Liberals Choose Racial Catharsis Over Progress for Blacks

What happened in Tulsa 100 years ago matters far less than what’s happening in Chicago today

By Jason L. Riley. Excerpts:

"The political left is much more interested in black suffering than in black accomplishment, but black history is about more than victimization at the hands of whites. It’s also about what blacks have achieved notwithstanding that victimization. And in the first half of the 20th century, long before an expanded welfare state supposedly came to the rescue, blacks accomplished quite a lot. Incomes rose, poverty fell dramatically, and education gaps narrowed. Blacks entered the skilled professions—medicine, law, accounting, engineering, social work—at faster rates in the years preceding the 1960s civil-rights legislation than they did in the years afterward. Among racial and ethnic groups rising from similar circumstances, historians have described the rapidity of these gains as unprecedented.

Black Tulsa residents of a century ago would also be shocked to learn that it is no longer racist white vigilantes but black criminals who pose the bigger threat to safety in black communities. Liberals blame today’s disproportionately high black criminality on the “legacy” of slavery and Jim Crow. But violent crime among blacks declined in the 1940s, then dropped even further in the 1950s, while remaining relatively stable among whites. In other words, blacks living during Jim Crow segregation, and much closer to the era of slavery, experienced significantly lower rates of violent crime and incarceration both in absolute terms and relative to whites."

"This country’s racist past should never be forgotten or sugarcoated, but neither should it be used as a blanket explanation for present disparities. History teaches us that the progress of blacks and other minorities in the U.S. is not conditioned on racial tolerance. Asian-Americans are one of any number of groups that have faced racism and mob violence. One of the largest mass lynchings in U.S. history targeted Chinese immigrants in Los Angeles, and Japanese-Americans were put in internment camps during World War II. Today, both groups outperform whites academically and economically and have for decades."