitimate birth rates began to level off in the early 90s before welfare reform. Is it possible that enforcing child support requirements has made men more responsible? I think it is. Government used to be pretty indifferent to enforcing child support orders.
If you want black men, and all men for that matter, to take responsibility for their families, hold them accountable for the children they create, don't let them use government as a 'scape goat, and don't let them blame the mothers who almost always are stuck trying to pick up the slack. Don't laugh when a man answers the question, "how many children do you have?" with "(fill in the blank) that I know of".
bttt