The cause of the problems of American Blacks

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The liberal left tries to place the blame for all of the problems of American blacks on whites (as opposed to on the blacks themselves). The Blacks do much more poorly in school, have much higher crime rates than whites, etc. and the reasons are white discrimination, slavery, etc. Whites are the villains — they are bad people who have done great harm to blacks.

The following is from Thomas Sowell. Black Rednecks and White Liberals p. 34, 35

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Nowhere was the effect of the white liberalism of the 1960s on the social evolution of black culture more devastating than in the disintegration of the black family. The raw facts are these: As of 1960, 51 percent of black females between the ages of 15 and 44 were married and living with their husbands, another 20 percent were divorced, widowed, or separated, and only 28 percent had never been married. Twenty years later, only 31 percent of black women in these age brackets were married and living with their husbands, while 48 percent had never been married. By 1994, an absolute majority — 56 percent — of black women in these age brackets were never married and only 25 percent were married. Accordingly, while two-thirds of black children were living with their families in 1960, only one-third were by 1994. While only 22 percent of black children were born to unmarried women in 1960, 70 percent were by 1994.

White liberals, instead of comparing what has happened to the black family since the liberal welfare state policies of the 1960s were put into practice, compare black families to white families and conclude that the higher rates of broken homes and unwed motherhood among blacks are due to a “a legacy of slavery.” But why the large-scale disintegration of the black family should have begun a hundred years after slavery is left unexplained. Whatever the situation of the black family relative to the white family, in the past or the present, it is clear that broken homes were far more common among blacks at the end of the twentieth century than they were in the middle of the century or at the beginning of the century — even though blacks at the beginning of the twentieth century were just one generation out of slavery. The widespread and casual abandonment of their children, and of the women who bore them, by black fathers in the ghettoes of the late twentieth century was in fact a painfully ironic contrast with what had happened in the aftermath of slavery a hundred years earlier, when observers in the South reported desperate efforts of freed blacks to find family members who had been separated from them during the era of slavery.

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The following is from pp. 32 - 38

In a parallel to the differences between Southern and non-Southern whites, a study of West Indian blacks in the United States noted that “the Negro immigrants, particularly the British West Indians, bring a zest for learning that is not typical of the native-born population. While black Americans have long been over-represented among people in prison, a study of the racial composition of New York’s Sing Sing prison in the early 1930's found that black West Indians were under-represented relative to their share of the population, at a time when native-born black Americans were over-represented several-fold among Sing Sing residents. During the same era, when American-born black women and West Indian black women worked in New York City’s garment district, the latter were “more frequently found at the skilled tasks.” More generally, the study found that the black immigrant “brings a cultural heritage that is vastly different from that of the American Negro.”

The first black borough presidents of Manhattan were West Indians. As late as 1970, the highest ranking blacks in New York’s police department were West Indians, as were all the black federal judges in the city. The 1970 census showed that black West Indian families in the New York metropolitan area had 28 percent higher incomes than families than the families of American blacks. The incomes of second generation West Indian families living in the same area exceeded that of black families by 58 percent. Neither race nor racism can explain such differences. Nor can slavery, since native-born blacks and West Indian blacks both had a history of slavery. Studies published in 2004 indicated that an absolute majority of the black alumni of Harvard were either West Indian or African immigrants, or the children of these immigrants. Somewhat similar findings have emerged in studies of some other elite colleges. With blacks as with whites, the redneck culture has been a less achieving culture.

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New England Enclaves

It should be noted again that not all blacks today are part of the redneck culture — far from it — nor has that culture been the only culture in which blacks lived in the past. There were small but significant enclaves of New England culture introduced into Southern black communities by teachers from New England who poured into the South immediately after the end of the Civil War, to establish schools and to teach and acculturate the children of freed slaves. Often these were the only schools available for black children, because the South was slow to begin establishing public schools, especially for blacks. W.E.B. Du Bois called the work of these dedicated missionaries “the finest thing in American history.”

By 1866 — just one year after the Civil War was ended — there were about 1,400 Northern white teachers from dozens of religious missionary associations teaching black children in 975 Southern schools — the numbers suggesting that these were mostly the kinds of one-room school houses common at the time in rural areas, which is where most Southern blacks lived. Just a few years later, at the end of the decade, there were more than 2,500 Northern teachers in just over 2,000 schools for black children. A sample of about a thousand of these teachers whose origins could be traced showed that more than 500 came directly from New England, and the others are believed to include people born in New England but who came to the South directly from some other location. To put this in perspective, only 17 percent of the Northern population lived in New England at the time, so this was a wholly disproportionate representation of New Englanders among those who began to educate newly emancipated blacks. This was a New England-led crusade, much like the pre-war abolitionist movement, and many of those who went into the post-bellum South were former abolitionists.

These teachers brought a wholly different culture into the South. In the words of distinguished black scholar E. Franklin Frazier: “The missionaries from New England who founded the first schools for Negroes in the south left the imprint of their Puritan background upon Negro education.” In addition to strict morality, these missionaries “taught the Yankee virtues of industry and thrift.” This cultural transformation was not incidental. The avowed purpose of the American Missionary Association was to transplant a different culture into the school and college enclaves which they established among young blacks in the South, in order to deliberately supplant the existing culture. These were deeply religious institutions, but in the New England sense, so that black students “were not to indulge in the religious emotionalism of the black masses” in the south. They were to be different in many ways, as E. Franklin Frazier noted:

First students were taught to speak English correctly and thus avoid the ungrammatical speech and dialect of the Negro masses. They were expected to be courteous, speak softly and never exhibit the spontaneous boisterousness of ordinary Negroes.

The casual Southern attitude toward sex was not tolerated: “To be detected in immoral sex behavior, especially if the guilty person was a woman, meant expulsion from the school.

The American Missionary Association was quite explicit in their desire to remove black youngsters from their existing culture and place them in enclaves of the culture transplanted from the North. In an 1882 essay titled “Change of Environment,” Dr. W.W. Patton, president of the A.M.A., lamented that many black children “grow up in communities of prevailing ignorance, superstition and immorality, where they live in miserable hovels, see only examples of coarseness and rudeness and hear only a negro dialect,” when what was needed was a total change of environment “ by removing young people to places “where morals are pure; where manners are refined; where language is grammatical.” Far from celebrating the existing culture of the black community, Dr. Patton declared: “All improvement must be by an influence from without, which shall quicken and inspire, which shall teach and guide” — this being the purpose of “planting and strengthening the institutional institutions which operate to change for the better the environment of the colored race in this country.”

... they were agreed that what was most needed for the advancement of blacks in the post-bellum south was the replacement of the culture prevailing around them and among them by a new imported culture. However, the greatest obstacle to creating this new culture was the existing black redneck culture:

For many missionaries the physical problems of overwork, illness and poor facilities were less frustrating than their everyday dealing with the freedmen. A constant problem for teachers was student absenteeism; a pupil would attend school for a few days, disappear for a time, then come back again; multiplied by a factor of 40 or 50, this made classroom continuity difficult. This “irregularity,” said one teacher was a “positive vice” of the freedmen. A related weakness was unreliability: “You can ... never depend on anything promised” went a typical complaint. Another “general failing among the colored people” according to many teachers was their tardiness at meetings, classes, church services, and so on ...

More serious were sexual offences, theft, and lying.

The redneck culture referred to was a culture originating in the highlands of highland Scotland, northern Ireland, and northwestern England, brought to the American south by immigrants from these regions, and, according to the theory of Thomas Sowell, assimilated by southern blacks.

For perspective on this see Basic Principles of Teaching

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It is all about culture — outlooks, attitudes, values, mentality, habits — the way people think. At it its most basic root it is about attitude in regard to education. How much a person believes in education, desires education. And it is about industriousness and perseverance versus laziness. It is about character, integrity, morality and responsibility versus irresponsibility and foolishness. It is about the kind of mindset taught by the Bible and exemplified by cultures as those of the Germans or orientals who value schooling and education, believe in hard work, and are disciplined and methodical in their habits. It is about wisdom and understanding versus foolishness.

Our modern liberals are just so advanced intellectually that they are simply unable to comprehend this fundamental truth. They have advanced so far past the Bible that they are now in a never-never land of an atheistic, morally degenerate, modern foolishness.

The hand of the diligent will rule,

But the lazy man will be put to forced labor.

Prov 12:24

The politicians and black leaders here in America tell the blacks that the cause of their problems is the white man. That is a narrative that sounds great to blacks and gets them lots of black votes. (Telling the truth would make the black man angry and repel him.) Lies bring political support. And there are lots of mischief-makers who love to cause divisions and strife.

17 Dec 2023