Sowell: Stop and think about what our politicians are saying

Politics produces lots of words that can mean very different things, if you stop and think about them. But politicians depend on the fact that many people don’t bother to stop and think.

We often hear that various problems within the black community are “a legacy of slavery.” That phrase is in widespread use among people who believe in the kinds of welfare state programs that began to dominate policies in the 1960s. Blaming social problems today on “a legacy of slavery” is another way of saying, “Don’t blame welfare state policies for things that got worse after those policies took over. Blame what happened in earlier centuries.”

Nobody would accept that kind of cop-out if it were expressed that way. But that is why it is expressed as a “legacy of slavery.” If we were being serious, instead of being political, we could look at the facts. Were the kinds of problems we are concerned about in black communities today as bad during the first century after slavery or in the first generation after the vastly expanded welfare state?

What about children being raised with no father in the home? As of 1960, nearly a century after slavery ended, 22 percent of black children were being raised in single-parent families. Thirty years later, 67 percent of all black children were being raised in single-parent families.

What about violence? As of 1960, homicide rates among non-white males had gone down by 22 percent during the preceding decade. But, during the decade of the 1960s, that trend suddenly reversed, and the homicide rate shot up by 76 percent.

‘Disparate impact’

The welfare state vision was often part of a larger, non-judgmental social vision that was lenient on criminals and hard on the police. Few people today know that marriage rates and rates of labor force participation were once higher among blacks than among whites — all of this during the first century after slavery. In later years, a reversal occurred, largely in the wake of the welfare state expansions that began in the 1960s.

Another fashionable phrase that evades any need for evidence is “disparate impact.” Whenever there is some standard for being hired, promoted or admitted to a college, some groups may meet that standard more so than others. One way of expressing that is to say that more of the people from group X meet the standard than do people from group Y.

But politically correct people express the same thing by saying that the standard has a “disparate impact” on group Y. Once it is expressed this way, it is the standard that is suspect — and whoever set that standard has to prove a negative, namely that he is not guilty of discrimination against group Y. Often nobody can prove anything, so the accused loses — or else settles out of court.

Stupid? No. It takes very clever people to make something like that sound plausible. But it also requires people who don’t bother to stop and think, who enable them to get away with it.