Which is doing more harm to black Americans: the distant past or the recent past?
Conservative columnist Thomas Sowell is out today with a thoughtful column that takes a hard look at racial politics — one that condemns the progressives whose careers have depended on divisive identity politics.
Sowell argues that progressives — including most in the mainstream press — have little to gain by finding common ground with anyone who doesn’t inhabit their patch of political turf. Common ground is boring and lacks the lucrative potential that comes with manipulating public opinion, he argues.
“When the recorded fatal shooting of a fleeing man in South Carolina brought instant condemnation by whites and blacks alike, and by the most conservative as well as the most liberal commentators, that moment of mutual understanding was very fleeting, as if mutual understanding were something to be avoided, as a threat to a vision of ‘us against them’ that was more popular,” Sowell writes.
That, he argues, explains why the South Carolina story has fallen out of rotation in national media reports, while less cut-and-dried cases of alleged racial violence — like Ferguson and Baltimore — drone on and on.
It also encapsulates the hypocrisy of the progressivist strategy of blaming current social problems on the nation’s deeper history, while conveniently ignoring its recent history — a history that, in many troubled cities, owes everything to progressive policies.
The “legacy of slavery” argument is not just an excuse for inexcusable behavior in the ghettos. In a larger sense, it is an evasion of responsibility for the disastrous consequences of the prevailing social vision of our times, and the political policies based on that vision, over the past half century.Anyone who is serious about evidence need only compare black communities as they evolved in the first 100 years after slavery with black communities as they evolved in the first 50 years after the explosive growth of the welfare state, beginning in the 1960s.… Murder rates among black males were going down — repeat, down — during the much-lamented 1950s, while it went up after the much celebrated 1960s, reaching levels more than double what they had been before. Most black children were raised in two-parent families prior to the 1960s. But today the great majority of black children are raised in one-parent families.
Read Sowell’s full column at National Review Online.
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