March 29, 2022

A concise and complete explanation of why black plight exists.

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A concise and complete explanation of why black plight exists.

Contrary to solving any problems, CRT is poised to increase racial tensions to the point of breaking.

Neil Mammen

We hear the cry, “blacks are underrepresented, blacks are under educated, blacks are not able to compete economically, blacks need special privileges to compete in colleges, they need to be guaranteed entry. Blacks are not competent enough to procure an ID for voting. We need racial equity. Corporate board rooms need to have a minimum number of blacks, we need a quota.

The along comes BLM and ‘wokeism’, they demand “Inclusion inclusion inclusion. We need Critical Race Theory to equalize the suppression of blacks over the years. Everyone white is a racist and are suppressing blacks. We have to pay past discrimination with future discrimination (says Ibram Kendi who charges universities $55K for an hour speech – never mind the irony that supposedly racist white folks have no qualms in paying a black person 366,600% of the current minimum wage per hour). America is racist, so let’s burn down black owned businesses.

But none of these proposed solutions are going to solve the problem. In fact, if anything, they are all guaranteed to make the problem worse.

Contrary to solving any problems, CRT is poised to increase racial tensions to the point of breaking. History has rare occasions if any, where a minority was able to internally overthrow a majority and maintain power without external help and that too, it was never against a force where the citizens were well armed and agitated. And if that power is ever gained it would only be maintained at the price of continued fascism and a continued shedding of the blood of innocents. Which means all those who are not worshiping the leader, dies. The end game may well be destruction in this case. The solutions they provide will cause more pain and suffering for the black community.

But, what is black plight, does it really exist and if it does why does it exist? Is it because of Racism?

Let’s first address if it exists. This is an important question because we are often asked by those who are more liberty minded: Why does EBLM focus on Blacks? Why not focus on everyone equally? Some say, “Post Civil Rights, blacks should just get on with it, it they aren’t taking advantage of their freedoms it’s their own fault.

So let’s address this.

Black plight is real

Today African Americans suffer from the following:
1. Their inner cities are plagued with gangs, drugs and violence.

  1. Their proficient literacy rate is at 17%1.
  2. The African American median income $45,870 is the lowest in the USA . $67,521 is themedian for all. Note this is not the lowest income for all blacks. Africans like those fromNigeria and Ghana are actually above the Median at $69,00, Indians are at $127,0002.
  3. 64% of all blacks are born in a house with no father in the home and the out of wedlockbirth rates is 72% 3
  4. Their home ownership is 43.4%4 (compared the US home ownership at 65.5%).
  5. Though they are only 13% of the population they consist of 38% of the prison populationand commit 53% of all homicides in America (most victims are black).5
  6. The African American abortion rate is the highest for any ethnic group, 27.1 per 1000. It’sonly 10 per 1000 for whites and 18.1 per 1000 for Hispanics.6

It is very clear that African Americans today have been disproportionately affected.

Now comes the important question: Is this all due to discrimination? Or are blacks so discriminated against or scarred from the slavery of their ancestors that they are unable to buck the system and overcome adversity to ever find equity with whites? That is indeed what many progressives and BLM claim.

Two Control Groups

To study this carefully, we will first look at two “control groups” of sorts. If discrimination due to color is the cause of the economic plight of African Americans, then anybody who is black should suffer from the same disproportionate plight. But a study of the median income by ethnicity tells us that Ghanaian and Nigerian Americans have incomes well above the median in the US and in fact well above the white median in the US.7 What are black Ghanaians and Nigerians doing that the descendants of American slaves are not doing. I have yet to debate someone who can explain this while holding to discrimination being the cause of black plight. Worse as far as racism, dark skinned Indians and Taiwanese have the highest median income in the US. The first time a white ethnicity shows up it’s the Australians who are #3. How is it that brown Indians and Taiwanese are prospering so greatly in a racist society? Maybe it’s because America is not racist and there are other reasons for the plight of African Americans.

1 https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ndecore/xplore/NDE look up black students and their proficiency rate.
2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_household_income andhttps://www.census.gov/library/publications/2021/demo/p60-273.html Note some may claim that the immigrants from Africa came with money and resources but once here, why did they not fall victim to the supposed racial bias in the work places. This is also simply not true. As an immigrant myself, I came to the US with enough money for 1 semester of out of state college tuition and 1 suitcase, I was also not eligible for any government assistance at any point.

3 https://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/107-children-in-single-parent-families-by- race#detailed/1/any/false/1729,37,871,870,573,869,36,868,867,133/10,11,9,12,1,185,13/432,431
4 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BOAAAHORUSQ156N
5 https://www.prisonpolicy.org/research/race_and_ethnicity/
6 https://www.guttmacher.org/infographic/2017/abortion-rates-race-and-ethnicity
7 “S0201 Selected Population Profile In The United States”. U.S. Census. United States Census Bureau. Retrieved 2021-12-12.

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Discrimination is not the cause of today’s black plight

Let’s look at a second control group. African Americans themselves. Not today’s African Americans, but those who lived in the 1930’s. In the 1930’s despite rampant racism and Jim Crow laws, black out of wedlock births were low, there was minimal drugs and violence in their communities (except when the racists would burn down their communities and lynch black people). And their literacy rates were around 70%8 and since there was no welfare, nobody was on it. Employment rates were very high. I know you are thinking “Yeah but as maids and cooks.” True many were maids and cooks, but far more were builders and carpenters and farm workers and entrepreneurs, lawyer, store owners and bankers to the black community and so on and so forth. I had the great honor to interview Clarence Henderson, one of the young black men who were at the counter strike in Woolworths in 1962.9 Clarence said in effect, that they a thriving prosperous community, with lawyers, bankers, butchers, and dentists, and there were minimal fatherless homes.

Then there were black millionaires like Madam CJ Walker (Sarah Breedlove) who also has the honor of being the first female millionaire of any ethnicity10 and Archie Givens. They also had a black Wall Street until it was burned down by racists in 1921. The description is quite interesting:

The average income of black families in the area exceeded “what minimum wage is today.” As a result of segregation, a “dollar circulated 36 to 100 times” and remained in Greenwood “almost a year before leaving.” Even more impressive, at that time, the “state of Oklahoma had only two airports,” yet “six black families owned their own planes.”….This “modern, majestic, sophisticated, and unapologetically black” community boasted of “banks, hotels, cafés, clothiers, movie theaters, and contemporary homes.” Not to mention luxuries, such as “indoor plumbing and a remarkable school system that superiorly educated black children” 11

This entire way of life was destroyed by racists with kerosene and/or nitroglycerin. I don’t need to tell you which party those racists belonged to. So, despite rampant racism it wasn’t until the racists engaged physically to destroy black prosperity that they were they able to hurt these prosperous self-sustained communities. Note I’m not advocating that blacks go back to an isolated community, but I show this just to show they don’t need white approval or benefits from whites to be prosperous. But I do plan to show how benefits from whites can hurt blacks.

Now let’s fast forward, past the Civil Rights Act

The Civil Rights Act should have freed blacks to prosper equally but it seems like it didn’t. In fact 20 years later, they seemed worse off than the 1930’s. And after a brief period of time, we started to see a gradual building increase in black plight instead of a decrease.

8 “According to a new five-volume compilation called Historical Statistics, the percentage of former slaves who said they couldn’t read or write plummeted after emancipation. Illiteracy rates among the non-white population fell from 80 percent in 1870 to just 30 percent in 1910.” www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5189912
9 https://fdfnc.site/index.php/leadership/

10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madam_C._J._Walker
11 https://daily.jstor.org/the-devastation-of-black-wall-street/

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So why did black plight grow in the 70’s. Did continued post Civil Rights discrimination lead to violence to black plight to gangs to low literacy to low incomes? Or is there another factor.

Let’s look at this other factor

Let me suggest what our studies show. Our research shows that it was actually socialistic policies pushed by progressives onto the US that caused black plight. It was specifically a policy within welfare. A policy that said if there was a man in the home the woman would get less money. If the government rewards women for kicking men out of their homes, you’ll get more fatherless homes. And we did to the tune of 64%.

Now you may argue, but this policy was effective for all poor people, why did it affect blacks so much? True, the policy has decimated many many families both blacks and whites, but when these policies were enacted, first, a higher proportion of blacks were poor (not a higher number, but a higher proportion) and second, then Democrat President Lyndon Johnson (who signed the Civil Rights Act) knowing that blacks had always voted Republican, realized that as more and more blacks gained their independence through the Civil Rights Act, there would be no way to win elections in the south. So he wooed the black community by ensuring that blacks were receiving the handouts that he had legislated in the “New Deal.” In fact, I have personal testimony that black wives were told to “hide their husband’s shoes” and lie about being married so that when the Social Worker came by the would be no traces of a man in the house. They were encouraged and brow beaten to divorce or chase out their husbands by social workers. They were wooed with how much more money they could have gotten.12 And when their husbands lost their jobs or a recession hit, the Social Worker was there to tell them to dump him. As we can tragically see statistically, they did. Fatherlessness went from 24% in the 60’s to 64% today.

So, while poor whites were hurt by these bad policies, the black community was disproportionally targeted. Because the ruling party in an effort to ensure that blacks started voting for them went out of their way to target and enroll blacks all over the country so even those on their way to independence were seduced by the free money. I would claim that that party is still doing that today.

It was bad socialistic public policies that lead to violence to black plight to gangs which led to back to discrimination
The reality is that insidious socialistic public policies have been the major cause of black plight. These socialistic policies have chased the father out of the home, resulting in 64% of all black kids growing up without fathers in the home. Fatherless homes have led to poverty, drugs and alcohol abuse, physical and emotional health problems, gangs, crime, and violence in their communities, in their streets, and in their school and increased sexual activity and teen pregnancy.13 As we noted before and worth mentioning again, the literacy rate is now about 17% but was 70% before the Civil Rights Act and at the height of Jim Crow and segregation and discrimination. So, how can discrimination be the cause of the literacy rate going down?

12 Personal conversation with B. Holder on 3/22/22
13 https://fathers.com/statistics-and-research/the-consequences-of-fatherlessness/

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In the 1930’s if you walked through a black community, they may have been poor and discriminated against, but you’d have seen fathers playing with their sons, teaching their sons, working on their yards, having barbecues, shopping, wearing fine suits and dresses. Walking with their daughters, sitting on their porches. Today you never see that. If you walk through an inner- city black community, you see barred windows and doors. Nobody is outside except for maybe a few gang members.

Yet, if anyone was to even suggest reversing these destructive socialistic programs, reducing welfare, or changing welfare in substantial ways, those who suffer under it will complain that you are reducing their welfare because of racism. In a manipulative tactic, those who want to keep the black community weak and broken and dependent would also join in to call you a racist. When in actual fact, that welfare and its government-mandated rules are precisely what caused the problem and are keeping the blacks in a state of dependence and lack.

Let’s summarize

Here’s what we are saying in a nutshell: Post Civil Rights, it wasn’t discrimination that caused the violence and the gangs and the low literacy rate and the perception that young black men were dangerous illiterate drug users but rather it was the socialistic welfare policies that caused the violence and the gangs and the low literacy rate. That in turn caused the perception that young black men were dangerous, violent, illiterate and drug users. And that in turn created discrimination. We’d come a full circle.

Note too discrimination post-Civil War and pre-Civil Rights Act, while horrible, did not destroy 64% of black families and suppress a majority of the black communities as effectively as the government did with its bad policies. If you hated blacks and wanted to destroy them, you could think of no better method to do so than to introduce socialistic policies to them. Add to that the black genocide that has been created by putting 79% of all Planned Parenthood clinics in black communities and then have the government pay for those abortions14. Abortions which mind you have killed over 30% of all blacks who would have otherwise been alive today. So put that together with socialistic policies and you have the making of a master plan to eliminate black people and worse it is being done insidiously with their blind and tacit permission.

Now don’t misunderstand our goals, while welfare has caused major problems, we can’t eliminate it overnight, people who do not have the skills to survive will suffer. We have to gently and carefully change the policy until the problem no longer exists. But that is not happening. At Every Black Life Matters we have a gradual path to get there, and Free Markets and School Vouchers and Fatherhood initiatives are the ramp to freedom. We at EBLM realize that we have to work within the current parameters of the existing government charity so we believe that we need to devise a system that will reduce government charity in the long term though it may encourage more expenditure now. But this is only because of the current thought process of the left.

So, if you ask people their views of why this is happening, it may be interesting, but it may not be true. Truth is not based on feelings, or on desires but on facts. If we are going to fix these problems, we need to address the actual causes of the problem, not the perceived view of the problem.

14 https://www.protectingblacklife.org/pp_targets/index.html

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Moreover, the disciplinarian is always going to be unpopular. Telling someone that they are going to have to wean themselves off the public trough and develop themselves into independence is always going to be unpopular.

But guess what, if what we say is true, it’s the only solution. Otherwise, in 20 years, we’ll have tried to fight the discrimination problem rather than the root cause of the discrimination problem. We’ll have unjustly blamed people from other ethnic backgrounds for being the cause and the problems and the inner cities will only have grown worse, and more blacks will be suffering.

But here’s what could eclipse all that, some folks with European ancestries will grow tired of being blamed and create counter groups to fight blacks and that is something that won’t end well for any of us that are not white. Today’s current false solutions will actually be the cause of tomorrow’s problems.

Let’s work towards real solutions and stop the insidious spiral of doom. In a later essay we will address the solution to all of these problems.

Neil Mammen Co-Founder, EVP
Every Black Life Matters

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Neil Mammen
About the Author
Neil Mammen
Neil Mammen, Founder of Values Advocacy Council, Co-Founder of Every Black Life Matters A non-hyphenated first generation American immigrant, an Engineer during the day and an Apologist at night. As an engineer, he spends his time designing video and networking systems, computer chips and boards with TentmakerSystems.com and other US and international engineering companies.. Neil was born in Ghana and grew up in Sudan and Yemen.