Black lives have long been endangered in this country. Now, with rioters burning down parts of many U.S. cities, ostensibly in support of black lives, it behooves us to accurately answer several questions: 1. Is traditional racism, brutal KKK-style anti-black hatred, still a major threat to black lives, as Black Lives Matter claims? 2. Today, is there a far greater threat to black lives than traditional racism, one that is widely overlooked? 3. If so, what can we do about it? What must be done to protect black lives? This essay will answer these questions.
Traditional Racism
Several months ago, I published a relevant essay, “America: A Racist Nation?“[i] One theme of the piece is that white racism, in its horrific traditional form, is mercifully dying in the U.S., and has been for almost sixty years, since the heyday of the Civil Rights Movement. It is gradually dying, not dead. Racism still exists among white Americans both within and without the police force; police brutality exists, and is perhaps directed more lethally at blacks than other racial groups. Such racism is evil, it is dangerous, and we must continue to fight it. But it is dying. The evidence for this conclusion, some of it provided in my previous essay and some of it new here, is overwhelming.
- The rise of a black American middle class. In 1940, eighty-seven percent of black families were living below the poverty line. By 1960, that number was down to forty-seven percent; by 1995, to twenty-six percent. By the late-1990s, greater than forty percent of black Americans considered themselves members of the middle-class.[ii]
- The Obama candidacy and presidency. In 2008, Obama’s run to the presidency generated enormous excitement. That year, he won forty-three percent of the white vote and fifty-four percent of the young white vote. In 2008, he won the largest share of the white vote by any Democrat in a two-man race since 1976. His first term included a still-stagnating economy, numerous dirty backroom deals (after promising the most transparent administration in history) to get Obamacare through the Senate, and, just months before the election, a failure to deploy U.S. military assets to Benghazi, resulting in the murder of the U.S. Ambassador by Libyan jihadists. Despite these failings, in 2012 he still received thirty-nine percent of a white vote that constituted seventy-two percent of the U.S. electorate. He averaged, for the two elections, just over forty percent of the white vote–tens of millions of supporters.[iii]
- Inter-racial marriage. A 2017 poll by the Pew Research Center showed that thirty-nine percent of white Americans favored inter-racial marriage, fifty-two percent were indifferent, and merely nine percent opposed it. (By comparison, eighteen percent of black Americans opposed it.)[iv]
- The dwindling Ku Klux Klan. One hundred years ago, the white American population was around 95 million and the Klan, a murderous terrorist organization, had roughly several million members.[v] Today, counting white Latinos, the white American population has grown to roughly 234 million but the Klan’s membership has dwindled into the thousands.[vi] This is still thousands too many–but the trend line is clearly in the right direction.
But more evidence of the diminution of white racism can be provided. For example: Which ethnic group has the highest education levels in the United States? Nigerians.[vii] Which ethnic group has the highest income levels in the United States? Indian immigrants[viii]–and it’s not even close. Granted, Indians are not black but, in contemporary parlance, they are “people of color.” (Second on the list are Chinese-Americans; third are Filipino-Americans; fourth are Japanese-Americans. White Americans are well down the list.[ix]) The brilliant economist, Thomas Sowell, pointed out in his book, Ethnic America, that second-generation black Caribbeans have higher income levels than whites.[x] (Ethnic America was published in 1981, almost forty years ago.) If black Americans constituted an independent nation, it would be the 15th wealthiest nation in the world.[xi] According to a 2018 Nielsen report, black Americans possess $1.2 trillion in purchasing power.[xii] Black Americans have been President of the United States, Secretary of State, Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, mayors of many large cities, State Governors, U.S. Congress (wo)men, and U.S. Senators, including from South Carolina, cradle of the Confederacy.
Would such enormous black gains (and by non-black persons of color) be possible in a country of systemic racism? Would they have been possible under the brutal reign of Jim Crow? The answers are: no–and no.
Related, white supremacy used to be a powerful philosophy in this country: It motivated thousands of lynchings and numerous white race riots that burned down black communities in Wilmington, North Carolina (1898), Tulsa, Oklahoma, (1921), and elsewhere, murdering countless innocent black Americans. Today, in 2020, there are still white racists who murder innocent blacks but, compared to the gigantic, pandemic threat to black lives–that we will discuss–these are relatively rare incidents. If white supremacy was still a powerful force among a significant subset of 234 million white Americans, we would see many thousands, perhaps millions of heavily armed savages invading, burning, destroying black communities, especially middle class black communities, for ignorant racists have long held especial hatred for educated, successful blacks. But we do not.
Mercifully, this version of white racism is dying.
The bottom line on current white racism is this: In a vast majority of cases, it is insufficiently powerful to prevent a determined black man or woman from gaining an education, a successful career, and a fulfilling life in contemporary America.
The Gravest Danger to Black Lives
The most egregious danger to black lives, by far, is black thugs. Every year–year after year after year after year–thousands of young black men are murdered in this country. Nine out of ten are murdered by black criminals. Taleeb Starkes wrote a courageous and brutally honest book on this theme, Black Lies Matter: Why Lies Matter to the Race Grievance Industry. In it, he quoted journalist, John Fountain: “For every Trayvon Martin killed by someone not black, nine other blacks were murdered by someone black…The national tally of black males 14 and older murdered in America over a 30-year period from 1976 through 2005, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics: 214,661.”[xiii] Ninety percent of this number is more than 193,000 murdered black kids. This is substantially more than double the number of American fatalities in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan combined. If Fountain’s numbers are accurate, this averages out to greater than 6000 murders per year. Roughly 6000 black kids are murdered every year by black thugs. This is a staggering number. It averages out to roughly sixteen homicides per day, every day, every day of every year, no exceptions.
Dr. Barry Latzer is a criminologist and emeritus professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. He provides further data. From 1976 to 2005, ninety-four percent of black murder victims were killed by blacks.[xiv] Between 1976 and 2014, 198,288 blacks were killed by blacks. This averages to 5,218 homicides per year, roughly nineteen times the number of blacks killed by the police.[xv] In 2018, whenever a murder victim was black, the suspect in eighty-eight percent of the cases was also black.[xvi]
The outstanding economist, Dr. Walter Williams, tells us: “The FBI reported that the total number of homicides in 2015 was 15,696. Blacks were about 52 percent of homicide victims.
“That means about 8,100 black lives were ended violently, and over 90 percent of the time, the perpetrator was another black person.”[xvii]
Ninety percent of 8,100 is 7,200 black lives snuffed out by black thugs in 2015.
There is perhaps a discrepancy in these differing data sets. But any accounting of black homicide victims shows a catastrophic crime problem. In fact, this is a Holocaust. It is not hyperbole but is literally accurate to point out that there is a Holocaust of black murder victims in this country. And almost nobody talks about it. Nobody seeks to understand the causation or thereby remediate the ongoing catastrophe…least of all, a movement calling itself Black Lives Matter.
Criminal brutality is, by far, the gravest danger to black lives.
In general, the overwhelming number of homicides are intra-racial: Most white murder victims are murdered by whites; most Latino murder victims, are murdered by Latinos; and so forth. This is just as true of black Americans. But the black homicide rate is off the charts: For example, it is three times the homicide rate of Latino Americans.[xviii]
Professor Latzer points out that, relative to other ethnic groups, the black-on-black homicide rate has always been high. But it reached a new high in the late-1960s. “Black violent crime was a major factor in the post-1960s crime tsunami…”[xix] It has fluctuated over the past fifty-odd years but the trend line is upward. Professor Latzer tells us: “From 2000 to 2015, the mean African-American homicide-victimization rate, adjusted for age, was 20.1 per 100,000. That’s more than three times the Hispanic rate of 6.4…and over seven times the average white rate, 2.7.”[xx]
It was not always this way.
Although the black-on-black homicide rate was always relatively high, Professor Latzer makes clear that it did not begin to reach the astronomic heights we’ve seen recently until the late-1960s. Jason Riley, of The Wall Street Journal and the Manhattan Institute, concurs. Speaking of high black crime rates, he wrote: “Crime began rising precipitously in the 1960s….Crime rates rose by 139 percent during the 1960s, and the murder rate doubled.”[xxi] (Emphasis added.)
Getting exact homicide rates by ethnic group going back to the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s is difficult. But we have a great deal of anecdotal evidence from impeccable sources corroborating the claim that crime rates were significantly lower in pre-1960s black urban neighborhoods. The brilliant economist/ researcher, Dr. Thomas Sowell (born 1930) tells us that as a boy and young man living in Harlem, he witnessed many cases of people sleeping on fire escapes and even in parks on hot summer nights[xxii]. He reports that he never heard a gunshot in Harlem in his youth.[xxiii] Another outstanding economist, Dr. Walter Williams (born 1936) writes similarly: “I attended predominantly black Philadelphia schools from 1942 to 1954. The only time we saw a policeman in school was during an assembly where we had to listen to a boring lecture on safety. Today, Philadelphia schools have hired more than 350 police officers.”[xxiv] Dr. Williams reminds us: “In the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s, people didn’t bar their windows. Doors were often left unlocked. People didn’t go to bed with the sounds of gunshots.”[xxv] Dr. Sowell points out: In recent years, parents in housing projects started putting young children to bed in the bathtub to protect them from stray bullets.[xxvi]
Some powerful social force pushed the black homicide rate to astronomic heights. What?
The Causes of the Crime Tsunami
Leftist (semi-socialist, anti-capitalist) policies are responsible for the Holocaust of black murder victims.
These are:
- The killing of marriage–or the war on the black family.
- The killing of phonics in the teaching of reading in the government (public) schools–or the war on young black minds.
- The killing of job opportunities–or minimum wage laws and the war on black teenage employment.
Take these one at a time.
Marriage
Both Dr. Sowell and Dr. Williams, two eminent economists, point out that poverty rates for married black Americans are below ten percent, and have been so for years.[xxvii] Dr. Sowell reminds us of the recipe for escaping (or avoiding) poverty: Graduate from high school, get a full-time job, and marry before bringing children into the world. Over the years, millions–perhaps tens of millions–of black Americans (and others) have risen economically by following such wisdom.
Marriage before having children is an important part of avoiding poverty. The reasons are clear: For one thing, it makes possible two salaries to support child-rearing. For another, by ensuring two parents to rear and supervise children, it is a responsible thing to do. Such responsible behavior, replicated in other arenas of life, will facilitate the careers of mother and father, as well. Dr. Williams reminds us that the black American illegitimacy rate in 1938 was eleven percent.[xxviii] Many black Americans still lived in the Jim Crow South, and even in the North Civil Rights policies had not yet started to ease discrimination against blacks. But by 1940, pronounced upward economic mobility by black Americans was under way. In 1965, future U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan worried that the black illegitimacy rate had reached twenty-five percent. This means that the enormous economic advances of blacks were accompanied by illegitimacy rates somewhere between eleven percent and a possible high of twenty-five percent. A minimum of seventy-five percent of black children were born to married couples during the greatest period of black economic advance in U.S. history.
Today the black American illegitimacy rate is over seventy percent. [xxix]
How did this happen? The welfare state gave a gigantic push in this direction. Walter Williams points out: “Unfortunately, many blacks followed the advice of white liberal academics such as Johns Hopkins professor Andrew Cherlin who in the 1960s argued that ‘the most detrimental aspect of the absence of fathers from one-parent families is not the lack of a male presence but the lack of male income.’ Cherlin’s vision suggested that fathers were unimportant and if black females ‘married the government,’ black fathers would be redundant.”[xxx]
The welfare program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) seduced many women, including many black women, to do exactly that. By 1970, women received government payments for their children whether or not there was a man in the house, and his income did not count against her benefits as long as they were unmarried.[xxxi]
At this point the Law of Unintended Consequences took over. If you target any ethnic group, no matter its religious devotion or established work ethic, and offer to pay women for illegitimate children, you will get more illegitimate children. This would be true of Jews, Chinese, Indians, whites, blacks, or whomever. Blacks, although gaining ground, were still disproportionately poor in the 1960s–and they became the especial target of leftist intellectuals and politicians.[xxxii] The consequences may be unintended but they are eminently predictable. Thomas Sowell summarized the point succinctly: “If you pay people to not get married, fewer people will get married.”[xxxiii]Kay Hymowitz, writing about the failed 1970s-80s attempt to diminish rising teen pregnancy via ready access to birth control, wrote: “But the truth was that underclass girls often wanted to have babies; they didn’t see it as a problem that they were young and unmarried.”[xxxiv]Might one of the reasons for this be that the teen girls, in effect, “married the government” and then received paychecks offered by Husband Government? Michael Tanner, in his carefully-researched book, The End of Welfare, cited numerous studies indicating a causal link between increased welfare benefits and increased illegitimacy among both whites and blacks.[xxxv] He also wrote, “the African-American family was the first to suffer from the anti-family incentives of welfare…”[xxxvi] Thomas Sowell took an international perspective, pointing out the harmful effects of welfare on recipients of differing races in various countries around the world, including in the United Kingdom. When he discussed specifically the welfare state and black Americans, he wrote: “A vastly expanded welfare state in the 1960s destroyed the black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and generations of racial oppression.”[xxxvii] Walter Williams was equally brutal in his assessment: “The undeniable truth is that neither slavery nor Jim Crow nor the harshest racism has decimated the black family the way the welfare state has.”[xxxviii]
This important issue deserves careful thought. That a child is born to unwed biological parents does not necessarily mean that he/she is reared without a father in his life. A man need not be married to his child’s mother to be a loving father to his child(ren). This is undoubtedly true…and it is certain that some percentage of black children (and non-black children) born to unmarried parents have a loving father in their lives. But what the welfare state did was vastly diminish the consequences for men who wanted little or no relationship with their biological children. The biological father was not legally responsible for his children. Husband Government provided financially for the children, and he was not married to the mother; so if he tired of her, or of fatherhood, or both, he could walk and there were no legal consequences for being a deadbeat dad. Plus, a woman could get paychecks from Husband Government whether the child’s father remained in her life or their child’s–or not. What the welfare state did was place perverse financial incentives in service of people’s most irresponsible premises.[xxxix]
(Not surprisingly, the illegitimacy rate also rose among white women. More white babies were born out of wedlock, more white children were raised without a father in their lives, and a good deal of research shows worsened problems in school, with drugs, and with crime for a significant percentage of those white children. Again, welfare benefits for unmarried mothers played a causal role.[xl] But the theme of this essay regards the major threat to black lives, the causes of the threat, and its cure.)
In 1965, when the black illegitimacy rate was merely twenty-five percent, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, published his classic study, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. Moynihan warned: “A community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken homes, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any rational expectations about the future — that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, unrestrained lashing out at the whole social structure — that is not only to be expected, it is very near to inevitable.”[xli] Moynihan was so prescient on this issue, that it is almost unbelievable. Of course, he was denounced by leftists as a racist.
Did Moynihan have a crystal ball? Obviously not. How did he know this? Because boys need a father. There are many tirelessly devoted, superbly moral, deeply loving single mothers, many of them black Americans, but a mother cannot role model for her son what it means to be a man. He needs his father to do this. When his father is in the home, or at the very least in his life, when he sees his father working honestly, helping support the family, respectful toward his mother, firm and loving with the children, he learns what it means to be a man, to really be a man, not a macho violent gangsta on the street.
And many fatherless boys are devolving into macho violent gangstas on the street. Walter Williams reminds us: “Children with no father in the home are five times more likely to be poor and commit crime[s], nine times more likely to drop out of school and 20 times more likely to be in prison.”[xlii] (Emphasis added.)
Michael Tanner, an expert on the U.S. welfare state, cited a good deal of research in his book, The End of Welfare. He wrote: “Yet another study indicated that…black children from single-parent households are twice as likely to commit crimes as are black children from families with resident fathers. The likelihood of criminal activity triples if a child lives in a neighborhood with a high concentration of single-parent families. Nearly 70 percent of juveniles in state reform institutions come from fatherless homes.”[xliii]
Women should be married to the government, Professor Cherlin said? This is what it looks like when women are married to the government and thousands of boys grow up with no father in their lives.
Reading
Reading is the fundamental cognitive skill. For a proficient reader, the whole world of knowledge is then accessible. Phonics is, by far, the most effective method to teach reading. All versions of its rival whole word method are, by comparison, dismal failures. Countless tests have established this cognitive truth.[xliv]
And yet, for one hundred years, dating back to John Dewey and the Progressive movement, leading American educators have warred persistently against phonics.[xlv] The results, predictably, have been catastrophic. In my essay on U.S. education, “Heroes and Villains in American Education,” I wrote: “In 1988, a mere 5 percent of seventeen-year-old high school students could read sufficiently to comprehend information disseminated in historical documents, college textbooks, or literary essays[xlvi]….The Educational Testing Service reported in 1994 that 50 percent of college graduates in the United States could not read a bus schedule and ‘that only 42 percent could summarize an argument presented in a newspaper article.'”[xlvii] Further, my essay reported that “some 44 million American adults cannot read well enough to read a simple story to a child–and nearly half the adults in the United States are functionally illiterate, unable even to read a drug label.”[xlviii]
Related, the public schools have severely de-valued academics. The more time they spend on shop classes, driver’s ed, sex ed, hygiene, and such practical skills, the less time they spend on teaching literature, math, science, and history. It is not a mystery that, relative to students around the world, American kids test poorly on academic subjects; for, overwhelmingly, American schools do not teach academic subjects to the extent or in the depth that many foreign schools do.
To put it bluntly, the American public school system is a shambles. What is the main reason for this?
Leftists have dominated the U.S. public school system for a century. This dates back to the days of John Dewey, William Heard Kilpatrick, and George Counts at Columbia University (the latter two at Teachers’ College). All three of these seminal influencers of American education (Dewey and Kilpatrick were especially influential) pilgrimaged to the Soviet Union and returned with glowing reports of education (and life) under Stalin.[xlix] The goal of these educators, and their intellectual heirs today, is to provide academic education for the brightest kids, society’s future leaders, but less so for the majority of youngsters, who will go on to be workers, and who therefore need(ed) vocational training and practical skills more than literature, history, math, or science.[l] Politically, the educated elite would govern in the legislature and in the classroom, and the rest of us would be conscientious workers who uncritically obeyed the wise rulers of the state; so we did (do) not need advanced thinking skills or academic knowledge. In this way, we would achieve the socialist state dreamed of by Dewey and his ilk, where the wise rulers would paternalistically provide for us…and do so better than we could for ourselves.
Dewey laid the foundations for a century (and counting) of American educators. As I wrote in my education essay: “He [Dewey] held that all learning is ultimately for the purpose of ‘saturating [students] with the spirit of service.’[li] In Dewey’s view, the purpose of education is not to convey ‘bodies of information and skills that have been worked out in the past’;[lii]not to teach the child ‘science, nor literature, nor history, nor geography’;[liii] but rather to prime him for ‘social cooperation and community life.'”[liv] The purpose of American public education for the past century has been generally not to teach the kids cognitive skills and academic knowledge–but to prepare them vocationally and socially to serve the community.
One major example of this was the 1918 “Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education,” which, to this day, a full century later, remains the foundational document of modern American education. The report declared that, moving forward, the schools would “concern themselves less with academic matters than with the preparation for effective living.”[lv] There were seven cardinal principles or main objectives that the secondary schools would henceforth emphasize. One was “Health,” meaning hygiene and sports. A second was “Command of Fundamental Processes” or academic education. Third was “Worthy Home Membership,” ensuring that high school girls would learn the rules of proper family management. Fourth was “Vocation,” later known as Industrial Arts or shop classes. Fifth was “Civics,” which shortly became part of a new hybrid known as “Social Studies,” and which largely replaced the teaching of History. Sixth was “Worthy Use of Leisure,” which assumed that most people, devoid of proper training, did not know how to relax and enjoy themselves–and that training in such activities was a worthy use of school time. Seventh and final was “Ethical Character,” which raised the terrifying question of which moral code would a government-run institution inculcate in young students? Might the Commission’s repeated emphasis on “collective thinking” and “collective responsibility” provide a clue?[lvi]
Educational writer, Charles Sykes, noted: “The Cardinal Principles, which are voluble to the point of tedium on every aspect of schooling, dismissed scholarship with a single sentence: ‘Provisions should be made also for those having distinctly academic interests.’ And that’s it; the commission offered no further comments, suggestions, or guidelines.”[lvii] Eminent educational historian, Diane Ravitch pointed out that academic education was thereby reduced to “an afterthought.”[lviii]She commented that, “The driving purpose behind the seven objectives was socialization, teaching students to fit into society….The overriding goal was social efficiency, not the realization of individual desire for self-improvement.”[lix] So, if we do our jobs and obey the state, what matter if we can barely read or write, and know nothing of history?
The positive goals of the U.S. schools and departments of education have largely changed in recent decades–but their hostility to phonics and to academic subjects has not. A century of anti-academic principles dominating the teachers colleges and departments of education has led to horrific results. Predictably, in terms of reading proficiency and academic subjects the government schools are terrible. As one recent example: The 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), jocularly referred to as “the Nation’s Report Card,” showed dismal results. “The tests were administered from January to March 2018 to a nationally representative sample of 42,700 eighth-graders from about 780 schools. The news is not very good. Only 24% of students performed at or above the “proficient” level in civics. Worse yet, only 15% scored proficient or above in American history and 25% were proficient in geography. At least 25% of America’s eighth-graders are what NAEP defines as “below basic” in U.S. history, civics and geography. That means they have no understanding of historical and civic issues and cannot point out basic locations on a map.”[lx]The reading results were equally poor: Fourth-graders scored at 220 out of a possible 500; 8th graders scored 263 out of a possible 500. This means that the average fourth-grade reading score stood at just 44 percent of grade-level proficiency; and the average eighth-grade score at 52.6 percent of grade-level expertise; both are dismally failing grades.[lxi]
Many persons believe the public schools are especially bad in black urban neighborhoods. If so, what makes matters worse is that powerful leftist politicians (and the abysmally leftist teachers’ union) strenuously oppose school choice, a set of policies generally favored by black parents, for these might permit them to gain tax credits for sending their children to better private schools.
In the black urban neighborhoods–as a matter of deliberate educational policy–parents are locked into sending their children to terrible schools that, year after year, churn out thousands of semi-illiterate teenagers.
Walter Williams points out one aspect of the problem–the “gross fraud practiced by the education establishment. High school graduation rates for black students range from a high of 84% in Texas to a low of 57% in Nevada and Oregon. However, according to ACT data, the percentage of black students judged to be college-ready in English, math, reading and science ranges from 17% in Massachusetts to only 3% in Mississippi. One concrete example of this fraud is the fact that Baltimore’s Frederick Douglass High School has a graduation rate of 70% while not a single student tested proficient in mathematics and only 3% did so in reading.”[lxii] (Emphasis added.)
Learning to read, for any human being with a healthy brain, is a relatively simple process, and, at ages four to six, can be accomplished in several months, using phonics. If the schools actually tried to teach reading, and committed to phonics, is it possible that no more than three of one hundred graduates from an urban high school would reach grade-level proficiency in this all-important skill?
It is far more likely that, in service of their political goals, the teachers’ colleges and government departments of education eschew phonics because they do not want the majority of Americans to read at a high level of proficiency. For strong readers will be thinkers, able and willing to challenge the decrees of the paternalistic state charged with the responsibility of taking care of us. And leftists do not want millions of educated American citizens challenging their socialist principles and policies. Above all, they do not want millions of educated black American citizens challenging them. One horrific example of this is that when American blacks dare to challenge socialist principles and policies, they are often reviled by leftists as “race traitors,” “coons,” “house niggers,” “Uncle Toms,” “sellout Negroes,” and other loathsome epithets.
Employment
Minimum wage laws create unemployment. Economists have identified this truth many times. For example, Nobel Laureate, Milton Friedman, wrote: “The minimum wage law requires employers to discriminate against persons with low skills.”[lxiii]Friedman was writing in 1979-80, so let’s update the numbers while retaining his principle. A low-skilled teen-ager, let us say, is eager to work but his labor is worth merely eight dollars an hour to an employer. Let’s say the minimum wage law requires an employer to pay him ten dollars an hour. Given that the teen’s work will then cause the employer to lose two dollars for every hour the kid works, the teenager will not be employed.
Henry Hazlitt, like Fredric Bastiat in the 19th century, was one of the clearest writers ever regarding economic issues; his classic primer, Economics In One Lesson, should be required reading in every high school and college in the country. Hazlitt wrote: “You cannot make a man worth a given amount by making it illegal for anyone to offer him anything less. You merely deprive him of the right to earn the amount that his abilities and situation would permit him to earn….In brief, for a low wage, you substitute unemployment.”[lxiv] You also deprive a low-skilled worker a chance to demonstrate his work ethic, to gain on-the-job training, to thereby develop increased skills, to build a resume, to get strong references, and so forth.
Friedman pointed out that the demographic hit hardest by minimum wage laws was (and is) black teenagers. “The high rate of unemployment among teenagers, and especially black teenagers, is both a scandal and a serious source of social unrest. Yet it is largely a result of minimum wage laws.”[lxv] Friedman reminded us that, in the years following World War II, the minimum wage was set at a substantially lower level than today, teen unemployment was roughly 10 percent, compared to 4 percent for adults, and unemployment rates were roughly equal for black and white teenagers. In subsequent decades, the minimum wage was raised sharply, and it was accompanied by a precipitous drop in teen employment. By 1979-80, the unemployment rate for white teens was 15-20 percent; for black teens it was 35-45 percent.[lxvi] In 2010, the unemployment rate for black teens was 40.6 percent, and had reached 50 percent the year before.”[lxvii]
Milton and Rose Friedman wrote: “We regard the minimum wage law as one of the most, if not the most, antiblack laws on the statute books. The government first provides schools in which many young people, disproportionately black, are educated so poorly that they do not have the skills that would enable them to get good wages. It then penalizes them a second time by preventing them from offering to work for low wages as a means of inducing employers to give them on-the-job training.”[lxviii] Minimum wage laws make it exceedingly difficult for the low-skilled among black urban teenagers to gain responsible employment.
Brutal Truths
A constellation of leftist policies have contributed mightily to an urban disaster–thousands of fatherless boys who are semi-illiterate and who have no prospect of employment. They are poor. Many have natural vitality and superb native intelligence, as evidenced by the colorful, image-laden use of the language and the clever rhyme schemes of the raps they favor. But they have little academic education. They are crowded together into cramped projects and dingy neighborhoods. In many cases, they have no father and little family.
What will they do?
Many form together into gangs, gaining thereby a sense of family. They deal drugs and gain a fair amount of money. They feud with gangs from the next street, the next projects, the next neighborhood. Ostensibly, it’s turf war to control the streets where drug trafficking is most lucrative. But the hideous violence is also driven by something deeper. It’s about loyalty to my gang, my tribe, my family. It’s the Hutus versus the Tutsis, less one-sided but just as deadly.
Some people might think that, in the 1960s, leftist intellectuals and politicians pushing these policies may have been unaware of their necessary consequences. I am not one of them. The consequences of the three socialist policies described above, especially in concert, were eminently predictable…as Senator Moynihan pointed out regarding one of them. But today and for decades past, one no longer need predict the consequences. One can observe them all around us.
Do leftists want to change these principles and policies? Or, like Bernie Sanders and his cadre of indoctrinated followers, do they demand we double down on them? Their answer is clear: To them, we need more social welfare programs, no increased use of phonics, no school choice for black parents, and higher minimum wage levels. More poison for the dying man.
It’s even worse than this. The Left does not merely seek to perpetuate the exact policies that have dealt death to hundreds of thousands of black youths. Today, leftists have found a new way to kill blacks. For example, there is a movement of leftist terrorists that calls itself Black Lives Matter (BLM).[lxix] Does it seek solutions to the crime tsunami that snuffs out thousands of black lives annually? It does not. Rather, it claims that the prime danger to black lives is white racism and/or brutal racist cops. In making such claims, BLM overlooks several inconvenient truths. One, as noted above, 19 times as many black homicide victims are killed by black thugs as by the police. A second is that a police officer is 18 times more likely to be killed by a black criminal than a black criminal is to be killed by a police officer.[lxx] Three, despite the dangers of policing high crime neighborhoods, dedicated cops of all races and either gender answer the bell every day, risking their lives to confront violent thugs who prey on innocent black victims.
Such charges are worse than mere injustice to honest cops and most white people. The refusal to confront the real threat to black lives permits that threat to proliferate. And it’s worse even than that. What is the real way to save black lives? One part of the solution is more stringent policing of high-crime neighborhoods. For example, Rudy Giuliani, as mayor of New York City during the 1990s, deployed strict law enforcement measures that substantially reduced the homicide and violent crime rates, including for black residents. Giuliani’s policies of tough policing saved black lives. Indeed, crime expert, Heather MacDonald, estimates that stop, question, and frisk policies implemented by Giuliani in the mid-90s and continued by Mayor Bloomberg, had this result: “more than 10,000 minority males were spared the violent death that they would have experienced had homicides remained at their early 1990s levels.”[lxxi]
Today, the Left, especially BLM, seeks to “defund the police.” The village idiot might discern that an inevitable consequence of less policing is a rising rate of violent crime. For those who can’t figure this out, Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute provided the data: She wrote (on July 3, 2020):
“The current tolerance and justification for vandalism and violence…send a clear message to criminals that society has lost the will to prevent lawlessness. In Minneapolis, shootings have more than doubled this year compared to last. Nearly half of all those shootings have occurred since George Floyd’s death….On Father’s Day, a mass shooting on a crowded street uptown struck 11 people. The next day saw a chain of retaliatory shootings — the first next to a park filled with children, the next, 90 minutes later, on a notorious gang-dominated street intersection…. In Chicago, 18 people were killed and 47 wounded in drive- and walk-by shootings last weekend….The previous weekend in Chicago, 104 people were shot, 15 fatally.
“New York City’s homicide rate is at a five-year high; the number of shooting victims was up over 42 percent through June 21 compared with the same period in 2019. The number of shootings in the first three weeks of June was over twice that of the same period in 2019, making this June the city’s bloodiest in nearly a quarter century… Milwaukee’s homicides have increased 132 percent. ‘In 25 years, I’ve never seen it like this,’ a Milwaukee police inspector [said]. So far this year, more people have been killed in Baltimore than at this point in 2019, which ended with the highest homicide rate on record for that city. June’s killings…eclipse those of June 2019….
“The victims in these shootings are overwhelmingly black. So far this year, 78 percent of all homicide victims in Chicago are black, though blacks are less than a third of the population.
“While 307 people have been murdered this year in Chicago, the Chicago police have killed three suspects, all armed and dangerous. In 2018, the New York Police Department recorded its lowest number of fatal civilian shootings — five — since records were first kept in 1971. (Data from 2019 have not been published.) All five victims were threatening or appeared to be threatening officers with guns or knives.”[lxxii]
MacDonald reports that, in many cases, the black victims were young children, who were either caught in the cross-fire or who, as children of rival gangbangers, were targeted for execution.
Leftists have undiluted contempt for black lives. If they sincerely cared about black lives, their call to defund the police would be insane. That they continue to advocate policies that inevitably cause the murder of ever-more black victims demonstrates that their goals are something else, to which black lives must be endlessly sacrificed. What is their goal? To transform America into a socialist state. Black Americans, disproportionately poor, were the first ethnic group of whom a large percentage of members were seduced onto the welfare rolls. This “accomplished” two things: It made many blacks dependent on the semi-socialist party, the Democrats, and gave that party a huge percentage of the black vote. Worse, blacks became the guinea pigs of America’s experiment with socialism, “useful idiots” (in Lenin’s vivid phrase) who, if necessary, could die in droves, in a Holocaust ignored by leftist intellectuals and politicians pushing for evermore social welfare programs. Black lives are cannon fodder for leftists, naught but collateral damage. It does not matter how many blacks are killed as long as they win the war for socialism.
Understandably, most black Americans care about black lives: A recent Gallup poll showed that 81% of blacks favored as much or more policing of their neighborhoods; only 19 percent favored less.[lxxiii] Unfortunately, leftist intellectuals, politicians, and terrorists are not as benign as most black Americans.
To say that leftists, and their political party, the Democrats, have black blood on their hands is to speak in pale understatement. They have oceans of black blood on their hands.
For Democrats, anti-black policies have changed only in their specific form. Until the 1960s, for almost a full century, from Reconstruction to the Civil Rights era, the Democratic Party included many Southern Democrats (so-called “Dixiecrats”), virtually all of whom supported Jin Crow laws, legalized segregation, the KKK, lynchings, white race riots, and endless violent degradation of black American citizens. George Wallace, long-time Governor of Alabama, was but one notorious example. They were white supremacists, who believed in the innate superiority of the white race via bloodlines, by biological inheritance, and suppressed, often brutally, anyone who opposed them–whether blacks, Republicans, or both. They were, in effect, a homegrown version of Nazi-like terrorists.
Republicans were always better on race issues…at the very least, less bad. The party of Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Jackie Robinson,[lxxiv] and many other heroes opposed the spread of slavery into the territories, abolished slavery, passed the 14th and 15th Amendments, making native-born blacks U.S. citizens and recognizing their right to vote, sought (to a degree) to protect black rights, were targeted for brutal violence by the KKK,[lxxv] voted in higher percentages than did Democrats to pass both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965,[lxxvi]and finally, in 2020, declared the KKK a terrorist organization.
Then, according to contemporary Democrats, came “The Great Switch.” Their claim is that the Democrats became the party championing the rights of black Americans, and the Republicans became the party of racists. Given the evidence cited above, the claim would be risible were it not so lethal. The main switch is that the Democrats shifted from Nazi principles to Marxist (Communist) ones. It is now in a very different form that they continue to torture the black community.[lxxvii]
Barack and Michelle Obama had a golden opportunity to minimize the danger to black lives. But they never confront(ed) the brutal truth. Instead, they wail(ed) endlessly that America is a racist nation and never used the bully pulpit they occupied for eight years to speak out against the catastrophic threat to black lives. If, on average, 5 to 6 thousand black American lives are terminated each year via homicide, that adds to roughly 66,000 murders since 2008, the year Obama was first elected. Ninety percent of this figure is 59,500 blacks murdered by black criminals. While the Obamas publicly mourned the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, they had little or nothing to say regarding the ongoing Black Holocaust. They let it go on, unchecked by their influence. They still do.
Leftist silence is violence.
What Can Be Done
What can be done to remediate this situation and terminate the Holocaust? Obviously, as implemented by Rudy Giuliani as mayor of New York City, we need more stringent policing of urban neighborhoods. Perhaps we need to screen applicants for police departments more assiduously to weed out racists; perhaps we need to recruit more minority police officers (although leftists generally hate them even more than white cops); perhaps we need to train the police more effectively to eliminate police brutality; but we unquestionably need a strong police presence in high-crime neighborhoods to protect innocent men, women, and children from violent criminals. And if, as a society, we whole-heartedly and full-throatedly support the many honest cops in their battle against murderers, we will attract into the police force more of those who sincerely seek to protect the innocent. Conversely, if we demonize the police, we will minimize the number of honest persons willing to join the force and risk their lives only to be met with vile abuse.
In my essay on racism, I urged several policy recommendations. These include: End the legal war on drugs–and thereby, to a great degree, defund the criminals; deploy phonics exclusively to teach reading, start in kindergarten, and read inspiring hero stories, including many about courageous black men and women who overcame daunting obstacles to reach noteworthy goals; join the movement originated by former NFL great, Jim Brown, in the hazardous outreach to urban street gangs in attempt to show them that education and productive career are vastly preferable to crime and a violent death by age twenty.[lxxviii] And, of course, minimum wage laws must be repealed, thereby protecting the rights of both employers to offer low wages to low-skilled workers–and of workers to accept low-paying jobs in order to gain work experience and possible on-the-job training.
Tough policing is vitally important. But, as Walter Williams argued: Police aren’t enough. More fathers are needed.
Fathers matter.
This is the movement we need: Fathers Matter. We need thousands, eventually millions of fathers who march peacefully in the streets, as did Martin Luther King and his supporters, raising public awareness of how important fathers are in the rearing of children. Imagine a Million Fathers’ March through high crime areas, publicly proclaiming that real men–married or not–work honestly and productively, help support their biological children, have loving relationships with their children, treat the mother of those children respectfully, and so forth–and repeat the march on a regular basis. Imagine members of Fathers Matter speaking regularly in elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools across the nation regarding the importance of fatherhood. Imagine them speaking in churches, at political rallies, at numerous public events. Imagine signs and billboards everywhere proclaiming “Fathers Matter,” and depicting a father reading a book with his sons/daughters. Imagine bi-partisan support for Fathers Matter, both major political parties championing the cause, doing everything they can to encourage fathers to play an active role in the lives of their biological children. Imagine major corporations taking up the cause, donating hundreds of millions of dollars to Fathers Matter, seeking to educate boys and young men regarding the importance of their role in child rearing…and the joy and the pride of it. Imagine the I-Net and social media brimming with messages of loving support for loving fathers. Imagine all of this and more…and the benign outcomes.
If there are any states or municipalities that still provide child support for unmarried mothers, this policy must be phased out. The idea of women being married to the government is pernicious in both conception and effect. Mother and father should provide for their children (along with any others, including family members, who voluntarily choose to help)–and recalcitrant fathers must be legally required to contribute to the support of their biological children. Even more important, we must encourage these fathers, in every possible way, to have a loving relationship with their children. Being raised in poverty is not the worst fate to befall a child. Being reared without a loving father is much worse. A paucity of love and guidance is far more detrimental to a child than a paucity of money. A loving father can contribute both.
We, as human beings, can’t do this? We, as male human beings, can’t do this? We can’t be firm and loving fathers to our biological children? I think we can. The beneficial outcomes, in numerous forms, will redound throughout American life.
References
[i] https://www.andrewbernstein.net/2020/06/america-a-racist-nation/
[ii] Stefan Thernstrom and Abigail Thernstrom, America in Black and White: One Nation Indivisible ( New York: Touchstone Books, 1999), 18, 183.
[iii] David Paul Kuhn, “Exit Polls: How Obama Won,” 11/05/08, https//:www.politico.com/story/2008/11/exit-polls-how-obama-won-015297. Accessed June 6, 2020.
[iv]Gretchen Livingston and Anna Brown, “Public views on inter-marriage,” May 18, 2017, https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2017/05/18/2-public-views-on-intermarriage/ Accessed June 9, 2020.
[v] (Joshua Rothman, “When Bigotry Paraded Through the Streets,” The Atlantic, 12/4/2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/12/second-klan/509468/. Accessed June 21, 2020.
[vi] (“Tattered Robes: The State of the Ku Klux Klan in the United States,” https://www.adl.org/education/resources/reports/state-of-the-kkk. Accessed June 21, 2020.
[vii] Leslie Casimir, “Data Show Nigerians the Most Educated in the U.S.,” The Houston Chronicle, 1/12/18,
https://www.chron.com/news/article/Data-show-Nigerians-the-most-educated-in-the-U-S-1600808.php. Accessed September 6, 2020. This claim is in dispute–but by all accounts, Nigerians are at or near the acme of American educational achievement.
[viii] Suman Guha Mozumder, “Report: Indian-American Incomes Highest in U.S.,” India Abroad, 9/22/17, https://www.indiaabroad.com/indian-americans/report-indian-americans-income-highest-in-u-s/article_ffc92b60-9ff9-11e7-93fd-479826805b04.html. Accessed September 6, 2020.
[ix] “List of Ethnic Groups in the United States by Income,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_household_income. Accessed September 6, 2020.
[x] Thomas Sowell, Ethnic America (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 220.
[xi] This point is made in the excellent film, Uncle Tom (2020), which chronicles the history of the black conservative movement in the United States. Its executive producer is Larry Elder, its director is Justin Malone.
[xii] “Black Impact: Consumer Categories Where African Americans Move Markets,” https://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/article/2018/black-impact-consumer-categories-where-african-americans-move-markets/ Accessed September 6, 2020.
Ellen McGirt, “Race Ahead: A New Nielsen Report Puts Black Purchasing Power at $1.2 Trillion,” https://fortune.com/2018/02/28/raceahead-nielsen-report-black-buying-power/. Accessed September 6, 2020.
[xiii] Taleeb Starkes, Black Lies Matter: Why Lies Matter to the Race Grievance Industry (Independently Published, 2016), 30.
[xiv] Barry Latzer, “The Need to Discuss Black-on-Black Crime,” December 5, 2019, https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/12/22/the-need-to-discuss-black-on-black-crime/. Accessed September 8, 2020.
[xv] Latzer, “The Need to Discuss Black-on-Black Crime.”
[xvi] Latzer, “The Need to Discuss Black-on-Black Crime.”
[xvii] Walter Williams, “Solutions to the High Black Crime Rate Rests With Black People,” January 11, 2017, Greensboro News and Record, https://greensboro.com/opinion/columns/walter-williams-solution-to-the-high-black-crime-rate-rests-with-black-people/article_d5220027-6333-52b3-abd5-598e2c192e0e.html. Accessed September 13, 2020.
[xviii] Latzer, “The Need to Discuss Black-on-Black Crime.”
[xix] Latzer, “The Need to Discuss Black-on-Black Crime.”
[xx] Latzer, “The Need to Discuss Black-on-Black Crime.”
[xxi] Jason Riley, “Family Secret: What the Left Won’t Tell You About Black Crime,” July 21, 2014, The Washington Times, https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jul/21/family-secret-what-the-left-wont-tell-you-about-bl/. Accessed September 13, 2020.
[xxii] “Thomas Sowell on the Myths of Economic Inequality,” 12/3/2018, www.youtube.com, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mS5WYp5xmvI. Accessed September 13, 2020.
[xxiii] Thomas Sowell, “Black Lives and Social Policy,” November 25, 2016, www.YouTube.com., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpA3Sf6Ffu4&list=RD7oLomNxp-m4&index=6. Accessed September 13, 2020.
[xxiv]Walter Williams, “Police Aren’t Enough–Fathers are Needed,” 4/5/19, TribLive, https://triblive.com/opinion/walter-williams-police-arent-enough-fathers-are-needed/. Accessed September 13, 2020.
[xxv] Walter Williams, “Solutions to the High Black Crime Rate Rests With Black People.”
[xxvi] Thomas Sowell, “Black Lives and Social Policy.”
[xxvii] Thomas Sowell, “On the Myths of Economic Inequality.” Walter Williams, “Welfare State Legacy Perpetuates Poverty,” September 19, 2017, The Meridian Star, https://www.meridianstar.com/opinion/columns/walter-williams-welfare-states-legacy-perpetuates-poverty/article_260c2ead-50f1-58e3-88ef-2676ef76b23a.html. Accessed September 18, 2020.
[xxviii] Walter Williams, “Police Aren’t Enough–Fathers are Needed.”
[xxix] Walter Williams, “Police Aren’t Enough–Fathers are Needed.”
[xxx] Walter Williams, “Police Aren’t Enough–Fathers are Needed.”
[xxxi] Charles Murray, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 157-162.
[xxxii] A disproportionate number of black Americans succumbed to the allure of government dollars. As recently as 2012, 41.6 percent of black Americans were on some form of government assistance, as contrasted with 21.3 percent of Americans generally. “21.3 Percent of U.S. Population Participates in Government Assistance Programs each Month,” The U.S. Census Bureau, May 28, 2015, https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2015/cb15-97.html. Accessed September 20, 2020.
[xxxiii] “Thomas Sowell on the Myths of Economic Inequality.”
[xxxiv] Kay Hymowitz, “The Black Family: Forty Years of Lies, Rejecting the Moynihan Report Caused Untold, Needless Misery,” City Journal, Summer 2005, https://www.city-journal.org/html/black-family-40-years-lies-12872.html. Accessed September 18, 2020.
[xxxv] Michael Tanner, The End of Welfare: Fighting Poverty in the Civil Society (Washington, DC: The Cato Institute, 1996), 78-80.
[xxxvi] Michael Tanner, The End of Welfare, 84.
[xxxvii] Thomas Sowell, “Welfare State No ‘Favor’ to Blacks,” October 2, 2016, The East Bay Times, https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2016/10/02/sowell-welfare-state-no-favor-to-blacks/. Accessed October 4, 2020.
[xxxviii] Walter Williams, “Welfare State’s Legacy Perpetuates Poverty,” 9/19/17, The Meridian Star, https://www.meridianstar.com/opinion/columns/walter-williams-welfare-states-legacy-perpetuates-poverty/article_260c2ead-50f1-58e3-88ef-2676ef76b23a.html. Accessed September 18, 2020.
[xxxix] The illegitimacy rates for both whites and blacks have risen since the 1960s–and the sexual revolution is undoubtedly one cause. But the perverse financial incentives were real–and their impact cannot be denied.
[xl]Michael Tanner, The End of Welfare, 69-85.
[xli]Quoted in Larry Elder, “Liberal and Conservative Agree, Fathers Matter, Case Closed,” 8/13/20, https://townhall.com/columnists/larryelder/2020/08/13/liberal-and-conservative-agree-fathers-matter-case-closed-n2574268?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&newsletterad=08/13/2020&bcid=01e7426b17f8b49e354343ab31b8937f&recip=1912933
[xlii] Walter Williams, “Police Aren’t Enough–Fathers are Needed.”
[xliii] Michael Tanner, The End of Welfare, 74-75.
[xliv] Rudolf Flesch, Why Johnny Can’t Read (New York: Harper and Row, 1955), passim. Flesch, Why Johnny Still Can’t Read: A New Look at the Scandal of our Schools (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), 28-39 and passim.
[xlv] Andrew Bernstein, “Heroes and Villains in American Education,” The Objective Standard, Vol. 13, No. 3, Fall 2018, 30-34.
[xlvi] Andrew Bernstein, “Heroes and Villains in American Education,” 14-15.
[xlvii] Andrew Bernstein, “Heroes and Villains in American Education,” 14-15. Charles Sykes, Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good About Themselves but Can’t Read, Write, or Add (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1995), 100-101.
[xlviii] National Adult Literacy Survey(1992) NCED, United States Department of Education. Cited at www.readfaster.com/education_state. Accessed July 9, 2018. Quoted in “Heroes and Villains in American Education,” 14.
[xlix] Andrew Bernstein, “Heroes and Villains in American Education,” The Objective Standard, Vol. 13, No. 3, Fall 2018, 14-40. Their attraction to Communism is discussed on 24-26. By generous permission of the publisher, the essay is available for free on my website: www.andrewbernstein.net.
[l] Andrew Bernstein, “Heroes and Villains in American Education,” 16-24.
[li] John Dewey, The School and Society (Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), 11,20.
[lii] John Dewey, Experience and Education (New York: Collier Books, 1938), 17.
[liii] John Dewey, “My Pedagogic Creed,” School Journal 54 (January 1897): 77-80. http://dewey.pragmatism.org/creed.htm. Accessed July 21, 2018.
[liv] John Dewey, The School and Society, 11, 20. These quotes from Dewey in Andrew Bernstein, “Heroes and Villains in American Education.”
[lv] Charles Sykes, Dumbing Down Our Kids, 205.
[lvi] Andrew Bernstein, “Heroes and Villains in American Education,” 19-21.
[lvii] Charles Sykes, Dumbing Down Our Kids,” 205. Quote from National Education Association, Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education: A Report of the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education, Bulletin No. 35 (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of Education, 1918).
[lviii] Diane Ravitch, Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 125.
[lix] Diane Ravitch, Left Back, 125.
[lx] Walter Williams, “The Nation’s Report Card,” May 7, 2020, The Daily Journal, https://www.djournal.com/opinion/walter-williams-the-nations-report-card/article_2b46c48c-ae31-53dd-9975-a19d327730e6.html Accessed September 22, 2020.
[lxi]“NAEP Report Card: Reading,” https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading?grade=4. Accessed September 22, 2020.
[lxii]Walter Williams, “Progressive Cities and Black Education,” March 24, 2020, The North State Journal, https://nsjonline.com/article/2020/03/progressive-cities-and-black-education/. Accessed September 24, 2020.
[lxiii]Milton and Rose Friedman, Free To Choose: A Personal Statement (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1980), 237.
[lxiv] Henry Hazlitt, Economics In One Lesson (Westport, Ct.: Arlington House Publishers, 1979), 135.
[lxv] Milton Friedman, Free To Choose, 237-238.
[lxvi] Milton Friedman, Free To Choose, 238.
[lxvii] The Crisis of Black Teenage Unemployment,” The Leadership Conference Education Fund, October 13, 2010. https://civilrights.org/edfund/resource/the-crisis-of-black-teenage-unemployment/. Accessed September 27, 2020.
[lxviii]Milton Friedman, Free To Choose, 238.
[lxix] Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of BLM, describes herself and another co-founder as “trained Marxists.” Yaron Steinbuch, “Black Lives Matter Co-Founder Describes Herself as ‘Trained Marxist,'” June 25, 2020. https://nypost.com/2020/06/25/blm-co-founder-describes-herself-as-trained-marxist/. The BLM leaders overtly reference Karl Marx, Chairman Mao, and Venezuelan Communist dictator, Nicholas Maduro. They explicitly state that they want to abolish capitalism. One leader speaks of whiteness as a “psychosis.” Rowan Scarborough, “Black Lives Matter Anti-Police Brutality Crusade Obscures Violent, Marxist Agenda,” The Washington Times, July 27, 2020. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jul/27/black-lives-matter-anti-police-brutality-crusade-o/. BLM leaders seek to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure,” a goal dating back to Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto. Jon Miltimore, “Black Lives Matter’s Goal to ‘Disrupt’ the Nuclear Family Fits a Marxist Aim That Goes Back a Century and a Half,” September 24, 2020, The Foundation for Economic Education, https://fee.org/articles/black-lives-matter-s-goal-to-disrupt-the-nuclear-family-fits-a-marxist-aim-that-goes-back-a-century-and-a-half/. Susan Rosenberg, a member of the cop-killing, Communist Weather Underground organization and a convicted terrorist, is a fundraiser for BLM. “Retired NYPD Commissioner Bernard Kerik Warns Public Black Lives Matter Fundraising is Run by a Terrorist,” KUSI Newsroom, July 9, 2020, https://www.kusi.com/retired-nypd-commissioner-bernard-kerik-warns-public-black-lives-matter-fundraising-is-run-by-a-terrorist/. Accessed October 3, 2020. Above all: Ye shall judge a bush by the fruit it brings forth. Endless rioting and street violence does not protect innocent black lives; it kills them. Defunding the police does not protect black lives; it kills them. But it furthers the Communist cause of fomenting endless crises in an on-going effort to bring down the capitalist system.
[lxx] “The Candace Owens Show: Brandon Tatum,” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9TKmZ70FNU. Accessed October 3, 2020.
[lxxi] Heather MacDonald, “Hillary’s Debate Lies,” September 27, 2016, , https://www.city-journal.org/html/hillarys-debate-lies-14759.html. Accessed October 3, 2020.
[lxxii] Heather MacDonald, “The First Black Lives Matter Wave Led to 2K Extra Black Homicides–But New Wave Will be Worse,” July 3, 2020, The New York Post, https://nypost.com/2020/07/03/new-black-lives-matter-wave-will-lead-to-more-black-homicides-than-first/. Accessed September 29, 2020.
[lxxiii] Lydia Saad, “Black Americans Want Police to Retain Local Presence,” August 5, 2020, https://news.gallup.com/poll/316571/black-americans-police-retain-local-presence.aspx. Accessed September 29, 2020.
[lxxiv] Jackie Robinson was a Republican most of his life because Southern Democrats were brutal segregationists and because he believed in black entrepreneurship and capitalism. His favored candidate was Nelson Rockefeller and he campaigned for Richard Nixon. Unfortunately, the Republicans, although rejecting the white supremacist brutality of the Dixiecrats, did not embrace what Robinson yearned for: a welcoming inclusiveness of blacks and other non-whites into the party.
[lxxv] It can certainly be argued that the Republican Party did not do nearly enough to protect blacks from the vicious brutality of Southern Democrats. I think this is true. But it must also be remembered that: “Democrats relied on the Klan to secure election victories, as Klansmen oftentimes threatened or killed competing Republican candidates. Many southern Republicans actually abandoned their campaigns due to the inability to hold meetings and attract voters while living in constant fear.” “The First KKK,” Khan Academy, https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/us-history/civil-war-era/reconstruction/a/the-first-kkk. Accessed October 4, 2020.
[lxxvi] “The Civil Rights Act of 1964,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964. “Voting Rights Act of 1965,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_Rights_Act_of_1965. Accessed October 4, 2020.
[lxxvii] The Republicans have their own set of problems on this–and their leadership needs to make unequivocally clear that there is no place for white racists in the party that claims to uphold individual rights. But, in justice, the Republicans were (are) responsible for neither the brutal Jim Crow oppression nor the current Holocaust of black homicide victims. These crimes were (are) perpetrated by the Democrats.
[lxxviii] Andrew Bernstein, “America a Racist Nation?” www.andrewbernstein.net.
