Maybe it’s worth laying out the basic lefty view of what’s going on with black poverty in America.
The story goes like this: Most black people in the US are the descendents of slaves. By design, they could not accumulate wealth of any kind, and even human capital accumulation like literacy was punished. The period following the Civil War was not much better. For decades, if you tried to get married as a black family and live on your own and grow your own crops, you could expect lynching. If you wanted to work outside agriculture, you had to get state permission to do so in many Southern states. If you tried to do side work on Saturday, you were liable to be imprisoned for vagrancy and forced to work for free for white people. Black lives were marked by white plunder punctuated by white terrorism.
Until WWII, the overwhelming majority of black people lived in the South under Jim Crow. In that regime, black wealth accumulation was, by design, rare and extremely difficult. Barriers to education remained high. If you were smart, hard-working, and ambitious, for the most part you became a preacher or a teacher. Even people that escaped (literally fleeing in the middle of the night in many cases), often found themselves property-less in cities where white landlords could charge them higher rents and white employers could pay them lower wages. When you fought for equal treatment, whites would kill your family and burn down your neighborhood. I assume nothing more needs to be said of the period before 1945 to explain why racist laws were why black people were poorer than white people, on average.
That brings us roughly to World War II. So already we’re talking about the grandparents of the people who are heads of households today. Even putting aside any discrimination after that period, it would be quite remarkable if in the space of a few generations a few centuries of plunder and terrorism was washed away.
Certainly, only the extraordinary were going to be able to do it under the legal regime that prevailed from 1945 to 1975. The white classes, including the newly-considered white, built their household wealth with, well, houses. They got loans restricted to white people and access to neighborhoods with rising housing prices and restrictive covenants for four decades. Beyond the effect on the ability to develop intergenerational wealth, residential segregation also concentrated poverty (and kept black people with middle class incomes in poor neighborhoods, with all the obstacles that brings from job opportunities to crime). And, of course, Jim Crow persisted in less severe ways for this entire period, including in particular in educational institutions and in many fields like medicine.
That takes us roughly to when the current heads of households were born. You don’t even really need to appeal to forms of state discrimination after that period to explain the current disparities. But, in fact, the 1980s and 1990s marked the period when we decided to explode our prison populations and arrest significant proportions of all black men. We decided to keep them in prison longer, offer fewer options for early release, and offer fewer resources while in prison. We policed and arrested black men at rates disproportionate to underlying crime rates, and focused on crimes disproportionately committed by black people while ignoring crimes disproportionately committed by white people. The result was as intended. 20% of Black Floridians are barred from voting. 9% of Black Wisconsin residents aren’t allowed to vote, warming Lee Atwater and Steve Bannon’s hearts mightily.
And all of that is just discrimination enforced by the state. Indeed, I mostly just touched on the negative discrimination. But there’s also the other side of the coin–the billions spent to enrich white people, from race-based work programs, to agricultural universities, to restricted access to the GI Bill, and all the rest. There is also rampant private discrimination by unions, employers, educators, neighborhood associations, and all the rest, continuing through to 2017 (though, thankfully, less in degree than in 1975). Plus, this period of the end of state discrimination is also the period when there has been very little real wage growth. The engines out of poverty that chugged along successfully for three decades have been sputtering for quite some time. Before colleges were desegregated, you could pay for school by working a part-time job. Now, a fulltime job isn’t enough.
Wealth accumulation, where people live, the education levels of children–all these social phenomena have momentum. You have to get them going in the right direction, and then give them time to work. The United States hasn’t even lifted all the forms of state discrimination, much less private discrimination. And it has made almost no effort to affirmatively lift up the people it plundered for so long.
I don’t offer that account because I expect conservative critics to agree with it. But it seems to me that if you want to critique it, you have to understand it. When you say things like, “well the Jews did fine,” you betray an ignorance of this history.