Originally Posted by Hedley

A person would have to be high to think that black people were not severely discriminated against in our history. Having said that, I will disagree with your argument. It isn’t the system keeping black people down during and after slavery that has got us to where we are today. There was a time when we could make that argument, but that time has past. After the Civil War, blacks had to endure reconstruction, employment contract laws, Jim Crow, and segregation. If you listen to black historians and authors such as Shelby Steele, Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Jason Riley, etc..., they point out the flaw in the argument that blacks today are where there are today due to “systemic racism” or government oppression. It certainly had an influence, but it’s not the main source of today’s problems. They show using empirical evidence that the blacks and whites shared almost identical percentages of intact nuclear families, unemployment, people being business owners, etc. After the Civil War it quickly became apparent that the government was going to let the newly liberated black people sink or swim, they chose to swim. Despite all of the hurdles thrown in their path, they turned to within and built a strong culture that centered itself on faith, self reliance, and the importance of an intact household. That remained up until the 1960’s. Jason Riley talks about two disastrous events that changed the black culture and got us to where we are today. For the almost 100 years after slavery ended, blacks and whites shared the same rates of intact families, employment rates, etc. It was in the years following the 1960’s and the Great Society when things quickly went down hill. One event was the creation of the welfare state. Government officials actually checked up on women to make sure that a man wasn’t in the home and explained that a single mother would get a bigger check if the father wasn’t present. This is where the breakdown of the nuclear family in the black community took off. He also talks about the political shift. Up until this point, the black community had invested in human capital, the idea that the best way to rise above was to make yourself better. According to Riley, is the second event is when the black community changed their focus from human capital to political capital. The idea was to vote in more black politicians so that they could carve out a bigger piece of the pie. From this there was the perfect storm provided by the breakdown of the family and the crucial role that fathers play, and the shift from self reliance to seeking assistance from the government. It is from this that the current victim mentality came from and what has been called the soft bigotry of lower expectations. Today, young black kids are mocked in inner city schools for trying to succeed in school, they are accused of acting white. The same is true among adults in our society. Black intellectuals who don’t blindly recite the victim narrative, but instead focus on data, are shouted down as Uncle Toms, and much worse. Candace Owens has been called a “black white supremacist” and has been called a sellout to her race for speaking out, and also for looking past race and marrying a white man. There was a time when black people were held down by the system, but now we are in a time where people, all people, are held down by themselves.