Liberal and black hell without end

(Note: see Mark P.’s Roissyseque account of how the welfare state starting in the early 1960s altered the mating choices of black women.)

The theme of Heather Mac Donald’s City Journal article, “Chicago’s Real Crime Story: Why decades of community organizing haven’t stemmed the city’s youth violence,” is simple and stark. Faced with the ongoing crisis of an urban black population immersed in profound dysfunction and engaged in savage violence upon itself, blacks and liberals—and particularly Barack Obama through his entire career as community organizer, politician and president—have systematically ignored the paramount cause of the dysfunction and violence: that 79 percent of blacks in Chicago and similar percentages elsewhere are born to unwed mothers and grow up without fathers. Instead of recognizing that the black community must first attain a minimal level of human and social functioning—namely by combining childbirth with marriage—before any “help” can even be helpful to it, liberals keep inventing new and utterly useless ameliorative programs, in much the same way that the U.S. government keeps inventing new and useless nation-building and democratization programs for Mideast Muslims whose entire religion and way of life preclude democracy.

Mac Donald gives an amazing recent example of this mentality at work. Chicago police using computer models identified a couple of hundred black youths at risk of being murdered in the next two years (exactly the same youths were also at highest risk of killing other youths). Social workers then surrounded the youths with a blanket of special support. The support consisted primarily of individually assigned, government-paid counselors whose main task was to help the youth and his family with such mundane tasks as buying car insurance and getting a new refrigerator.

Supposedly deeply alarmed by the nightmarish disorder and culture of cruelty produced by 50 years of government assistance that has destroyed individual responsibility and made marriage unnecessary, liberals and blacks keep calling for—more government assistance.

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Mark P. writes:

The Roissysphere has an interesting explanation for black family disintegration that is unique compared to the racism/welfare arguments of Democrats and Republicans.

Apparently, the effect of the welfare state on the black family was not, as Republicans believe, to make blacks lazy and irresponsible. The effect was to essentially price black women out of the market for marriage. As Thomas Sowell observes, the black family in pre-1960s America did not manifest the kind of problems that we see in post-1960s America. This is because black women had imposed on them the same kind of constraints as white women when it came to choosing a man: a compromise between the exciting and the stable, between the cad and the dad. The high penalty for out-of-wedlock births, the lack of contraceptives, the close-knit communities and reputational effects, all conspired to force black women to choose stable, reliable beta providers over the more exciting but unstable alpha males.

The effect of the welfare state was the first step in decoupling a black woman’s mating decision from the compromise between dad and cad. Now that the state is the head of her household and now that she does need to compromise, she can spend her time dating and mating with exciting cads, like the drug dealers, athletes, gang bangers, criminals and other assorted riff-raff that she really likes. This, of course, produces the next generation of thugs growing up in single-mother households.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 15, 2010 08:58 PM | Send