Sixteen years ago, the radio shock jock sparked outrage and a conversation about hip-hop and black culture. But the “people who know better” have not done better.
Nationwide, it is estimated that more than five out of every six black children lived with both parents in 1950, a figure that had been fairly stable since Reconstruction. Then everything changed.
It shouldn’t surprise when once in a while, the conditioned hypervigilant self-restraint of white society melts over in acts of Icarus-like self-destruction.
“Whites”—to the extent we can determine any race in an intermarried, multiracial society—do not fit the now ossified definition of an exploitive majority.
The lesson from the $22 trillion record of Great Society compensatory payouts is that massive infusions of federal money are more apt to ensure social disruption and dislocation than alleviate them.
Thinking beyond racial categories is vital to devising and executing public policies that will mitigate the inequalities that are the legacy of American slavery.