I've only scanned the thread, so I'm not going to address any specific post, I'll just give my take on things.
After reading Thomas Sowell's "Race and Culture," I can't honestly say why certain cultural characteristics, for good or evil, seem to manifiest themselves in certain ethnic groups. Are genes involved, or are there genetic predispositions reflected in certain ethnicities? Perhaps, I don't really know, nor do I care.
What I am certain of is that race does not equal moral or cultural destiny. If there are predispositions, they are just that, and nothing more. All of us are endowed by our Creator with Free Will and Inalienable Rights. All of us have the capacity, by God's grace, to transcend our sinful nature and overcome any predisposition.
As to the question of social pathologies in "black communities," again, the question of predispositions is largely irrelevant. We know that these pathologies were in the minority prior to 1960, and have increased tragically since then.
As I see it, there have been three significant changes since that time with regard to the day-to-day life of the average black person.
- The first is the eradication of legal racial discrimination and segregation. This has been a positive development ofr all Americans, and I don't for a monet believe that blacks are less able to manage full freedom and enfranchisement than anyone else.
- The second is the dilution of a traditional moral code of social behavior, as predicted by Daniel Moynihan in "Defining Deviancy Down," in 1965. This breakdown of morality has hit all ethinic groups, but I believe it's hit blacks harder as a result of the third development...
- The third development has been the creation of a welfare state, aimed disproportionately at blacks. The welfare state has generated a legal reinforcement of America's moral decline by, intentionally or unintentionally, attempting to dismiss the consequences of immoral, self-destructive behavior, particularly fatherless families... oftentimes rewarding it. I believe this has led to a plague of lower expectations, especially in underclass black communities. And many people, whatever their color, will live down to the level of expectations placed upon them.
The welfare state is largely the creation of the Democrats (although there has certainly been Republican complicity), who've wittingly or unwittingly, generated a plantation mentality among a huge percentage of Amercan blacks for the purpose of insuring their loyalty on election day. By brazen demagoguery, these Democrat masters have inculcated trans-generational cycles of dependency and victimhood mentality, with flagrant disregard to the devastation these pathologies have wreaked on black individuals, families, or communities.
It's at the feet and on the heads of the liberal creators of the welfare state, and its consequential social degeneracy, that I place the blame for any disprortionate presence of self-destructive pathologies among American blacks.
