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Jewish World Review / Oct. 1, 1998 /11 Tishrei, 5759
Cal Thomas
The race panel: lies in black and white
AS PRESIDENT CLINTON'S "RACE PANEL'' concluded its work with
the predictable lament that blacks have trouble getting
anywhere solely because of "white privilege,'' Washington
Mayor Marion Barry said the November election could
produce a majority-white D.C. City Council, which he thinks
would be bad for the city's 63 percent black majority. Why?
According to Barry, when it comes to legislating, whites and
blacks are different in terms of culture, in terms of
philosophy.''
A Klansman couldn't have said it better. Perhaps the mayor
might explain why the mostly white 4th district of Oklahoma
believes that Rep. J.C. Watts, a black man, can represent its
interests quite well in Congress.
The president's race panel reached conclusions familiar to
those who have been listening to the liberals' siren song for
four decades. Though more blacks than ever are in the
middle and upper class, how they got there is not to be our
concern. Neither is the reason why other blacks have been
left behind. The panel said the president should take the lead
in educating people about "the country's history of white
privilege'' and how an inferior status was assigned to people of
color. Better we should focus on how those who refused to
accept that status overcame and how they might show others
the way.
The race panel also said that whites and Asians enjoy greater
advantages economically and have better access to health
care and education. It found social and economic progress for
blacks slowed between the mid-1970s and early 1990s. And
it urged an end to sentence disparity for crimes involving
powdered cocaine and crack cocaine. Crack is more often
used by minority drug abusers than whites, and the panel
thinks longer sentences for crack use than for the powdered
variety is "morally and intellectually indefensible.'' Certain
"leaders'' in the black community have promoted the myth
that crack cocaine and AIDS are part of the white man's
"plan'' to rid them of their "black problem.''
The impediment to greater black progress is not racial
discrimination. It is family breakdown. In every category --
from out-of-wedlock births and fatherless homes, to the
percentage of young males in prison and victims or
perpetrators of violent crimes --- blacks are disproportionately
affected because it is their racial group that suffers most from
broken or never-formed two-parent homes.
Since the 1965 "War on Poverty'' began, more than $5
trillion have been spent on various programs to help the poor
overcome poverty. They have not ended poverty because
money was never the sole answer. Every study known to
government has shown that families formed by a man and
woman marrying and staying together to rear their children
produces a more economically and socially stable outcome
than single motherhood and absent fathers.
While the race panel points to a drop in government
programs in the '70s and '80s, the Population Issues Research
Institute at Pennsylvania State University found that "51
percent of the 4.5 percentage-point increase in child poverty
between 1980 and 1988 can be accounted for by changes in
family structure during the 1980s.'' Furthermore, the study
said, "Changing family structure also accounted for 48
percent of the increase during the 1980s in deep poverty, and
59 percent of the rise in relative poverty among U.S.
children.''
Sure, racism exists. But the best way to reduce its impact is
not to pass more laws or fund more failed government
programs. It is to help rebuild the black family and liberate
blacks not only from poverty but also from the white
paternalism that is little different from the plantation -- when
slave masters said that blacks couldn't make it on their own.
Liberal Democrats are today's slave masters. They should let
these people go, instead of holding them in indentured
political servitude, trading their votes for a few government
crumbs.
The race panel should have committed itself to putting the
black family back together again. But that might solve the
problem and unemploy certain black "leaders'' who seem to
have made a lucrative career for themselves by ensuring that
the misery of others never
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