Maggie's Farm

The statistics are accurate. It is the reasoning that is bogus. You do a good job of analyzing the bogus reasoning. As you point out, it is absurd to cry "white privilege" when one ignores the issue of black responsibility for those behaviors.

As if it were the KKK which is forcing blacks to have unwed children!

During Jim Crow, the disparity between black and white unemployment was much less. How could that be? After all, if there was a time in the last hundred years where there was white privilege, that was it!

In addition, during Jim Crow, the disparity between black and white illegitimacy rates was much less than it is now.

In defense of blacks, a lot of the increase in the black illegitimacy rates since the 1950 came from the gummint increasing welfare rolls, while requiring that there be no "man in the house" in order to receive that blessed gummint money. This is a case of liberal good intentions leading to bad consequences.

Link correction: Surber: Ferguson is about white guilt. A quotation follows.

I never think about race or prejudice or discrimination until and unless I see it on the news. But my black friends and relatives think about it all the time.

As, I see it, a big reason why blacks think about race all the time- or much more than whites- is that they are in the minority. Why do I say that?

I worked in Trinidad for a some months. I found myself constantly categorizing people- Black, Indian, Oriental, White, mixed. After a while I got tired of my categorizing. I certainly categorized more than when I was in white minority Trinidad than when I was in white majority USA.
I suspected in Trinidad that while blacks were outwardly polite, in their heart of hearts thought otherwise about me. One time an old black woman called me a "white MF C###" for wearing shorts- in a country where a substantial proportion of the adult male population wore shorts. The people I worked with were friendly. The old lady- whom bystanders informed me was drunk- was the exception.

I decided that I didn't care what people thought of me, as long as they were polite. After that I was more comfortable.

When I left Trinidad, I sat on the plane next to a black Trini who was a MBA student at USC. He understood what I was saying about being in a minority. As he put it, "the shoe is on the other foot."

From my experience,there is something to being in the minority.

Yet in all my years as a tourist and worker in Hispanic America, I felt discomfort about being in a racial minority only once- and that discomfort went away. In the Peruvian mountain town of Huaras, I got called "gringo..gringo..gringo." It got on my nerves, but as I stated, my discomfort went away.

Why? Because they were very open. Such as the child who came up to me and said that he was blessed because God had wanted him to be born.

The women especially, were very jocular. I like joking around and quickly got used to their joking. When someone on a bus told me that there were bad people in the mountains where I would be hiking solo, who would rob me etc., I laughed. They're just like you, I said. [This was before the time of Sendero,when there really were bad people in the mountains.] I saw very few people on my 5 day hike, One peasant/herder invited me to share his hut, which I did. I also shared some of my food.

Some in Huaras wanted to teach me Quechua. I took them up on the offer. That was endearing. You have come here gringo, to see our mountains, but learn something about us. Decades later, I still remember some Quechua.