Source: Center for a Stateless Society
by Kevin Carson
“The right-wing talking point that Black poverty is the result, not of historic injustice, but of ‘Black culture’ — and particularly the effect of Great Society welfare programs on Black culture — dates almost as far back as the Great Society itself. … In fact, as Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward showed in their radical history of the welfare state, Regulating the Poor, while the rise in urban Black crime and poverty in the postwar period was associated with family disintegration, the causality was entirely different from what Sowell and Stossel imply. The rise in fatherless households was ultimately an outgrowth of powerlessness and economic exploitation. The primary driver of family disintegration and unemployment was actually Black sharecroppers mass-migrating to northern cities after they were tractored off their land by white landowners.” (03/25/25)