townhall | If we put ourselves into the shoes of racists who seek to sabotage
black upward mobility, we couldn't develop a more effective agenda than
that followed by civil rights organizations, black politicians,
academics, liberals and the news media. Let's look at it.
First, weaken the black family, but don't blame it on individual
choices. You have to preach that today's weak black family is a legacy
of slavery, Jim Crow and racism. The truth is that black female-headed
households were just 18 percent of households in 1950, as opposed to
about 68 percent today. In fact, from 1890 to 1940, the black marriage
rate was slightly higher than that of whites. Even during slavery, when
marriage was forbidden for blacks, most black children lived in
biological two-parent families. In New York City, in 1925, 85 percent of
black households were two-parent households. A study of 1880 family
structure in Philadelphia shows that three-quarters of black families
were two-parent households.
During the 1960s, devastating nonsense emerged, exemplified by a
Johns Hopkins University sociology professor who argued, "It has yet to
be shown that the absence of a father was directly responsible for any
of the supposed deficiencies of broken homes." The real issue, he went
on to say, "is not the lack of male presence but the lack of male
income." That suggests marriage and fatherhood can be replaced by a
welfare check.
The poverty rate among blacks is 36 percent. Most black poverty is
found in female-headed households. The poverty rate among black married
couples has been in single digits since 1994 and is about 8 percent
today. The black illegitimacy rate is 75 percent, and in some cities,
it's 90 percent. But if that's a legacy of slavery, it must have skipped
several generations, because in the 1940s, unwed births hovered around
14 percent.
Along with the decline of the black family comes anti-social
behavior, manifested by high crime rates. Each year, roughly 7,000
blacks are murdered. Ninety-four percent of the time, the murderer is
another black person. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics,
between 1976 and 2011, there were 279,384 black murder victims. Using
the 94 percent figure means that 262,621 were murdered by other blacks.
Though blacks are 13 percent of the nation's population, they account
for more than 50 percent of homicide victims. Nationally, the black
homicide victimization rate is six times that of whites, and in some
cities, it's 22 times that of whites. I'd like for the president, the
civil rights establishment, white liberals and the news media, who spent
massive resources protesting the George Zimmerman trial's verdict, to
tell the nation whether they believe that the major murder problem
blacks face is murder by whites. There are no such protests against the
thousands of black murders.
There's an organization called NeighborhoodScout. Using 2011
population data from the U.S. Census Bureau, 2011 crime statistics from
the FBI and information from 17,000 local law enforcement agencies in
the country, it came up with a report titled "Top 25 Most Dangerous Neighborhoods in America." They include
neighborhoods in Detroit, Chicago, Houston, St. Louis and other major
cities. What's common to all 25 neighborhoods is that their makeup is
described as "Black" or "Mostly Black." The high crime rates have
several outcomes that are not in the best interests of the
overwhelmingly law-abiding people in these neighborhoods. There can't be
much economic development. Property has a lower value, but worst of
all, people can't live with the kind of personal security that most
Americans enjoy.
Disgustingly, black politicians, civil rights leaders, liberals and
the president are talking nonsense about "having a conversation about
race." That's beyond useless. Tell me how a conversation with white
people is going to stop black predators from preying on blacks. How is
such a conversation going to eliminate the 75 percent illegitimacy rate?
What will such a conversation do about the breakdown of the black
family (though "breakdown" is not the correct word, as the family
doesn't form in the first place)? Only black people can solve our
problems.
