[img]1640|right|Arthur Christopher Schaper||no_popup[/img]For decades, the accepted political discourse has held that through racism, black people are being put down by conservatives and the Republican party. These indictments are fatuous in too many ways to count.
Let’s start with the term black. What does it mean? Young dark-looking children live in South Los Angeles. Some do not consider themselves African. Of Belizean descent, their primary ancestry with South America. Others of African descent come directly from African countries, or from the West Indies, or other nations. West Indies natives espouse different cultural and ethnic values from blacks born and raised in the United States.
Issues that make the difference touch on class not race. Class has more to do with their skills, traditions, and values learned and appropriated over time. West Indians descend from people raised in nations with a slave past, too, much like the United States. Unlike American slavery, West Indians had to grow their own food, engage in their own business practices, care for themselves because there were not enough white people to keep them dependent. The American slavery system was based on keeping slaves incompetent and dependent as much as possible, a legacy that breathes today.
For blacks, connections between the slave past and the impoverished present rely on the dependency link. However, academics still posit that the demise of the black family started with American slavery because the peculiar institution would permit a slavemaster to break up married slave couples. An ordained minister would read “till death or sale do you part.” Slavery was an evil blight on American history, removed only with great bloodshed and political turmoil.
The false notion that the primacy of the mother in black families today stems from the demise of the family in antebellum America has neither style nor substance to its argument.
Period of Relative Prosperity
Race-baiting activists charge that the legacy of slavery persists across our communities. The facts are much different. From the end of the Civil War until the 1920s, black communities thrived in spite of prejudice and Jim Crow. Celebrated African-American academic Thomas Sowell reminded his viewers in one episode of Firing Line that the literacy rate among African-Americans exploded from nil to fifty percent from the end of the Civil War until the early 1900s. This massive transformation of success and growth was not the result of government action, but in spite of government repression. Jim Crow de jure segregation was rigorously enforced against African-Americans, and not just in the South.
Institutional racism or affirmative action cannot limit a man's capacity to improve his lot. Mr. Sowell discovered that in societies with persecuted minorities, those same individuals may lose key political privileges, yet their traditions and skills promote them to quality jobs and financial success. This was the case for the Chinese in Malaysia, the Lebanese in Sierra Leone and in Mexico, where the wealthiest man alive, Hugo Slim, is of Lebanese descent. The same holds for the United States, where African-American statesmen like Booker T. Washington refused to feel sorry for themselves, in spite of sharecropping and de jure discrimination. Mr. Washington succeeded through hard work, established universities, and even advised Presidents.
Regarding Republicans and conservatives as the source of black repression, the first African-American activists were Republicans, not Democrats. The first popularly elected Republican senator was Edward Brooke of Massachusetts. Republican Tim Scott of South Carolina is the only black in the Senate. Recently in Louisiana, state Sen. Elbert Guillory, transferred his allegiance to the Republican party along with Ralph Washington, a City Councilman from Central City. As state leaders of African descent in the South are switching parties, minorities in Washington identify greatly with conservative causes such as school vouchers.
Digging for Causes
So what has caused the breakdown of the black a man and his family in our generation? Not slavery, not past prejudices, where civil rights leaders pressed against the indoctrinated cultural hatreds yesterday, not the conservative movement, not the Republican party.
Look to Democrats, and you will see a cause. From Woodrow Wilson, who purged blacks from the White House, to President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who said, “We’ll have those (n-word plural) voting for us for the next two hundred years,” we find the policies that advanced state-sponsored welfare, that enabled failed education systems, that bolstered race-baiting minority politicians, all strands that caused incalculable harm to African-Americans.
As the government increased its handouts, widened welfare, and encouraged individuals to remain dependent instead of growing in grace and prosperity, so African-Americans have suffered instead of prospered.
Arthur Christopher Schaper is a teacher-turned-writer on topics both timeless and timely; political, cultural, and eternal. A lifelong Southern California resident, he currently lives in Torrance.
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