Katrina and the Culture of Welfare

Wanna get your blood stirring? Just read this opinion piece by John McWhorter of the Manhattan Institute that appeared in the Sunday Times. In it he argues that the Katrina disaster exposed the fact that "Black poverty is the result of 30 years of misguided welfare rather than racism."

Want some more?

In 1966.... a group of white academics in New York developed a plan to bring as many people onto the welfare rolls as possible. Across the country, poor blacks especially were taught to apply for living on the dole even when they had been working for a living, and by 1970 there were 169% more people on welfare nationwide than in 1960.

This was the first time that whites or blacks had taught black people not to work as a form of civil rights. Politicians and bureaucrats jumped on the new opportunity for political patronage and votes, and welfare quickly became a programme that essentially paid young women to have children.

And what was the result? According to McWhorter, you saw it in those TV images of poor blacks clustered in the New Orleans Convention Center. Those are the victims of white liberals and politicians who created and sustained a welfare culture of abject dependency.

Gentlemen, start your engines...., vrooom, vrooom.

Oh, by the way, McWhorter is black. [Just in case you are one of those who believes that skin color shapes perceptions.]