White culpability for black poverty.
London Times Online John McWhorter
Black poverty is the result of 30 years of misguided welfare rather than racism, says John McWhorter
As it quickly became clear that there was a certain demographic skew among the people stranded in New Orleans, journalists began intoning that Hurricane Katrina had stripped bare the continuing racial inequity in America.
The extent to which this was hidden is unclear, actually. An awareness that a tragic disproportion of black Americans are poor has been a hallmark of civic awareness among educated Americans for 40 years now.
The problem is less a lack of awareness than a lack of understanding. The publicly sanctioned take is that “white supremacy” is why 80% of New Orleans’s poor people are black. The civics lesson, we are to think, is that the civil rights revolution left a job undone in an America still hostile to black advancement.
In fact, white America does remain morally culpable — but because white leftists in the late 1960s, in the name of enlightenment and benevolence, encouraged the worst in human nature among blacks and even fostered it in legislation. The hordes of poor blacks stuck in the Superdome last week wound up there not because the White Man barred them from doing better, but because certain tragically influential White Men destroyed the fragile but lasting survival skills poor black communities had maintained since the end of slavery.
Read the entire article on the London Times Online website.
I don’t quite understand the author’s point. Here’s some data from the Census Bureau:
Black poverty rate:
1967 33.9%
1977 28.2%
1987 29.4%
1997 23.6%
2001 20.7%
Total poverty rate:
1959 18.5%
1967 11.4%
1977 9.3%
1987 10.7%
1997 10.3%
2001 9.2%
Not all data are available for all years. The web page has data for every year; I just posted a selection.
http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/histpov/hstpov4.html
These are the historical poverty tables for the Census Bureau. Looks to me like poverty has gone down for everyone, especially since the 1950s and ’60s. Something must have gone right.
McWhorter’s point is very simple. Chronic black poverty in the inner cities has been institutionalized by the liberal welfare state. The sociology is a bit more complex of course (predatory crime, collapse of education, fostering single parent families, etc.), but McWhorter provides a good introduction to it in the article. If the Bush iniatives announced last night can be implemented (home ownership, job creation, job training, opportunity society, etc.), the grip of poverty, in New Orleans at least, could be broken. If it works, it could become a model for other troubled cities.
In my reading of the data, over the years the poverty rate for blacks was cut by 40 percent, and by 50 percent for the whole country. In my mind that hardly sounds like social programs were a disaster. In fact, they seem to have been very successful, though certainly not perfect. But the author claims that blacks are the victims of a “hideous sociological disaster of 40 years ago” engineered by white leftists. That’s what I don’t understand. Where is the disaster? He implies that a pre-“disaster” poverty rate of almost 34 percent would be better than a post-“disaster” rate in the low 20s. If only we could have more disasters like that!
You cannot determine by the data that the reason for the decline in poverty is due to social programs. It could be due to other factors such as an expanding economy, etc. Breaking down the poverty rate by state might be helpful here.
You can determine (from different data) that in areas where welfare is institutionalized, the conditions that contribute to chronic poverty (single mothers, decline of education, lawlessness, etc.) increase. McWhorter addresses the latter.
1) This commentary selectively omits mention of the welfare reform legislation signed by President Clinton nearly ten years ago which gave states the flexibility to move AFDC recipients from welfare to work. The author’s argument might hold water if a Democratic President hadn’t already pushed through the legislation to correct the very situation the author is condemning.
2)Are all government programs which alleviate poverty to painted with the same negative broad brush just because some of them needed to be corrected? Obviously a welfare system that resulted in 3 or 4 generations of the same family depending on public assistance had to be completely revamped. Other programs like Head Start however are highly successful and have been empirically proven to help children escape poverty. The old programs that created a culture of dependency must not be confused with new programs, like job training and tution assistance that help people escape poverty. It is intellectually lazy and dishonest indeed to assert that because some of the programs needed to be fixed than they must all be bad.
3) If federal poverty programs didn’t elimnate all poverty in the long run, does this mean that their short-term benefits had no value either. People who might have gone hungry and ill from malnutition were able to eat because of food stamps. People who might have slept on a grate, had a roof over thier head because of section 8 housing. These are short-term band-aids, not long-term solutions, but they do have value and meet a genuine need.
Note 5.
1) The article does indeed mention the 1996 reform. Read the last paragraph: “All indications are that the reform of welfare in 1996 is bearing fruit in terms of income and the life conditions of children.” It’s a credit to Clinton that he was able to work with the Republican Congress on this issue.
2) McWhorter deals with the culture of black dependency created by white “do-gooders”. He doesn’t assert that “because some of the programs needed to be fixed than they must all be bad.”
3) Point 3 restates point 2. Again, McWhorter makes no such assertion.
I’m sorry Father, I just respond poorly to what I think are ideologically rigid explanations, and liberals are certainly guilty of that as well.
Last Tuesday the director of the Food Bank where I volunteer surprised me by saying, “Five years ago, if you would have asked me I would have said the solution to poverty was government programs. Now I’m not so sure. Now the solution seems to be more locally based public-private partnerships and getting non-for-profits to learn to become more innovative and entrepeneurial in the way they do business.”
My own involvement with the Food Bank has shown me that there is a lot more private generosity and compassion in our commuunity than I ever expected. People really do want to help. What are needed are more effective conduits for chanelling that generosity towards people in need.
As examples of how non-for-profits can be more innovative the Food bank is working with a local high school that wants their students to perform a community service for part of their academic credit towards graduation. A local grocery encourages shoppers to donate to it’s “Food for Families” program at the check-out line and donates that money to the Food bank. A local realtor allows his agents to donate a small percentage of their commissions, while his competitor sponsored a fun run this summer that raised money for the Food bank. A local builder donated land for a community garden that will provide vegatable plots to clients of the Food Bank.
So George W. Bush is correct when he indicates that private charity is an important untapped solution to poverty that needs to be encouraged. He needs to dispel suspicions however that he views private charity is an excuse for public abdication of its role in reducing poverty. Instead we have to find the right public-private mix.
In my experience with Trinity Missions, the foodshelf that grew to be the largest private foodshelf in Minnesota, the biggest problems were caused by the government funded foodshelves that looked on Trinity as an encroacher on their turf. If it wasn’t for Mayor (now Senator) Coleman, they would have shut it down.
When Trinity moved into care of the homeless (getting them back on their feet), the money to pay for four to six months of all expenses were private donations. The original four-plex used to house the homeless families was donated by a Greek Orthodox parishioner. The food for AIDS patients was cooked by the Philoptochos of the Greek Orthodox Church in Minneapolis, which also held regular food drives (bags were distributed one Sunday and returned filled the next). I would take my GOYA groups over to the foodshelf and help them stock shelves on occassion.
The problem with solely government directed programs is that it also fosters political corruption. The reason schools are so poor in the inner cities is because of corruption (mostly Democract which I am sure you won’t be happy to hear but nevertheless true — which is why I tell you to be a Kennedy (John, not Ted), rather than a McGovern Democrat). The reason any kind of self-reliance or opportunity, program is resisted so much by the hard left is because if successful, it will eradicate a measure of poverty thus also eradicating a longterm constituency. Don’t underestimate this. If the Democrats lose just 5% of the black vote, their descent into a permanent minority party is virtually assured — for several decades most likely.* (Of course the Republicans can mess things up for themselves and change the outlook, but so far they seem to have better sense than the Democrats.)
*(This is one reason for the charges of racism we heard the past week reaching towards hysteria. There is a sense of desperation that the old slogans are losing their grip behind much of it.)
One other point. The suspicion you mention exists only on the left, the hard left in particular which means much of the present Democratic leadership. It’s not playing in mainstream America. People see that much of the aid so far is privately driven.
Fr. Hans writes: “You cannot determine by the data that the reason for the decline in poverty is due to social programs. It could be due to other factors such as an expanding economy, etc. Breaking down the poverty rate by state might be helpful here.”
Looking at the poverty rate by state you’ll see that the red states lead the pack, Washington D.C. excepted.
Whatever the reason for the decline in the poverty rate, it is certainly reasonable to believe that social programs played a role, especially educational programs. The doorway into the middle class is typically through education. In the period in question there was a tremendous increase in educational assistance. Call it socialism or income redistribution or whatever you like; making education affordable is indeed a great investment.
But even with education, there are always going to be people who simply do not have the aptitude for study past public school. In the past many of these people found gainful employment in manufacturing jobs that provided a stable middle class income. Today, many of those jobs are gone. There will always be people whose highest achievement in the workplace is employment as janitors, nurses aides, file clerks, farmworkers, and so on. The work that these people do is no less important than what we professionals do, even though the compensation is not nearly as great. The question we as a society have to address is whether these people will be economically marginalized or supported through minimum wage, tax credits, and so on.
But more importantly, I find that a number of articles posted here, typically originating in right-wing think tanks, tend to leave out some very important data. Again, whatever the cause of the decline in poverty rates both black and white, I was surprised that the article failed to mention that there was in fact a profound decrease in the poverty rate for black and white in the period under discussion. To read the article, one would come away with the impression that the social programs of the 60s were an unmitigated disaster. I don’t see that the data support that assertion.
Fr. Hans writes: “You cannot determine by the data that the reason for the decline in poverty is due to social programs. It could be due to other factors such as an expanding economy, etc.”
(I don’t know if you’ll get two responses on this. The first one didn’t seem to go through.)
Great, let’s look at the unemployment rate for black. Go to the web site of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. You can get data going back to 1972. What you’ll find is that black unemployment was 10.4% in 1972, 10.4% in 2004, went up during the Reagan and Bush 1 presidencies, came down under Clinton, and is going back up during Bush 2.
Sure, there are a lot of factors that could be at work here. But at least I’m looking at the data. The author of the article in question is simply making assertions, apparently based on no data at all, no surveys, no interviews. Doing a Google search, I found the Census Bureau data in 2 minutes, but the McWhorter can’t be bothered to give the data even a passing glance.
The credibility of an essay such as this, inasmuch as it has any, comes not from any data or research. It comes simply because the argument fits in with standard right-wing economic theology. In particular, this argument supports the following ideas:
1) the liberals ruin everything, especially the smart-ass liberals who think they know more than everyone else
2) government programs that are supposed to help people really don’t
This is standard right-wing “think-tank” crap, issued for the consumption of the Faithful.
Editorials don’t substantiate every assertion with data within the editorial itself. You are confusing research papers with editorials.
McWhorter has an outstanding reputation, as does the Manhattan Institute, the policy think tank he writes for. Their periodical City Journal is one of the best in America. (You might consider reading the article by Kay Hymowitz The Black Family: 40 Years of Lies.) For more information on McWhorter go to : The Manhattan Institute: Race and Ethnicity.
For research on the effects of welfare policy on the black social infrastructure go to:
The Heritage Foundation, Policy and Research Analysis: Welfare. Other resources exist as well if you are interested.
Note 10: There’s a danger in under emphasizing the reality of racisim in American culture. According to the Center for Public Information on Population Research, “More than one in three whites interviewed in Detroit, Boston, and Atlanta said they would move if their neighborhoods reached varying levels of racial integration, according to a study published in the November issue of the journal Demography…The most highly educated respondents cited property values as the reason for wanting to move”
I’m not suggesting that blacks are without moral blemish, but simply asserting that to deny that part of black poverty may very well be related to continuing racism is naive. You’ll never hear this from the Heritage Foundation though.
When you give a patient exogenous steroids like Prednisone, the body stops producing endogenous steroids because it doesn’t have to. The body is very economical and will not exert itself when it isn’t necessary.
If you give someone money with no expectation of an action or change of priorites on their part, nothing will happen. Their capacity to fend for themselves begins to atrophy. In the extreme, your effort to “help” completely renders people incapable of developing a work ethic, personal discipline and ability to plug into the workforce. The brains of many are rewired in such a way as to make them totally dependent on the system and they pass this to the next generation as being the normal state. There is such inertia now for this approach that virtually nothing will change unless extreme economic conditions force change.
James, I would argue that the racism that held blacks back continues in the programs that keep the black man poor. While the original intentions behind these programs may have been good, their consequences are no different than when racism flourished in this country.
As for property values, what lowers them is when crime enters the neighborhood because crime leads to decay. Gulianni understood this well. Check out the broken window theory of urban decay that Gulianni adopted in the civil restoration of New York City. BTW, James Q. Wilson, founder of the Manhattan Institute, first came up with it.
My hunch is that the black middle class would feel the same way. A home is a middle-class person’s greatest investment. He wants to see the value hold steady and even increase because he is thinking of his retirement down the road. This holds true for anyone in the middle class, black or white.
To the extent that whites don’t want to see blacks moving into their neighborhood probably has more to do with the fear of crime, and that unfortunately poor blacks and increasing crime are often related. But again, is the racism embedded in this fear, or in the attitudes McWhorter describes, ie: liberal pieties that allow the crime to flourish in ways that liberals would not tolerate for a moment in their own neighborhoods?
The article you cited claims the former without mentioning the fear. But this conclusion is highly interpretive and runs against practical experience. I’ve lived in Atlanta, in an integrated middle-class neighborhood in fact, and no racism was evident. This doesn’t disprove their assertion of course, but it’s questionable that a concept as amorphous as racism can even be quantified anyway. Practical experience has a lot going for it.
Sorry if this posts more than once. Third attempt.
Fr. Hans writes: “Editorials don’t substantiate every assertion with data within the editorial itself. You are confusing research papers with editorials.”
My objection to the article is not just that the author doesn’t reference data. My objection is that his assertions are contradicted by the data.
For example, he completely ignores the known data on black educational achievements:
Percentage of blacks 25 or older who have completed four years of college:
1959… 3.3%
2000… 16.5%
For whites:
1959… 8.8%
2000… 26.1%
http://www.census.gov/population/socdemo/education/tabA-2.pdf
In other words, during the period in question, from the 60s on, the rate of white college educational attainment increased by an average of 7.4 percent per year, while the black rate increased by 12.5 percent per year. This occurred during the same time as the “social disaster” engineered by white liberals.
If you look at the difference in poverty rates for black and white from 1967 to 2000 (the years data by race are available) you find that the white poverty rate decreased an average of 0.06 percent (six-tenths of a percent) per year, while the black povery rate decreased an average of 0.75 percent (three-quarters of a percent) per year. In other words, the rate at which poverty for blacks decreased was over 12 times the rate of decrease in poverty for whites. Again, this is during the liberal white “disaster” inflicted upon the black community.
The author also has a very strange view of how blacks make decisions. For example, he says that “young women had babies in their teens because there was no reason not to with welfare waiting to pick up the tab.” But this completely contradicts the data. Rates of college education for black males and females have always been very close, but in recent years black females have pulled ahead of males. As of 2004 they led black males in college education by almost two percent: 18.5% vs. 16.6%. Even in the years leading up the the welfare reforms they still led black males in college education. In 1996, the year of the welfare reforms, they led black males by 14.6 percent to 12.4 percent – almost a 20 percent difference in the rates. This hardly speaks to a situation in which black females conclude there is “no reason” not to go on welfare.
In exploring the causes of multigenerational black poverty the author would better serve his readers by addressing the actual data rather than making assertions that are flatly contradicted by the data. This is what we in the “reality-based” community try to do anyway.
Jim, McWhorter is not arguing that blacks are not capable of progress, or that blacks have not made progress. He is decrying the lack of progress among the black urban poor, those most directly affected by the programs of the Great Society. Let’s look at a few facts:
I wont cite all the data here, but follow this link for a report on how welfare reform has lifted black children out of poverty. Cleary a good thing, IMO.
From: Understanding Differences in Black and White Child Poverty Rates
From testimony by Robert Tanner to a congressional subcommittee (1995 data but still relevant):
It appears you are taking all data concerning blacks and generalizing it to the black urban poor. You are not trying to argue that the welfare state has not institutionalized poverty among the black urban poor, are you?
Fr. Hans writes: “It appears you are taking all data concerning blacks and generalizing it to the black urban poor. You are not trying to argue that the welfare state has not institutionalized poverty among the black urban poor, are you?”
There are many factors involved in how and why someone ends up in poverty. The availability of welfare is only one factor, and is probably not the deciding factor. The studies that you mention are interesting, but hardly definitive. For example —
“In light of the current widespread recognition among legislators and the general public that teenage childbearing is a serious social problem, it may come as a surprise that actual birth rates among teenagers are substantially lower today than they were in 1960. In 1960, 89 out of 1000 females ages 15-19 bore a child. By 1980, that birth rate had declined to 53 per 1000 females. It then remained relatively stable for several years, reaching its lowest point in 1986 at 50 per 1000. Since 1986 it has been rising, increasing to 61 per 1000 in 1992.”
Concerning whether welfare induces teenagers to have babies —
“Some argue that it has played such a role, but this is a difficult case to make. In nominal terms, welfare pays more now, but inflation has eroded most of its value. Since 1970, the real value of AFDC plus food stamps has decreased by more than 25 percent. The main reason government expenditures on the poor have risen is the skyrocketing cost of Medicaid. But from the point of view of the welfare recipient, Medicaid buys about the same coverage today as in the past: in 1970, the recipient could see a doctor if she or her child got sick; the same is true in 1995. Thus, on balance, a woman on welfare is worse off in 1995 than she was in 1970. Consequently, it is difficult to attribute the rising out-of-wedlock birth rates to rising welfare benefits because, from the point of view of the recipients, benefits have decreased.”
http://www.urban.org/url.cfm?ID=306620
What I’m saying is that the issue under discussion is very complex, and that there is no one main factor involved. Are there teenagers who figure that having a baby is a great way to pick up $300 in cash every month? I suppose there are, in the same way that there are probably people who see the three meals a day, the free medical care, and the dry place to sleep offered by prison life as attractive. But I think we would hardly conclude that the existence of prisons causes a rise in the crime rate. Likewise, when looking at welfare benefits the issue is the extent to which those benefits actually lead people to a life of poverty. When you look at the totality of data (some of which actually exist outside of Cato Institute position papers) the picture is neither simple nor clear.
Even if we grant for the sake of argument that welfare itself causes long-term poverty, that doesn’t mean that welfare is a bad thing. For any program (actually, for most any human activity) there are unintended consequences. Now if ALL that welfare did was to cause poverty, sure, you’d have a case. But that’s not all it does. If you widen the scope of analysis to all social programs, not just welfare, then you can see the great amount of good accomplished by these program. Take, for example, the tremendous rise in the percentage of people, black and white, with college educations in the last 30 years.
Also, EVERY major program, social or otherwise, has to have reforms over time. The U.S. military has undergone a number of major reforms the last 30 years. Does the necessity of reform mean that the military was a “disaster” or a failure? Of course not. Likewise with welfare and other social programs.
But back to the original issue of the social “disaster” engineered by white leftists. That accusation is simply not supported by the totality of data. It relies on an overly simplistic view of the situation. It makes for a nice piece of propaganda, but confuses rather than clarifies the issue.
If I may speak up a little here. My father came from the “black urban poor” group – his parents were divorced when he was young and he grew up during the depression, living with his mother. He never lost contact with his father, though. He did what he could do to further his education, working while attending colleges. He went into the accounting field. When he kept hitting roadblocks because of discrimination against black accountants, he got a job with the government, and started his own accounting firm with other partners. Someone wrote a book about black accountants and their story is in it. He was away for much of the time; at the time I didn’t understand why he was away so much. My mother gave up her job (she came up from a more middle class family) to take care of me.
I guess, the point is that people make good and bad decisions. My father obviously made decisions that bettered his life. Once he was wrongly arrested for being in a fight – he just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time (he was standing near the group). The judge took a look at him (he’s on the small side and wears glasses) and let him go.
It may be that those who are persistently poor and on welfare make bad decisions that keep them where they are. And some of them may not realize the ramifications of such decisions, when they’ve not been exposed to those who make good decisions that have a positive outcome on their future. For instance, teenage girl has grown up with mother who has made bad decisions about men in their life. Teenage girl learns from examples around her. She may be resolved not to make the same mistakes, but there isn’t much in the local community to help her reinforce her. And peer pressure is very strong at that stage, so she may be pressured into having sex and ends up having a child. The child’s father won’t pay, so she has to go on welfare. And so on . . .
One of my cousins did have her first daughter out of wedlock, but her family supported her, and she went to college and got a degree. Later she married her daughter’s father, and they’re still married years later; oldest daughter is now in graduate school and younger daughter is in her freshman year, with plans to become a nurse (and she will be one of the best nurses all around due to her bubbly and cheerful nature).
Simply throwing money after the problem is not going to enough. What also needs to be done is to teach people how to make the right decisions and think in the long run. And, people also need to stop using racism as a crunch and be open to the possibility that black people can differ in their opinions and be Republicans, libertarians, gun-right supporters just as they can be Democrats and devoted public servants.
Note 18: Thanks for your story, Lola. Again, I don’t think that most liberals wish to encourage a climate where “bad decisions”, as you say, are encouraged and promoted. Maybe some do, though I don’t see why. To this extent, yes, welfare should be reformed (and it has been in many areas). But there are many, many people who are where they are not through “bad decisions” but through misfortune or illness. I know someone with cancer who is simply too ill to work, so, yes, he receives Social Security checks along with a small long-term disability check. What are we to say? Pass the collection basket and hope that it’s enough to cover the impossibly large bills for radiation treatments? It would have to be a mighty well-heeled church, indeed.
In situations where children are born out of wedlock, again, we can either punish the children for the sins of the parents or do something to assist. Are to tell the children, “Sorry, but your mother’s a little tramp so we have decided that you will not eat this week”? This doesn’t seem plausible unless we plan on removing the children from the mother’s custody in each and every case.