This is the hell that most of the people in the Superdome either lived in or knew at close hand, and none of them could help being stamped by it. Welfare reform was only nine years ago. The women now past the five-year cap are mostly struggling in dead-end jobs. This is better than living on the dole. But these women are weighed down by too many kids created under the old regime to have the time or energy to get the education to get beyond where they are. Poor black neighbourhoods 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.
But before the 1960s the kinds of behaviour so common among the blacks stranded in the Superdome, possibly including multiple rapes, was a fringe phenomenon. Only after the 1960s did it become a community norm.
Well obviously the most important thing we can do is to return all of that welfare $$ and make sure that we reinstitute slavery as quickly as possible for all african americans--no wait--just for the poor ones, and the middle class ones, and well maybe the rich gangsta ones. This argument of his, other than being purely silly and inane without any citational support or documented data and research, does represent the thinking of those same white racists who bring us closer to an apartheid society not unlike that of most military dictatorships around the world. This "fringe phenomenon" certainly ignores the history of places like Detroit, East St. Louis, Washington D.C., and other locales around the US who experienced black on black violence and hostility from the earliest days. To desire a return to that period, as it seems poor ol' James would have us believe is best, further ignores the influence of african american athletic and celebrity success, most of which is garnered from the white people wishing to be like the blacks in the ghetto. But of course he makes no mention of that; why? Well he is already pushing his lack of expertise in sociology and to engage in discourse regarding role modelling and TV's influence and the success of advertising and media saturation of luxury lifestyles, would disprove his thesis. I wonder what he would say if, no when, this sort of crisis chaos occurs in upscale communities of good white folk. Then all that looting and ugly human behavior will have to be played out as something about liberal permissive child rearing i suppose.
UPDATE: well i didn't have to work to hard to find an example. Here is a story from Belfast today:
You could be forgiven for thinking that Northern Ireland had left its days of organized violence behind. The last few years have been relatively quiet, even encouraging: the peace process seemed to be making strides. Cranes hovering over Belfast's skyline were evidence that reconstruction money was flowing to the area. What's more, the Catholic Irish-nationalist movement's political wing, Sinn Fein, had recently gotten a decisive leg-up on the movement's military division, by convincing the IRA to agree to a ceasefire. But the IRA still hasn't given up its weapons and this week's eruption of violence underscores tensions caused by the fact that many of Northern Ireland's Protestants feel the IRA and Catholics have disproportionately gained from the peace process.
The mayhem that broke out in Belfast has left behind a disturbing amount of destruction, a surfeit of unsettling images, 60 injured policemen and massive social unease. Few deny that Loyalist Protestants were responsible for the weekend's violence: the rioting erupted on Saturday when Northern Ireland's main legal Protestant fraternity, the Orange Order, called for Protestants to mount sit-down protests on roads all over Belfast in response to British authorities' refusal to allow an Orange parade from passing along a main road on the Catholic side of town. Before long, the ostensibly peaceful protest had transformed into a hailstorm of automatic gunfire and Molotov cocktails.
The tenor is that of people rioting looting raping, burning and killing, just like NOLA? So what is McWorther's causal discourse here. Oh yeah, it must have been British socialized medicine and possibly the use of welfare funds to provide only for the poor catholics??? Obviously for Jimmy history over centuries is irrelevant.
