|
Jewish World Review May 19, 1999 /4 Sivan, 5759
Walter Williams
(JWR) ---- (http://www.jewishworldreview.com)
Only 40 percent of black children live in two-parent households. The illegitimacy rate among blacks stands close to 70 percent. The "legacy of slavery" explanation for today's weak black family structure loses all manner of credibility when one examines evidence from the past. Even during slavery, most black children lived in biological two-parent families. One study of 19th-century slave families (Herbert Gutman, "The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom: 1750-1925") found that in up to three-fourths of the families, all the children had the same mother and father. In New York City in 1925, 85 percent of kin-related black households were double-headed. In fact, "Five in six children under the age of six lived with both parents." Both during slavery and as late as 1920, a black teen-age girl raising a child without a man was rare among blacks. Gutman, also found in analyzing data on black families in Harlem between 1905 and 1925 that only 3 percent of all families "were headed by a woman under 30." Scholar and columnist Thomas Sowell found: "Going back a hundred years, when blacks were just one generation out of slavery, we find that census data of that era showed that a slightly higher percentage of black adults had married than white adults. This fact remained true in every census from 1890 to 1940." In absolute numbers, blacks commit most of the crime in the United States. Blacks account for half of all the arrests for assault and rape, and two-thirds of arrests for robbery. Blacks are disproportionately more represented in all categories of felonies, except those requiring access to large sums of money such as embezzlement and stock fraud. Criminologist Marvin Wolfgang says, "For four violent offenses -- homicide, rape, robbery and aggravated assault -- the crime rates for blacks are at least 10 times as high as they are for whites." Close to 90 percent of the victims of black criminals are black. Crime turns neighborhoods into economic wastelands, forcing poor people to bear the cost of traveling to suburban malls to do routine shopping or pay the high prices at local "Ma & Pa" shops. If they manage to buy a home, that home is worth less because of crime and wanton property destruction. Poor people are most dependent on law and order for safety and welfare. Wealthier people have the financial resources to protect themselves, by taking such steps as purchasing alarms or hiring private guards. An often-overlooked crime cost is that people who are the most upwardly mobile people are the first to leave. Their replacements are not as mobile or they care less about neighborhood amenities. The people who leave take with them the social leavening that contributes to vital and stable communities. The "politically correct" theory is that poverty and discrimination is the cause of high crime rates. During my youth in the 1930s and 1940s, black neighborhoods were far safer than today. It would be preposterous to suggest back then there was less poverty and discrimination.
The level of social pathology seen in many black communities is
unprecedented and has nothing to do with a so-called legacy of slavery,
unless we're willing to say that slavery has a delayed reaction of four or
five
05/14/99: General principles
|