Pretend we could resurrect the black and white Americans, now dead, who fought the struggles yielding Brown vs. Board of Education, which ended de jure school segregation, and later won the moral battle yielding the Civil Rights Act of 1964. There is no doubt they'd be shocked by what has happened in matters of race - shocked because they had every reasonable expectation that racial problems would have been solved some three decades later.
Today's racial climate affirms the success of race hustlers and the failure and capitulation of decent people who should know better. Failure and capitulation have allowed race hustlers to use their venomous brew of lies, misrepresentations and demagoguery to mislead large numbers of black people into believing that white racism is their paramount problem. This concoction serves the financial and political interests of the race hustlers, but it has produced disaster for large and increasing numbers of black people.No doubt America's history is blemished by slavery and gross discrimination. But it's a history also featured by the fact that our nation has expended large amounts of resources in an attempt, often misguided, to redress the injustices of that history. Since 1965, over $4 trillion has been spent on the War on Poverty. Trillions have been spent in housing and education. Courts and administrative agencies have legislated thousands of decrees mandating one form of racial preferences or another.
Despite these efforts, the lifetime prospects of a large percentage of blacks are just as bleak, if not bleaker, than in periods when racism was at its worst and opportunities severely limited. That outcome sets the stage for many black people to fall prey to race charlatans and quacks who can sell their message of racial victimology. After all, when trillions upon trillions of dollars have been spent and thousands of court decisions made, one program failure after another makes the race charlatan's message an appealing explanation of today's bleak prospects.
Race hustlers convince black youngsters that college is barred to them because of racism. The fact that black students score low on standardized tests is seen as irrelevant or just another sign of racism. No evidence is ever produced that colleges deny admittance to black students scoring 1,100 on the SAT. Race hustlers see quota programs, instead of better academic preparation, as solutions to black education problems. What's most criminal is they've led black people to think quotas have perpetual political stability.
Race hustlers preach that the daily nightmare of robbery, rape, murder, property destruction, family breakdown and illegitimacy and other forms of social meltdown is caused by racism and the solution is more federal money going to them and bureaucratic poverty pimps. No mention is made of the fact that black neighborhoods had far greater social stability and more intact families and were far safer back in the '30s, '40s and '50s, at a time when there was codified discrimination and far fewer opportunities.
If all white people were morally rejuvenated tomorrow morning, it would matter not one iota in the lives of black people locked into a pathological environment. Racial discrimination is not even close to being their main problem, which is not to say discrimination and victimology are nonexistent. As long as race hustlers can preach the discrimination and victimology message to the exclusion of the necessary structural changes, I have every confidence that race relations will continue to go south, and what's already a seemingly permanent underclass will become even more permanent.