an American nightmare
(learn more about the book at the “Ask Me Anything” on Reddit)
Everyone from Bill Cosby to Ronald Reagan seems fond of placing the blame for our black community’s fate squarely on the shoulders of African-Americans, largely excusing the rest of America from any blame for their plight and refusing to consider that - just maybe - other factors might have come into play at some point during our shared history.
Until now, the emergence of the modern Welfare State in particular has been singled-out as the single most detrimental force on our African-American community, since it supposedly allowed “welfare queens” with “80 names, 30 addresses, and 12 Social security cards” to pull in over $150,000 of tax-free income a year. As the argument goes, the Public Welfare Amendments of 1962 created a system that disincentived marriage by rewarding single mothers with loads of free cash.
All they had to do was remain out of wedlock, and the checks would just keep on rolling in.
This view was popularized by a Nobel Prize winning physicist, William Shockley, who argued that these programs “tended to encourage childbirth, especially among less productive members of society (particularly blacks, whom he considered to be genetically inferior to whites), causing a reverse evolution.” Shockley popularized this hypothesis, bringing it to both Congress and the public, and even put forth a proposal offering financial rewards to minorities if they were voluntary sterilized.
So assuming that the Welfare State was created by black mothers who had no intent to ever marry, and willfully popped out babies to get paid, we’d expect to see a steady even rise in American government expenditures on the welfare funding sent to families and children starting in 1962 and then into the next few decades. That’s the year the Public Welfare Amendments were passed, which specifically increased aid to dependent children.
And yet that’s not what happened at all:
Seems a bit odd, there’s a distinct spike – but it starts in the early ’70s not the early ’60s. Neither population growth nor total welfare spending explain this spike, both grew at a relatively flat linear rate during this time period. Did it just take a full decade for black women to finally realize that all they had to do was pop out a baby or seven, marriage be damned, and they could start rolling in the dough? Or maybe something else happened that created a dearth of African-American men who were available to actually marry?
In 1971 President Nixon officially began the War on Drugs, which fully hit its stride in ’73 with the passage of the draconian Rockefeller Drugs Laws, and very quickly a distinct trend in the American prison population emerged:
If the War on Drugs didn’t directly precipitate the Welfare State and the destruction of the American black family, why did welfare aid to families spike in lockstep with our prison population right as that War started? Well, if you’re familiar American drug laws, it shouldn’t surprise you that some 90% of those arrested under the Rockefeller Drug Laws in the years after its passage were minorities.
Sure, correlation doesn’t prove causation – but when you stop a moment and consider that marriage requires an eligible male, it’s not that hard to figure out why the modern Welfare State emerged in tandem with our War on Drugs, as it’s a little bit difficult to marry someone behind bars:
A black male born in 1974 had a 13.4% chance of going to prison at some point in his life, while a white male had just a 2.2% chance. And it’s not like this trend got any better, by 1991 the odds a black male would spend time in prison had ballooned to 29%, while the odds a white male would end up in the clink had only increased to 4.4%
And it’s not at all difficult to see how the reduction in marriageable males affected the rate of black marriages in America. In the decade prior to the start of the War on Drugs, the first decade of the Public Welfare Amendments, the percentage of married African-American women roughly followed the national trend and declined proportionally by less than 6% – but then in the ’70s as the War on Drugs raged, that proportional decline tripled to nearly 18%:
(66.3 - 62.6 = 3.7% | 3.7 / 66.3 = 5.5% and 62.6 - 51.5 = 11.1% | 11.1 / 62.6 = 17.7%)We’ve certainly come a long way as a nation since Abolition, but the horrible reality is that a black child who was born during slavery was more likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during the twenty-first century. As Fredrick Douglass explained, during slavery it was common practice to separate children born into slavery from their birth-mothers before their first birthday. Which makes perfect sense when you consider that under slavery blacks were human chattel, and separating newborns calves from their mothers is just what you do with livestock.
Category: racial inequality, terrorism, war on drugs | Tags: civil unrest, domestic terrorism, gates of injustice, income inequality, malcolm x, militant islam, prison growth, prison system, racial wealth disparity, racist laws, rockefellar drug laws, terrorism, the new jim crow, war on drugs, welfare state 14 comments »
August 11th, 2011 at 1:25 pm
what about the disintegration of the nuclear family? isnt trying to narrow it down to one factor silly?
http://www.childtrendsdatabank.org/pdf/75_PDF.pdf
I havent found better statistics, but by 1980, 57% of african american births were to single mothers.
I’d like to find data for before that, but the trend is fairly linear, so at this point, I think it would be safe to assume at least 40% were to single mothers in 1970, and so on.
To me, for whatever reasons, there were already dynamics at work behind the trend, aside from simply the ‘war on drugs.’
TtD: I’m sure there were other dynamics at work, but having almost 15% of the male population behind bars certainly played a role in creating single mothers. I’m not sure it’s even speculating to state that, it seems kinda straightforward.
August 11th, 2011 at 1:51 pm
one more bit
http://www2.census.gov/prod2/statcomp/documents/1971-02.pdf
page 39 last table,
says in 1968
8% of white minors were being raised by a single mother, while
30% of african american minors were being raised by a single mother at the time.
to me that illustrates that there were other dynamics at work in destroying the african american nuclear family present before the ‘war on drugs’ fueled this vicious cycle.
TtD: That table’s pretty dense (but an awesome resource, thank you) – but I think I’m with you, on the last two lines of it it looks like the percent of persons under 18 living with a Negro mother only stays constant at 29% between ’67 and ’70. But just because African-American families were in poor shape before the War on Drugs started doesn’t mean that the War on drugs didn’t make it a lot worse. Thanks a ton for the stats though!!
August 11th, 2011 at 6:28 pm
One of Nixon’s advisors – “criminalize their pleasures” answer to civil rights movement.
August 13th, 2011 at 6:53 am
I’m confused. At what point you complain how blacks have a low acceptance rate in terms of getting a mortgage:
“blacks were routinely rejected for loans which whites in a comparable economic situation were accepted for. And this phenomenon wasn’t isolated to one city, as a 1991 study showed that out of 6.4 million mortgage applications nationwide, even after income was controlled for – blacks were rejected twice as often as their white counterparts. However that wasn’t the worst of it, in urban centers such as Boston, Philly, Chicago, Minneapolis, blacks were rejected three-times more often than whites. [...]
Wealthy black neighborhoods in the DC suburbs have a much tougher time getting loans than low-income white areas, and in Boston blacks living on the exact same street as their white neighbors and earning similar incomes found it much tougher to get a mortgage than their white neighbors. Joe Kennedy summed up the cumulative effect of this racial injustice well, describing “an America where credit is a privilege of race and wealth, not a function of ability to pay back a loan.””
And then in the next paragraph, you say how easily they do get loans:
“The city of Baltimore partly captures how higher-rate loans to blacks have affected foreclosure rates, with several Wells Fargo loan officers testifying that they targeted “mud people” for “ghetto loans,” resulting in 71% of foreclosures in that city being made on black homes in recent years. And so, even when income and credit score are controlled for, across the nation blacks are more than three-times more likely than whites to have their home foreclosed and be thrown out into the streets.”
What exactly do you want or suggest?
TtD: sorry that was confusing, the argument is a bit nuanced. Just suggesting that in certain times and places blacks have had a tough time getting any loan at all, and in other times and places when they do get loans – they’re at shitty rates simply because they’re black.
August 18th, 2011 at 10:54 am
[...] one of the first influential American voices to speak out against slavery, and saw well in advance the lasting legacy of injustice and despair it would bring America. click Next Page to continue reading this article, or click here to check out the book’s Table [...]
September 3rd, 2011 at 9:34 am
At the end of the day…it’s will over skill.
My father didn’t really have a father growing up, but refused to take the route of selling drugs in order to make a quick buck. My father also took pride in working jobs in order to make his money. He willed himself to get a great civil service job and have a better life for his family.
The fact is that these people who fall into the drug selling gives up on society that seems to always “bring them down”. Do what you have to do…and you won’t have to worry about that. Society completely adores the rich…the media adores the rich…we see shows on TV about how big some people’s houses are….and all their cars and music videos with artists with all this money.
Those same artists glorify the drug game…..little do these young men know is that most of those artists never sold drugs.
At the end of the day, it is will over skill. Everyone makes excuses for people who fall into a life of crime…….. Let’s stop the excuses, please.
TtD: Awesome your Pops made it out, but that doesn’t change the inescapable reality that cops are targeting minority. Half of all drug arrests are for simple possession charges, not dealing. One individual’s story doesn’t change everyone else’s reality.
October 27th, 2011 at 12:55 am
“cops are targeting minority.”
I don’t understand what you are getting at.
The plight of African Americans can be blamed on racist cops? How does that work exactly? Do they learn to be racist at law enforcement academies or do racists flock to police jobs?
November 1st, 2011 at 2:18 pm
I think that you’re both right and wrong at the same time. It was indeed the War on Drugs, combined with a larger disintegration of urban society caused partially by the War on Drugs and partially by the destruction of American Mass-transit and partially by “Urban Renewal,” but it’s not because of a shortage of “eligible males” but rather a shortage of any society worth respecting in marriage. Marriage, after all, is just as much about the extended family and the community as the male and female involved, and when your entire society is built on criminal behavior, with even human slavery, mostly these days of black females for sex, being a norm (and it now is in many American inner cities), what is there to respect?
November 1st, 2011 at 5:43 pm
How is it that one minority, Asian Americans, makes equal or even more money than whites whereas the other non-whites make less than whites? (2010 census) I’m totally serious, I don’t get it. My initial guess what that each group had a completely different history in the US and thus has totally different institutionalized issues to overcome, and the white/minority dichotomy is basically false. Some groups, like Native Americans and African-Americans, have cycles of poverty and institutionalized racism to overcome whereas a Latino family that arrived in the 1980s has to deal with English as a second language and xenophobia. However, when I’ve made comments like this in the past, I’ve been called racist.
November 3rd, 2011 at 3:49 pm
I wanted to know what you would do about this that might be practical or even possible I’m getting your point is that racism is prevalent because the war on drugs was racist and incarcerated black men causing single mother families which caused black youth to get into drugs or put into prison this affecting their ability to get a job. That is a rough synopsis sorry if I missed points . I have a question about it possibly being a issue of education that the problem may be an issue of the school systems not being able to educate black students as well because of environment. I bring this point up because of something in your article about prisoners being illiterate. I’m also not sure about how the whole black and white difference in mortgage rates came to be racist are they not based on area , market and comparable houses sold in that area recently. I don’t know if that is racist or just a product of the area that most African Americans are in. I would like to discuss some of these things with you and possibly hear ideas on what you think should be done.
February 17th, 2012 at 1:46 pm
While I agree there is a huge overlap between drug prohibition and poverty I am afraid there is a key piece of data that disproves your hypothesis regarding the drug war and welfare. The FBI tracks arrest rates in its Uniform Crime Reports and have been tracking drug arrests since 1930.
There is a useful report (http://www.jrsa.org/programs/Historical.pdf) which summarizes this data (page 40 for the drug data) and show that while there was a small spike with the announcement of the drug war in 1971 rates fell before climbing again and the rate it climbed after 1971 was actually lower then before 1971.
February 17th, 2012 at 2:30 pm
I’ve spent the past 8 months working in downtown DC. Quite honestly, the black community there is looking pretty grim. There are always police, people getting arrested, people selling drugs, people harassing people, people living on the streets everywhere, people loitering around shops, etc. It doesn’t feel safe to me – and I grew up on the north side of St. Louis. I think we agree that the reasons for this situation are varied, that there was racism involved at least at some point, and that increasingly the black community seems to be simply hanging on. My question is about solutions you might have to solve this problem. How do we fix this?
February 17th, 2012 at 9:47 pm
Well…Asian Americans came here as immigrants rather than slaves…and came here to the Western Coast, which has less of a racial legacy to overcome than the North and certainly the South. The Coast is far from perfect..but when change came it was much easier here…except for blacks. Asians could fit in the middle. Hell…prejudice against darker skin is prevalent in Asia, Africa, the whole damn planet.
The Right wants to forget slavery and genocide….yet they are the ones who complain their culture is being disrupted and causing all these problems while ignore the complete disruptions of culture slavery and forced migrating had upon Native and Black Americans.
They complain about the “War on the Southern Culture” by Lincoln but are fine with invasions of Afghaistan and Iraq. If you want to avoid responsibility or just recognition of all that…and your leaders can only win elections via racism and blaming liberals in a few years of “the Projects” and a smattering of Welfare are an easy scapegoat.
March 13th, 2012 at 3:15 am
Discrimination it seems still holds a couple of truths to be self evident.
Some of the other commentors have made mention of the fact that Asians have had a better bit of success than African Americans. I would stipulate they still largely have the precursor structures of their culture still intact, be it China, India or other countries from SE Asia, there are functional societies (or recently disfuctional ones) from which to draw traditions and family commitments to education in particular.
If this precursor notion were not the case, how then do we explain that when blacks and whites of similar socioeconomic circumstances are compared – in fact their educational outcomes are very similar and almost indistinguishable.
Furthermore, it presumes that racism is not selective, that one cannot still be selectively racist to US blacks versus, Africans, anecdotally I have seen profound differences us US urban/black culture versus that of black natively African students from abroad, and the differences are striking, with the latter doing every bit as well, and many times better than their asian , white or other counterparts.
We saw this kind of institutional bias for many years against Irish, Jews, and Italians when they arrived, the peculiar circumstance of black culture is that it has been not just systematically discriminated against, but pulled apart at the very core; in this respect functioning far more similarly as do communities of war refugees , having to rebuild their familial and cultural societies ad-hoc as they also try to excel in US mainstream culture; which brings up another interesting artifact of US culture.
The vast funding – by MTV, and other media firms into the dumbing down of black musical repertoire and glorification and support of some of the very worst aspects of african-american youth culture , be it gangs, violence, or fast money – by virtue of drugs or whatever.
How acceptable is it to have Wu-Tang Clan or Gorillaz or some other perhaps even talented groups brought high into the media culture, how acceptable to say Japanese if we highlighted Triad youth culture, or promoted Pop-Geisha / Schoolgirl Fetish culture as normal and what young girls and boys really should aspire to be like , or made common practice rampant disparaging or comical reference to Hasidim Orthodox , or Chinese Confucian culture.
I’m sure it’s possible to point to some aspect of US culture which in fact does indulge some mockery of those cultural institutions in a way that’s entirely acceptable (i.e.; Weird Al Yankovic or Robin Williams), but it’s nothing like the gang cultural constructs created to encourage some pretty powerfully bad stereotypes.
To suggest otherwise, neglects the toxic impacts of our culture in other forms or the specific assault of African American culture in particular.