How Democrat Socialist Programs have DESTROYED the Black Family - U.S. Politics Online: A Political Discussion Forum

jpsartre12 · #1 (**permalink**) 12-30-2006

When doing a little research on claims of voter disenfranchisement, I ran across the following which reinforces what I have believed for years. LBJ's Social Engineering Programs destroyed the black family and created a perpetual clientelle for the Democratic Party, poor blacks.

Quote:

How Democrat Socialist Programs have DESTROYED the Black Family
Black Families, Black Men

Carey Roberts

Sounding like a born-again social conservative, president Lyndon B. Johnson stepped to the podium and made this stirring pronouncement: "When the family collapses, it is the children that are usually damaged. When it happens on a massive scale, the community itself is crippled."

And with his usual modesty, LBJ later hailed that 1965 Howard University commencement address as his "greatest civil rights speech."

A few months later the Moynihan Report came out. Despite its commonsense focus on strengthening the Black family, civil rights leaders raised a stink that Mr. Moynihan was trying to "blame the victim." Floyd McKissick, director of the Congress of Racial Equality, insisted, "It's the damn system that needs changing."

So the architects of the Great Society not only set out to ignore the formative role of the Black family, they plotted to make things worse.

They instituted programs with men-stay-away names like "Women, Infants, and Children." They enacted Medicaid in 1965 that imposed eligibility tests slighting non-custodial parents (read "fathers").

Then the social do-gooders delivered the knock-out blow: the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program. AFDC had its infamous "man-out-of-the-house" rule that withheld benefits if the primary breadwinner (again, read "father") resided in the house.

Sociologist Andrew Billingsley has traced the historical lifeline of the Black family. In 1890 the number of intact Black families with fathers and mothers at home was 80%. Over the next seven decades through 1960, that figure held remarkably constant.

But once the Great Society programs were put in place, the African-American family went into a tailspin.

When the number-crunchers tallied up the results from the 1970 decennial census, they couldn't believe their eyes ? the number of intact Black families had fallen to 64%.

For the next 20 years two-parent families continued their free-fall, reaching a rock-bottom 38% in 1990. And most of the remaining intact families were concentrated in the Black middle class. In the inner city, the traditional Black family had essentially ceased to exist.

So forced to compete with a government welfare program, poor Black men had suddenly found themselves persona non grata in their own homes. Like an unwelcome houseguest, Uncle Sam had moved in, unpacked his bags, and made himself a surrogate husband.

What two World Wars and the Great Depression were unable to do, the Great Society accomplished in only 25 years.

With the Black family now in shambles, no amount of federal money could fix the problem. In 1965, 21% of all American children under the age of 18 lived in poverty. Thirty years and billions of welfare dollars later, the number of American children living in poverty was ~ 21%.

........
Viewing the plight of the once-proud Black family, Kay Hymowitz recently mused in the City Journal, "The literature was so evasive, so implausible, so far removed from what was really unfolding in the ghetto, that if you didn?t know better, you might conclude that people actually wanted to keep the black family separate and unequal." [ The Black Family: 40 Years of Lies by Kay S. Hymowitz, City Journal Summer 2005 ]

When I reflect on the vestiges of the American Black family, the disenfranchisement of its men, and the despair of its children, I admit to feeling an abiding sense of betrayal, actually outrage is a better word.

They promised us the Great Society.
Black Families, Black Men | How Democrat Socialist Programs have DESTROYED the Black Family

Hank · #2 (**permalink**) 12-31-2006

I remember in the 60’s and mid 70’s it was cool to be black. Hell, it was cool to be seen with a black.

Imperator · #3 (**permalink**) 12-31-2006

Quote:

Originally Posted by jpsartre12

When doing a little research on claims of voter disenfranchisement, I ran across the following which reinforces what I have believed for years. LBJ's Social Engineering Programs destroyed the black family and created a perpetual clientelle for the Democratic Party, poor blacks.

good post.....the "self esteem" and "non responsibility" factions should read & pay attention...

John McWhorter, ( a black prof. professor of linguistics at berkely)wrote a great book on this as well, seen from an academics point of view......called "Losing the Race"...

jpsartre12 · #4 (**permalink**) 12-31-2006

More support for the author's thesis comes from the Moyniham Report:

Quote:

The Negro Family:
The Case For National Action

Office of Policy Planning and Research
United States Department of Labor

March 1965

Chapter III:
....
In 1940, Edward Wight Bakke described the effects of unemployment on family structure in terms of six stages of adjustment. Although the families studied were white, the pattern would clearly seem to be a general one, and apply to Negro families as well.

The first two stages end with the exhaustion of credit and the entry of the wife into the labor force. The father is no longer the provider and the elder children become resentful.

The third stage is the critical one of commencing a new day to day existence. At this point two women are in charge:

"Consider the fact that relief investigators or case workers are normally women and deal with the housewife. Already suffering a loss in prestige and authority in the family because of his failure to be the chief bread winner, the male head of the family feels deeply this obvious transfer of planning for the family's well being to two women, one of them an outsider. His role is reduced to that of errand boy to and from the relief office."

If the family makes it through this stage Bakke finds that it is likely to survive, and the rest of the process is one of adjustment. The critical element of adjustment was not welfare payments, but work.

"Having observed our families under conditions of unemployment with no public help, or with that help coming from direct [sic] and from work relief, we are convinced that after the exhaustion of self produced resources, work relief is the only type of assistance which can restore the strained bonds of family relationship in a way which promises the continued functioning of that family in meeting the responsibilities imposed upon it by our culture."

Work is precisely the one thing the Negro family head in such circumstances has not received over the past generation.*
U.S. Department of Labor -- History -- Chapet 3 The Roots of the Problem

jpsartre12 · #5 (**permalink**) 12-31-2006

And it's not just the black family that has suffered as a result of ill-conceived social welfare programs that undermine the concept of the a male-headed nuclear family and self-determination.

Quote:

Time for a new ‘Moynihan Report’?
Confronting the National Family Crisis

By Bryce Christensen*
......
Quite understandably, sociologist Norval Glenn has marveled at the ferocity of the attacks on those asserting that family life is in dangerous decline in the American mainstream (that is, among the white majority), seeing in these attacks “a vehemence uncharacteristic of most intellectual and academic debate.”[59] In such attacks, sociologist David Popenoe finds reasons to grieve that colleagues will go to “sad, even heartrending ... lengths ... to distort the overwhelming evidence and undeniable truths” about the traditional family as they “serve their own agendas.”[60]

But the mendacity and ferocity of the response would surprise no one familiar with what happened to Moynihan in the Sixties. To be sure, Berman stands almost alone in raising the charge of racism so often brandished against Moynihan. But the Berman analogy linking contemporary resistance to family change to Fifties-era resistance to racial progress defies logic and reason. Those trying to check the erosion of family life among whites, after all, are not trying to keep it from resembling family life among the blacks in 1950 when illegitimate births accounted for less than 18% of all black births and when only 4 in 1000 black women headed a single-parent family.[61] And they are working just as hard to prevent white family life in contemporary America from resembling white family life in contemporary Iceland or Sweden as they are to keep it from resembling black family life in contemporary America. For though it has received almost no play in the media, even the generous welfare states of Scandinavia have not been able to fully prevent unmarried Scandinavian women and their children from experiencing “substantially lower economic status than two-parent households,”[62] nor prevent fatherless Scandinavian children from developing significantly more educational and psychological problems than peers from intact families.[63] What is more, in relying on the welfare state to mitigate the effects of family failure, Scandinavian policymakers have fostered more family failure, so increasing the number of women and children suffering the sad consequences. Popenoe — a scholar of family life in Sweden as well as America — remarks that whenever Swedish authorities have enlarged the welfare state to compensate for family failure, “the very acceleration of welfare-state power weakened the family still further. ... The effect of welfare states on the family may thus be viewed as a ‘cultural contradiction’: while assisting families in pursuit of the goal of social welfare, actions of the welfare state unwittingly helped to undermine the achievement of that very goal.”[64]
The Howard Center: The Family In America

Hank · #6 (**permalink**) 01-02-2007

Quote:

Originally Posted by Imperator

good post.....the "self esteem" and "non responsibility" factions should read & pay attention...

Where are they???

jpsartre12 · #7 (**permalink**) 01-02-2007

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hank

Where are they???

Maybe I've scared away all of the liberals?

jpsartre12 · #8 (**permalink**) 01-03-2007

I guess nobody disagrees.

Quote:

HUD Secretary Attacks Black Victimhood

Ronald Kessler
Wednesday, Jan. 3, 2007

WASHINGTON -- Alphonso Jackson, the secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, says that black leaders like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Julian Bond are doing a disservice to blacks by perpetuating an ideology of victimhood.

"They [black leaders] have created an industry," Jackson, who is black, told NewsMax. "If we don't become victims, they have no income. They have no podium."

Rather than confronting real issues that face blacks, African-American leaders suggest that "it's racism that's stopping everything that we're doing," Jackson said.

"They are in the business of making excuses," he said. "White folks have nothing to do with the fact that seven out of every 10 black children born in this country are born out of wedlock," Jackson said. Nor do they have anything to do "with that fact that we have more black males in prison than we do in college."

While racism still exists, "Young black kids are getting every opportunity that they need, just like every other kid," Jackson said. "I think in 2006 to say that everything is the fault of our brothers and sisters of the lighter hue is ridiculous."

Until blacks "begin to focus in on the serious problems that we have in our communities, and begin to try to solve those problems in the most positive manner that we can, we're not helping ourselves," Jackson said.
HUD Secretary Attacks Black Victimhood

Johnny K · #9 (**permalink**) 01-03-2007

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Originally Posted by jpsartre12

I guess nobody disagrees.

Or perhaps no one finds it credible enough to bother arguing with. I know I sure don't.

jpsartre12 · #10 (**permalink**) 01-03-2007

Quote:

Originally Posted by Johnny K

Or perhaps no one finds it credible enough to bother arguing with. I know I sure don't.

I see. You don't agree but aren't articulate enough to tell me why?

Beer · #11 (**permalink**) 01-03-2007

What should the alternative have been? Let blacks fend for themselves fresh out of an era when they werent allowed to eat with whites or share bathrooms with them?

Johnny K · #12 (**permalink**) 01-03-2007

Quote:

Originally Posted by jpsartre12

I see. You don't agree but aren't articulate enough to tell me why?

No sir, I learned long ago that wasting words on people with negative agendas and prejudices they refuse to even see, let alone let go, is a waste of time.

jpsartre12 · #13 (**permalink**) 01-04-2007

Quote:

Originally Posted by Johnny K

No sir, I learned long ago that wasting words on people with negative agendas and prejudices they refuse to even see, let alone let go, is a waste of time.

Seems to me that you're the one with the prejudices. I posted the topic to discuss it with those that believe otherwise. So far, all I got was unsubstantiated negative comments from those that disagreed with the thesis. As my father used to tell my brother and me when we came home from hunting with stories but no game "It makes damn thin gravy".
If you're not willing to defend your opposition to the thesis, then why bother posting to the thread at all?

jpsartre12 · #14 (**permalink**) 01-04-2007

Quote:

Originally Posted by Beer

What should the alternative have been? Let blacks fend for themselves fresh out of an era when they werent allowed to eat with whites or share bathrooms with them?

Don't confuse the South with all of the country. I grew up in the North and never saw segregated bathrooms, etc., and I was born in 1956, but you ask a valid question.
Looking back, I'd say that what was needed was a plan that didn't disenfranchise the black male, especially the black father. All of the Welfare programs' benefits were predicated on the absence of the father in the household. If you withhold money from a poor family just because Dad lives with Mom, then you're essentially driving a wedge in the poor family and forcing Dad out. The rise in illegitimacy statistics bear this out.

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