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Back in the late ‘60’s I worked in the poverty programs and was the first white person to live in the Central City Ghetto in New Orleans and in the St. Bernard projects.

I also worked in the Barrios of San Antonio. So I know quite a bit about race and poverty in America. I also know that no matter how much money you make if you have 8 kids you will be financially stretched. You will be even more destitute if you are a single teenage mother (i.e. uneducated). Regardless of race.

In the 80’s I was walking in downtown San Francisco with a German neurologist and we came across a poor “homeless” person who in previous times would have been called a wino. The German Doc “tsk, tsked” and said, “I would hate to be a black person in America”. So I asked him where he would like to be a black person, exactly? He had no answer.

I have spent a fair amount of time in Africa and Europe. No where are people of negro decent doing better than the USA. No doubt people of African decent has suffered horrific racism, when I worked in NO they were not allowed into City Hall and the French Quarter was segregated. Having said that the American Blacks of the 60’s were doing much better than present day Zimbabweans.

I have no answer but I can say throwing money wastefully at the Department of Education and shoveling money to the various “Reverends” sure as hell IS NOT going to help. Executing drug dealers, rapidly and in public, would help some in that it would at least make me feel better.

Were you walking the streets of Cedar Top, the west side of an oil town in East Texas in 1940? You would see, mainly, houses that were the equivalent of what John Ford depicted as the Jobe home that very year. The Jobes and the Harrison's were living on more or less the same material level that year, except that there was work available for the father, doing odd jobs for an oil drilling company—though not as a roughneck or roustabout which were reserved for white men. There was work as a domestic for the mother. Neither family were regarded with much respect, although the Harrison thankfully were not economic refugees. Some families were doing fairly well, as a matter fact, for my town was not in depression. The occasional white caddy was parked alongside fairly decent houses.But all in all, the place was what one can expect when it mis occupied by
a brace that is regarded —as the Irish were—as inferior. They had no say in the running of the city, town or state. so the concrete pavement
ended where Cedar Top began. The inhabitants had access to a small brick High School —the assessed valuation of the town was over $100 million that year. And I can recall walking, some years later past the high school on graduation. All the graduates were neatly dressed in suits and ties and shiny new shoes. Unlike the students of my high school where we dressed more casually—and took our schooling casually. But the school was small because the enrollment was small. We lost maybe a third of our kids between the 8th and 12th grade; they lost two-thirds. I recall talking to a black man who cleaned the tools at the well-servicing company I worked, and he complained he could not get his boy to take school, work seriously. What's the use, the boy said, look at you Daddy!
Oh, I agree that the welfare state has savaged American blacks. And of course they don't measure their standards against those of Haiti. They measure them against what they see on TV. And lacking any sense of loyalty to city or state,and thinking as the first Irish machines did of politics in terms of plunder, their ideology is self-defeating. They identify economics and politics, as a hustle. But the simple truth is that just fifty fifty years ago, they were under the thumb of other men who did everything in the power to get ahead. The end of segregation was not unlike the end of energy: they were free, but somehow new arrivals in America, their circumstances not unlike those of the peasants who came to America. Any wonder that they squandered the vast resources dumped on them by the Great Society?