Some thoughts on our racial tensions....

First of all, Thomas Sowell points out something that we don't like to hear; one of the biggest enemies blacks have is well-meaning liberals who prevent housing from being built in economically booming areas like the San Francisco area.  Due to building bans in these areas, a once significantly black city is being drained of black people--really of the middle class in general.  Obviously, there are other factors at work, but Sowell points out that if you want to see the races mixing, you generally go to where the major is likely to be a Republican.

Here's one that is a little bit more challenging.  John Stossel makes the claim that the war on drugs is a chief reason for the myriad disasters which afflict blacks specifically, and I'd wonder if he'd claim the poor in general.  More or less, the argument is that as drug prohibition drove prices up, luring poor men into the trade, resulting in their imprisonment and the disintegration of the black (poor) family.

I'm torn on this one; having read Walter Williams for many years, I've become aware of many other things afflicting the poor in general and poor blacks in particular, starting with Moynihan's observation that AFDC's "father out of the house" rule was resulting in fatherless families. 

And so I wonder if Stossel's source--a Berkeley professor named John McWhorter--is inverting the actual process by which poor blacks (and poor people in general) had their families obliterated.  That is, welfare decimated the families, and that led to a culture where dealing drugs became seen as acceptable--and hence the drug trade and war on drugs are not the initial cause, but rather a contributor to what has become a vicious cycle of illegitimacy, poverty, and crime.

There may be--despite the reality of addiction--a legitimate reason to end the war on drugs.  I'm just not convinced that McWhorter and Stossel have hit on an adequate one.