What have we done?

Sometimes you come across statistics that make you stand back, shake your head and wonder: “How can that be?” So it was last week when perusing a Kevin Williamson piece in National Review Online with the title “A Shocking Number.”

The shocking, jaw-dropping number for Williamson was $4,995, which is, according to census data, the average net household worth of black families in America.

That number happens to be less than 5 percent of the median net worth for white families ($110,729) and even less than the net worth of the average family in India (the same India with all those starving children that Mom used to remind us of so we would clean our plates).

It gets still worse. Under the apartheid regime in South Africa, black South Africans had a median net worth 6.8 percent that of white South Africans, and were thus relatively better off financially vis-à-vis whites than blacks now are in the U.S. It is thus quite possible that no minority group in any country has a worse financial status in relation to their countrymen than black Americans do today.

Nearly 50 years on from the initiation of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, Williamson notes that “black Americans still have a median household net worth of less than half the price of a 2011 Ford Fiesta with 28,000 miles on it.”

However you spin it, from whatever side of the partisan divide, we should all be able to admit that this is an unmitigated disaster for both black America and America as a whole.

And it isn’t just the dismal networth figures. It is also the absurdly high violent-crime rates for young black males, the chronic educational failure within the black community, and beneath everything else, and almost certainly the primary causal driver, a black illegitimacy rate that is now approaching 75 percent. “Baby mamas” aren’t outliers anymore, they are the black norm.

Within this tragic context, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that as a nation we took one step forward with the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act and then two steps backward with a Great Society that turned most of black America into a dependent class with no long-term economic or social prospects, an underclass which has since then become more entrenched and afflicted by every conceivable social pathology that can be passed down in more widespread form from one generation to the next. As Williamson puts it, “Twice the unemployment, twice the high school dropouts, four times the abortions, four times the HIV, seven times the prison sentences, 12 times the babies born with congenital syphilis, 14 times the murder victims, and 19 times the gonorrhea.”

That, in a nutshell, is the status of the black community in the second decade of the 21st Century. We might have elected our first black president, but he and his family are about as unrepresentative of the rest of black America as can be (and in office he has offered up nothing but more of the same as a solution to its problems, thereby ensuring that they will only get worse).

At the root of all this can be found perverse incentive structures. Just as the dramatic expansion of the welfare state that occurred in the 1960s has snared much of black America in a cycle of illegitimacy and poverty, so too has the political message transmitted from fake civil-rights leaders like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, aided and abetted along the way by white liberal guilt, worked to make matters worse.

The central theme of the civil-rights movement in recent decades has destructively switched from integration within a color-blind society to an emphasis on helplessness and victimhood in the face of allegedly entrenched white racism. This has been the worst possible message to convey to people, even to genuine victims, because it prevents them from even trying. Far easier to simply give up and accept a place, generation after generation, on the liberal racial plantation, otherwise known as the modern welfare state.

The entrenchment of affirmative action and racial preferences has compounded these tendencies by virtue of the underlying assumption that black Americans can’t achieve anything without special help from white liberals. The smothering effects of political correctness, the strictures of which are vigilantly controlled by the liberal left, have then prevented anyone from discussing these problems for fear of being called racist.

How utterly strange that the Democratic Party of segregation and Jim Crow has now become the Democratic Party administering that new liberal plantation, and that upwards of 90 percent of black voters, the same folks suffering from poverty, joblessness, crime, etc., routinely give their votes to it. As Williamson sadly notes, “Everywhere it has been tried, the Democrats’ dependency agenda has been a social and economic catastrophe for black Americans—and a full-employment program for Democratic apparatchiks.”

So by all means, let’s finally have that national dialogue on race, beginning with the key question: What has been worse for black Americans in recent decades, racism or liberalism?