Even after 52 years of legislated equality, African-Americans like to throw their struggle in our faces with the words, “Walk a mile in my shoes.”
And an African-American did that on the timeline of one of my Facebook friends today, in the process of calling Dr. Ben Carson a token.
Back in the 1990’s, I heard that phrase a lot from my African-American boss. Who, at that time, had lived half her life since the Civil Rights Act was passed. In her defense, she was from Muncie, Indiana, which, like Kokomo, wasn’t exactly known as a Klan-free environment, even in the 1990’s.
But the phrase strikes me as disingenuous. Historical research suggests that the black family in America was a lot better off before the Civil Rights Act than after, regardless of segregation issues (and of course, schools were famously desegregated in 1954 by federal fiat). The Great Society of LBJ did finally end up turning blacks to the Democrat side, when for nearly a century they had been, by and large, staunch Republicans.* But what blacks didn’t know at the time was what destruction the Great Society would wreak on them, both as individuals and as families.
Yet even after that destruction had become baldly apparent, African-Americans continued to vote for Democrats and the “free” handouts they promised (otherwise known as “entitlements”). All of which were paid for by the people who actually paid taxes, like my mother and father, and later myself. Thousands of dollars (from our standpoint; billions, in total) hoovered out of the wallets of white folks like us whose families had nothing to do with the discrimination blacks had faced since the end of slavery; whose families had never held slaves, either because we were Northerners who didn’t need slaves to make our crop (and who found the entire institution of slavery abhorrent), or because our families were newcomers to these shores long after the entire slavery question was decided (and who faced our own brand of discrimination because we dressed funny and didn’t speak English and weren’t WASPs).
The problem was, the entire War on Poverty waged as part of the Great Society simply spent billions of dollars of taxpayer money for nothing. Well, OK, not nothing. It bulldozed middling-poor neighborhoods full of perfectly good homes to build concrete high-rise “projects” that became little more than warehouses for single black mothers and their broods of multi-fathered children, it engendered the epidemic drug abuse problem we have been fighting alongside it for fifty years, it fostered crime among young black males who dropped out of lousy schools and could not find jobs, and it created slums worse than the ghetto it had replaced.
And blacks kept voting for the Great Society and the War on Poverty, election after election. They’re still voting for it, even now, when it’s clear that the Great Society has been little more than a 22-trillion-dollar failure. But that’s OK — they’re not paying for it.
I am. My wife is. My sister and her husband are. My mother and step-father are. My in-laws, my cousins, my friends — every one I know who pays taxes is still pouring billions of dollars annually that super-massive singularity** of failure. Some of it is our actual tax money. Most of it is probably borrowed from the Chinese. It’s creating a debt that will take centuries to pay off, if in fact it ever is.
And blacks still make noise about “reparations” for slavery. “Walk a mile in my shoes.”
Dude, guess what. Don’t you even dare tell me I need to walk in your shoes until you walk in MY shoes, and see with MY eyes, what a horror has been perpetrated*** on your people at the expense of mine,
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* Remember, it was Democrats who a) were pro-slavery, b) started the Civil War and were responsible for the destruction of the South, c) were responsible for Jim Crow, and d) opposed the Civil Rights Act in the first place.
** I was going to write “black hole” but reconsidered.
*** I had originally written “perpetuated”, and posted it that way. Not so sure if that was a genuine typo or if it was a Freudian slip.