Anti-whiteness was already official government policy in 1965

It’s not just free-lance, way-out liberals like Mayor Don Ness of Duluth and anti-white ideologist Peggy Macintosh who say that whites are responsible for all blacks’ inadequacies and that America is more racist than ever. The U.S. Department of Labor said the same back in March 1965. It published a paper, “The Negro Family: The Case For National Action,” in which it blamed blacks’ then worsening condition on the pre-Civil Rights mistreatment of blacks. Because of this past mistreatment which was still damaging blacks’ functionality after the passage of the Civil Right Act, whites, not blacks, were responsible for assuring that blacks achieve “roughly equal outcomes” with whites. And, of course, it went without saying that if whites failed in this inherently impossible project, that just proved that they were refusing to take responsibility for their racism.

Here is the introduction of the 1965 paper, with my interspersed commentary:

The United States is approaching a new crisis in race relations.

In the decade that began with the school desegregation decision of the Supreme Court, and ended with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the demand of Negro Americans for full recognition of their civil rights was finally met.

The effort, no matter how savage and brutal, of some State and local governments to thwart the exercise of those rights is doomed. The nation will not put up with it—least of all the Negroes. The present moment will pass. In the meantime, a new period is beginning.

In this new period the expectations of the Negro Americans will go beyond civil rights. Being Americans, they will now expect that in the near future equal opportunities for them as a group will produce roughly equal results, as compared with other groups. [Italics added.] This is not going to happen. Nor will it happen for generations to come unless a new and special effort is made. [LA replies: the effort, of course, must be made by whites, not blacks. See Paul K.’s incisive comment on this. ]

There are two reasons. First, the racist virus in the American blood stream still afflicts us: Negroes will encounter serious personal prejudice for at least another generation. Second, three centuries of sometimes unimaginable mistreatment have taken their toll on the Negro people. The harsh fact is that as a group, at the present time, in terms of ability to win out in the competitions of American life, they are not equal to most of those groups with which they will be competing. Individually, Negro Americans reach the highest peaks of achievement. But collectively, in the spectrum of American ethnic and religious and regional groups, where some get plenty and some get none, where some send eighty percent of their children to college and others pull them out of school at the 8th grade, Negroes are among the weakest.

The most difficult fact for white Americans to understand is that in these terms the circumstances of the Negro American community in recent years has probably been getting worse, not better.

Indices of dollars of income, standards of living, and years of education deceive. The gap between the Negro and most other groups in American society is widening.

The fundamental problem, in which this is most clearly the case, is that of family structure. The evidence—not final, but powerfully persuasive—is that the Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling. [LA replies: It’s not exactly correct to say that the family structure was “crumbling”—in the case of unmarried women bearing children, it never formed. And in the generations of black illegitimacy since then, it has still never formed.] A middle class group has managed to save itself, but for vast numbers of the unskilled, poorly educated city working class the fabric of conventional social relationships has all but disintegrated. There are indications that the situation may have been arrested in the past few years, but the general post war trend is unmistakable. So long as this situation persists, the cycle of poverty and disadvantage will continue to repeat itself. [LA replies: This statement leaves out the facts that in the early 1960s, the federal government dropped the previous limitations on receiving welfare, and made it available basically to any unwed mother who asked, and that black illegitimacy greatly increased from that point onward. Yet the Dept. of Labor said in 1965 that all of blacks’ problems were due to white racism, even in the present case, where the problems were due to white liberalism.]

The thesis of this paper is that these events, in combination, confront the nation with a new kind of problem. Measures that have worked in the past, or would work for most groups in the present, will not work here. A national effort is required that will give a unity of purpose to the many activities of the Federal government in this area, directed to a new kind of national goal: the establishment of a stable Negro family structure. [LA replies: But of course the best way to help re-establish a stable Negro family structure, then and now, is to dismantle liberalism. Liberalism, by (1) promoting sexual liberation (which has harmed blacks’ functionality far more than it has hurt whites’), (2) making whites guilty for all blacks’ problems and thus destroying whites’ moral authority in American society, particularly the authority of white men, and (3) giving out welfare almost automatically from the early 1960s until the welfare reform act of the late 1990s (which by the way did nothing to combat illegitimacy—it only added a new layer of bureaucracy to help unwed mothers find jobs), was the greatest single factor in the spread of black illegitimacy. Yet the Dept. of Labor, declaring that black illegitimacy was the greatest threat to blacks’ well-being and that it must be solved, wanted to solve it without questioning—and through the means of—the same liberalism that produced the catastrophe.]

This would be a new departure for Federal policy. And a difficult one. But it almost certainly offers the only possibility of resolving in our time what is, after all, the nation’s oldest, and most intransigent, and now its most dangerous social problem. What Gunnar Myrdal said in An American Dilemma remains true today: “America is free to chose whether the Negro shall remain her liability or become her opportunity.” [LA replies: See? They call for a “new departure,” perhaps implying that something needs to be changed about the liberal approach itself. But then they revert in the end to the liberal credo that it’s up to America—i.e. white America—to transform blacks from a liability into an opportunity. Meaning that if blacks remain a liability, that is whites’ fault, and whites are still guilty—forever and irretrievably guilty—of the monstrous sin of racism. Thus we see how the process that VFR commenter Kilroy M. calls the “psychic genocide” of whites began in the mid-1960s.]

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 10, 2012 01:28 PM | Send