"A half-century after his death, Martin Luther King, Jr. is as revered as ever. But have we been following his example, or merely paying lip service to his ideas? Jason Riley, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, weighs in."
"A half-century after his death, Martin Luther King, Jr. is as revered as ever. But have we been following his example, or merely paying lip service to his ideas? Jason Riley, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, weighs in."
Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler
Marcus Aurelius (01-21-2019)
MLK is not one of the most revered persons in american history, and civil rights IS a racket.
And so it goes.
Safety (01-15-2019)
Captdon (01-21-2019)
Captdon (01-21-2019)
This is an excellent video discussing the modern-day black "ghetto culture" as I call it. I lived in the midst of that culture (in an inner-city neighborhood) for two years, and I can vouch for the veracity of the analysis by personal experience. I'm bumping this thread for MLK day - it's worth having a discussion of where black people have gone right in our society, and where they've gone wrong.
Thomas Sowell refers to it as the "Black Redneck" culture...
Chris (01-21-2019)
This might be long but worth it. As liberals see it inequality is all a matter of economics and how to redistribute wealth to level the playing field. But what if it's actually about social capital, the various associations that make up community, from family to faith to work to other interests that bind us together?
Different Races, Same Boat
Toward the end of his life, Martin Luther King Jr. turned his attention from an exclusive focus on racial justice to unequal opportunity more generally. The United States was “a nation gorged on money,” he wrote, “while millions of its citizens are denied a good education, adequate health services, decent housing, meaningful employment, and even respect, and are then told to be responsible.” He specifically blamed federal policymakers for “subsidies of the rich and unemployment and underemployment of the poor.”
...Does economic inequality depend on individuals’ good and bad choices, or on the social circumstances in which individuals make those decisions?
...Certainly, conservatives should affirm the moral agency of the individual. But we must also recognize the ways in which social conditions, history, and policies make the exercise of personal responsibility more or less difficult.
King was right that “a productive and happy life is not something you find, it is something you make.” But you make it with other people. Supportive relationships and institutions do a great deal to facilitate opportunity.
...For two years the Social Capital Project of the Joint Economic Committee has studied the health of families, communities, and civil society, documenting changes in social capital over time and its uneven geographic distribution across the country. One striking finding from the project was that ten of the eleven states with the lowest social capital — as measured by an index we created — and 17 of the bottom 20 fall within a continuous bloc running across the southern part of the country.
...One of the seven components of our Social Capital Index measures the prevalence of marriage and intact families in a given area (the darker the blue, the worse the score). We then overlaid our county-level map of this “family unity” index with a map depicting the share of those counties’ 1860 population that was enslaved (the more red dots, the higher the proportion of slaves). Here’s what we found:
...The institution of slavery stole agency from African Americans, for generations. Families were regularly split up, with children torn from their parents and spouses from each other. Black women were often sexually assaulted by their “owners.” Husbands and fathers were prohibited from exercising the authority that men at the time were supposed to wield. They were neither breadwinners nor protectors but were instead subjected to violent humiliation and abuse at the hands of the privileged few who profited from the arrangement.
...But policies less extreme than slavery can also weaken social capital and lead people to act in ways that impede their success. For it is not just African Americans in the Southeast who have low social capital: This was an explicit theme in Carlson’s monologue, and it was an implicit factor behind Donald Trump’s 2016 victory.
President Trump won all eleven of the low-social-capital states east of Texas. Around 15 to 25 percent of whites in these states identify their ancestry as “American.” This group is overwhelmingly composed of southern whites, and it ranks below nearly all ancestry groups in terms of median household income. Nationally, the correlation across states and counties between low social capital and the share of the population that identifies as “American” is stronger than it is for all but a few of the major ancestry groups.
...Martin Luther King insisted that, in expanding opportunity for blacks, we would also be “rescuing a large stratum of the forgotten white poor.”
He was right then, and he may be even more right today.
As King put it, “we may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now.”
Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler
Correct answer is to ship them back, as Lincoln advocated. Problem solved forever....The institution of slavery stole agency from African Americans, for generations. Families were regularly split up, with children torn from their parents and spouses from each other. Black women were often sexually assaulted by their “owners.” Husbands and fathers were prohibited from exercising the authority that men at the time were supposed to wield. They were neither breadwinners nor protectors but were instead subjected to violent humiliation and abuse at the hands of the privileged few who profited from the arrangement.
Well, you are largely inaccurate, as I understand it, so that's deferral of the correct answer ... yet again ...
It was slavery that kept black families together. It has been liberal, progressive politics that has broken them up and caused chaos, not only in the black community but in the entire country, especially in the last 70 years.
In proper light, MLK Jr was nothing more than an anarchist -- an agent of Satan, sorry.
Last edited by Lummy; 01-21-2019 at 07:47 PM.