Quote:
Originally Posted by Pete F.
Explain how the black community went from owning 14 million acres of land to sharecropping.
Is the "black community" still without land and still sharecropping?
Between 1910 and the 70s, seven million blacks migrated out of the south where they were systematically deprived of opportunity to the northern and western cities.
So the "black community now does own land and is not restricted to sharecropping. That's a good thing, I presume.
And there was also a large migration of whites to northern cities because they were also "deprived" of opportunity. There was no opportunity for many in the south during those years. I suppose you can consider that to be "systemic" since the system simply didn't provide opportunities. That has now changed. The South has attracted various industries that provide opportunities. There has even recently been a large migration of blacks, along with others to the South.
A huge reason that the South was not rich in opportunity back then is because the persistent "red neck" culture still dominated both the white and black southern population. It was a culture brought to the southern colonies by the early settlers immigrating from the northern English borderlands ,and from the Scottish Highlands, and from Ulster County Ireland--the folks from what were then the backward part of what we refer to as the British Isles. It was a culture that was referred to as "a whole constellation of attitudes, values, and behavior patterns . . . which would prove to be counterproductive . . .the cultural values and social patterns prevalent among Southern whites included an aversion to work, proneness to violence, neglect of education, sexual promiscuity, improvidence, drunkenness, lack of entrepreneurship, reckless searches for excitement, lively music and dance, and a style of religious oratory marked by strident rhetoric, unbridled emotions, and flamboyant imagery."
The early colonists who came from cultures that were productive, greater England e.g., tended to settle in New England. So there was a great cultural divide between the Northern and Southern whites. The Northerners considered the Southerners as undesirable. They even discriminated more against them than Northern Blacks who had adapted to the more productive New England culture. Actually, there had been a great deal of racial progress between Northern whites and Northern blacks, to the extent that they eventually lived in harmony in the same neighborhoods--until the great migrations from the South. The "undesirables," both black and white, with their violent and dissolute "redneck" behavior, were detested by both the white and black Northerners. And thus the progress in race relations collapsed.
The Southern blacks had adopted the "cracker" culture that surrounded them in the Antebellum South, including even the peculiar language of the typical Southern whites. Actually, what is considered to a great degree to be black ghetto culture is actually an inherited version of what was then white cracker culture including even the "touchy pride" of white crackers which often ignited into violent, even deadly eruptions over a perceived sense of merely being insulted.
But it is not inherent to the black race, is not particularly black, and certainly not displayed by blacks who immigrated from the West Indies and whose ancestors there were also slaves. And those blacks from the West Indies do quite well in the demographic stats such as low crime rates and low incarceration and high employment and compensation and good education and intact families.
As well, blacks who abandoned the redneck culture or were never part of it were doing much better in demographic stats after emancipation and until the great Progressive solution, The Great Society government fix for the ills that befall the lower classes. Black crime and family stats have either progressively gotten worse since then, or have been made to look worse in order to gin up votes for the left.
The war on drugs rewarded police departments for arrests of drug offenders and little was done about drug abuse till it hit the white middle class with the advent of prescription opioids.
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That seems to be a contradiction. Police were encouraged to arrest drug offenders but little was done about drug abuse. Arresting is doing little? What big thing did the "black community" do about drug abuse. Oh, that's right, Blacks have no power. They must depend on white behavior to correct Black behavior.
That is so demeaning and disrespectful. Coddle the little babies. They're not capable. White people have to take care of them. They have a systemic and historic reason for being incapable. Really?
Some would see that "reason" more to be an alibi. Sowell quotes Eric Hoffer re alibis in his book
Black Rednecks and White Liberals:
"There are many who find a good alibi far more attractive than an achievement. For an achievement does not settle anything permanently. We still have to prove our worth anew each day: we have to prove we are as good today as we were yesterday. But when we have a valid alibi for not achieving anything we are fixed, so to speak, for life . . . America is the worst place for alibis. Sooner or later the most solid alibi begins to sound hollow."
Sowell then says "Those who provide black rednecks with alibis, do no favor to them, to other blacks, or to the larger society in which we all live. In American society, Achievement is what ultimately brings respect, including self-respect. Only for those who have written off blacks' potential for achievement will alibis be an acceptable substitute. The liberal version of blacks' fate as being almost wholly in the hands of whites is a debilitating message for those blacks who take it seriously, however convenient it may be for those who are receptive to an alibi . . . By making black redneck behavior a sacrosanct part of black cultural identity, white liberals and others who excuse, celebrate, or otherwise perpetuate that lifestyle not only preserve it among that fraction of the black population who have not yet escaped from it, but have contributed to its spread up the social scale to middle class black young people who feel a need to be true to their racial identity, lest they be thought to be "acting white." It is the spread of a social poison, however much black or white intellectuals try to pretty it up or try to find some deeper meaning to it."
I highly, highly, recommend reading
Black Rednecks and White Liberals by Thomas Sowell, especially the first 63 pages, or any book by him, or watching a lot of interviews with Sowell on YouTube, especially by the Hoover Institute, or with Milton Friedman or William Buckley.