PASTOR COREY BROOKS: How the welfare state broke the Black family, and how to fix it
Both men are at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and both have made compelling cases that it was the welfare state that broke up the Black family.
Key points
- Steele has argued that Black Americans were the first group in this nation to have a form of socialism practiced upon them by federal, state and city governments.
- However, after 30 years of programs and policies of dependency, the welfare state had expanded enormously and become institutionalized.
- CHICAGO PASTOR GATHERS HUNDREDS OF MEN TO DECLARE VIOLENCE-FREE ZONE ON SOUTH SIDE My community center, Project H.O.O.D., exists because government programs have not fixed this, even after decades.
Recently, I got into a disagreement with a friend of mine who told me that it was slavery and segregation that broke the Black family.
We can argue over how much of that original 22% can be traced to the legacy of slavery, but there is no argument that the astronomical increase that followed was due heavily to the welfare programs of the 1960s.
Additional details
- The Black family survived slavery, Jim Crow and every other form of legal oppression.
- In Steele’s view, this form of racialized socialism was rooted in White guilt — the pursuit of racial innocence by Whites — instead of Black development.
- This resulted in Blacks being treated not as free citizens but as a special class whose problems required permanent management by the state.
- After the civil rights victories in the 1960s, we had the Great Society and its War on Poverty, and what we saw was the shift from the pursuit of equal opportunity under the law to remedies based on race instead of the needs of individuals.
- And no racial group, especially Blacks who held their families together for generations through racial oppression, could survive this onslaught on the basic values that any human needs to survive and thrive.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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