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Originally Posted by mburbank
2.) A lot of people acknowledge that not only will the poor suffer dispraportionately in Katrina's wake, the poor got totally screwed during Katrina, in that if you didn't have a car you were way more hosed than if you did. That being said, the vast majority of poor folks in NO are black. Statistically, African American's are way more likely to be poor than whites. If Race isn't part of the equation, what explains it? If the playing field is even, why are African American's mired in poverty? Are they just worse than whites? Is there culture inherently inferior?
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I think you're getting into dangerous Bill Cosby territory here. George Will, who I usually think is a great conservative thinker, seriously said on Sunday that one reason so many African-Americans didn't know what to do when Katrina hit was that there were no fathers around. No joke.
I think the conservative argument would be public schools, welfare state dependency, the New Deal, Jesse Jackson, and Democratic machines that rely on poor black voters.
I don't buy much of that at all, and I feel terribly unqualified to talk about how black people need to work harder and depend on the government less. I haven't donated NEARLY enough money yet to charity to justify making that statement, even if I believed it.
A lot of the argument is relativistic, too. Even this week, the Wall Street Journal and Will are arguing that the poverty index is bullshit. Walt Williams would tell you that if you took all of the blacks in America, they are like the 14th richest country in the world. They'd say "do poor people own so many pairs of Nikes and TVs???"
So really, the debate isn't even how you framed it, Max. It isn't why do poor people tend to be black, the real debate to be had is "are there really so many poor people?"