While liberals spent the decades after the civil rights era pretending they were fighting 1962 battles—when most of them were five years old—the rest of us had to live through race riots, denunciations of the police, extreme restrictions on speech, liberal racial pandering and a stream of racial Armageddons.
For decades, one racist incident after another filled the news pages: a racist police siege of Louis Farrakhan’s mosque; trigger-happy cops shooting peaceful blacks, like Jose (Kiko) Garcia and Edmund Perry; Nazis on the Wappinger Falls police force; black children held down while having their faces forcibly painted white; the racist prosecution of Washington, DC mayor Marion Barry; police brutality against an innocent black motorist in Los Angeles; and on and on. Loads of these hate crimes turned out to be hoaxes, but they would be followed by retaliatory crimes against whites, which were not.
From race riots to race hoaxes to the automatic excuse machine for black criminals, the country had gone mad.
Contrary to what you might imagine, all this did little to improve the situation of blacks. In fact, it was exactly the opposite of what was needed.
After slavery, most of black America was starting at the bottom rung of social advancement. Not only that, but they had spent centuries in the backwoods culture of Southern hillbillies. Thomas Sowell points out that much of what is thought to be black culture is actually Southern “cracker” culture, imported, like Russell Brand, from the Northern provinces of the British Isles.11
In his book, Black Rednecks and White Liberals, Sowell traces behavioral patterns of various early Americans back to their original regions in the British Isles. Most colonialists in Massachusetts, for example, came from a small area in East Anglia. They were educated, religious and genteel.
White Southerners were another story. Much of the Southern population was made up of eighteenth-century immigrants from the “Celtic fringe”—Scotland, Ireland and Wales. As Sowell demonstrates with a mountain of hilarious examples, the unique cultural attributes of these British highlanders included wanton and brutal violence, hair-trigger tempers, an obsession with pride, shocking promiscuity, unalterable sloth, illiteracy and a total lack of respect for human life, including their own.
Today the only place we see this culture is on the TV show Cops—and in the black underclass.
The people of the Celtic fringe were practically a different species from those who settled New England. In the seventeenth century, rape was a capital offense in New England, while in some parts of the South it was treated as a misdemeanor on the order of petty theft.12 Around the time of the Civil War, illiteracy was virtually nonexistent in New England, but more than 20 percent of Southern whites still couldn’t read.13 In military IQ tests administered during World War I, black recruits from northern states like Ohio, Illinois, New York and Pennsylvania scored higher than white southerners from Georgia, Arkansas, Kentucky and Mississippi.14
The very word “cracker” is thought by some scholars to refer to the prideful boasting of the transplanted British highlanders. Remnants of their fighting spirit has proved a boon to the U.S. military, but a few centuries ago, their skirmishing included fights that involved biting off noses, gouging out eyes, and ripping the ears off their opponents’ heads. Far from objecting, local crowds would enthusiastically cheer the combatants on.15 A millennium ago, even Roman armies couldn’t subdue the barbarians of Scotland and instead built a gigantic wall, penning them in the north.
David Hackett Fischer gives an example of the “exceptionally violent” backcountry ways from 1787 newspaper accounts in his book, Albion’s Seed: “robbers seized a man named Davis and tortured him at his own hearth with red-hot irons until he told them where his money was hidden. Then they burned his farm for their amusement and ‘left the poor man tied to behold all in flames.’” The raiding parties “mutilated their victims for sport.” These were families—and women were often the most violent.16
A British soldier, Major George Hanger, said of the backcountry Scots-Irish, “I have known one of these fellows [to] travel two hundred miles through the woods never keeping any road or path, guided by the sun by day, and the stars by night, to kill a particular person.”17
It was these colorful folkways of the Celtic fringe that southern blacks were marinated in for centuries, but today are written about by twenty-first-century sociologists as a specifically “black culture.”
These traits have nothing to do with Africa or the legacy of slavery. The quaint customs of southern rednecks came directly from their Scottish, Welsh and Irish ancestors and were passed on to southern blacks.
The East Coast–West Coast hip-hop rivalry, with its “diss tracks” and shootings and murders, are not a distant echo from the plains of Africa, but a modern version of the Hatfields and the McCoys, with much greater use of the F-word. For decades, raging right up to the twentieth century, these two Scottish families warred across the Kentucky and West Virginia border, leaving at least a dozen dead.
The Southern style of religious worship also lives on in black churches, as well as some white Protestant evangelical churches. It can be seen in the style, if not the substance, of Louis Farrakhan and the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Citing Frederick Law Olmstead’s direct observation of Southern religious services in the late nineteenth century, Sowell describes the technique thus: The preacher “nearly all the time cried aloud at the utmost stretch of his voice,” “had the habit of frequently repeating a phrase,” and exhibited “a dramatic talent that included leaning far over the desk, with his arms stretched forward, gesticulating violently, yelling at the highest key, and catching his breath with an effort.”18
Voting Democrat is another bad habit blacks picked up from their neighbors. Southern blacks voted against their fellow Southerners only immediately after the Civil War and during the Democrats’ Jim Crow period. But then things settled down and blacks began supporting the same southern Democratic demagogues as white southerners did. The smarmy disingenuousness of a Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, or John Edwards seems familiar and homey to southern whites and blacks alike.
It is a telling fact that although most blacks detested Ronald Reagan—a 90 percent black jury even found his attempted assassin, John Hinckley, not guilty19—a majority of black Alabamians came to support segregationist rabble-rouser Democrat George Wallace in his later years.
Wallace had stood in the schoolhouse door rather than allow the University of Alabama to be integrated; he appealed to white supremacists for political advantage; and he ran for president expressly as a segregationist. As late as 1970, Wallace had used a campaign flyer in his run for governor that proclaimed: “Wake Up, Alabama! Blacks vow to take over Alabama,” accompanied by a picture of a blonde white girl on a park bench surrounded by seven leering black men.20
But just about a decade later, Wallace went to black voters and apologized, admitting he was a Christian sinner—and they forgave him. Wallace won 90 percent of the black vote in his last run for governor in 1982.21
Wallace spoke the language of the South; Reagan didn’t.
Reagan was a straightforward Californian without an ounce of southern populism. He wasn’t a demonstrative speaker, he didn’t openly discuss his Christianity and there was nary an opportunity for audience participation during his speeches.
Even what is risibly called Ebonics—black dialect—can be traced back to the British highlanders, who used such words and phrases as “I be,” “You be,” “ax” (ask), “acrost” (across), “do” (door), “dat” (that). As Sowell says, “No such words came from Africa.”
Luckily for southern rednecks, their wild and wooly ways weren’t tolerated in the North. They were barely tolerated in the South, where these poor whites were used as a buffer against the Indians, but not much more could be done about them, inasmuch as the rednecks far outnumbered the gentry.
Long before there was discrimination against blacks, there was discrimination against white southerners. When large numbers of these country
people moved north during World War II, they were aggressively excluded from neighborhoods, jobs and homes—not because of their skin color, but their accents.22
It was grossly unfair: Not all southerners were slothful, promiscuous drunks. But northerners couldn’t be expected to examine each case individually to ascertain whether an applicant was Robert Penn Warren or Bull Connor, Flannery O’Connor or Casey Anthony. It was more efficient simply to discriminate against all southerners.
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.23
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.24 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.”25
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.26
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.27 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.28 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.”29
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.30 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 1970.31 As late as that, a majority of black children were still living with both parents.32 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.”33
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.34 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.”35 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.”36
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.”37
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 5,891,924.38 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 behav
ior 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.