By Harold Pease, Ph. D
We recently looked at the well-meaning progressive policies of the last fifty years, notably welfare, that have done much to return our black brother to a slavery of dependence and seemingly to set our black communities on fire driven mostly by angry black young men who have turned first on their own race then on law enforcement. Past 2012 black presidential contender, Herman Cain, said it best: “Uncle Sam is the master who gives today’s nominally free blacks just enough to get by so that they can continue to work for their master by voting for those politicians who promise to give them more of other people’s earnings.”
Many in the black community know that these progressive policies, in exchange for their vote and loyalty to the progressive agenda, have left them less educated, less employable, less family oriented and more on welfare, and more both the perpetrator as well as the victim of crime. This column shares black solutions for black problems, not normally given by the establishment press, as they identify what must change. It also borrows much from the New American article “Real Solutions for Black Americans,” written by Michael Tennant. Their common message: “Blacks are worse off now than they were before government began ‘helping’ them.”
Black George Mason University economics professor Walter E. Williams speaks to the education problem where nearly half of blacks in government schools drop out of school. Those who do reach the 12th grade, according to The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), “score at the same level as the average white seventh-or eighth-grader on standardized tests.” Williams identifies private black schools such as Marva Collins School in Cincinnati and Marcus Garvey School in Chicago where “85 percent of those kids at each of those schools read at or above…grade level….” Those not happy with government schools must have choice of other types of schools. Competition with school choice must return.
Williams advocates four other changes to help his people. The Department of Education and all federal education programs and money must be abolished as quickly as possible. More should be expected of teachers. “Education majors,” he says, “have the lowest entrance-exam scores of all majors in college.” Schools must enforce discipline, order, and structure. Finally, affirmative action must be abolished. “Black students need to be admitted to schools where they belong on the basis of their preparation and aptitude. Were this the case, many more blacks would graduate than currently do.”
With respect to ending blacks being less employable, two actions are needed. First, repealing “the minimum wage and other labor laws that discourage the employment of low-skilled workers would make it possible for many blacks to get their first jobs, where they can gain skills that will enable them to move up to higher-paying jobs and out of poverty.” Second, “remove barriers to starting and expanding businesses…. From licensing laws to permit requirements to environmental impact assessments.” Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson, a Black pastor working in the trenches, said it best when he said: We need the government out of our lives, really, as much as possible.” Adding: “Let the free market reign.”
With respect to welfare it must end says Professor Williams. He suggests “giving welfare recipients a definite deadline after which there will be no more handouts and, in the meantime, making them work for their welfare checks.” The private sector could help in teaching skills that enable getting good jobs, as once it did. Reverend Peterson does exactly this through his Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny (BOND). “We’re teaching these boys a trade so when they finish high school, if they don’t want to go to college, they don’t have to.” Fraternal societies and churches did much of this in pre government handout days and they will again if the federal government slowly stepped out, Peterson argued.
With respect to blacks being both the perpetrator as well as the victim of crime, both education and employment of young black men in particular would help. Blacks are also “disproportionately victimized by criminals in part because they live in cities with strict gun control laws that criminals ignore. Repealing these laws would give potential victims a chance to defend themselves.” Also needed is for black communities “to get more people attending church.” Males normally drop church attendance between ages 15 and 50, Peterson notes, “If kids are raised in the church and they stay in church…. They’re significantly less likely to get arrested.”
Welfare has effectively taken dads out of the home because single women with children could draw larger government checks if dads lived elsewhere, thus the black family is less family oriented—the government became the dad. Lacking fathers and an adult male role model in the home is a giant problem.
Getting the Black communities to detox from welfare addiction will not be easy. What is promising, however, is that real black leaders, those in the trenches (not the “race baiting” televised leaders), have the solutions for their own people if the establishment press will but cover them and the government will cease bribing their people with “free” money. For them it is not a conservative or liberal solution but a matter of freeing their people from slavery a second time.