From comments to Steve Sailer:
* By every standard you can measure….blacks were much better off before “civil rights.”
Prior to the left “helping” blacks with desegregation, blacks had thriving businesses, an intact family unit, a much lower rate of illegitimacy, strong churches and church attendance, lower rates of crime and substance abuse, etc.etc.etc.
Welfare incentivized single motherhood….and fatherless boys do MASSIVE crime. Out of wedlock births are now 76%, the more intelligent (leadership class) fled to white hoods to escape high crime leaving blacks without decent leaders, substance abuse and gang crime exploded, the entire family structure was destroyed, and now blacks are dependent on govt. handouts.
* Black people, on the whole, had much more self-respect in the earlier era, even though they didn’t advertise it to anywhere near the degree they do now. Sort of ironic.
The various pathologies which characterise way too much of black culture today were trivial back then by comparison. We now have a society which disparages personal responsibility and celebrates every kind of immorality, and is much more racist than ever before. Also sort of ironic.
I’ve seen single black moms struggling with their sons. It can’t be easy. Our cultural propaganda makes it nigh impossible. No one dares tell kids that they shouldn’t have kids of their own, outside a stable family unit. The results are everywhere.
* Anything subsidized grows: TANF, SNAP, Section 8, heating assistance, free school lunches and breakfasts, free preK-12 education, Pell grants, etc, etc. We are subsidizing the reproduction of the least able people. The crop of neck and face tatooed carjackers that bedevil our streets have been brought into being by the good intentions of people like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.
* America has been sliding downhill overall since 1970, with blacks sliding even more than whites. Striving for equality is just one of many things that America can’t do as well as it could 50 years ago. Personally, I look at the Apollo 17 mission returning from the moon for the last time one month before the Supreme Court decided the U.S. Constitution includes a right to abort fetuses, and I wonder if the nation turned its back on the blessings of God available to it. Secularists can formulate that idea in their own secular terms if inclined.
* Moving to the North with lots of good jobs in factories for those with limited education or skills undoubtedly helped. But as the workforce for manufacturing declined, it probably affected blacks the first and the most, as there were no comparable employment opportunities to replace them. Toss in badly misguided social policies and we have experienced a social disaster.
They were then sold on the transformative promise of college education, with the result that culturally they place a high premium on credentialism while being fleeced like no other group by the higher ed industry. That has led to the current moment of millions of people with useless degrees and no practical skills believing only a systemic force organized solely to hold them back is responsible for all the disappointments.
* Things that hit the fan for Blacks around 1970: Black fathers disappearing and Black marriage rates plummetting; deindustrialization; lots more whites going to college on financial aid; drug use and selling by blacks going way up; rising crime rates.
Plus let us not forget the ability of white people to replace black labor with Hispanic labor due to mass illegal migration and stagnation of wages that has now lasted decades and loss of labor union membership.
* Perverse incentives in the 1960s turned the black lower class feral: that’s well understood by now.
Perverse incentives today are turning the black elite destructive and useless. I’m thinking of incentives like: white credulity, meaning that a hate hoax results in career advancement and monetary rewards; booming employment as DIE enforcers, resulting in talent (such as it is) getting channelled away from honest productive work, and the proliferation of professional black racists; intensification of affirmative action (from a thumb on the scale, to a foot on the scale), eroding the need to study and perform even at the levels a mediocre person would be capable of.
* There’s also been a general race blind falling behind of the working class, which disproportionately affects blacks compared to whites and so ceteris paribus increases the black-white gap. It’s something that the civil rights movement is partially responsible for because it helped suck the oxygen away from old school economic liberalism that was dedicated to giving the working class stability and economic resources. It’s still a pretty common response to pointing out how much more economically equal the US used to be or certain other countries currently are to say that well those places are racist so we shouldn’t copy them. Civil rights also poisoned many whites against the left broadly
You’re also ignoring the fact that the black-white relationship never stabilized around no net discrimination, but has been ratcheting up more and more net anti white discrimination for decades.
