Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) was out campaigning for Donald Trump in Philadelphia on Wednesday and told the truth about black families.
“You see, during Jim Crow, the black family was together. During Jim Crow, more black people were not just conservative — black people have always been conservative-minded — but more black people voted conservatively,” Donalds said. “And then HEW [Department of Health, Education, and Welfare], Lyndon Johnson — you go down that road, and now we are where we are.”
And where are we? Black families have been pulverized, steamrolled, and flattened by successive waves of Democratic-created policies, an alphabet soup of government agencies that on the whole do more harm than good to the black family, and a plantation mentality among Democrats who get all bent out of shape if a Republican begins to make inroads into the black vote.
Democrats pounced.
“It has come to my attention that a so-called leader has made the factually inaccurate statement that black folks were better off during Jim Crow,” Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said. “That’s an outlandish, outrageous, and out-of-pocket observation.”
No, Donalds did not say that "black folks were better off during Jim Crow." That's a deliberate lie. Donalds said that the "black family was together." He said during Jim Crow "more black people were not just conservative — black people have always been conservative-minded — but more black people voted conservatively,”
The Biden campaign took Jeffries's lie and expanded on it.
Trump VP contender Byron Donalds claims life was better for Black Americans during Jim Crow pic.twitter.com/MMot0WSKW1
— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) June 5, 2024
In my rant, please note I was referring exclusively to "the black family." Donalds wasn't saying that black people were better off under Jim Crow. He said explicitly and clearly that the black family was better off before liberal government policies made it more profitable for husbands and wives to divorce and single women to have lots of babies.
Donalds tried to respond to the lies and exaggerations on X.
“What I said was, is that you had more black families under Jim Crow, and it was the Democrat policies — under HEW, under the welfare state — that did help to destroy the black family,” Donalds said.
The black divorce rate today is more than 30%, as compared to the divorce rates for Hispanics (18.5%), whites (15%), and Asians (12.4%). Out-of-wedlock births for blacks are at a staggering 72%. This is after trillions of dollars in transfer payments to black communities have been made since the 1960s.
The great liberal lawmaker Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan clearly foresaw this disaster in 1965 when he was working at the Department of Labor.
"The Negro Family: The Case for National Action" is still considered one of the most thoughtful and prescient treatises on the black family.
The fundamental problem, in which this is most clearly the case, is that of family structure. The evidence — not final, but powerfully persuasive — is that the Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling. A middle class group has managed to save itself, but for vast numbers of the unskilled, poorly educated city working class the fabric of conventional social relationships has all but disintegrated. There are indications that the situation may have been arrested in the past few years, but the general post war trend is unmistakable. So long as this situation persists, the cycle of poverty and disadvantage will continue to repeat itself.
The thesis of this paper is that these events, in combination, confront the nation with a new kind of problem. Measures that have worked in the past, or would work for most groups in the present, will not work here. A national effort is required that will give a unity of purpose to the many activities of the Federal government in this area, directed to a new kind of national goal: the establishment of a stable Negro family structure.
Moynihan was definitely not calling for an end to government welfare spending. Rather, he was crying out to end policies that were destroying the black family. And he was calling for a massive increase in giving black men the skills they needed to work in America.
Writing to Lyndon Johnson, Moynihan argued that without access to jobs and the means to contribute meaningful support to a family, black men would become systematically alienated from their roles as husbands and fathers, which would cause rates of divorce, child abandonment and out-of-wedlock births to skyrocket in the black community (a trend that had already begun by the mid-1960s), leading to vast increases in the numbers of households headed by females.
Moynihan made a contemporaneous argument for programs for jobs, vocational training, and educational programs for the black community. Modern scholars of the 21st century, including Douglas Massey, believe that the report was one of the more influential in the construction of the War on Poverty.
Indeed it was. Johnson and every president who succeeded him paid little attention to Moynihan's recommendations. And the black community nitpicked it to death. Many accused Moynihan of "blaming the victim," which is an incredibly shallow criticism when looking at the entire report.
Donalds was not wrong. In fact, it's exactly what the black community needs to hear. But Democrats need to discredit voices like Donalds so they can maintain the plantation mentality they use to keep black Americans in line.
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