Sixties to Superdome
John McWhorter at Times Online draws connections from the 1960s to the Superdome Scandal.
In 1966, however, a group of white academics in New York developed a plan to bring as many people onto the welfare rolls as possible. Across the country, poor blacks especially were taught to apply for living on the dole even when they had been working for a living, and by 1970 there were 169% more people on welfare nationwide than in 1960.
This was the first time that whites or blacks had taught black people not to work as a form of civil rights. Politicians and bureaucrats jumped on the new opportunity for political patronage and votes, and welfare quickly became a programme that essentially paid young women to have children.
Only in 1996 was welfare limited to five years and focused on training for work. But by then generations of poor blacks had grown up in neighbourhoods where there was no requirement that fathers support their children. Few grew up watching their primary parent work for a living. Most people paid nominal subsidies as rent and were thus less inclined to treat their living spaces well.
The multigenerational welfare family with grandmothers in their forties became typical: young women had babies in their teens because there was no reason not to with welfare waiting to pick up the tab.
This is the hell that most of the people in the Superdome either lived in or knew at close hand, and none of them could help being stamped by it. Welfare reform was only nine years ago. The women now past the five-year cap are mostly struggling in dead-end jobs. This is better than living on the dole. But these women are weighed down by too many kids created under the old regime to have the time or energy to get the education to get beyond where they are. Poor black neighbourhoods are not what they were at the height of the crack epidemic in the 1980s, but they are still a crying shame.
The poor black America that welfare expansion created in 1966 is still with us. Poor young blacks have never known anything else. People as old as 50 have only vague memories of life before it. For 30 years this was a world within a world, as is made clear from how often the Katrina refugees mention it is the first time they have ever left New Orleans.
What Katrina stripped bare, then, was not white supremacy, but that culture matters – even if what created the culture was misguided white benevolence. Social scientists neglect that before the 1960s poor blacks knew plenty of economic downturns and plenty more racism.
But before the 1960s the kinds of behaviour so common among the blacks stranded in the Superdome, possibly including multiple rapes, was a fringe phenomenon. Only after the 1960s did it become a community norm.
