The Washington Monthly talks about the lingering effects of slavery and the effects that has on racism and thus the socio-economic position of blacks in the US. There being the one rather important thing we might want to say about this:
To many liberals, these inequities are the obvious legacy of slavery and decades of legalized discrimination, such as under Jim Crow. The substandard education to which black Americans have been relegated has meant fewer students succeed in school and in the workforce. Segregated housing, too, has left many people living in neighborhoods without access to good jobs, reliable public transportation, or quality health care.
I tend to think that the second one, the housing, is an outcome of the system, not a cause of it. The education part though, yes, that’s a very large part of it. The public school education on offer to a large portion of American blacks is terrible.
And where is this terrible system? It’s in places like Baltimore. The American inner cities. Places that have been run by that unholy alliance between the teachers’ unions and the Democratic Party for the past two and three generations. Note that such places don’t have low budgets – Baltimore regularly lists among the top 10 large educational districts by money per pupil.
So, who is it that is institutionally racist in American society? I think we’d have to say it’s the Democratic Party, wouldn’t we?
That unholy alliance is clear in D.C., the city Congress has the Constitutional power to run. Directing welfare checks to broken homes has broken millions of homes and created a culture where fathers are unattached to a family. Apart from that, the only “legacy of slavery” is the debilitating message, from Colin Kaepernick to Michelle Obama, that you have to worry about a white person taking one look at your skin and trying to ruin your day. If it were so, why hustle?
European slave traders transported roughly 10 times the number of Africans to their colonies in The Caribbean and South America as they did to their North American colonies. It would be interesting to see a comparison of the educational attainment of the descendants of those Central/South American slaves to that of the descendants of North American slaves. A surprising number of the high-achieving people of African heritage one meets in the US turn out to have migrated from the Caribbean — or are children of those immigrants. But race-pimping is one of the few policies that seem to deliver for… Read more »
Oh, yes, Jamaica in particular. It is fascinating meeting black Americans with a British accent rather than the Southern accent spoken with cases and conjugation deliberately done wrong.
Wasn’t Jamaica one of the islands where the British West African Patrol settled slaves liberated from the slave traders?
Malcom Gladwell (yeah, I know) makes an interesting point about Brown Vs Board of Education in an episode of his Revisionist History podcasts.
In short, it meant that black children no longer went to schools that were run for black children with black teachers. Instead they were bussed off to white schools where they were, at best, neglected and treated as second class citizens. As a consequence their education suffered.
Epitomized by the court-ordered “Forced Busing” era in metro Boston (a rare use of gov’t force referred to as “Forced”). A recurring question was, What is so wrong with kids from Roxbury that they can’t learn except in a distant classroom with white kids in it?
Thomas Sowell points out educational achievement by blacks was pretty good in the early 60s, (in the Yankee states at least), but that was before welfare kicked in
If on the one hand you are told you will never get a decent job and never get a fair shake because society is “racist” and the other hand you are told that trying hard in school makes you an Oreo and thus liable to ge beaten up I’m pretty sure lots of children are not going to to well at school.
But many states never had slavery, so how is slavery the problem in those states?