There is no question that liberals do an impressive job of
expressing concern for blacks. But do the intentions expressed in
their words match the actual consequences of their deeds?
San Francisco is a classic example of a city unexcelled in its
liberalism. But the black population of San Francisco today is less
than half of what it was back in 1970, even though the city’s total
population has grown.
Severe restrictions on building housing in San Francisco have
driven rents and home prices so high that blacks and other people
with low or moderate incomes have been driven out of the city. The
same thing has happened in a number of other California communities
dominated by liberals.
Liberals try to show their concern for the poor by raising the
level of minimum wage laws. Yet they show no interest in hard
evidence that minimum wage laws create disastrous levels of
unemployment among young blacks in this country, as such laws
created high unemployment rates among young people in general in
European countries.
The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations
of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals’
expansion of the welfare state. Most black children grew up in
homes with two parents during all that time but most grow up with
only one parent today.
Liberals have pushed affirmative action, supposedly for the
benefit of blacks and other minorities. But two recent factual
studies show that affirmative action in college admissions has led
to black students with every qualification for success being
artificially turned into failures by being mismatched with colleges
for the sake of racial body count.
The two most recent books that show this with hard facts are
Mismatch by Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, Jr., and
Wounds That Will Not Heal by Russell K. Nieli. My own book
Affirmative Action Around the World shows the same thing
with different evidence.
In all these cases, and many others, liberals take positions
that make them look good and feel good — and show very little
interest in the actual consequences for others, even when liberal
policies are leaving havoc in their wake.
The current liberal crusade for more so-called “gun control”
laws is more of the same. Factual studies over the years, both in
the United States and in other countries, repeatedly show that “gun
control” laws do not in fact reduce crimes committed with guns.
Cities with some of the tightest gun control laws in the nation
have murder rates far above the national average. In the middle of
the 20th century, New York had far more restrictive gun control
laws than London, but London had far less gun crime. Yet gun crimes
in London skyrocketed after severe gun control laws were imposed
over the next several decades.
Although gun control is not usually considered a racial issue, a
wholly disproportionate number of Americans killed by guns are
black. But here, as elsewhere, liberals’ devotion to their ideology
greatly exceeds their concern about what actually happens to flesh
and blood human beings as a result of their ideology.
One of the most polarizing and counterproductive liberal
crusades of the 20th century has been the decades-long busing
crusade to send black children to predominantly white schools. The
idea behind this goes back to the pronouncement by Chief Justice
Earl Warren that “separate educational facilities are inherently
unequal.”
Yet within walking distance of the Supreme Court where this
pronouncement was made was an all-black high school that had scored
higher than two-thirds of the city’s white high schools taking the
same test — way back in 1899! But who cares about facts, when you
are on a liberal crusade that makes you feel morally superior?
To challenge government-imposed racial segregation and
discrimination is one thing. But to claim that blacks get a better
education if they sit next to whites in school is something very
different. And it is something that goes counter to the facts.
Many liberal ideas about race sound plausible, and it is
understandable that these ideas might have been attractive 50 years
ago. What is not understandable is how so many liberals can blindly
ignore 50 years of evidence to the contrary since then.
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