The collapse of the 2-parent black family…
…was not a legacy of slavery, although it is often claimed that it is. It happened much, much more recently, as this article by Walter E. Williams points out.
The article is a very short version of points that Thomas Sowell has been making for decades. Watch this debate from 1980, and note that the situation has only gotten much worse since then:
Both Sowell and Williams are black, but although I’m very familiar with Sowell’s work I don’t recall ever having heard of Williams before. But when I looked him up and started reading his personal history, it struck me that it resembles Sowell’s greatly, including the fact that he’s a professor of economics and similar in age.
As I read on, I discovered that they are long-term friends:
While at UCLA, Thomas Sowell arrived on campus in 1969 as a visiting professor. Though [Williams, who is slightly younger] never took a class from Dr. Sowell, the two met and began a friendship that has lasted to this day. In the summer of 1972 Sowell was hired as director of the Urban Institutes Ethnic Minorities Project, which Williams joined shortly thereafter. Correspondence between Sowell and Williams appears in the 2007 “A Man of Letters” by Sowell.
Logical, highly intelligent, bold, and fearless are adjectives I’d use to describe both of them.
It is tragic that people like Williams, Sowell, Elders, and many other conservative/libertarian minded black males were not the role models for the last 2 generations of black male youth. Williams 2010 autobiography is inspiring. Sometimes you can catch him on the airwaves as guest host on various conservative radio programs. He is such a calm voice of reason.
Walter Williams has had a nationally syndicated column for many years. One year at Christmastime he was guest-hosting Rush’s show (he used to be on regularly). He had Thomas Sowell come on the program one day, and the two of them had their own “Race Commission”. It was perhaps the best three hours of radio I have ever heard.
Drs Sowell and Williams are both world class thinkers, who have such command of their subjects as to make it easy for most people to understand their writing. Too bad they are written off, most of the time, by many, who are teflon coated (truth does not stick) low/no information people
Most black problems are self inflicted.
I guess I hadn’t heard of Williams before because I almost never listen to talk radio.
The subtitle at 3:26 points out that while the woman was bragging that only 12% of the families were headed by women in 1980 that number has now tripled. That statistic validates Thomas Sowell’s argument that the government was encouraging illegitimacy by subsidizing it.
The guy is a real card. 🙂 For example:
Proclamation of Amnesty and Pardon Granted to
All Persons of European Descent
Whereas, Europeans kept my forebears in bondage some three centuries toiling without pay,
Whereas, Europeans ignored the human rights pledges of the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution,
Whereas, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments meant little more than empty words,
Therefore, Americans of European ancestry are guilty of great crimes against my ancestors and their progeny.
But, in the recognition Europeans themselves have been victims of various and sundry human rights violations to wit: the Norman Conquest, the Irish Potato Famine, Decline of the Hapsburg Dynasty, Napoleonic and Czarist adventurism, and gratuitous insults and speculations about the intelligence of Europeans of Polish descent,
I, Walter E. Williams, do declare full and general amnesty and pardon to all persons of European ancestry, for both their own grievances, and those of their forebears, against my people.
Therefore, from this day forward Americans of European ancestry can stand straight and proud knowing they are without guilt and thus obliged not to act like damn fools in their relationships with Americans of African ancestry.
Walter E. Williams, Gracious and Generous Grantor
“Most black problems are self inflicted.”
Try telling blacks that. Dr. Bill Cosby was the keynote speaker at the NAACP celebration of the 50th anniversary of Brown vs Board of education. He read them the riot act about the high crime rate, the high illegitimacy rate the high school drop out rate etc. After he finished the head of the NAACP went to the podium and said these are not the fault of the black community. Dr. Cosby got lots of criticism but he didn’t back down. In a later interview he said that if you keep blaming other people for your problems, nothing is going to get better.
The Democrat party ensured that blacks would be economically, socially, and genetically inferior to Democrats. First with slavery. Then with the KKK and jim crow. Now with welfare that breaks their males into thugs and their children into welfare money deposits that the moms use to get fed from the Gov sugar daddy.
This is as intended.
50-Years of The Great Society Guilt Carnage has been a catastrophe. I saw, very up-close and personal, for 4-recent years on trips out to see some kids on Diston Ave. in Clermont and The Loop in Minneola here in Central Florida. Nearly every Friday. WHEW..!
The collapse of the black two-parent family is the result of an abandonment of parental obligations by both genders but the collapse of the American black two-parent family was enabled by three historic factors; the onset of which occurred successively in but 13 years. The first factor was the birth control pill being approved for contraceptive use in 1960. The second factor was the Passage of LBJ’s Great Society, War on Poverty program, specifically the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. The third factor was the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe vs Wade decision.
Birth control affected men as well as women but most importantly, in the minds of many young men, made women responsible for the prevention of pregnancy.
Social welfare programs gave women the economic support needed to be single mothers, further freeing men from the obligation to support their offspring.
The Roe vs Wade decision gave women the ‘safety valve’ needed to make pregnancy a matter of convenience and conscience. It gave men the freedom to place the burden of child raising entirely upon the woman. After all, having the child was her ‘choice’ NOT his… since he had no legal say, he had no moral obligation, when personally unattached to religious and traditional societal strictures.
Walter Williams paraphrased; ‘Poverty is not very difficult to explain. There are three basic causes: People may be poor because they cannot produce anything highly valued by others. Or, if they can produce things highly valued by others, circumstance hampers or prevents from doing so. Or, they volunteer to be poor.’
Walter Williams quotes:
“Here’s Williams’ roadmap out of poverty: Complete high school; get a job, any kind of a job; get married before having children; and be a law-abiding citizen. Among both black and white Americans so described, the poverty rate is in the single digits.” Walter Williams
“What is just has been debated for centuries, but let me offer you my definition of social justice: I keep what I earn and you keep what you earn. Do you disagree? Well, then, tell me how much of what I earn belongs to you – and why?” Walter Williams
Obama and the left’s response; “you didn’t earn that!”
“The idea that the legacy of colonialism explains Third World poverty is nonsense. Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong were once colonies. “In fact, the richest country in the world, the United States, was once a colony. By contrast, Ethiopia, Liberia, Tibet, Sikkim, Nepal and Bhutan were never colonies, but they are home to the world’s poorest people.” Walter Williams
“Suppose I hire you to repair my computer. The job is worth $200 to me and doing the job is worth $200 to you. The transaction will occur because we have a meeting of the mind.
Now suppose there’s the imposition of a 30 percent income tax on you. That means you won’t receive $200 but instead $140. You might say the heck with working for me – spending the day with your family is worth more than $140. You might then offer that you’ll do the job if I pay you $285. That way your after-tax earnings will be $200 – what the job was worth to you.
[But] There’s a problem. The repair job was worth $200 to me, not $285. So it’s my turn to say the heck with it.
This simple example demonstrates that one effect of taxes is that of eliminating transactions, and hence jobs.
In the above example, either the customer is paying more than the job is worth or the person doing the repair is getting less than the job is worth. In the real world, both occur. Those offering a service pass on the costs of doing business, as they must and both lose money to the state which typically wastes it, negatively affecting the economic health of the society.” Walter E. Williams
Williams possesses a fine mind leavened with what today is a rare quality indeed; common sense. A combination that Williams, Sowell, Elder, Shelby Steele, Clarence Thomas and Emmet G. Sullivan, United States District Judge for the District of Columbia all share.
Wisdom (wise dominion) is intelligence refined by experience, leavened with common sense.
Geoffrey Britain:
And the white 2-parent family isn’t doing so well these days either.
The counterexample for poverty as a race-based condition is West Virginia. It’s all white. Welfare state, failing schools, destroyed families, and drugs. It’s all there along with “white flight” (that is, middle class or talent flight)
Geoffrey Britain,
I have been saying for a long time that the pill has had a transformational effect on society that we haven’t yet been able to comprehend. Sexual pleasure has replaced responsibility for establishing a home for children as the most important aspect of life.
Holmes,
The poverty and problems of places like WVa are, I think somewhat related to the Coming Apart effect.The better educated try to be as “enlightened” as their role models in college education departments and in the welfare industry all the while distinguishing themselve with the “white trash” they claim to be working to help. Meanwhile the young there are subjected to the same trashy cultural influences as inner city blacks.
neo,
Absolutely true and for the exact same reasons, it is not just black males who have concluded that the responsibility for pregnancy is all on the female’s shoulders. Whites who follow William’s ‘prescription’ do not remain in poverty either, nor do the majority end up as one parent families.
expat,
Yes, the negative social impact of the oral contraceptive is little appreciated, especially as it applies to young male’s abandonment of parental obligations.
DNA rides heavy.
In West Africa — going back into the mists of time — society has been structured along r-selection, not K selection.
Male mortality has been that high forever. Young men in all (primitive) societies are ‘harvested’ as warriors. This reaches its extreme in the sub-Sahel.
There are essentially no geophysical barriers there; no mountains, only the most occasional river…
What farming that is, is performed by women, exclusively. All of the men are consumed by the ‘warrior economy.’
Individualism is quite impossible. EVERYTHING is team/ clan/ tribe oriented. Anyone foolish enough to self-actualize is promptly punished by the cousins.
Mate exclusivity is largely unknown.
Male mortality is so high that monogamy is unstable. It’s safer for the children to be deemed ‘of the tribe’ than ‘of one man.’ With this social construct, every child has a crack at food, protection and acceptance. There are no out-cast bastards.
LBJ’s war on poverty re-enabled ALL of the old African dynamics. This was entirely unforeseen. European do-gooders never, ever, imagined that they’d be unleashing r-selected DNA upon a K-selected dominant population. (& culture)
Rampant bastardy is only considered weird in K selection societies.
Back in Africa, where land title is a joke, where farming is women’s work, where individualism is ruinous, where adulthood comes 30 months earlier than it does in Europe — ALL of the Darwinian rules have different norms.
It’s quite completely not politically correct, but the genetic truth is that it’s okay to be K-selected, it’s okay to be r-selected — but such sub-populations are intrinsically incompatible.
The DNA shift is just too great.
I could write a massive tome on the topic. Here are just a few of the high points:
1) Early Black puberty sets Blacks (teen males) up to a lifetime of failure because their life experiences inform them that they can out muscle their problems/ conflicts/ rivals — ESPECIALLY White rivals.
Once the teen years are over, such young men promptly find out that they’re in perpetual, criminal, violation of the law.
This situation is so pronounced that the USMC/ USA HAVE to have a hefty percentage of Black drill instructors. The Black ‘kids’ just won’t accept White instruction — even if the DI can wrap them around a bean pole.
Naturally, the PC crowd can’t acknowledge any of the above.
2) Black teen girls know that to conform, they’d better sleep around. Women are always creatures of the pack/ herd/ group. A solitary woman is totally helpless. This drive to stay with the group entirely predates our humanity. You’ll find it running in the DNA of every mammal you care to point to. Breaking away from the pack is exclusively a male behavior.
Of course, young Black males are fully aware that their chances of marrying and holding on to a virgin are non-existent. (Unless they marry out of their race.)
3) K-selection norms make such perfect sense to those who are immersed in K-selection societies that they never imagine that life can go on — forever — in a totally different way.
&&&&
Ultimately, the evil of enslavement will have to be undone. This is something that can actually be (more or less) done. For the way is clear to repatriate Blacks back to Africa.
Indeed, this latest disaster of ebola, on top of HIV, is creating a talent crisis in Africa.
1) Africans are absolutely unable to accept advice/ management/ you name it from non-Blacks. Racism is very much alive, and African Blacks are not only racist in the extreme — they’re tribal, to boot.
Even so, Africans have come to accept and tolerate American Blacks — as elites. As talented as they are, such Blacks are far too few in number to affect political power balances. Even if every single Black American were to make the transit, they’d be swamped by the natives — vote wise.
2) Yet the average IQ of Africans is 70ish. To get anything productive rolling, outside talent has had to be imported. First under European colonialism, now under Chinese contract labor. In both cases the racial tension is so intense that riots erupt.
So the need for American Black talent is universal across all of Africa, where they can do the work that no other cohort can do — if only because of racial politics.
3) By the rules of Darwin, American Blacks are not going to blend up and attain White normative IQs of 100 — unless Hitlerian levels of genocide are set loose.
The current PC fantasy that AA or any other construct is going to pull Black DNA into alignment with White DNA on the IQ front is just as absurd as getting Whites up to Ashkenazi norms. For those without history primers to hand: it took repeated pogroms to lift Ashkenazi IQs.
By the rules of Darwin, selection operates by destroying DNA — the hard way.
It does not work by wishing DNA adjustments upwards towards what some Hollywood scriptwriter would love to see.
Unless one is willing to play God, and either murder by the million or mess with zygotes (by the million) then one must accept the DNA distribution as it is.
4) Nothing in life is all that fair. No-one in my entire extended family ever benefited from American slavery. My family hails from nations famed for BEING enslaved.
Still: looking forward, not backward, it’s essential that America stump up the $$$ and enable Blacks to return to Africa.
The weather there beats Chicago, Boston, and many another American city. Weather is a major driver for street crime. (Teens bouncing off the walls, think about it.)
Africa has outstanding fertility and mineral resources. Whites are NOT wanted. Someone has to replace their talent lest the African economy collapse — and countless millions starve.
All other prior efforts to get Africa into the modern era have been total and complete busts. The missing ingredient is talented Blacks. America has the global monopoly thereof.
I say it’s better to be a prince in Africa than on the dole in America.
This correction will take decades. But it can’t possibly be more expensive than the Great Society — which is tearing families apart — and creating ripe conditions for a fulsome race war. Yes, they happen.
This effort should entirely replace the Peace Corps, which is quite obviously a total bust. American culture CAN’T be exported to the Third World. That much should be obvious by now.
expat: “Sexual pleasure has replaced responsibility for establishing a home for children as the most important aspect of life.”
That really sums things up very well.
W.E.B. Dubois, in The Souls of Black Fok, written only 40 years or so after the end of slavery, assumed that stable and lasting marriage could be and often in fact was normal for his people.
Many good comments. Walter Williams is a treasure, as is Thomas Sowell. How and why did they succeed? How did my neighbor, a successful black banker, succeed? Good parenting and decent schools helped a lot.
The majority black community doesn’t realize it, but they are on a virtual plantation, overseen by the Federal government. The chains they’re in are cultural and crafted by the Democrats, MSM, black victim organizations (NAACP, Rainbow Coalition, etc.), and Hollywood. They could break those chains if they followed Walter Williams’ four rules. How to get them to do that? Aye, there’s the rub. Change the Great Society laws, change the message, and use tough love? It could work over time, but would be hard. We don’t do hard any more. Sigh.
J.J.:
I never read Williams’ autobiography, but I’ve read Sowell’s. He didn’t really have good parenting, although it wasn’t awful either. And he fought to go to a good school. He was self-directed and very ornery and challenging, a rugged and completely uncompromising individual from the start. Part of his success is his own dogged personality and the brilliance of his mind. Even then, his road was hard.
neo, Sowell and I are about the same age. We didn’t have the cultural distractions and temptations that the youth of today have. Discrimination was much worse then, so that would have been a factor for Sowell. He had to want to improve his lot. Where did that come from?
It’s also true that a parent can do everything right and the child doesn’t turn out well. I’m reminded of an old family friend. Wonderful woman whose husband died early. One of their sons became an Admiral. The other son died of alcohol poisoning in a dive on Larimer Street in Denver. It makes me think that genetics may play a larger role than we like to admit.
What is the magic ingredient that motivates young people like Sowell to fight to get ahead? Clarence Thomas had a tough grandfather who instilled discipline in him. He hated how tough his grandfather was on him, but now he admits he owes him everything. Even so, Thomas had to have had a first rate mind. And a desire to better himself even though his grandfather taught him discipline and the value of hard work.
If we had answers to how to motivate children in every case, I guess life would be much less of a mystery.
Williams came from extremely difficult circumstances, yet he rose above his circumstances and became a shining light. This is the divide between left and right. We believe in the strength of the individual and they believe in the weakness of the collective.
}}} although I’m very familiar with Sowell’s work I don’t recall ever having heard of Williams before.
LOL, this is… amusing. Because many of the venues that carry Sowell’s columns also carry Williams’ columns. Townhall is the obvious one, but JWR is, I believe, yet another.
Williams, at one point, was not just a professor, but the chairman of the Econ department he was in.
He is/was also a regular guest host on Neil Boortz’ radio show, among those filling in for Boortz when he went on vacations or had business that took him away from hosting the show.
If you’d like to see some of his columns…
Townhall
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=walter+williams+and+thomas+sowell+together
}}} I guess I hadn’t heard of Williams before because I almost never listen to talk radio.
LOL, nope, that ain’t it. I don’t, either, and I encountered his stuff back in the “Hamster Dance” days of the internet, long before other media forms became more common.
When you pay mothers to remain single, and pay father to get lost…you get what you pay for.
(White) Democrats view Blacks (African Americans) as a herd of pigs to be farmed. You separate the males and females when raising animals. Only way to control the herd and use it economically.
(Black) Democrats, who are poor, agree to be paid. I blame them less than their (White) Democrat Animal Husbandders because they were poor, and poor people are desperate to do anything.
But still, that’s the why of it and everyone knows this. It’s not a socioeconomic thing, it’s a law of economics. If you pay for poverty and ignorance, you will get people who take the bargain.
Regarding Roe v Wade and its impact on the black community: 80 percent of Planned Parenthood clinics are in minority neighborhoods. Aborting black children is a big moneymaker for PP. Black women may be less than 15 percent of the general population, but they account for more than a third of abortions. Many good links here:
http://studentsforlife.org/planned-parenthood-and-racism/
Meant to say that black women are less than 15 percent of the American female population.
Margaret Sanger wasn’t kidding when she said the Race would be cleansed if blacks could be convinced to abort (their poorest and dumbest cliques) their own children.
Prof Walter has long been a replacement host for Rush Limbaugh, and teaching the economic analyses behind political issues from that perch.
Ala Rush’s ego-driven hauter, Walter makes fun schtick over his attractiveness and charm, using flirtatious innuendo to sell himself.
Since his retirement from teaching, I believe he has had shorter and rarer stints behind the EIB microphone. The delight of his hosting duties has been the more formal classroom “instructive” air given to Rush Limbaugh’s less formal patterns.
The only problem I have with Williams’ advice I that it doesn’t start early enough. You have to start when the kids are young and teach them to treat others with respect. The first time they parrot some rap lyrics about hoes, they have to be told that the language is not cool and will not be tolerated. If parents can’t counter coolness when the children are young and instead give them recognition for their accomplishments and respect for others, it will be hard to reach them when they are 12 or 14. Kids need a foundation of values so that when they are confronted with coolness in their teen years, they have this nagging voice in their heads that says no. Of course, creating a stable home with regular meals at a shared table is part of what builds that foundation.
The first time they parrot some rap lyrics about hoes, they have to be told that the language is not cool and will not be tolerated.
But it is tolerated, that’s why it is popular. So it’s their word against society’s. Most children respect society’s power more than their parents, since their parents look and act weak.
So the direct attack would be to destroy the credibility of rappers as being the slaves of the MPAA, providing plantation money to the white music establishment, working for the Man, getting rich, and spending it on cocaine, crack, and hookers.
The idea is to destroy the credibility and authority of musicians, to turn their supporters and the musicians themselves against the power and funding sources of the Left.
But this is difficult to do obviously since they control the popular narrative. So you need something even stronger than the popular narrative. Hate and disgust at hypocrisy is good enough, for now.
Fight emotion with emotion. Poison with poison. Fire with fire.
Logick doesn’t really work that well against fanatics.
I have attempted to work with, however it will not functions whatsoever.