Your Black Bloggers The official gathering spot for black bloggers
According to the Wall Street Journal’s Jason Riley, blacks were doing a lot better back in the days when lynchings were common.
In a column on Tuesday, Riley — a member of the newspaper’s editorial board and fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute — argues that liberals were secretly delighted about the University of Oklahoma frat brothers’ racist chants because it allows them to blame racism for the problems facing blacks. The incident offers Riley an excuse to parrot one of conservatives’ favorite memes: that the welfare state is a giant plantation liberals use to keep blacks down.
Citing statistics showing the rise of the black middle class in the post-World War II period, Riley concludes that things were a lot better for blacks before the Civil Rights era:
History shows that faster black progress was occurring at a time when whites were still lynching blacks, not merely singing about it. Liberals want blacks to ignore the lessons of this pre-Civil Rights era, which threaten the current relevance of groups like the NAACP and call into question the Democratic Party’s belief that there is a federal solution to every black problem.
Any sentence that starts “history shows …” should be your cue that the author is about to make an exaggerated, underinformed generalization, which is certainly true in this case. For starters, it wasn’t just blacks that rose into the middle class in the post-war period; it was everyone.
