Professor Williams' Klansman

The economist Walter Williams  has said  a Klansman wanting harm black people could scarcely have come up with a more effective means of doing so than the government schools attended by many black children.  With a nod to Professor Williams,  let’s try a  thought experiment along the same line. Suppose you are a grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan fifty years ago in 1963.  You and your  colleagues detest black people and wish to see them held back from achieving prosperity, kept poor and ignorant, and separated from the mainstream of American life.  You, however, are smarter and more observant than your comrades and realize that the days of Jim Crow laws and direct oppression are numbered. So you start trying to find more subtle ways to accomplish your objectives.  The first thing you come up with, after noting the importance of stable, two parent families to the development and later success of children is to create perverse incentives favoring single parent households headed by indigent women.  Then, considering  the importance of learning to read, write, calculate, and understand something of the world for success in life, you hit on the idea of destroying schools which serve black children by turning them into useless holding tanks - overrun with thugs and trouble makers, staffed by ineffective time servers, and teaching the average student very little.  Next, realizing how the qualities of thrift, prudence, grooming, ability to plan ahead and defer gratification, sustained effort toward  self improvement, and honest enterprise contribute to success, you come up with the idea of fostering a cultural milieu among black people that  devalues and dismisses those things, and tags black people who display them as pathetic, contemptible copies of whites. Since you certainly do not want black people feeling self confident and able to deal with life, you think of ways to inculcate  a sense of weakness, despair, radical separateness, and victimhood among them and make as many as possible helpless wards of the state. Finally, as the last thing you want is harmony between whites and blacks, you plan to encourage black people to resent and hate whites, to offend their sense of fairness by demanding and getting quotas and special favors from the government, and to display behaviors and attitudes tending to confirm white people’s worst stereotypes of blacks.  Along these last lines, if you were perverse enough, you might even invent hip hop.  

Of course this is only a mental exercise.   No real Klansman, no matter how much he hated black people, would have had the power to do those things.  Yet they all happened, and the country is worse off for them. One has to wonder why. It was not inevitable.  People working for civil rights in the 1950’s and early 1960’s did not expect these things, nor did trends at the time suggest them. Politicians and bureaucrats, opinion makers in the  traditional media and entertainment companies, so-called civil rights leaders, teachers and administrators in government schools, and others made these things happen with their decisions and actions.

The usual explanation is that this was an unintended consequence of well intentioned efforts or at worst the result of simple blunders and venal politics. Those explanations  certainly would have been true in many cases. Yet the effects have been so obviously pernicious, and  there have been so few attempts to change direction and make corrections  that a person has to wonder if that is  the whole story.  It is fair to ask if all the powerful and influential people who contributed to creating the present situation did  so innocently or inadvertently or if some were motivated by anti-American malice or a need to maintain a large, politically  reliable underclass.