On Wednesday, 31 March 2021 at 15:47:11 UTC-4, Adam H. Kerman wrote:
> I'm sure Micky DuPree will ignore this as she pretends to have me kill
> filed. I really don't enjoy her hectoring about white guilt justifying
> reparations proposals. (Again, my white ancestors were peasants in that
> part of former Poland annexed by Russia in the late 18th century and
> hadn't even immigrated into the United States until several decades
> after the end of the Civil War.)
>
> Bob Woodson was a guest on C-SPAN Washington Journal 3/31/2021. He's a
> critic of the 1619 Project, but that wasn't discussed. His counter-1619
> Project is 1776 Unite Campaign.
>
> He has a far more optimistic view of the United States and its ability
> to overcome poverty, especially among black families. He objects to
> reparations for slavery as a solution and doesn't trace today's poverty
> among black families to either a post-slavery legacy nor Jim Crow laws.
>
> He blames Johnson-era War On Poverty programs.
>
> He promoted his book Lessons from the Least of These: The Woodson
> Principles. He does discuss successful anti-poverty programs but points
> out that they aren't heavy-handed federal Social Security programs nor
> state welfare programs but community-based and commuity-designed
> programs. He criticizes War On Poverty spending -- $20 trillion in
> aggregate over the decades -- and says most of it went to consultants,
> who would parachute in, impose a solution, then not stick around to
> observe success or failure. With typical failure, politicians wouldn't
> take a hard look to figure out what went wrong, simply conclude that
> more money was needed.
>
> There were a few good quotes from the segment. When a C-SPAN caller
> suggested defunding the police and instead spend the money on services,
> he objected, "I mean services are what created the problem in the first
> place!"
>
> "There ought to be a moratorium on black people talking about harm from
> white people."
>
> "America is a country of second chances." That was not so much about
> immigrants coming here to thrive, but the fact that the IDEA of America
> always deserves a second chance despite centuries of slavery.
>
> He talked about the black renaissance in the 1920s, about despite
> segregation there was a black middle class and black businesses and no
> extreme poverty and no black-on-black crime in northern cities. He
> commented, when white people were at their worst, black people had
> greater success in getting out of poverty, pointing to achievements
> during Reconstruction and even under Jim Crow.
>
> He pointed to poverty indicators, like out-of-wedlock birth (I wasn't
> sure if this was among teens or all women of child-bearing years)
> falling from 40% in 1940 to 25% in 1960, as a success, then by the 1970s
> under welfare, some 70% of children were born out of wedlock.
Now it's over 80%. D.P. Moynihan predicted this course in 1968.