The Irony of Black Criminals vs White Criminals by Paul Mooney – GENIUS!!!

Race, Sex and Work

By Tim Wise

Examining White Lies About Black Americans

“You wanna know what the real problem with black people is?”

So read the opening line of the first e-mail message of my day. Not a good start.

Whenever these words or their functional equivalent greet you before you’ve had the chance to rub the sleep from your eyes, let alone consume that first sip of coffee, you know you’re in for a long and troubling morning.

Sure enough, I wasn’t to be disappointed or proved wrong.

“The problem,’ explained my Monday morning instigator ‘is that they can’t stop having illegitimate children (especially the teenagers), and they’d rather lay around on welfare all day than work for a living.”

Jesus. And to think, I could have opted to sit down with my daughter and watch Sesame Street like a responsible father; but no, I had to check my e-mail first.

Now it wasn’t as if this shit was new. I’ve been hearing this from white folks ever since I was a child. And although I was getting it this time from someone who was well aware of my views on race, I often am regaled with such splendid intellectual mediocrity by total strangers who I meet during the course of my travels: in airplanes, restaurants, hotel bars, taxicabs, or wherever else people interact.

“White bonding,” I began calling it some twelve years ago: a phenomenon that causes many if not most whites to apparently believe that every white person they meet must be just as racist as they are and will find their joke funny, their comment acceptable, and their slur pithy. The things white folks say about people of color when they aren’t around give the lie to all the nonsense we pump about color-blindness, not having a racist bone in our bodies, never noticing race, having all those black friends, and so on and so forth.

But the things we say when people of color aren’t in the room actually do more than expose the festering sickness of white racism; they expose the profundity of our ignorance and demonstrate just how divorced from reality so many of us are. For not only are the racist beliefs expressed above (and according to opinion polls, accepted by half or better of the white population) exaggerated stereotypes, they are in fact flatly contradicted by hard evidence.

Take the popular image of black women, particularly teens, popping out babies as fast as they can make them. This rendering of black females as the oversexed, irresponsible incubators of demographic decay has been at the heart of attacks on social welfare programs and is as commonly heard as the daily weather report: shame it’s even less accurate.

In truth, the fertility rate for black women is hardly different than for white women. For every 1000 white women 15-44 there are 66.5 live births, while for every 1000 black women that age there are 71.7.

Indeed, the fertility rate for black women has fallen by more than half in the last forty years, such that the gap between black and white fertility has been slashed by nearly 80%, according to the Centers for Disease Control. The birthrate for unmarried black women–especially vilified by racist rhetoric–is at a forty-year low and the rate of babies born to black teens hasn’t gone up one iota since 1920.

And speaking of teens, only six-tenths of one percent of black babies are born to women under the age of fifteen, and the birthrate for black teens 15-19 has dropped by a third since 1991. Overall, more than eight in ten black babies are born to mothers in their twenties or older, and the teen birthrate has fallen faster among black youth than any other racial group over the last decade.

The parallel belief that black women have too many children–at whatever age–and therefore can’t properly care for them is equally mythical. The average number of minor children in white households and black households is identical, and for female-headed black and white households the difference is statistically insignificant. Contrary to the widespread notion that black women typically have four or five children (if not more), only one in twenty black female headed families have four or more kids.

Even for families receiving public assistance–and even before welfare “reform” bumped tens of thousands off the rolls and restricted eligibility for benefits–the typical “welfare family” of whatever race included only a mother and two children and was actually slightly smaller than the typical non-welfare family.

Of course I can hear the voices of racial apoplexy now. “What about the skyrocketing rate of out-of-wedlock births in the black community?” Doesn’t that indicate the sexual irresponsibility of black females and their male compradors, one might ask?

Well no. In fact, not even close.

The reason for the increase in the share of black children born out-of-wedlock in recent decades is that two-parent black couples are having fewer children than ever, meaning that a growing share of the children who are born in the black community will be out-of-wedlock, even though sexual behavior hasn’t changed, and fertility rates among single black women have been falling.

Indeed, eighty percent of the increase in out-of-wedlock childbirths in the black community is because of the falloff in children born to intact black families: a falloff that has been even steeper than the decline among single moms.

Additionally, the apparent “increase” in out-of-wedlock children in single mother homes within the black community, and generally, is the result of the Census Bureau changing the methods used for counting such families in the first place.

Whereas single moms with kids who lived in extended family settings (such as living with their own parents) were historically not counted as separate family units, since the early 1980′s they have been. So even though such families may have existed for many years prior to the accounting switch, they would not have appeared in statistical data until more recently.

Putting aside the issue of just how “harmful” single-parent homes are (and evidence indicates that with the exception of the smaller income base there isn’t much difference between such homes and “intact” families, and indeed children in intact families are often less confident and well-adjusted), clearly the problems for black folks in this country are not the result of childbirth patterns.

A 1997 report found that the median income of young two-parent black families had fallen by nearly half since 1973. What’s more, even black women who “played by the rules,” and had no kids out-of-wedlock, saw their incomes fall 32% from 1972-1989, and have been unable to regain the lost ground since.

Which brings us then to the issue of work; or rather the claim that blacks are allergic to the concept, preferring instead the “generous” benefits of the welfare state for their sustenance.

That anyone could possibly believe such a thing has always struck me as humorous to say the least. After all, African Americans have been doing work that white folks thought “beneath” us for roughly four hundred years. Were it not for their labor, in fact, the American Revolution could never have been won, since its financing came from the tobacco and cotton industries–both of which were built by the work of slaves.

Yet despite the historical record the belief persists, often put forth by people whose own forefathers tried desperately never to break a sweat doing actual work themselves.

And as with the arguments about black women as baby factories, the ruse about blacks as lazy welfare-sapping parasites is patently absurd, not to mention ironic. After all, welfare programs in this country were originally created so as to allow white widows and abandoned mothers to care for their children without having to enter the paid workforce.

Creating “dependence” was not seen as problematic, at least for white women whose “womanhood” had long been viewed as dependent on the presence of a white male husband. It was only when women of color gained access to such programs in the late 1950′s and afterward that suddenly “dependence” became the great scourge to be avoided.

Yet the truth is that welfare dependence is hardly the norm–for black women or anyone else receiving public assistance. Even before the passage of punitive welfare reform, six in ten welfare families were leaving the rolls within two years, debunking the notion of long-term dependency as the norm for welfare recipients.

Indeed, two-thirds of women who receive welfare as children will never receive aid as adults and 81% whose mothers received AFDC for long periods never receive aid as adults. In other words, the notion of intergenerational welfare dependence so commonly accepted is a false one.

Instead of welfare, the poor prefer work, yet often there are not enough jobs to go around that pay wages at or above the poverty line. In Central Harlem, one study found that there were fourteen applicants for every job opening in the area.

Nationally, in times of recession, there may be as many as seven to ten people out of work for every job opening above the poverty line. And since the Federal Reserve’s policy is to raise interest rates whenever unemployment drops below four percent–thereby freezing new hires–millions will be jobless, poor, and need welfare no matter their work ethic, solely because of this one monetary policy intended to keep wages and prices low.

Indeed, experience from around the country demonstrates that low-income people of color have work ethics that are no different from whites and those above the poverty line. In the early 1990′s, when a handful of longshore jobs opened up in Los Angeles, 50,000 blacks and Latinos–mostly low income–showed up to apply.

In Cleveland, 15,000 unemployed welfare mothers and teenagers of color stood in the rain for four hours to get one of the minimum-wage temporary jobs cleaning up public parks.

In Chicago, 15,000 mostly low-income applicants of color applied for less than 4,000 temporary jobs.

In Baltimore, 75 openings at the Social Security Administration were met with 26,000 applications, mostly from blacks, and heavily from low-income citizens.

Far from relying on taxpayers for their livelihood, only one in ten blacks receive any form of cash welfare, and only about one in six receives food stamps. In fact, blacks who are eligible for the Food Stamp program are actually less likely than similar whites to apply for and receive such assistance.

As for black single moms, although they are twice as likely as white single moms to be in poverty, they are no more likely than white single moms to receive public assistance. What’s more, three out of four single black moms have jobs, further dispelling the notion that single mothers in the black community mostly choose to “live off welfare.”

Yet despite all of these simple truths, I didn’t send any of them to the individual who had chosen to start off my week with such a mindless stream of e-nonsense. I knew it wouldn’t matter much to him, and if anything would only detract from the time I could spend on Sesame Street, which as it turns out is a much friendlier place to be.

But I did write him back. First to thank him for serving as my muse for what would become this article; and secondly to remark upon the last paragraph of his message to me: the part that blamed black folks for “taking all the jobs” from white guys like himself.

My statement on this score was really fairly simple. In the interest of consistency, I suggested that he choose which racist drivel he would prefer to promote: either the kind that says blacks are lazy or the kind that says they are taking all the jobs. After all, both cannot be true at the same time. If one is taking all the jobs, then by definition one hardly qualifies as lazy, and if one is indeed lazy, one is not likely to take any job, let alone all of them.

And if there’s anything worse than a racist, it has to be a racist who can’t make up his mind.

Tim Wise is an antiracist essayist, activist and lecturer. He can be reached at (and footnotes procured from)

Racism, Reparations and the Politics of Blame: Pardon You

By Tim Wise
May 07, 2010 – counterpunch.org

As a writer, there are times when you have something to say, and yet no particular “hook” upon which to hang the missive you are burning to release. In these moments, it is often best to wait, to hold on to the material you find so compelling, secure in the knowledge that soon enough something will happen–some personal experience or news event–that will render the intended screed relevant at long last.

Apparently, Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. believes not in this sagacious advice. To wit his recent essay for the New York Times, in which he addressed the issue of reparations for slavery, imparting therein the completely unoriginal and long-recognized wisdom that Africans were implicated in the enslavement of their continental peers. This, to Gates, is a revelation of monumental proportions, which demonstrates the complexity of the slavery issue, and implacably muddies the matter of who should pay whom for the damage done. Resolving this last point is, Gates wants you to know, far more difficult than the apparently simple-minded who clamor for repair might believe.

That literally no one in the dominant political culture had been raising the issue of actually paying reparations makes the timing of Gates’s piece especially bizarre. It’s as if he had been wanting to say these things for some time, had never previously been able to find the right opportunity, but now intuited his opening, given the presence of a black president ensconced in the White House. Let Obama be the hook, by suggesting as Gates did in the article, that because of the president’s unique ancestry, he would be the perfect vessel for carrying this message of joint responsibility to the masses. Just as surely as Gates would no doubt advise a Jew, should one ever become German Chancellor, to ruminate often and endlessly about the responsibility of the Kapos in the camps, or other Jews who collaborated with the Nazis.

Or, since Gates is so recently enraptured by the discovery of his Celtic ancestry, I’m sure we can soon expect him to explain ever so patiently to those in Northern Ireland that while the Ulsterite Protestants have been mighty nasty, there have no doubt been many a Catholic collaborator with the oppressive conditions meted out over the centuries, including some who likely bedded down, in the political sense at least, with Bloody Cromwell right to the end.

Fair is fair, after all.

It is as if Gates wishes for Obama to wash clean the sins of the West–and indeed, expects he is capable of such a Herculean feat–by reminding us of the venal and corrupt ways of the African leaders who sold their kin into slavery in the first place. To Gates’s way of thinking, such a clarification might help narrow the racial divide that so plagues us, and which occasionally manages to swallow even people like Gates himself. It was just last year, after all, when Gates was racially profiled as a likely burglar, trying to enter his own home in Cambridge, and was then unjustly arrested for disorderly conduct after an officer found Gates’s anger at the notion a tad on the belligerent side. Just as Gates apparently found the Obama-convened “beer summit” between himself and officer James Crowley so palliative of the injury inflicted, so too does he appear to envision something of a transcontinental equivalent now. Perhaps the Presidents of Ghana and Congo could encamp in the Rose Garden along with the descendants of slaving families, all slamming back a few and saying their respective “I’m sorries” to the descendants of those they sold or owned as the solution to the intergenerational pain inflicted.

Which brings us to the moral and intellectual absurdity of his reparations column.

Aside from the mind-boggling timing, Gates’s attempt to undermine the case for reparations by spreading the blame for the enslavement of African peoples falls flat on a number of levels.

To begin, there are really two issues in play, which Professor Gates utterly fails to disentangle. The first is the issue of responsibility for enslavement, and the second is reparations: from whom and to whom are they due, if they be due at all? The reason these are separate issues is simple enough: for starters, those who have long argued for some form of reparations or restitution for peoples of color have rarely based our claims on the harms done under enslavement alone. Rather, the claim has been (and whether one agrees with the position is not the point here), that repair is due for the centuries-long process of white supremacy, including enslavement, but also segregation, theft of indigenous land, and plain old discrimination, which collectively have robbed folks of color of literally trillions of dollars in income and assets.

In other words, even if one accepts Gates’s historiography, it would fail to diminish the claim for reparations from the U.S. government, since that government and its colonial forebears practiced overt white supremacy from the 1640s until the 1960s, both before and after the large-scale importation of black bodies from the African continent directly to the place that would and did become the United States. That there were co-conspirators in the enterprise for some of those years is an interesting historical point, but ultimately irrelevant, in that it neglects the way in which white supremacy continued well after the ending of the African slave trade, and indeed became, by many accounts, even more vicious when the trade morphed into an intra-national, intra-regional affair. Then of course, we have the substantial scholarship indicating that the post-enslavement period for blacks was often just as cruel as the period of bondage, thanks to the brutal oppression of the Black Codes, debt peonage, the sharecropping system and Jim Crow. Surely even a man as quick to castigate Africans as Gates appears to be–and his role in the documentary travelogue, “Wonders of the African World” consisted of many a seeming lecture about the backwardness of that side of his ancestral lineage–it would prove more than a little difficult to blame lynchings, or the Greenwood massacre, or redlining on Nigerians.

A second and related point is this: the claim for reparations is not merely rooted in assigning blame for an injustice. It is rooted in the belief (backed up by copious volumes of evidence not to mention common sense–the first of which, at least, is still presumed to count for something among Harvard academics), that enslavement of African peoples led to the unjust enrichment of the West. The United States was built by the labor of the enslaved. White society was subsidized by the system of white supremacy and the economic base of the nation grew as a result of both enslavement and labor discrimination after the abolition of the same.

On the other hand, Africa did not benefit by the complicity of some of their own with that system. Quite the contrary: the depopulation of Africa limited the growth of African economies. Ten to fifteen million Africans were shipped to the Americas by 1800, while numbers at least that large died either at sea or on the march from their homes to the coast. At least 25 million, and more likely as many as 50 million lives were lost to Africa due to the system of enslavement. At the very moment that Europe was growing in population–enriched as they were by slavery–Africa was witnessing a rapid loss of peoples. Whereas Europe’s population more than doubled during the centuries of the Middle Passage, Africa’s grew by only about 30 percent, in large part because of the trade in human beings. And population growth was positively correlated with economic dynamism all throughout this period: modernization, mechanization, and advances in political and social well-being–the kinds of things in which African nations had actually led Europe in the centuries before enslavement began, but which would all but come to a halt after its initiation.

So reparations are due, according to the argument, not merely because a certain group committed a wrong, but because the wrong led to the unjust enrichment of an entire nation (the United States) and a continent (Europe), at the expense of those enslaved. Since Africa came out worse for wear in the bargain, they cannot be said to have benefitted from the process in the same way, nor, as such, owe a debt in the same fashion. Although individual African leaders no doubt profited from their role in the slave trade–and so their descendants if they be extant may owe restitution to the descendants of those made into chattel, as well as to the very Africa they helped impoverish in the process–in the United States it is not merely some who benefitted from human bondage, and afterward, from formal apartheid. The nation itself reaped enormous wealth on the backs of unpaid or underpaid black and brown labor, from imperial adventurism and conquest abroad, and from the capture of half of Mexico in a war that its advocates most assuredly conceived of as a battle for Anglo-Saxon supremacy.

In short, and to recast the old admonition that “to the winner goes the spoils,” to the winner must also go the debt incurred. It is the flipside of the advantages afforded, indeed purchased, by that victory. Those riches come with a cost, however little we’ve wished to stare them in the face, and now that bill has come due. Especially because we are, contrary to popular belief, still living with the legacy of the system put in place so long ago and sustained over the centuries (and not by Africans but by red-white-and-blue Americans right on down the line). In addition to the obvious legacy of wealth inequality, as well as gaps in health, education, and professional accomplishment, there is the underlying thinking of white supremacy that keeps all of these things in place. After all, the mentality of white supremacy was in large measure the result of the slave system and its aftermath, rather than its progenitor.

It was slavery that brought forth the excuses, the rationalizations, the justifications and the pithy commentary down through the ages about the tainted blood or bile or genes of the African. It was enslavement that made necessary the mental and psychological game of Twister in the national psyche. How else, after all, could one smooth over the glaring contradiction between the talk of freedom on the one hand and the fact of bondage on the other? How else except by lying to oneself and others, and by making the spreading of that lie–that these people were not people, or at least not the kind about whom one should lose much sleep–the most important task of one’s social order? No, racism did not give birth to slavery, so much as the other way around. And it is that issue from the womb of the American slave system with which we are still umbilically entangled. To the extent all of us have been born into a nation where racism remains a pervasive social force, we all bear the scars of that delivery. Modern racism is no bastard child; its father was the chattel system. In its absence there simply would have been no logical reason for the development of white supremacist ideology in the first place.

None of this is to say that fashioning a workable restitution scheme would be easy. It wouldn’t be. But the difficulty of devising such a reparative framework (even the impossibility of doing so, for either practical or political reasons, should such a thing prove to be the case), alters not by one iota the moral claim for such an effort. Any more so than you could dodge your own moral responsibility–and 100 percent of it, truth be told–when as a child, and upon breaking some valuable in the family home, you chose to point to your friend or perhaps a sibling and insist that he or she too had been involved in the bouncing of the ball from which efforts the unhappy accident had flowed. As I recall it, one’s mother, upon witnessing this ecumenical attempt at blame-sharing always seemed to respond with something about a bridge, and then followed this imagery by querying as to whether or not, if by chance your sibling or friend were to hurl him or herself off of it, you too would, in the manner of a damned fool, do the same?

Surely a nation that gave white America more than 240 million acres of essentially free land under the Homestead Act, and made possible over $120 billion in federally-guaranteed low interest home loans to whites under the FHA and VA programs at a time when those of color were being virtually excluded from the same, can do more than engage in a collective shrug when these matters are raised. Surely we can figure out a way to–at the very least–target economic stimulus to the neediest communities (which are disproportionately of color). Surely we can envision something akin to what was done in the post-World War Two era for our former enemies, Germany and Italy, under the Marshall Plan. Surely we can do better than silence, or the putrid suggestion put forward by some that welfare spending–most of which didn’t even go to people of color, and which most people of color never received–somehow has already repaid the debt, and relieved the nation of any other obligations.

And surely a man as intelligent as Henry Louis Gates can do better than to try and make equivalent, between whites and Africans, the culpability for white supremacy and its legacy, as if the whole thing had been a wash in terms of who was up and who down as a result of the arrangement.

Tim Wise is the author of five books on race. His latest is, Colorblind: The Rise of Post-Racial Politics and the Retreat from Racial Equity. (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2010).