You are ignoring the impact of the dem's 'War on Poverty,' as described in the link above, in which blacks were far better off before the corruption and ineptitude of a massive gov program:
“Roughly 75 percent of black children were born to a married two-parent family when the ‘war’ began in 1964. By 2008, the percentage of black babies born out of wedlock numbered over 72 percent. Today, the rate of unwed motherhood in the black community is more than twice as high as among whites — and almost three times higher than before big government’s grand intervention."
I'm in North Carolina at the moment and do not have access to my books. However prior to the 60s, blacks made more progress than since. They performed better academically as well. The below is long for some, but is interesting as well. A few snippets---
Peter Robinson: All right, and the point is that's dangerous. We should not want more government, more hands in the power of the politicians.
Thomas Sowell: Yeah, one of the real problems is that you have people making decisions for which they pay no price when they're wrong, no matter how high a price other people pay. And right now, the homicide rates are beyond anything that were around, let's say, prior to 1960. And I mention 1960 in this case because that's when the Supreme Court remade the criminal law. They discovered rights in the Constitution that no one had noticed for over a century and they were impervious to evidence.
Peter Robinson: So contrast your neighborhood in Harlem when you were an eight and nine and 10-year-old boy with what we see in neighborhoods in Chicago today, say.
Thomas Sowell: Oh my gosh, people are astonished when I tell them I grew up in Harlem, I can't remember ever hearing a gunshot. And then, I've checked with my relatives who grew up in similar neighborhoods in Washington and down in North Carolina, they never heard a gunshot when they were growing up. I remember going back to Harlem some years ago to do some research at a high school. And I looked out the window and there's this park there near the high school. And I mentioned in passing that when I lived in Harlem as a kid, I would take my dog for a walk in that park. And looks of horror came over the students' faces. People have no idea how much has retrogressed over the years in the black community and how much of what progress has been made has not been made by politicians or by charismatic leaders. One of the things that drives me crazy are people who cite the trends over time without deciding where they're gonna start the time period. For example, this guy said all sorts of wonderful things happened in the 1960s and beyond, and especially for the minorities and the poor and so forth. So what I did, I said no, well, you can't... If you start the data in 1960, we don't know how much was a result of that and how much was a result of other things. That also applies in other things. So for example, one simple one, many people say... Ralph Nader wrote this book in 1965 and asked about the automobile safety and so on. As a result, there were laws by the government and the death rates went down after that, which is true in itself. But the death rate went down at a far higher rate prior to his writing the book. And this was the continuation of a trend that went back another 20 or 30 years.
Peter Robinson: Median black family income has been lower than median white family income for generations, but the median per capita income of Asian groups is more than 15,000 a year higher than the median per capita income of white Americans. Is this the white supremacy we're so often warned about? For more than a quarter of a century, in no year has the annual poverty rate of black married-couple families, married-couple families been as high as 10%. And in no year has the poverty rate of Americans as a whole been as low as 10%. If black poverty is caused by systemic racism, do racists make an exception for blacks who are married? I guess you're allowed to be angry.
Thomas Sowell: Yes, yes.
Peter Robinson: So do you have the feeling, when you're addressing this notion that racism accounts for everything, do you have the feeling that the arguments are subtle, it's persuasive, and you can forgive someone for buying that argument? Or do you have the feeling that it's willful, that the case is so clearly mistaken that there's a willfulness about it?
Thomas Sowell: No, I don't, I think that people don't look for certain evidence and therefore they don't find it. And so on the basis of what they know at a given time, this may be very plausible. The problem is that you really need are other people with a different orientation who are skeptical and who will then look for things and find things that are very different from that. One of the things that I found interesting was the fact that there are various counties in the United States which are among the poorest counties in the country. And six of those counties have a population that ranges from 90% white to 100% white.
Peter Robinson: Appalachian counties, Kentucky and Ohio as I recall.
Thomas Sowell: Yeah, but mainly it's the hillbilly communities. And of course there's that great book that was written, "The Hillbilly Elegy". It was on the bestseller list for more than a year consecutively.
Peter Robinson: JD Vance now Senator Vance.
Thomas Sowell: Yes, and there, these are people who have faced zero racism.
Peter Robinson: They are white after all.
Thomas Sowell: And they are white and zero racism, and also back in the '30s when they did IQ studies, their IQs were not only at the same level as those of blacks, they had the same pattern, namely that the young people whether they were black or hillbilly would have an IQ very close to the national average at age six, but by the time they were teenagers, it just kept going down and down and down 'cause it's relative to the other people of that age group. And they simply were falling behind. So it was clearly not biological, it was social. But despite that, these hillbilly counties had incomes that were not only lower than the national average, they were lower than the average of black incomes for a period of half a century. It may have been longer than that because I only went through half a century. But in every study that was done over that half century, they scored lower, their family incomes were lower than the family incomes of blacks. So obviously, there must be other things that cause people to be poor other than racism.
Peter Robinson: All right, people in low-income American hillbilly counties already face zero racism because they're virtually all white.
Thomas Sowell: Yes.
Peter Robinson: Yet, they have lower incomes than blacks, just as you were saying. In other words, some behavior patterns seem to pay off. Now, this book is dedicated to fallacies, to showing errors in premises and errors in analysis. It's not dedicated to an alternative explanation. Nevertheless, you've got this argument lurking in here that it's the way people live, it's the way cultural patterns-
Thomas Sowell: Yes.
nationalcenter.org
