John Ritter's interesting USA Today article, "San Francisco hopes to reverse black flight" (USA Today, August 28, 2007), touches several themes that this blog has developed, but, alas, without underlining their significance. The first theme is not well understood by either conservatives or liberals. The Supreme Court's prohibition of racial housing covenants and its Brown decision had the unintended effect of separating the black classes, middle class from working class and poor. Freed to seek better housing, in the 1950s, urban, black, middle class families across the nation fled the inner city racial ghettos, leaving the poor blacks behind. Sometimes the middle class flight led only a few blocks away, sometimes it was miles away to suburbs; but however far, the middle class was no longer present in the community. As it was the middle class that provided the moral leadership and social structure for a stable black community, this separation led quickly to the collapse of social order in the inner city ghetto, producing the riots of the 1960s. Taking advantage of the vacuum in social leadership, radical, criminal black groups, such as the Black Panthers moved in, leading to delegitimation of mainstream values*, violence, and structural chaos that continues today.
The second theme is that white liberal welfare-state policies to aid the working class and poor blacks who remained in the cities in the 1960s and later accelerated the disintegration of the black community. This theme is well understood by conservatives, but liberals remain willfully ignorant--as it is in their political interest. The welfare policies reinforced the decline of black church moral authority, the disintegration of the black family, the rapid increase in illegitimacy, and welfare dependency that shackled ghetto blacks onto the lowest rungs of the American ladder of upward mobility. All of the deleterious effects of liberalism's response to the events of the 1960s have been masked by the obstinate, misplaced loyalty of African Americans to the Democratic Party, which has enshrined as indisputable dogma the Party's harmful racial ideology and misguided social policies.
The most important reason for a substantial portion of African Americans to leave the Democratic Party is to make possible, within the black community and with non-black communities, a realistic discussion about African American problems and genuinely innovative solutions to them.
*The Supreme Court initiated the delegitimation of mainstream values in the 1954 Brown decision, when it cited social scientific studies that labelled the black middle class a "pathological" copy of the white middle class. See my discussion of the effect of the Brown decision on school curricula and on the notion of "subjectivity".
(Thanks to Instapundit for the newspaper reference.)
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