I am sure that according to the Chinese New Year we aren't living in the Year of the Idiot. But if you read the news you wouldn't believe it.
So the black welfare queen meme starts with Reagan. Reagan's Republican Party is trying to figure out a way to neuter strong support for welfare policies in general. Charles Murray (who later argues that blacks are genetically inferior to whites in The Bell Curve) makes an argument in Losing Ground that poverty policies actually increase poverty rather than hurt it. The urban poor have more kids to actually increase their welfare checks. When this idea is attached specifically to images of black women, the deal is pretty much done. By the mid nineties, you could give two groups of white Americans the exact same story about welfare, manipulate the race of the victim, and the groups would exhibit support for two very different policy preferences.
Now back to Murray real quick. The central argument is that women are making a rational decision to have more kids in order to make more money. The logic here is straightforward....unless you are a parent. Or someone who studies birthing trends. Or someone who studies migration trends. Or someone who believes that the poor are not much different than the rest of us. Or someone who believes that black people aren't deviant.
You believe any one of those propositions...and the argument crumbles on its face.
Now what the hell does the decision to cut the NSF budget have to do with welfare?
Three words--reality based community.
The conservatives do not believe that knowledge can be gained by scientific endeavor.
No. This is not quite right.
By their DEEDS, the Republican conservatives running the government don't believe that knowledge can be gained by scientific endeavor. In as much as they were able to change the way that folks think about welfare without science the first, what is happening with NSF is part of a larger plan to make the US a third world state.
Posted by at December 31, 2004 12:43 PM | TrackBackNational Science Foundation.
Posted by: P6 at December 31, 2004 06:59 PMSpence,
*Science* also shows that the lack of managerial/professional class black denizens in the hood, collective moral/legal cynicism/ and lack of immigrant culture within the hood are statistically meaningful factors in the demise of black communities.
It's like a quote from Muhammad Ali in this peculiar op/ed-umentary on the first half of his career that I've watched a couple times on cable called AKA Cassius Clay. I love boxing. The piece is interesting to me because not only does Ali explain the "phantom" punch that KO'd Sonny Liston, this 1970 piece has a treatment of Muhammad as a Muslim and whether he would become a leader like Malcolm X. The telling quote from this joint was when in a speech he gave, Muhammad talked about the emergence of slum conditions in the black community and he talked very precisely about blacks moving out of the hood and "imposing themselves" on whites. He went on to say that the emergence of slums is a condition that is "in us", as in "we weren't put in slums, the slum conditions are in us". (anecdotal note from boyhood, I don't recall Muhammad or any of his sequence of lovely wives -profiled in the Ebony magazines I religiously scoured - at their lovely estates - living in and serving as social *guardians* in the hood either)
As I reflect on your and Earl's harshnings on George Will as the trifling propagandist that he is, and, note the fact that propagandists and science don't mix, I'm still left wondering at the increasingly obvious conclusion that existing data bear out. Namely, that in the American culture in which commerce is behavioural driver numero uno, is it useful to continue including race as a factor in the project of reality based improvement of black communities? Something other than race is at the root of poverty, violence, and a host of social ills plaguing po folk (black and white) all around.
By the plan for making the US a third world state are you referring to anything other than the collapsing of the middle class?
Posted by: cnulan at January 1, 2005 11:33 AMis it useful to continue including race as a factor in the project of reality based improvement of black communities? Something other than race is at the root of poverty, violence, and a host of social ills plaguing po folk (black and white) all around.
That is Glen Lourey's position, one I find has strong merit.
as a slightly ironic aside, the Greek term "idiotes" that appears quite often in the New Testament has an entirely different meaning than the one I'd wager you had in mind with this post/thread. I'm still grinding away at my thesis about whether the segregated black community had unintended synodial characteristics which post-integration were lost. I talked with my wife about it at length last night and her take on it was that once the professional/managerial classes left the hood, the game was over. She saw no need to look much more deeply than that, I'm not fully convinced that's the whole story, but realize I have a biased axe to grind and may be struggling through my peculiar bias rather than dealing with the question(s) objectively.
Posted by: cnulan at January 1, 2005 01:33 PMInterestingly, Glenn Loury is not alone in that pov.
Posted by: cnulan at January 1, 2005 01:38 PM
NSF is?
Posted by: EBrown at December 31, 2004 02:36 PM