Quote:
Originally Posted by dc_denizen
This seems true.
This is the crux of the debate, was the decline in black society (and Detroit) the result of government conspiracy, or many factors in economics, politics, cultural change. I lean toward the latter, but am unsure as to the degree that government action or inaction abetted the decline. But I don't agree that "psychological attacks" or government action against "forced segregated communities" (eg black panthers) caused black marriage rates, homicide trends, single motherhood, etc etc to change from 1960 on. if anything, the demeaning of blacks and poor treatment was far worse before 1960 than after.
And you're pretty cavalier about riots in the 1960s, many of which took place in cities like Detroit with large black middle classes. As I said Detroit and DC had high rates of black homeownership, low unemployment, and relatively stable communities then. Most of the riot damage was to black owned businesses or white owned businesses that catered to blacks. You read about the riots, and some of justifications given for destroying shops were ridiculous: "their prices were too high" or "they were selling shoddy merchandise" etc. It wasn't a bread riot, and I've never understood the effort to rationalize the riots as some kind of legitimate Les Miserables-esque response. There should have been riots in the south, not downtown DC or Detroit. The riots destroyed black economic power at a time when skittish or racist white economic power structure was already not inclined to invest in the city.
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What you ignore is that riots were not an ORGIN, but rather, a REACTION to pent up frustrations and anger emanating from racism and police brutality being one of the extensions of that racism. In other words, the riots were a symptom of the racism and not separate and distinct phenomena that spurred the cities decline.
Racism need not conspire in a democracy where enough people harbor the mindset. That having been said, J Edgar Hoover did proclaim that the number one threat to the internal security of America, back then, was black militancy, as terrorism is today. The FBI and CIA are not known to be passive observers. Rather, they undertake clandestine efforts to stomp out these threats, with their last resort usually being violence. This is when drugs started to flood America and the black community somehow became the retail market while the suburb is where the whole sale market and people bringing the drugs into the country resided. Soon after the alpha males in the black community stopped being black militants and turned to the more lucrative drug game, as dealers, while some turned into fiends, either way, they were no longer fighting the system. Those who continued the fight got the “last restore” treatment, which was usually some sort of assassination.
There is plenty of historical examples of what happens when people are hooked on controlled substances and the law prohibits its sale. Simply go back to the prohibition era and see how the crime rate and murder rate spiked and how a crime syndicate rose out of that bootleg era. As soon as prohibition ended, the crime rate and murder rate dropped remarkably. Today there is market demand for all types of illegal drugs which creates opportunities for poor people who feel they have no other real options in their environment. It does not take a rocket scientist to predict the impact of drugs on the poor black community back then, given the level of hopelessness and frustration.
In terms of marriage and out of wedlock births, it’s not enough to just talk about what the rates are today, blacks relative to whites, without talking about what the rates were back then, blacks relative to whites. Yes, black’s rate of children born out of wedlock is 3 times higher than whites….but it was also about 3 times higher than whites back in 1960 as well. In other words, the increase in births out of wedlock and the decline in the rates of marriage are NOT endemic to blacks, but rather pandemic for both groups. However, you just do not hear about the increase in white problems because everyone is focusing on the increase for blacks and trying to DEFLECT from the role that racism has played in the unequal black condition by suggesting that it is the result of the increase in out of wedlock births and the like. Even though these same issues has increased for whites as much as for blacks, I do not seen an increase in crime or poverty in the white community as a whole, that these things are responsible for supposedly trigger in the black community. In other words, where is the increase in crime and violence in the white community that is the resultant of the out of wedlock rate of birth for white women increasing from 9% to 27%? When the rate for blacks has increases since the 60's....that rate is then said to be the root of the increase in crime. If this it true....then whites should have seen a big increase in crime and violence given that their rate increased from its baseline in 1960 as the same rate as it did for blacks. However, that is not the case (that the crime and violence increased among whites due to the increase in out of wedlock births since the 60's and the decline in marriage)