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发帖数: 29853 | 1 原文在
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/417899/it-isnt-legacy-slavery-caused-social-breakdown-ghetto-communities-thomas-sowell
Among the many painful ironies in the current racial turmoil is that
communities scattered across the country were disrupted by riots and looting
because of the demonstrable lie that Michael Brown was shot in the back by
a white policeman in Missouri — but there was not nearly as much turmoil
created by the demonstrable fact that a fleeing black man was shot dead by a
white policeman in South Carolina.
Totally ignored was the fact that a black policeman in Alabama fatally shot
an unarmed white teenager, and was cleared of any charges, at about the same
time that a white policeman was cleared of charges in the fatal shooting of
Michael Brown.
In a world where the truth means so little, and headstrong preconceptions
seem to be all that matter, what hope is there for rational words or
rational behavior, much less mutual understanding across racial lines?
When the recorded fatal shooting of a fleeing man in South Carolina brought
instant condemnation by whites and blacks alike, and by the most
conservative as well as the most liberal commentators, that moment of mutual
understanding was very fleeting, as if mutual understanding were something
to be avoided, as a threat to a vision of “us against them” that was more
popular.
That vision is nowhere more clearly expressed than in attempts to
automatically depict whatever social problems exist in ghetto communities as
being caused by the sins or negligence of whites, whether racism in general
or a “legacy of slavery” in particular. Like most emotionally powerful
visions, it is seldom, if ever, subjected to the test of evidence.
The “legacy of slavery” argument is not just an excuse for inexcusable
behavior in the ghettos. In a larger sense, it is an evasion of
responsibility for the disastrous consequences of the prevailing social
vision of our times, and the political policies based on that vision, over
the past half century.
Anyone who is serious about evidence need only compare black communities as
they evolved in the first 100 years after slavery with black communities as
they evolved in the first 50 years after the explosive growth of the welfare
state, beginning in the 1960s.
You would be hard-pressed to find as many ghetto riots prior to the 1960s as
we have seen just in the past year, much less in the 50 years since a wave
of such riots swept across the country in 1965.
We are told that such riots are a result of black poverty and white racism.
But in fact — for those who still have some respect for facts — black
poverty was far worse, and white racism was far worse, prior to 1960. But
violent crime within black ghettos was far less.
Murder rates among black males were going down — repeat, down — during the
much-lamented 1950s, while it went up after the much celebrated 1960s,
reaching levels more than double what they had been before. Most black
children were raised in two-parent families prior to the 1960s. But today
the great majority of black children are raised in one-parent families.
Such trends are not unique to blacks, nor even to the United States. The
welfare state has led to remarkably similar trends among the white
underclass in England over the same period. Just read Life at the Bottom, by
Theodore Dalrymple, a British physician who worked in a hospital in a white
slum neighborhood.
You cannot take any people, of any color, and exempt them from the
requirements of civilization — including work, behavioral standards,
personal responsibility, and all the other basic things that the clever
intelligentsia disdain — without ruinous consequences to them and to
society at large.
Non-judgmental subsidies of counterproductive lifestyles are treating people
as if they were livestock, to be fed and tended by others in a welfare
state — and yet expecting them to develop as human beings have developed
when facing the challenges of life themselves.
One key fact that keeps getting ignored is that the poverty rate among black
married couples has been in single digits every year since 1994. Behavior
matters and facts matter, more than the prevailing social visions or
political empires built on those visions. |
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