It has only been reading and listening that hipped me to the fact that it's 40 years today. In my own radio show, which gets me up to 40 minute rants in my car after I snap off Dennis Prager or Michael Medved, this morning I considered the extent to which the Talented Tenth is in a position to fulfill their interpretation of King's Dream (tm).
I covered about four interlocking topics in this morning's thoughts, one of which is the extent to which middle class success is indeed King's dream. And so I've come up with a new benchmark. How many African Americans live as well as Dr. King did? But before I evaluate that lightly, let me go on an oppositional tangent which also sparked my curiosity as I considered the matter of middle-class philanthropy.
It starts with the concept of 'economic justice'. I say there is no such thing. The only economic justice available is torts. There were torts in pre-civil rights era, there are now. But how many of us take cheaters to court for breach of contract? Not many. But what about social justice? Doesn't that require a black effort? I echo Spence. Black Power is dead, and so I trample a few flowers on the grave.
Your appliances. Your car. Your clothes. Your cell phone. How many of these are made in Asia? What did Black Power ever do to negotiate for the presence of these products in your life? Nothing. H. Rap Brown never talked to Sony. Stokely Carmichael probably never uttered the word Hitachi in his life. Malcolm never went to Tokyo. So how is it that all these blackfolks have their life made that much more convenient by people that they never spoke to? It's the American economy - it took care of you without any special consideration from you whatsoever. It's why the average black person's cell phone has more computing power than the systems that put whitey on the moon. The revolution will not be televised, but your daughter will YouTube herself with no assistance from the Black Power Movement.
The Black Power movement was an impatient one. It wanted to get to point C whereas the Civil Rights movement was to get us from Jim Crow to point B. All those young revolutionaries had no reason to trust The Man, and to this day we retain the radical pose that substitutes 'The Man' for the economy. But they didn't come through, even for themselves. The economy did. How do we know?
Perhaps we could use the King Economic Benchmark. We all know, and Progressives are quick to remind us that MLK was on about the War on Poverty, not so much the content of our character.
The US Census doesn't give us black poverty figures for 1968. We have to start in 1974. But there are some interesting numbers I've been able to compile from their Poverty Statistics.
The red bars peaked in 1983 at just over 5 million. Those represent all individual blackfolks 18-64 in poverty. And while there are constantly more and more of us, as the blue bars continue to aggregate up, relatively fewer and fewer African Americans remain in poverty. By this measure, it's clear that the proportion of blackfolks whose problems are the problems of poverty seem less when you look at the bars, but there's no optical illusion. The numbers speak for themselves. The average is 23.17. Green is better and red is worse. The poor are always with us, but they are fewer and fewer of us. Mathematically speaking, MLK's war on poverty becomes less and less significant over time, even though, symbolically speaking, the politics of spinning the significance of that war stays constant.
How many of us are living as well as MLK was when he represented the majority of African American wishes for our future? A whole lot more than ever. In 1974, less than 10 million African Americans were not in poverty. In 1984, 12 million were. In 1994, 15 million African Americans were out of poverty.
Let's stop right there for a minute. If you wished, in 1974 for every single African American to be out of poverty - to have a nation of millions without a single black person in poverty, your goal would have been reached 20 years later, provided you were willing to ignore the 4.3 million more. It begs some very important questions about black nationalism. How many blacks out of poverty makes a nation to be proud of?
Today there are over 18 million blacks out of poverty. Almost double the number of 1974, the year I entered high school, back when Richard Pryor's jokes comparing blackfolks and whitefolks were funny for the first time, back when having a Black Student Union on campus was a scary and dangerous thing.
There are probably a million ways to interpret the meaning of Dr. King's numerous dreams. But taking the War on Poverty at face value, the numbers look pretty good, and this is after the essential destruction of Welfare as we knew it.
Thomas Sowell 101. It's not politics. It's economics.
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