After America’s modern social welfare programs were initiated back in the 1960’s, it was thought that the poverty rate across the country would continue to decline like it had been doing for a decade and a half before it was started. But, when we look at the average poverty rate, it basically flatlined at around 15-17 percent, a place where it’s stayed ever since. In the black community, however, the poverty rate started to increase.
In other words, no one was hit worse by the deleterious effects of our social welfare programs than those in the black community. Now why was this? The politicians that were pushing these programs on all Americans as an “entitlement” and a “basic human right” liked to especially market these programs the most to the blacks. They would say things like, “For so long the black community has been treated as second-class citizens, and has struggled with poverty more than anyone else in our country. We designed these programs to help those in poverty, but they were most importantly designed for you, the poor black person. You, black people, are especially entitled to these programs, in fact, it’s a basic human right. You’ve waited for so long to have racial justice happen, and now here it is.“
Politicians were using the truths that blacks were treated like second-class citizens, and were poorer than others, and using those truths to manipulate the black community into supporting a scheme that, if we’re to continue being honest, doesn’t actually help the black community, but hurts them by keeping them poor. Actually, the whole scam perpetrated on the black community by the political left gets way worse than that. So, let’s delve into the depths of this scam.
The False Narrative of Rampant Racism
People who became beneficiaries of our social welfare programs never truly learn the kinds of behaviors they need to practice as individuals to go and become prosperous. They stayed dependent on these government programs because they had no incentives or motivations to leave, and became afraid to – hence chronic dependency on the government. Yes, people from all racial and ethnic groups partake in these programs, but our social welfare programs have been pushed and marketed more towards our minority groups than the majority whites, and has been pushed the most on the black people, so it should come as no surprise that there’s a higher percentage of the black population that became, and still is, dependent on social welfare than the lower percentage of white people and other minority groups that aren’t black.
Remember how I told you, in other articles, that people dependent on government social welfare tend to be written off in government statistical manuals as “poor” or “below the poverty line”? Since a higher percentage of black people take advantage of these programs, this amounts to having higher percentages of blacks below the poverty line than is found for whites, or other minorities. Politicians on the political left use this disparity of poor blacks vs. poor whites, as found in our statistical manuals, and use it to claim that this disparity is because of racism. They make the claim that “Racism is alive and well and as bad as it’s ever been.” This is despite the fact that, although there are still small traces of racism found in our society, by traditional standards – that is, by standards you might extrapolate from Dr. King’s Dream speech, or his Letter From a Birmingham Jail – racism is at an all-time low.
At a time in our history when black people should be jumping for joy, knowing that they now have more of a chance to thrive and flourish and prosper than at any other time in our country’s history, and treated with more equality than ever before, they are being fed the false narrative that racism is still really bad. The disparity we see in black vs. white poverty rates has nothing to do with racism directly, and has very much to do with the indirect effects that our social welfare programs, pushed very hard by the political left, have had on the black community.
(If you do think that there is rampant racism, you really should read my article: “How Does the Political Left Make it Appear that Racism is Everywhere, Even Though It’s Not?” This article goes into more detail as to how the political left gets away with this “racism is everywhere” false narrative.)
Social Welfare and the Dissolution of the Black Family
So, I’ve talked about how our social welfare programs have been detrimental to society as a whole; I’m now going to talk about how it’s been detrimental to the blacks, and in particular, to the black family. Let’s begin.
There are three things that people need to understand when it comes to the black family: first, although there is poverty to be found within all race groups, entrenched, multigenerational poverty in our country is largely black; secondly, this entrenched and multigenerational poverty found within the black community is intricately intertwined with the collapse of the traditional nuclear black family, especially in the inner city; thirdly, this collapse of the traditional nuclear black family in the inner city is intricately intertwined with, and directly related to, our social welfare programs being pushed on the black community, and those programs’ negative effects on the black community.
Back in 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, an Irish-American who worked for the Labor Department, having a place of understanding based on his own broken-family history, wrote a report entitled “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.” His report, if I can sum it up in two very general points, are these: first, many black families, especially those in the ghetto, were unhealthy and dysfunctional, and this dysfunctionality can be traced back to the effects that slavery, racism, Jim Crow laws, the infamous Black Codes, and segregation had on the black family; second, Moynihan believed that the best way to help the black community was to work to strengthen the black family, and work against all the negative things that hurt the black family, by using a variety of educational and social programs directed towards nurturing the black family back to health, and by doing so, we would eventually see a place in society where blacks and whites were on the same page, socially and economically.
Moynihan made his points very clear through page after page of data in his report. A lack of traditional family structure and high level of dysfunctionality in black homes led to what he labeled as “pathological” behavior, including delinquency, joblessness, crime, failure to finish school, and fatherlessness – all things which characterizes the ghetto, even today.
He considered the functional and traditional family unit as a “basic socializing unit” for society at large. The family was what shaped children’s’ behavior and character and ability to interact in healthy ways with other members of society when they became adults. Lack of healthy families for the upbringing of these children caused pathological behavior in these children as they grew up – this, besides being poor, is the essence and epitome of why these children are disadvantaged and underprivileged. And it helped to make poverty in the black community intergenerational.
He also made the argument that marriage, in particular a healthy marriage relationship, oriented those men and women in that relationship towards the future, motivating them to commit to each other’s future, and to their childrens’ future, which improved the prospects and upward mobility of everyone in that family unit. And how did he say this happened? By not only their commitment and devotion to each other, but by their planning, saving, working and earning, with the idea of a better future in mind.
Single mothers in the ghetto, on the other hand, tended to “float around the chaos surrounding them,” eaking by, drifting into pregnancy, and often more than once, and all of this chaos gave them an inability to shape their childrens’ character and their ability in ways that led to upward economic mobility. What was even worse was the fact these poor single-mother households from the inner-city, because of the position they put themselves in, were in a place where they were unable to seize all the opportunities that the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s had opened up for them, and were creating new generations that would be unable to take advantage of those opportunities also.
At the time our country’s social welfare programs were initiated, only about 3 percent of whites were raised by single mothers, but 23 percent of blacks were, which meant, at the time, a big difference. But the political left didn’t welcome Moynihan’s report; they attacked it – civil servants and academics picked apart his report; they claimed he was racist and sexist, and refused to acknowledge his conclusions. So they didn’t work to create educational and social programs meant to strengthen the black family, but did the exact opposite – they continued to support the very social welfare programs that continued to erode the black family, and continued to attack anyone that got in their way.
What’s so odd to me is the fact that so many black social, political, and religious leaders, including those in the Christian church, attacked Moynihan’s conclusions too, meaning they supported these social welfare programs and their continued assault on the black family. Of course, just days after the report was leaked to the press, the Los Angeles Watts neighborhood erupted into its famous riots, so that had something to do with the black community’s opposition, because they wanted to blame the system and not the poor state of affairs in the black family, which they called “blaming the victim,” but you think it would have eventually dawned on them that, “Oh yeah, the black family is important. We better fight for it!”
But it didn’t. The end result was that by the 1990’s, during the Clinton-era social welfare reforms, and even today, more than 70 percent of black children are born to single mothers, which means about three in every four black youth come from a household where they are raised by a single mother, who is much more likely to be poor than married mothers are.
Being raised in this kind of household, which causes most black youth to be underprivileged and disadvantaged today, greatly increases their chances of criminality and of having psychological issues, and greatly decreases the possibility of upward economic mobility, when compared to other groups in society. Remember, I talked about these issues in another article, about how our social welfare programs hurt the family, but nowhere in our society is this more pronounced and profound than in the black family, or black households.
This continued push by the political left in support of our social welfare programs, and its effects on society, has caused our country to turn into a two-caste system, with those coming from intact, healthy, vibrant, prospering families, with two adults in a healthy relationship with each other, making the upper caste, and those coming from poor, single-mother households making up the lower caste. And all too often this lower caste is comprised of blacks, and the upper caste is comprised of everyone else. It’s created a system of “separate and unequal.”
Many people, or more accurately, feminists, on the political left try to paint the whole single-motherhood-thing as a modern “woman-empowerment” phenomenon, a fact of modern life (the “Murphy Brown syndrome”), claiming that anyone opposed to that type of household is being anti-woman and sexist, but this is not so – it is a largely black phenomenon, and continuing to accept and support the single-mother household as an “equally valid type of household” does nothing but hurt the black community the most.
Others were painting the traditional nuclear family structure as a “toxic white hang-up,” that needed to be opposed, despite the fact that African Americans that came from this type of nuclear family background were the most advantaged, had the highest chances of upward economic mobility, the highest chances of achieving their life goals, and the lowest chances of being behind bars of anyone in the black community – and thus, they continued to work against, not for, the well-being and betterment of the black person and community.
So, what am I trying to say through all of this? The traditional husband-and-wife two-adult nuclear family structure is good for blacks. Opposing it only hurts the black individual and community, and yet, to this day, there are many people on the political left, including social, political, and religious leaders in the black community, who continue to support policies that continue to destroy the black family, continue to support the political party (the Democrats) that push these terrible programs, and vilify those of us that don’t, as if that somehow magically makes us anti-black and racist.
I think it’s time you wake up, open your eyes, and become “woke.” I’m especially talking to those of you in the black community – no, I take that back, I’m screaming this fact to you at the top of my lungs until my face is bright red from the blood flowing to it. Please listen to me before I have a stroke.
Is the traditional family fascist? No. It’s beneficial to the black community. Opposing the traditional family structure, in this case, means you’re the ones truly being anti-black and racist. Is that really what you want to be?
