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The time for complaints is over. We need action to fix black America. The status quo is unacceptable, and worse, blacks are being manipulated by others to further stoke division. Increasingly, we do not identify as Americans first, but black or white or brown.

The time for white complaints is over. Hours spent complaining and pointing at black-on-black violence is not productive. Nothing changes. Harping on black foibles and stereotypes only serves to frustrate and enrage both sides. Further, many of the reasons black culture has suffered is due to white "solutions." Soft bigotry at best, outright chattel slavery at worst. I'll address that below. Suffice it to say: being angry with black Americans isn't changing anything for the better.

Also...

The time for black complaints is over. Slavery happened in America like it has happened in every culture around the world since the beginning of time. Slavery has been prohibited in the West, and apart from communist China and parts of Egypt, most of the East. Moreover, as recent studies have shown, racial police brutality has declined to the point of statistical insignificance. The raison d'etre for the Black Lives Matter organization is a rounding error. Recent spikes in crime aside, broadly speaking, America has never been safer.

So why does everything feel worse? For one, media and technology. Mainstream media, citizen journalism, and nonstop social media all contribute to the sense that our racial divide is at the root of all evil. Foreign and domestic agitators also, to be sure. George Soros, the billion dollar Black Lives Matter organization (which funds Democratic candidates through for-profit ActBlue), the DNC, ACLU and SPLC--in short, the usual suspects, propagandizing and profiteering off the pain of an imperfect history, an evolution that, for all its growing pains, resulted in the greatest nation on Earth.

A brief disclaimer: This is not to disparage black America. To the contrary, I share these ideas here out of a profound frustration and deep hope for a peaceful future. I'm not sure Martin Luther King Jr.'s vision of a "colorblind" society is possible, but race should never be used as a cudgel.

There exists a burgeoning black community that recognizes the ruse, the ugly bargain of welfare for Democrat votes. Yes, blacks are the most loyal voting bloc in the country. Roughly 90% vote blue, but that's slowly changing due to the work of patriots like Thomas Sowell, Candace Owens, CJ Pearson, Terrence Williams, and many others.

Still, none of the ideas to fix our latest race-based nation-spasm are worth a damn. Worse, they divide us further. Reparations? Statistically and legally impossible, not to mention morally fraught. Defund police? Ha. Address police reform thoughtfully and proportionately when departments accrue too many violations, yes. Defund? That's illogical and dangerous to all--especially blacks, who oppose the idea! Abolish the "carceral state"? Absurd. Look what happened in New York City when a few thousand prisoners were released, allegedly due to COVID concerns. Violent crime has skyrocketed. Prisons exist for a reason.

First, America must abolish welfare. It's not a new idea. Charles Murray, an academician, discussed it in the early '90s. Conservative ears pricked up. Tim Worstall of Forbes discussed it a decade ago. Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-WI) made it part of his winning platform in 2014, when he noted the following:

“A single parent with a couple kids can easily get $35,000 a year in total benefits between the health care and the earned income credit and the FoodShare and the low-income housing and what have you...That’s after taxes," Grothman stated, noting the welfare arrangement is "in essence a bribe not to work that hard, or a bribe not to marry somebody with a full-time job,”

And that's the ugly truth: welfare acts as an impediment to marriage. It's also a drain on the economy. In 2019, welfare programs--not including Medicare--cost taxpayers $364 billion. Divided by roughly 144 million taxpayers in the US, that's over $2,500 per taxpayer on average.

Welfare Ruined the Black Nuclear Family

I have repeatedly written about the evils of welfare and its end result: single black families. The raft of Great Society legislation in 1964 was designed to address the very problem it exacerbated. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, author of The Negro Family: The Case For National Action, helped to usher in the "Old Black Deal," a.k.a. "The War On Poverty": welfare, food stamps, and public housing.

From an earlier CDMedia piece on the same subject:

Helping a man get back on his feet is a great and noble endeavor. To keep him on the perpetual dole is to take a hostage.

Put a few other ways, throwing life preservers to people drowning at sea can save lives. Throwing them to folks swimming in a pool is distracting, an invitation to float. Just as the goal of therapy is to end therapy, the goal of welfare is to get people on their feet and back to the dignity of self-supporting work.

The social safety net is there to catch people. That’s why it’s a net, not a hammock.

The Great Society was a social experiment gone haywire. The time to abolish it has unquestionably arrived. In its place, we need to advocate for, and yes, provide incentives, for strong black nuclear families.

A key failing of the new welfare that grew out of Great Society programs is that it rewards more funds to single mothers, a “detail” that Moynihan would later claim to regret. As Edwin Feulner, founder of The Heritage Foundation notes,

“The War on Poverty created negative incentives. Instead of promoting the growth of healthy families, the welfare system discouraged them. A single mother could receive larger payments from Uncle Sam by remaining single than by marrying the father of her child. Over time, many fatherless children entered the world. The welfare checks showed up month after month, regardless of how their parents spent their days. As these boys and girls grew up without fathers around, they came to regard such households as natural. The social safety net, designed to be a temporary help to the people in need, instead kept them trapped in government dependency.”

--Ibid.

All the planning, the politicking, the browbeating--due to a 1964 single-parent family rate of 24%. Of course, Great Society had the opposite effect. The black single-parent rate today is tragic: 72%.

The result? As Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation notes, children of single-parent families are:

  • More than twice as likely to be arrested for a juvenile crime,[3]
  • Twice as likely to be treated for emotional and behavioral problems,[4]
  • Roughly twice as likely to be suspended or expelled from school,[5] and
  • A third more likely to drop out before completing high school.[6]

But those are mere statistics. Cold numbers. Scroll through the long thread below. Whoever Mr. Parker is, he makes his point indelicately and seems to have a beef with Nick Cannon--I'm not endorsing any of that. The point is to look at the problem. These acts of violence that degrade our public schools and inner cities often are not reported in mass media. They don't end up in official statistics. They are so common as to be inextricable from black culture. Go to worldstarhiphop.com and bear witness--not just to the ubiquity of black violence, but how onlookers exult over it.

Those are not the actions of children raised in a home with a present and attentive father. The entitlement of BLM followers, the sense of being owed something--that emotion has, at its core, the pain of familial emptiness. Lack of learned discipline.

Now consider for a moment: what if even half the energy that went into horribly condescending welfare programs had instead gone to simply incentivize stable black families?

Reward Stable Families

The solution doesn't have to be complicated. A tax credit for all families under a certain income level would do the trick. Abolish welfare, and make starting a stable family more economically attractive.

It's no mistake that BLM is anti-nuclear family. Stability and family values are the natural enemies of Marxism. "Community organizers" need discord to recruit soldiers. As Glenn Stanton points out in an excellent article in the Federalist:

BLM’s antagonism to the family is glaring. On the organization’s website, Black Lives Matter proclaims, “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.”

Beyond the mistaken assumption that the “nuclear family” is unique to the Western world, their position is profoundly concerning. BLM, as an organization, seeks to dismantle the very institution that mountains of published academic research has consistently demonstrated as most likely to strengthen and empower Black Americans and their children: the traditional, nuclear family.

Lastly, blacks must advocate for this change. The will to make this monumental shift must come from within the community. No more bespectacled Daniel Patrick Moynihan fiddling with the economic lives of "the Negro family." Black voices must ring loudest in the chorus.

Abolish welfare. Reward building a family. This foundation must be laid before anything changes. After it is done, in decades henceforth, sanity will return, and "race relations" will simply be...American relations.