"In fact, white America does remain morally culpable — but because white leftists in the late 1960s, in the name of enlightenment and benevolence, encouraged the worst in human nature among blacks and even fostered it in legislation. The hordes of poor blacks stuck in the Superdome [in New Orleans weeks ago] wound up there not because the White Man barred them from doing better, but because certain tragically influential White Men destroyed the fragile but lasting survival skills poor black communities had maintained since the end of slavery.
Few thinking people regret the flower children’s opposition to the Vietnam war, sexism and racial discrimination. But these advances also spelt the demise of old standards of responsibility. Taught that criminality and violence must be judged in proportion to the extent to which poverty and discrimination have colored one’s existence, the enlightened white person saw black violence as 'understandable'. This meant a largely theatrical black separatist ideology, drastically short on constructive aims, had a public sanction that it had never had before.
Hating whitey for its own sake now had an ear among the influential and quickly became the word on the street. There was a new sense that the disadvantages of being black gave one a pass on civility — or even achievement: this was when black teens started teasing black nerds for 'acting white'. Behavior that most of a black community would have condemned as counterproductive started to seem normal. Through the late 1960s blacks burnt down their own neighborhoods as gestures of being 'fed up'.
But blacks had been 'fed up' for centuries: why were these the first riots initiated by blacks rather than white thugs — when the economy was flush and employment opportunities were opening up as never before?....Poor black neighborhoods are not what they were at the height of the crack epidemic in the 1980s, but they are still a crying shame. The poor black America that welfare expansion created in 1966 is still with us. Poor young blacks have never known anything else. People as old as 50 have only vague memories of life before it. For 30 years this was a world within a world, as is made clear from how often the Katrina refugees mention it is the first time they have ever left New Orleans.
What Katrina stripped bare, then, was not white supremacy, but that culture matters — even if what created the culture was misguided white benevolence. Social scientists neglect that before the 1960s poor blacks knew plenty of economic downturns and plenty more racism." — John McWhorter, University of California at Berkeley linguistics professor and moderate, on Hurricane Katrina, race, class, and welfare mentality
Few thinking people regret the flower children’s opposition to the Vietnam war, sexism and racial discrimination. But these advances also spelt the demise of old standards of responsibility. Taught that criminality and violence must be judged in proportion to the extent to which poverty and discrimination have colored one’s existence, the enlightened white person saw black violence as 'understandable'. This meant a largely theatrical black separatist ideology, drastically short on constructive aims, had a public sanction that it had never had before.
Hating whitey for its own sake now had an ear among the influential and quickly became the word on the street. There was a new sense that the disadvantages of being black gave one a pass on civility — or even achievement: this was when black teens started teasing black nerds for 'acting white'. Behavior that most of a black community would have condemned as counterproductive started to seem normal. Through the late 1960s blacks burnt down their own neighborhoods as gestures of being 'fed up'.
But blacks had been 'fed up' for centuries: why were these the first riots initiated by blacks rather than white thugs — when the economy was flush and employment opportunities were opening up as never before?....Poor black neighborhoods are not what they were at the height of the crack epidemic in the 1980s, but they are still a crying shame. The poor black America that welfare expansion created in 1966 is still with us. Poor young blacks have never known anything else. People as old as 50 have only vague memories of life before it. For 30 years this was a world within a world, as is made clear from how often the Katrina refugees mention it is the first time they have ever left New Orleans.
What Katrina stripped bare, then, was not white supremacy, but that culture matters — even if what created the culture was misguided white benevolence. Social scientists neglect that before the 1960s poor blacks knew plenty of economic downturns and plenty more racism." — John McWhorter, University of California at Berkeley linguistics professor and moderate, on Hurricane Katrina, race, class, and welfare mentality
