November 1, 2005
Civil Rights, Rites
By Thomas
Sowell
While giving my office
at home an overdue cleaning up -- "operation Augean stable,"
as my wife and I call it -- I uncovered in the paper jungle a
2005 calendar. Since there was not a lot of 2005 left, I was about
to throw it out when I read its title: "2005 Republican Civil
Rights Calendar."
Sent by the National
Black Republican Association in Washington, this calendar listed
for each month various things that Republicans had done for civil
rights over the years.
No doubt there was
a need for something to counter the impression built up over time
that Democrats were pro-civil rights and Republicans anti-civil
rights, when in fact a higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats
voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act
of 1965.
So far, so good.
But the calendar
featured a long list of minority and female individuals appointed
to high office by Republicans or elected to office as Republicans.
While it was good to see that the Republicans had finally woken
up to a need to articulate their case on civil rights -- as they
need to articulate their case on a whole range of other issues
-- there was still something disquieting about this approach.
Civil rights cannot
include everything that is done by government which benefits particular
groups, individually or collectively. The whole case for civil
rights is that every American is entitled to them. Civil rights
are not about doing special things for special groups.
Even when there is
a persuasive case for providing special benefits to particular
groups -- military veterans, for example -- there is no need to
call those things civil rights.
While blacks have
had a long struggle to achieve the civil rights that many other
Americans took for granted, not everything that has advanced blacks
in the past or that can advance blacks in the future, is a civil
right. In fact, the most dramatic economic advancements of blacks,
in both incomes and occupations, occurred in the years immediately
before the civil rights legislation of the 1960s.
The effect of government
policies on blacks cannot be judged by whether these policies
were conceived or carried out with blacks in mind.
It has long been
axiomatic, for example, among those who study the American economy,
that "A rising tide lifts all boats." When the economy
has been booming, there have been years when black incomes rose
at a higher rate than white incomes.
No one has a greater
stake in various school-choice plans, including vouchers, than
blacks have, even though school choice is not specifically racial.
Social Security is not a racial policy either, but economists
who have studied it have long described it as a system that transfers
money from black men to white women, given the different life
expectancies of these two groups.
Minimum wage laws
have long had an adverse effect on the employment of blacks, especially
young blacks, who are more likely to be looking for entry-level
jobs. These are the kinds of jobs most often reduced or eliminated
when the minimum wage set by the government exceeds what those
jobs are worth to an employer.
This is a pattern
found in countries around the world, so it is not even peculiar
to the United States, much less to black Americans. But its impact
on black Americans is especially harsh.
Few policies have
had more devastating local impacts on blacks than severe restrictions
on the building of housing under "open space" laws,
which lead to skyrocketing prices for homes and apartment rents
that take up half the incomes of low-income households in many
California communities.
Almost invariably,
such communities are controlled by liberal Democrats -- and blacks
have been forced out by high housing costs. The black population
of San Francisco, for example, declined by 18,000 between the
1990 census and the 2000 census, even though the city's total
population rose by more than 50,000 people.
The time is long
overdue for both blacks and Republicans who are trying to appeal
to blacks to focus on policies in terms of their actual effects
on blacks -- and to stop calling things "civil rights"
when they are not.
Copyright
2005 Creators Syndicate
