I cannot count all the times a liberal has told me there were more whites on welfare than blacks. Apparently, Bernie didn't get the memo!
I did not feel I needed to go into all the statistical minutia that, of course, there are a higher percentage of whites than black in the country, and the raw numbers of welfare recipients was likely to skew one way, and then a breakdown of those numbers by race, according to their percentage of the population could well show another. Fine.
A person, whom I shall not name, to spare her the embarrassment, (but will note she had the face of Bernie Sanders on her avatar), responded to my comment with this:
there are more whites than blacks on welfare in this country. the difference is that the blacks are genuinely poverty stricken whereas a good percentage of the whites are just lazy asshats with a sense of entitlement who believe they deserve to be semi-supported by the federal government
My response:
And the basis for your own assumption, that whites are in poverty, but blacks are in "poverty poverty"* is what exactly? I don't know that I've ever heard a more racist way to describe the situation, that blacks, unlike other people, who can be governed by greed or avarice or a sense of entitlement, only seek out government assistance when they are in abject poverty, unlike a "good percentage" of whites who are just "lazy asshats". I personally believe that goodness or lazy asshattedness is not dependent on race, color or creed.
Does this mean that the discovery of so much as a single black who is a "lazy asshat" disproves your theory? I say theory, because I doubt there is any legitimate study on the planet that agrees with your conclusions.
Would I be correct in assuming that you, too, are a liberal? Or does the Bernie face in your avatar mean you have shifted much, much farther to the left?
BTW, since Bernie Sanders spent most of his adult life on public assistance,before suckling on the government teat of politics, is he your exemplar of a white "lazy asshat"?
Just wondering.
*like "rape rape" (Thank you Whoopi Goldberg)
To me, the problem of poverty is irrevocably linked to illegitimacy. Back in the "good old days", before the Great Society, if a young woman, regardless of race, were to get pregnant, she typically had four choices:
A) Marry the baby's father (sometimes the presence of a shotgun was required here)
B) Get an abortion
C) Give the child up for adoption
D) Have the child and move back in with your parents, which was typically the only way a single mother caring for her child could economically live
In times and locales where abortion wasn't legal or available, she had three.
Enter the government (ta-daa!) Government assistance to single mothers could be a substitute for either marriage or living under your parent's rules. An unmarried woman could apply for assistance and subsist on checks from the government. By the way, we won't call them "asshats" if the "baby daddy", able to support his family, moves in without the benefit of marriage, but still collects the checks. Note, too, that nothing has been said about race. People game the system...black, white, red, chartreuse...all of them! Character crosses lines of race, color creed and ethnic origin.
Relatively stigma free, the government began to subsidize illegitimacy. As with anything else, whatever the government subsidizes, it gets more of. The poverty that accompanies illegitimacy is self perpetuating. Deprived of a two parent family, boys growing up without a strong male role model, without the stability of discipline, or someone to teach them a solid work ethic, drift into the fellowship of gangs and/or means of self support that don't include a nine to five job. Note, again, these things, too, are irrespective of race.
These values are transmitted culturally. Government subsidies, starting with the Great Society, have cultivated a culture of dependency, a culture of envy and despair, predominantly centered in the inner cities. Here's where the element of race is introduced. In urban America where there are large groups of blacks and racial minorities, we see higher rates of illegitimacy. NBC News noted that in 2008:
The black community's 72 percent rate eclipses that of most other groups: 17 percent of Asians, 29 percent of whites, 53 percent of Hispanics and 66 percent of Native Americans were born to unwed mothers in 2008
Walter Williams notes that it's even worse today and puts it in historic context.:
Today's black illegitimacy rate of nearly 75 percent is also entirely new. In 1940, black illegitimacy stood at 14 percent. It had risen to 25 percent by 1965, when Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action" and was widely condemned as a racist. By 1980, the black illegitimacy rate had more than doubled, to 56 percent, and it has been growing since. Both during slavery and as late as 1920, a teenage girl raising a child without a man present was rare among blacks.
In our pop culture, the terms "baby mama" and "baby daddy" are commonplace among celebrities. There once was a social stigma to both "being on the dole" and having children "out of wedlock". These terms are now outdated and antiquated. The genie is out of the bottle. No sign that it;'s going back in anytime soon. Short of a revival on the scale of the Great Awakening, the cycle of illegitimacy, dependence and poverty will be with us for a long time.
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