Much important work has been done on the devastating effects of the Great Society on the inner city. Oddly enough, black society was in many ways healthier, with more intact families, fewer illegitimate births, more employment, and the like in the 50s than in the 70s.
Marvin Olasky has argued that part of the problem was the counter- culture, which extolled hedonism and derided middle- class norms. While the white middle class ultimately had the resources to weather many of the baneful effects, more vulnerable groups, like working class blacks in the ghettoes, were devastated by the "do your own thing" ethic.
William Julius Williams has shown a correlation with the "de- industrialization" of the inner city and social pathology. What he has inadequately acknowledged is that a pattern of increasing taxation without gain in services drove out both the tax base and a lot of businesses from the city, and thus, it was partly the fault of the redistributionist policies of a lot of big city governments that their people lost jobs.
Others have argued that during the 60s the final blow was struck against the black male, already somewhat marginalized among working class blacks, where women often found steadier employment as domestics. When the government took over as "husband" of women with children, and actually penalized couples that got married, from a financial standpoint, men in the inner city became almost superfluous to the raising of children.
But studies have suggested that fathers are important to the raising of children: women with no father, or a troubled relationship to a father, are more prone to dysfunctional relationships with men, and men who grew up without a strong paternal role model are more likely to get into trouble.
Finally, of course, the flooding of the country with all sorts of drugs hit the ghetto particularly hard. Persons who are hanging on by a thread, or particularly need to get an education to improve their circumstances, do not need cheap and easy access to marijuana, much less harder drugs like PCP, heroin,and qualudes, and, by the 80s, crack cocaine. Drug dealers ought to be regarded as worse than parasites in the ghetto. There motto may as well be "debase the race"......... |
