Meanwhile, the old virtue of self-improvement through education and discipline is dismissed as “acting white.” The segregationists used to call this acting “uppity,” which referred not just to self-assertion or behavior outside the racial code, but also to speaking the King’s English or using manners or acting with decorum or being too fond of reading. In the end, however you camouflage it, all these sophistical excuses still add up to inferiority, the assumption that black people lack the virtue and character to better themselves and fight against joblessness, drugs, promiscuity, vulgarity, crime, and the slaughter of blacks by their black “brothers.” That’s why they need their progressive wards and patrons.
More astonishing is how this narrative insults those generations of blacks who, despite confronting violence ranging from beatings, race riots, and lynchings, to the daily indignities and demeaning slights of legal segregation, still steadily improved their lot. Jason Riley of The Wall Street Journal not long ago summarized this improvement documented by Thomas Sowell––another independent, free-thinking black intellectual despised by the progressive race industry.
Kanye West and the Fugitive Slave Law
More astonishing is how this narrative insults those generations of blacks who, despite confronting violence ranging from beatings, race riots, and lynchings, to the daily indignities and demeaning slights of legal segregation, still steadily improved their lot. Jason Riley of The Wall Street Journal not long ago summarized this improvement documented by Thomas Sowell––another independent, free-thinking black intellectual despised by the progressive race industry.
Between 1890 and 1940, for example, black marriage rates in the U.S. where higher than white marriage rates. In the 1940s and ’50s, black labor-participation rates exceeded those of whites; black incomes grew much faster than white incomes; and the black poverty rate fell by 40 percentage points. Between 1940 and 1970—that is, during Jim Crow and prior to the era of affirmative action—the number of blacks in middle-class professions quadrupled. In other words, racial gaps were narrowing. Steady progress was being made. Blacks today hear plenty about what they can’t achieve due to the legacy of slavery and not enough about what they did in fact achieve notwithstanding hundreds of years in bondage followed by decades of legal segregation.
In the post-’60s era, these positive trends would slow, stall, or in some cases even reverse course. The homicide rate for black men fell by 18% in the 1940s and by another 22% in the 1950s. But in the 1960s all of those gains would vanish as the homicide rate for black males rose by nearly 90%. Are today’s black violent-crime rates a legacy of slavery and Jim Crow or of something else? Unfortunately, that’s a question few people on the left will even entertain.
In the post-’60s era, these positive trends would slow, stall, or in some cases even reverse course. The homicide rate for black men fell by 18% in the 1940s and by another 22% in the 1950s. But in the 1960s all of those gains would vanish as the homicide rate for black males rose by nearly 90%. Are today’s black violent-crime rates a legacy of slavery and Jim Crow or of something else? Unfortunately, that’s a question few people on the left will even entertain.
Kanye West and the Fugitive Slave Law
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