LONG POST ALERT
Quote:
Originally Posted by Iam4USC
Partly true except you have the political party wrong. Keep in mind that while slow, black wealth and land ownership was steadily increasing from emancipation until the mid to late 60s. The democrat party put itself out there as the party of “equal rights” and “affirmative action” in an effort to swing the black vote their way. Many entitlements and social programs were created (by democrats) that enticed the black vote. But it all backfired on people of color. Once you (as a collective group) surrender your power and vote for entitlements, you become dependent on that party for continued support. But now the initiative to improve yourself has been lessened. You can rely on government for education, daycare, food, housing and healthcare. Actually, what happened is the need for a strong nuclear family unit has been dissolved because the government is the primary breadwinner in the household. Thus, a new type of dependency is created which makes it difficult to break. Now, generation upon generation has changed the culture. Government dependency is now the cultural norm. Conservatives Or Republicans didn’t do that. If you need further evidence, just look at traditionally democratic controlled cities like Jackson, Detroit, Chicago, Baltimore. Infrastructure is crumbling and crime is rampant.
So while I agree with your sentiments, you’ve got your political parties mixed up.
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Actually it's common conservative rhetoric like this and the mindset behind it which keep Black Americans millions of miles away from the GOP. Not only is this narrative, which is wildly popular among Republicans, extremely insulting and dehumanizing (not to mention very emblematic of the yoke of the false notion of Black inferiority under which we continue to labor 350 years after the first laws establishing race-based slavery in the colonies were passed), but it's just flat-out wrong and doesn't jibe with the facts, past or present. And you couldn't even bother to cite one source for any of your assertions.
I didn't initially intend for this post to become as long as it did and if you bother to respond, I'm sure you won't do so point-by-point, but I considered it necessary to take the time to refute this well-worn and terribly off-base narrative that demonstrates how enduring and malleable the lie of Black inferiority/White supremacy is. I'm determined to do my part to drive as many daggers through the heart of this falsehood as I can.
Firstly, you present an overly simplistic history of economic trends for African Americans that really isn't all that accurate.
growth in Black wealth began flattening around 1950 which is also when the number of female-headed Black households began
increasing sharply, coinciding with a rapid urbanization rate (higher than the White urbanization rate during this time) during the second wave of the Great Migration.
Pay gains for Black workers slowed in the 1950s but in the 1960s, Black workers again began to experience more rapid increases in relative pay levels due in large part to anti-discrimination policies enacted in the mid-1960s. Median Black family income rose 53% and Black poverty was halved, going from 55% in 1960 to just 27% by
1968. These gains for Black workers were concentrated in the South across many industries under a variety of labor market conditions. However the decade from 1979-1989 saw a return of stagnating wages due to urban deindustrialization and a ramping up of mass incarceration via the War on Drugs primarily. From there things continued to see-saw due to fluctuating national/global economic conditions.
The loss of Black-owned land began in earnest in the earlier part of the 20th century due to rampant discrimination by local USDA officials during the New Deal, land theft via racial terrorism, and complications due to
heirs' property status. This has
special resonance for Gullah folks in SC.
Secondly, the history of shifting African American partisan alignment goes back to the beginning of the 20th century with
Herbert Hoover failing to keep his promise after winning the presidency in
1928 to prominent African Americans who covered for him while he was Secretary of Commerce under the Coolidge administration and African American farmers in Mississippi who suffered during the 1927 Mississippi River floods. FDR didn't gain majority Black voter support in 1932 but he most certainly did in 1936 with New Deal programs that offered at least some support to Black citizens reeling from the Great Depression as well as Eleanor Roosevelt's public support for the cause of civil rights and her high-profile friendship with Mary McCleod Bethune.
FDR did better in committing to civil rights in his second administration and that initiated the political realignment of African Americans with the Democratic Party, and this was strengthened with increased commitments to the cause of civil rights with Truman, Kennedy, and of course Johnson with the 1964 election solidifying that alignment.
But just as consequential as Johnson's actions were the actions of
Barry Goldwater, the GOP nominee in 1964 (the link details it all) whose anti-civil rights stance even convinced Strom Thurmond to officially switch party affiliation to the GOP. And it is this egregious omission in the conservative narrative that aptly demonstrates just how disingenuous this whole thing is on you all's part. And not only that, but you have Nixon, who started out as rather progressive on issues of race, pivoting to appeal to racially resentful Whites in the aftermath of the nationwide unrest that occurred after MLK's assassination; the
origins of the Religious Right in private religious educational institutions (namely SC's own Bob Jones University) defying the federal government's civil rights mandate to cease its policy of racial discrimination or else forfeit its tax-exempt status;
Reagan's opposition to the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, racist rhetoric concerning African leaders in a conversation with Nixon, kicking off his campaign as GOP presidential nominee near Philadelphia, MS where three civil rights workers had been killed 16 years prior and emphasized states' rights in his kick-off speech, his "welfare queen" trope, his resistance to authorizing MLK as a national holiday, and more; George HW Bush's infamous
dog-whistle; too many insults against Obama from Republicans to even list; and too many examples from Trump to list. Of course Democrats haven't been sinless with LBJ arguably being the prime example here but he at least had a record demonstrating a strong commitment to civil rights and related measures intended to rectify many of the wrongs of the past; in this respect he's more like Lincoln than anything.
Thirdly, the notion that Black folks vote Democratic because we just love being on the dole is ridiculously racist and, as I said, doesn't jibe with facts. For one, Aid to Dependent Children (ADC, later renamed Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or AFDC)--which was part of the New Deal enacted in the 1930s that African Americans largely were prohibited from accessing until the Great Migration resumed after the Great Depression was over--was
subverted by those charged with locally administering the program (in this case social workers) in various ways which resulted in lots of mothers getting kicked off the rolls for various reasons and even for those who were receiving benefits, they weren't particularly generous at all. Although Whites have always constituted the decided majority of welfare benefits, as more Blacks enrolled and the face of the program became Black in the media, significant backlash to the program ensued and states introduced various controls (e.g., work requirements) and, of course, Reagan instituted austerity measures for government spending across the board. Since welfare reform in the 90's during the Clinton administration when the program was renamed to Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), it was essentially ended as a cash entitlement with the addition of lifetime limits and tons of other restrictions. According to
conservative sources, reform was successful in moving beneficiaries into work and off the rolls, and reducing poverty. Another point to keep in mind is that states with the largest Black populations (e.g., Southern states) pay the least in benefits and since 1970, Blacks have been moving back to the South in droves which, by itself, blows a pretty big hole in the ridiculous "Blacks vote for Democrats to get free stuff" myth. Also it should be mentioned that 70% of SNAP and Medicaid beneficiaries actually
work full-time.
It's a bit hilarious to even think that Black voters are so aligned with the Democratic Party because of our intense desire for "government dependence" when in 2016 and 2020, our preferred primary candidate was the one who
wasn't promising all the free stuff. And in the general election last year, we rejected Trump and his
proposal of "government goodies." If you wish to broaden the parameters of "government dependence" as the term is usually understand to include affirmative action programs (which actually benefits White women more than any other group) implemented after 1965, then we certainly can't omit
massive governmental transfers that disproportionately aided Whites in the previous three decades, 1935-65, or even in the previous century such as the
Homestead Act. But you know what? I'm cool with defining affirmative action as government dependence for the simple fact that society cannot be trusted to do the right thing on its own. As
this article so aptly states:
But the reason we have affirmative action is that we once had slavery and Jim Crow and redlining and racial covenants, and that we once had all-white police forces and all-white union locals and all-white college campuses and all-white law firms. To paraphrase George Shultz, Nixon’s Secretary of Labor: for hundreds of years, the United States had a racial quota. It was zero. Affirmative action is an attempt to redress an injustice done to black people. The Fourteenth Amendment protects white people, too, but that is not why it needed to be written.
The Court’s decision in Shelby v. Holder vacating a central provision of the Voting Rights Act has backfired. It turns out that, when you remove enforcement mechanisms and remedial oversight, things tend to revert to the status quo ante. The whole history of affirmative action shows, as Urofsky somewhat reluctantly admits, that when the programs are shut down minority representation drops. Diversity, however we define it, is politically constructed and politically maintained. It doesn’t just happen. It’s a choice we make as a society.
This hateful, racialized zero-sum thinking on the part of many conservatives, who don't exhibit nearly this amount of disdain towards any other minority group, has always been the primary motivation behind anti-Black
racial backlash that has historically involved widespread destruction and loss of Black property and wealth that, in the vast majority of instances, we've never been able to recoup. Just the mere specter of collective Black advancement never fails to elicit suspicion, derision, or plain ol' anger from folks like you who believe that our gains must be at the expense of White folks. I'll never forget around 15 or so years ago when I read an article in the Rock Hill Herald online about how Black and White graduates of my alma mater, Winthrop, had reached parity in terms of graduation rates (and from
2012-2014, the Black graduation rate was a few percentage points higher than the White graduation rate, ranking second nationally among non-HBCU institutions for highest Black graduation rates), which I considered to be nothing but positive and welcome news. It didn't take long for my joy to give way to dismay (and disgust) when I scrolled down to the comments sections and read the complaints coming from presumably White folks about how this could only mean that standards were being lowered in the name of racial equality and White students were being cheated out of a quality education. I could hardly believe what I was reading but it was quite a wake-up call for me. Even right now, this whole anti-CRT panic is one conservative activist's deliberately-crafted
backlash against the national and institutional responses to the murder of George Floyd last summer that has nothing at all to do with the actual Democratic Party or its platform and everything to do with typical conservative zero-sum thinking on matters of racial justice.
You say,
"If you need further evidence, just look at traditionally democratic controlled cities like Jackson, Detroit, Chicago, Baltimore." Firstly, just mentioning cities without any evidence to back up your claim doesn't constitute an actual argument. Secondly, most cities are "traditionally Democratic-controlled cities" so I could just as easily mention Atlanta, DC, Nashville, and Louisville--all of which have had only Democratic mayors over the past half century with
Atlanta and DC in particular having much Black success to show for it.
Detroit,
Chicago, and
Baltimore are usually singled out for problems that, unbeknownst to those who are singling them out or not, are rooted in their exceptionally high levels of racial segregation combined with massive deindustrialization. However, what folks who mention those cities as posterchildren of "Democratic failure" ignore is the fact that those cities also have plenty of African Americans in their Democratic-controlled suburbs doing well for themselves. A Chicago suburb makes
this list, metro Baltimore ranks as the third-best for Black women on
this list (and it typically ranks well on all such lists on the strengths of its suburbs), and metro Jackson ranks third and Detroit comes in 24th out of 124 metros for Black-owned businesses
here.
At the very least, pick up a book and actually learn about the plethora of things that were happening in the country during the 60's onward. You only expose your own deficiency of American history to think that only one thing was happening to Black people over the past half century. You seem to think we're simple-celled organisms in petri dishes, responding to one stimulus at any given moment in a tightly controlled environment. We are every bit modern
Homo sapiens as any other group of people with the full range of abilities and properties that this entails.
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) My point being.. without that context.. how many people born in the USA or immigrating to the USA would draw the same conclusions without the benefit of context. Again, people have to make individual decisions on how to improve their lives but government should help that happen where appropriate or get out of the way where also appropriate.. as opposed to being the one to cause those problems.. To the extent that government was complicit.. the collective "we" as Americans need to understand it and let those lessons guide us in our future endeavors. I think liberals and conservatives should be able to agree on that...and THAT is where the conversation should start...
