Posted on 09/10/2005 8:35:29 PM PDT by saquin
As it quickly became clear that there was a certain demographic skew among the people stranded in New Orleans, journalists began intoning that Hurricane Katrina had stripped bare the continuing racial inequity in America.
The extent to which this was hidden is unclear, actually. An awareness that a tragic disproportion of black Americans are poor has been a hallmark of civic awareness among educated Americans for 40 years now.
The problem is less a lack of awareness than a lack of understanding. The publicly sanctioned take is that “white supremacy” is why 80% of New Orleans’s poor people are black. The civics lesson, we are to think, is that the civil rights revolution left a job undone in an America still hostile to black advancement.
In fact, white America does remain morally culpable — but because white leftists in the late 1960s, in the name of enlightenment and benevolence, encouraged the worst in human nature among blacks and even fostered it in legislation. The hordes of poor blacks stuck in the Superdome last week wound up there not because the White Man barred them from doing better, but because certain tragically influential White Men destroyed the fragile but lasting survival skills poor black communities had maintained since the end of slavery.
Few thinking people regret the flower children’s opposition to the Vietnam war, sexism and racial discrimination. But these advances also spelt the demise of old standards of responsibility. Taught that criminality and violence must be judged in proportion to the extent to which poverty and discrimination have coloured one’s existence, the enlightened white person saw black violence as “understandable”.
This meant a largely theatrical black separatist ideology, drastically short on constructive aims, had a public sanction that it had never had before. Hating whitey for its own sake now had an ear among the influential and quickly became the word on the street.
There was a new sense that the disadvantages of being black gave one a pass on civility — or even achievement: this was when black teens started teasing black nerds for “acting white”.
Behaviour that most of a black community would have condemned as counterproductive started to seem normal. Through the late 1960s blacks burnt down their own neighbourhoods as gestures of being “fed up”. But blacks had been “fed up” for centuries: why were these the first riots initiated by blacks rather than white thugs — when the economy was flush and employment opportunities were opening up as never before? Because the culture had changed, in ways that hindered too many blacks from taking advantage of the civil rights revolution. Meanwhile, the most grievous result of the new consensus was black American history’s most under-reported event, the expansion of welfare. Until now, welfare had been a pittance intended for widows, unavailable as long as the father of one’s children was able-bodied and accounted for, and granted for as little time as possible.
In 1966, however, a group of white academics in New York developed a plan to bring as many people onto the welfare rolls as possible. Across the country, poor blacks especially were taught to apply for living on the dole even when they had been working for a living, and by 1970 there were 169% more people on welfare nationwide than in 1960.
This was the first time that whites or blacks had taught black people not to work as a form of civil rights. Politicians and bureaucrats jumped on the new opportunity for political patronage and votes, and welfare quickly became a programme that essentially paid young women to have children.
Only in 1996 was welfare limited to five years and focused on training for work. But by then generations of poor blacks had grown up in neighbourhoods where there was no requirement that fathers support their children. Few grew up watching their primary parent work for a living. Most people paid nominal subsidies as rent and were thus less inclined to treat their living spaces well.
The multigenerational welfare family with grandmothers in their forties became typical: young women had babies in their teens because there was no reason not to with welfare waiting to pick up the tab.
This is the hell that most of the people in the Superdome either lived in or knew at close hand, and none of them could help being stamped by it. Welfare reform was only nine years ago. The women now past the five-year cap are mostly struggling in dead-end jobs. This is better than living on the dole. But these women are weighed down by too many kids created under the old regime to have the time or energy to get the education to get beyond where they are. Poor black neighbourhoods are not what they were at the height of the crack epidemic in the 1980s, but they are still a crying shame.
The poor black America that welfare expansion created in 1966 is still with us. Poor young blacks have never known anything else. People as old as 50 have only vague memories of life before it. For 30 years this was a world within a world, as is made clear from how often the Katrina refugees mention it is the first time they have ever left New Orleans.
What Katrina stripped bare, then, was not white supremacy, but that culture matters — even if what created the culture was misguided white benevolence. Social scientists neglect that before the 1960s poor blacks knew plenty of economic downturns and plenty more racism.
But before the 1960s the kinds of behaviour so common among the blacks stranded in the Superdome, possibly including multiple rapes, was a fringe phenomenon. Only after the 1960s did it become a community norm.
Wise people tell us that poor blacks in New Orleans went to rack and ruin when low-skill industrial jobs left the city centre, a common argument about cities nationwide. But in cities like Indianapolis where the factories largely stayed close, the same degradation began — starting in the late 1960s.
Wise people tell us that housing projects destroyed poor black communities by concentrating too many poor people in one place. But in city after city, these projects were peaceful places until welfare recipients were allowed to move in in large numbers.
All indications are that the reform of welfare in 1996 is bearing fruit in terms of income and the life conditions of children. Hopefully, legions of poor black people who return to New Orleans will take advantage of the job opportunities that rebuilding a city will offer. But what we should all remember from Katrina is a tragic close-up of a group of people staggering after, first, a hideous natural disaster but, ultimately, an equally hideous sociological disaster of 40 years ago.
Did you hear about the two people in Atlanta who used their hurricane debit cards to buy louis Viton handbags? $800 each.
The cards say no alcohol or cigarettes. Forgot to mention Louis Viton.
bbbb
Brilliant article bump.
"All I have to say is 'The Bell Curve'"
Oh boy, you are just looking for trouble, aren't you? Whatever differences in average IQ, if any, that exist between various racial groups, I don't think the effect comes anywhere near explaining what we are seeing. I teach at a university and I can tell you that the difference between female and male black students is like night and day. Some of my best students have been black females - sharp, respectful and very engaged in learning. On the other hand the majority of black males have serious attitude problems - I get the impression from them that I am at best an inconvenience and they really have much more important things to be doing than listening to what I have to teach; they seldom ask questions or even make eye contact. Most of them probably won't make it to graduation and many of them don't even make it through the first 4 weeks of my class. There is much more going on here than just some small differences in average IQ between various racial groups. The thing same could be said about the dearth of caucasian students in engineering and computer science courses - again, the differences claimed in the Bell Curve are not significant enough to account for this in my opinion.
"I'm going to donate to the pet recovery agencies as a result of that interview, and to where I can get money to the children of Katrina -- in Mississippi or Alabama."
I'm going to donate to Mississippi too, because of what that virago Ann Rice wrote. But I may send a small amount to the Cathedral in NOLA, I went to Easter Sunday Mass there once and it was great.
um... consider: "did for" as an active voice variant of "done for"
as in "they're done for"
the implication may be that white "do-gooders" did in Black America.
that's an implication that it's difficult to deny has significant weight
Well written, well said.
Been saying the same thing here m'self since we started being inundated with Katrina footage.......
Not a chance in hell.
As a culture, they have been given housing, food and education, and the way their education opportunities are squandered is criminal.
The administrators of the schools that are now teaching ebonics should be arrested for stealing these kids chance at a normal education.
You really have to admire those who come from that kind of upbringing and are successful. It must take a huge amount of drive and ambition to overcome that kind of hell.
Excellent article. It's one of the best summaries I have ever read of the time-line and causes of the dysfunctionality of the black "community," which is about as much a "community" as a bunch of people sitting in the waiting room of a train station. It is simply a random assemblage of people who are stuck in the same place because of circumstances, not because they share values, goals, etc.; they are passively sitting there waiting for something to come along and make them happy, and they're angry because they dimly realize that this isn't the way life works.
The only appeal can be to individuals. Perhaps breaking up these large dysfunctional clumps of people - as has happened in the aftermath of Katrina - will give black individuals in this underclass the freedom to actually make decisions on their own, make independent choices and structure their lives on a more workable model. Churches, hope you're out there getting ready to help - because what these people need more than anything else is the message of a structured, purposeful world and their personal responsibility in it.
What a web site! New media bump!
BTTT!
Great find...thanks for posting.
Ping
Bump!
LINKS to more good writing on this subject:
Can you tell me what the best pet recovery agencies are, as I wish to donate to them as well?
I'm mostly lurkin',so as not to get flamed,... gettin' their kids to "act out",then get "Crazy Money" is quite common,... recall the little girl that trashed a school room, cops put her in cuffs, did you get to see any of the interviews of MOM ???
Not in British English. The title made perfect sense as was. It meant that White Do-Gooders had basically stabbed black America in the back.
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