The experience of both the Irish and Jews is different from Blacks. The Jews have a strong religious tradition that tells them they are God's chosen people. No matter what collective or individual tragedies befall them, they are God's chosen. They know where they fit, they are part of a plan that's bigger than anything happening to them at the moment.
The Irish experienced discrimination that is common to all immigrant groups. In the end, their children speak without accents and look like us and are accepted.
Blacks were brought to America as slaves. To deprive a people of their freedom and feel good about it, their humanity was minimized. They fell some where between human and animal, legally, they were 3/5 human. Their religion was taken from them, their names were taken from them, they were removed from their families and what relationships they formed were subject to the whims and sensibilities of their masters.
They were given new names, and a new religion that taught them to be good slaves. After the "War of Northern Aggression", they were free to make it on their own without the tools necessary to do that. Many did make it and their success made them targets of those who felt the color of their skin gave them entitlement to lynch, rape, and steal. Communities were destroyed without consequence to the destroyers or aid to the displaced (check out "Black Wall Street).
All of that happened before welfare, my friend. While some still feel justified in dragging a human being to death behind a truck, others are outraged and demand justice. Blacks have been subjected to generation after generation after generation of abuse. It may take several more generations before the effects of abuse fades.
By and large, the only people abusing blacks in America today are other blacks. Blacks were on their way to economically matching whites in many areas last century before Liberals started giving black women an incentive not to catch a husband - thus giving black men a free pass on having to take care of his own family. IIRC, through the same period blacks had similar proportion to whites with broken families. Your argument of some kind of lingering effect of past dicrimination doesn't take into account the whites who also leech on the system - what great past abuse are they waiting to overcome before they can stop acting irresponsibly?
The article mentions Charles Murray's Losing Ground - American Social Policy, 1950-1980. I read that book when it came out in the mid-80s; you obviously have not. Murray showed that when welfare became a "right," blacks decided not to work. He showed the statistics, and they tell the tale.That isn't racism, it is just to recognize the reality that black men were cut out of the loop by the "Great Society." What the minimum wage does is to outlaw the first rung of the economic ladder, for the people with the least ability to get a good job. Thomas Sowell will tell you that the minimum wage law was first proposed by and for white racists. Sowell himself once thought the "minimum wage" law was a good idea, but he did an economic analysis of how much good it was doing - and realized that it was pernicious.
Some other poster said that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a disaster for blacks. I won't go that far, but the rest of the "Great Society" program was. Because it was socialism, and socialism is mismanagement. The fundamental principle of management has to be that a person can only be responsible for something if he has authority over it. IOW, if the plumbing leaks, kicking the cat will not make it stop leaking because that cat had no control over it in the first place. But socialism gives the authority to the government, and the individual still has to bear the results without being in control.
I'm not an Ayn Rand fan in general, but the Atlas Shrugged principle is true in the case of the black man and the "Great Society" - the black man just disappeared. And what you have in the matriachial black family is the result. The black man doesn't support and protect the black family because the government co opted him - effectively seduced the black woman into throwing him over for the government welfare check.
And what is the consequence? Half of the black children are boys - but far too often they have no positive role model not only in their own home but even in their neighborhood, to inspire them to grow up to be providing and protecting fathers. And the other half, the girls, don't have a role model for being a mother who can select and be loyal to a man who will grow (as men do) into that role.
All very well to blame "the legacy of slavery," but that is in very important ways a half-truth. For all the travails along the generations, blacks are Americans. And the truth is that if they were given the right to sell their American citizenship to foreigners and, say, move to Africa, they would be able to afford "forty acres and a mule" - but what fool would take that deal? If the Democrats had been willing to allow the process of the 1950s to extend through the 1980s, blacks wouldn't have become - become the "underclass" which this article describes. They were not the "underclass" in 1960 that they were in 1990 for the simple reason that the black family (although "scandalously" unstable by reputation at the time) was about as solid then as the white American family is now.
If you looked at the trendlines of statistics in Losing Ground, and covered up all the data after 1960, you would predict on that basis that blacks would have essentially caught up with whites within a couple of generations - i.e., about now. But the "Great Society" prevented that from happening. The "Great Society" was in its own way a horror to be compared with slavery. It is a blot on American - and Democratic Party - history.
And while you are expanding the scope of your knowledge of the history of blacks in America, take a moment to expand your knowledge of the general history of slavery. All very well to sit comfortably in your study and pound out denumciations of slavery in other times, but throughout history (and worldwide) real people were involved not only as slaves but as slave masters.
Slaves were stolen by whoever could take them, from whoever could not prevent it, by whoever could get away with it. That started a very long time ago (see for example the book of Exodus in the Bible), and (it is true) it did not end with the advent of Christianity. It did not end with the advent of Islam. In fact, when did it end? It actually still exists in places. Christians didn't take it upon themselves to end the institution of slavery until basically the lifetime of Queen Victoria (1819-1901). Up until that era not only the Christians in particular but humanity in general had tried to avoid being slaves but had not lifted a finger to prevent strangers from being enslaved.
What happened? First, European polities coalesced into states which were powerful enough to prevent slavers from stealing citizens from their countries, at least on a commercial scale. Then - concommitant with such novelties as the Declaration of Independence - Christians began to actually question the virtue of peole who held slaves or even tolerated the holding of slaves. Only then, in all of history, do you see anyone (i.e., American Southerners) attempting to justify slavery because only then was the institution under serious attack.
There was a shift in the Christian paradigm. That didn't happen in Islam, or anywhere else. What happened was that Christians, and not anyone else, came to feel a responsibility to behave toward the slave as the Good Samaritan of the Bible behaved toward the man who "fell among thieves." The result was that Christians in general, and English-speaking people in particular, actually fought for the liberty of strangers. Certainly the southerners who fought the Union Army opposed that, and they were Christians. But they were in different circumstances than those who did not have a huge racial population with the motive to start a race war - they had a tiger by the tail, and not only had a reason to hold on but a positive dread of letting go.
Net - net, slavery was abolished in North America through the Civil War, which was over secession - but secession was over slavery. Slavery was abolished elsewhere, due more than any other Christians to the influence of the British who controlled up to a quarter of the world - and to no one other than Christians. The abolition of slavery was essentially the British equivalent of putting a man on the moon. During the Victorian era, whatever else the British had on their plate they also kept a squadron of warships off the west coast of Africa to hunt down slave ships - for no other reason than (Victorian-era) Christian scruples.
And that was just some of the highlights of Thomas Sowell's Black Rednecks and White Liberals, at a bookstore near you.
I agree they have, but that's no excuse for 70% illigitimacy.
Yes, that happened. But it was exaggerated by the professional race-baiters: it was only one case; if it were the norm as the race-baiters implied, it wouldn't have MADE the news. Whereas before the 1960's, these things happened all the time, but there was far LESS outrage. Therefore, the larger society's attitudes are changing over time, for the better.
As a counterexample to your argument that past collective oppression has taken a lingering toll, why wasn't the black nuclear family so screwed during the Great Depression, for example? That was before welfare, and without civil rights laws. Blacks had far fewer economic opportunity, were held in far lower regard, and yet their families were more intact. Since the racism has only DECREASED in the US over time, why have the pathologies gotten worse as opportunities for blacks have improved?
The question raised by the article is, why haven't all the "makes white liberals feel good" programs had the intended effect? Why did the black family do so much better without welfare, and with (as you point out) much more oppression?
The answer is that the liberals felt so guilty over other people's sins, they decided to ignore, then to allow, then to encourage collectively self-destructive behaviour. (Or else it was cultural intellectual pride on the part of the libs--the "precious", the "annointed ones"--that they couldn't admit their solutions were ineffective or harmful.)
C.S. Lewis (in a science ficition work, unrelated entirely to race issues) used the phrase "furious self-exiled negation". The reason blacks do not advance so much in industry is not "racism" but ordinary business rules. How many Appilachian rednecks with no teeth do you see in corporate boardrooms? Is that "White Trashism"? No, because there are certain skills and behaviours which you must show before IBM will hire you. If you insist on speaking only Ebonics or (say) "Redneck", you will not get in the door. If you can write grafitti but not DB2 you will not get in the door. If you can brew moonshine but not administer a Linux box, you will not get in the door. So if blacks insist on defining their identity as a culture with few or no marketable skills, they won't get hired. Just as trailer trash doesn't climb the ladder, until they learn different behaviour.
As another counter to "racism" consider the illegal immigration or outsourcing threads. Plenty of jobs are going to non-whites, if the applicants
a) have the skills
and
b) work cheap.
Full Disclosure: There are some effects of past racism which have helped slow the advancement of black people up the corporate ladder. The fact that it has only been within (say) the last 20 years or so that blacks have made it to the corporate offices, has meant there may have been fewer opportunities for mentoring.
Second disclosure: Another form of distinction between races (but not due to classical "racism" as due to slavery and Jim Crow) is due to fear. A disproportionate share of the violent crime in the US (far out of proportion to the population demographics) is due to inner city males, usually minorities. It is not merely 'racist perception' but fact. If "gangsta rap" and "attitude" were not emphasized to the extent that they are, there would be fewer issues.
Third disclosure: A third form of distinction between the races which may influence hiring (you can see analogies in hiring people over 50) is the fear of lawsuits. Gee, if we bring Fred on board, and we have to let him go, he'll get a lawyer and sue the pants off of us. But Geez, if we don't hire him, he'll claim discrimination, and sue us for that! If there weren't so many lawyers pushing specious claims, there'd be less problems.
Cheers!
It may take several more generations before the effects of abuse fades.
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The culture of resentment for past abuses is being fomented in certain communities today.
The black family was much more cohesive and strong before The War of Poverty separated men from their women and children. I worked as a Public Health nurse in the early and late sixties, and the plight of those blacks at the bottom of the socio-economic scale today correlates directly with throwing money into the cities if the men would desert the women.
Sorry to be so blunt but that is the truth.
Being a little presumptuous, aren't you now??
You make it sound like there is a substantial segment of the public who got behind the killers.
As I recall, there was universal condemnation, and the killers all were sentenced to death by execution.
And another thing about your confusing post. What is your rational in claiming that this "new religion" that blacks were given, (Christianity, I presume), taught them to be good slaves.
As I recall, it was the devout Christian abolotionists who brought about an end to slavery.
Christianity does not teach people to be "good slaves."