Mugged (3 page)

The identical thing happened with Irish immigrants in the nineteenth century. They brought many of the same primitive behaviors directly from the British Isles—but when their native folkways turned violent, they were met with Anglo-Saxon law and order.

The North’s zero-tolerance policy for a backward culture forced the white trash out of both the Irish and southern rednecks, leaving just enough of them in their natural state to populate modern reality shows and the Kennedy family.

Unfortunately, such harsh but effective policies were briefly practiced and then guiltily abandoned when it came to southern blacks. In fact, New York City mayor John Lindsay expressly argued against bringing black people into the middle class through the immigrant model of assimilation in the Kerner Report, examining the reasons for the 1967 race riots.
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Although some blacks made it north in time to be acculturated to New England mores, just as the mass of black Americans were on the verge of shedding their adopted redneck culture in the sixties and seventies, the nation’s elites decided to adopt a new set of rules.
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A 1958
Time
magazine article reported: “They are afraid to say so in public, but many of the North’s big-city mayors groan in private that their biggest and most worrisome problem is the crime rate among Negroes.”
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Instead of punishing violence, criminality, sexual promiscuity and other charming Celtic customs—as society had with white southerners—we would protect the exact same behavior among black southerners as priceless cultural artifacts of their African heritage. That’s how we ended up with the intractable black underclass.

First, liberals set to work destroying the black family. The broken family isn’t a black thing. As Sowell points out, there are numerous accounts of newly freed slaves who had been separated from their wives walking across entire states, looking for their families. Economic circumstances aside, the black family unit in the immediate postslavery era was a dream compared
to what Democrats have done to it today. The same was true before slavery, with African wives clinging to their husbands as they were being taken into slavery by African raiders and having to be whipped until they would let go.
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Erol Ricketts, a demographer and sociologist with the Rockefeller Foundation, found that between 1890 and 1950, blacks had higher marriage rates than whites, according to the U.S. Census.
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Until then, black women were more likely to get married than white women—and that was despite the high mortality rates among black men, which left fewer of them available for marriage and made more black women widows. In three of four decennial years between 1890 and 1920, black men outmarried white men, with a virtual tie in 1900 at about 54 percent.

Black Americans were moving forward on a well-trod path in this country when liberals decided it would be a great idea to start subsidizing illegitimacy.

Everyone knew—even FDR’s secretary of labor, Frances Perkins, knew—that granting widows’ benefits to unmarried women with illegitimate children would have disastrous consequences.
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An early twentieth-century social welfare advocate, Homer Folks, warned back in 1914 that to grant pensions for “desertion or illegitimacy would, undoubtedly, have the effect of a premium upon these crimes against society.”
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But under LBJ, that’s exactly the system liberals implemented. The “suitable home” requirements for welfare—such as having a husband—were jettisoned as irrational and racist by liberal know-it-alls in the federal Bureau of Public Assistance.
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By 1960, only 8 percent of welfare benefits intended for widows or wives with disabled husbands were being collected by such. More than 60 percent of Aid to Families with Dependent Children payments went to “absent father” homes. As a result, illegitimacy, particularly among blacks, went through the roof.

That was the very year the black marriage rate began its precipitous decline, gradually at first, with the marriage rate for black women falling below 70 percent for the first time only in 1970.
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As late as that, a majority of black children were still living with both parents.
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As Ricketts says, “The argument that current levels of female-headed families among blacks are due directly to the cultural legacy of slavery and that black family-formation patterns are fundamentally different from those of whites are not supported by the data.”
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Rather, it resulted from the specific policy of paying women to have
children out of wedlock—in Folks’s words, putting a “premium upon these crimes against society.”

By 2010, only 30.1 percent of blacks above the age of fifteen were married, compared to 52.7 percent of whites.
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If blacks managed to get married again at their pre–Great Society rates, the entire black “culture of poverty” would be wiped out. Black people know this: The vital importance of the institution of marriage, felt by its absence, is reflected in the overwhelming, ferocious opposition to gay marriage in the black community.

Next, liberal judges and academics decided it was a bad idea to punish criminals. Instead, they suggested we try to
understand
the criminal, persuade him that the system is fair and give him 157 second chances.

This was not simply a failure to implement good policies. It was an aggressive plan to impose idiotic ideas dreamed up by self-righteous people who had worked it all out on paper. In a classic decision of the era, a New York judge refused to institutionalize Joyce Brown—
nom du insensé
Billie Boggs—a psychotic and schizophrenic woman living on the street, who was menacing passersby, defecating on herself, smoking crack, burning money and running into traffic.

Brown’s family begged that she be put in an institution, but the American Civil Liberties Union disagreed. Norman Siegel, director of the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), said Brown was merely “eccentric and different” and had “no business being taken to Bellevue.”
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In an argument few could disagree with, her attorney, Robert Levy, said Brown was as sane as “a member of the board of the Civil Liberties Union.”
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Judge Robert Lippman agreed with the ACLU. He explained that “the sight of her may improve us. By being an offense to the aesthetic senses, she may spur the community to action.”
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Of course, the community had already been spurred to action, which was precisely why it was seeking to have her committed to a mental institution.

Ordinary people said:
You think not imprisoning criminals will lead to less crime? You say that by paying women to have children out of wedlock, we’ll reduce the illegitimacy rate? Are you sure that a guaranteed income will encourage people to work harder?
They were ridiculed as unenlightened rubes.

Between 1960 and 1973, the number of FBI index crimes—which are serious offenses such as murder, rape, robbery, arson, assault, kidnapping and burglary—nearly tripled from 2,019,600 offenses a year to 5,891,924.
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Hundreds of thousands of Americans had to die, be raped or have their property destroyed or stolen because liberals had some neat new ideas about crime. As with all of the left’s social experiments, it was the people at the bottom of society who bore the brunt of jaw-dropping crime rates.

It’s striking that the race riots of the sixties were nearly nonexistent in the South, the locus of earlier Democratic segregationist and Klan violence. Rather, the hotbeds of violence were all the places where liberal ideas about crime and punishment prevailed—New York, Philadelphia, Rochester (NJ), Paterson and Newark, Detroit and Los Angeles.

All the while, the entire press corps dedicated itself to clamping down on anyone who looked askance at the dysfunctional black culture that liberals had done so much to cultivate. All Americans walked on eggshells for fear of being called a racist and having their reputations ruined. The elites’ ceaseless defense of behavior that would never have been tolerated from a white person destroyed lives and got people killed—most of them black.

If liberal elites had spent years designing a plan to harm blacks, they couldn’t have come up with a more ingenious one. Subsidize something, and you will get more of it. Tax it and you will get less of it. Both literally and figuratively, liberals taxed good behavior and subsidized bad behavior right about the time a lot of blacks needed to go through the same hard-knocks education that white southerners and Irish had.

Illegitimacy was directly subsidized through Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). The “tax” on crime was largely eliminated as liberal reformers shackled the police and rewarded criminals with reduced or nonexistent prison sentences. Honest discussion about the effects of these policies, such as exploding black crime rates, racial discrimination against white college applicants, and the black illegitimacy crisis was “taxed” by the penalty of being called a racist and possibly losing one’s job.

Meanwhile, the black crime, dropout and illegitimacy rates continued their ever-upward spiral. Black college students were expected to major in “Being Black,” instead of subjects that might get them jobs outside of a university or a government agency.

To hide their own role in the suppression of a black middle class, liberals promoted the myth that slavery alone had produced dystopian black lives. This is the quasi-theological underpinning of the modern welfare state. But the culprit wasn’t slavery: It was the seventies. Anyone who looks closely at the footage of Martin Luther King’s campaign will see impeccably attired audiences in sober business clothes. These were enormous middle-class gatherings, with married parents and intact families. That
ethic, that population—black lawyers, doctors, shop owners—was destroyed by malignant reformers who then papered over their dirty work with the creation of a fraudulent black middle class engineered through affirmative action and government jobs.

Slavery—a policy defended to the death by Democrats—already meant that the great mass of black Americans were starting on the ground floor. But even that other Democratic innovation, the Jim Crow laws, couldn’t stop blacks from progressing in the century following emancipation. It was modern Democratic policies guaranteeing that much of black America would fall back down.

From slavery to Jim Crow to “hope and change,” liberals wrote the book on how to destroy a people. Democrats simply would not treat blacks as the equal of whites, deserving of rebuke for bad behavior just like a white person. Anyone opposed to mollycoddling blacks would be denounced as a racist.

It could be called “racism by mollycoddling,” except that liberals don’t actually want to hurt black people. They couldn’t care less about black people. All they care about is their own glorious selves and how courageous, forward-thinking and fair-minded they are. At least the old Democratic racists were unabashed demagogues. Modern racists wrap themselves in unbounded self-righteousness.

This isn’t a story about black people—it’s a story about the left’s agenda to patronize blacks and lie to everyone else. It wasn’t black people’s job to stop whites from acting like idiots. It took blubberbutts like Jim Dwyer, Anna Quindlen, Tom Wicker, Howell Raines and the
Los Angeles Times
to treat blacks as always right, never wrong, while self-righteously disparaging execrable, boring, rhythmless white people. Excluding their own hip selves, of course.

There was a whole industry of people that depended on the existence of racism, but Americans had not been delivering on being racists for years. By 1970, there were more child pornographers in the country than racists. So the media set about inventing them.

But no one could acknowledge that fact until the O. J. Simpson verdict.

Here we had a black celebrity, spectacularly guilty of murder but acquitted by a predominantly black jury. The verdict was wildly cheered by blacks across the nation. With those images, we were finally liberated from having to pretend America was run by the Klan. It was a watershed moment. It was the end of white guilt.

The media, politicians and academia had turned blacks into spoiled children who had never before heard the word
no
. After this one breathtaking miscarriage of justice, the American people said no and the White Guilt Bank was shut down overnight.

With that, America became a much healthier country. Blacks could never be brought into the culture while being so thoroughly infantilized by white liberals who oohed and aahed over every little thing they did.

The only people who had ever benefited from the left’s lunacy on race were (1) professional blacks and (2) self-righteous white liberals, who congratulated themselves on their own ethnic sensitivity while moving heaven and earth to make sure their own kids didn’t go to school with black kids.

In 1993, a few years before the Simpson verdict,
New York Times
columnist Brent Staples complained that “black prep school boys who study the classics and live within the law have found only marginal acceptance in American cultural reality.” American culture, he said, preferred to celebrate the “angry black men.”
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After the OJ trial, “angry black men” were a lot less attractive. Talented black people were in.

Blacks were the only people, as we discovered with the OJ verdict, who cheered criminals just because they were the same race. It’s one thing to complain if an innocent member of your race is falsely accused. But when the guy turns out to be guilty, it’s hard to imagine any other group instantly siding with the perp because of some shared characteristic. You didn’t have white people rooting for Charles Manson, gays hoping Jeffrey Dahmer would be acquitted or Hispanics supporting Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker. (Liberals rooted for Teddy Kennedy, but that’s another book.)

After the OJ verdict, blacks’ ferocious group identity began to weaken.