Nicholas Kristof Wields Occam’s Butterknife On "Race In America"

08/30/2014

NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof is a little peeved that he got some pushback against his last column about how white people must struggle to root out racism from their subconscious minds. Now, he’s back with some killer stats:

When Whites Just Don’t Get It
After Ferguson, Race Deserves More Attention, Not Less AUG. 30, 2014

… So let me push back at what I see as smug white delusion. Here are a few reasons race relations deserve more attention, not less:

• The net worth of the average black household in the United States is $6,314, compared with $110,500 for the average white household, according to 2011 census data. The gap has worsened in the last decade, and the United States now has a greater wealth gap by race than South Africa did during apartheid. (Whites in America on average own almost 18 times as much as blacks; in South Africa in 1970, the ratio was about 15 times.)

• The black-white income gap is roughly 40 percent greater today than it was in 1967.

• A black boy born today in the United States has a life expectancy five years shorter than that of a white boy.

• Black students are significantly less likely to attend schools offering advanced math and science courses than white students. They are three times as likely to be suspended and expelled, setting them up for educational failure.

• Because of the catastrophic experiment in mass incarceration, black men in their 20s without a high school diploma are more likely to be incarcerated today than employed, according to a study from the National Bureau of Economic Research. Nearly 70 percent of middle-aged black men who never graduated from high school have been imprisoned.

Considering that liberals have been in charge of Race in America since 1964, especially the rules governing “Conversations about Race,” these data points might suggest it’s time for a rethinking of the liberal conventional wisdom on race, which doesn’t seem to have done blacks on the whole all that much good over the last, say, 40 years.

But instead, all this just proves that the reigning conventional wisdom hasn’t failed, it just hasn’t been tried hard enough. There are wreckers among us, comrades! Maybe in your deep self-conscious mind, you too are a wrecker. You know how you can prove you aren’t a wrecker? Find a wrecker and send him to the gulag. That will buy you a little time.

< Previous

Next >

This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.