Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory was panned when it was released in 1971 but has since become a much-loved classic. One of the best moments in the movie, of course, is when the abysmally spoiled, demanding Veruca Salt sings her anthem, “I Want It Now!” only to be destroyed by her impatient greed. Back then, audiences nodded approvingly. Today, if Salt were portrayed as a black activist, she’d be wildly applauded for putting her boot on the neck of white privilege. However, if you look back on America a century or more ago, most whites had no privilege and lived horrific lives. It was the patience of generations that raised them up.

To orient you to my thought process here, I need to recount a conversation I had with a Democrat some twenty years ago when my kids were small. He was complaining that someone in his office was an abysmal worker. The kids asked the logical question: “Why don’t you fire him?” The Democrat then embarked on a convoluted explanation about poor black kids growing up in ghettos and needing instant access to quality jobs for which they were not prepared to offset their deficits as opposed to my kids’ (white) advantages.

I countered that the better thing for all involved would be to give people opportunities but to make demands on them. For example, said black employee would get an internship or a six-month trial. If during that time, he was amenable to learning the ways of office life—responsibility, punctuality, respect, effort—he’d keep the job, no matter that his progress was slow. If not, he’d be out of there. No one, I said, should simply be paid for showing up.

Image: Homeless children, New York, 1890, by Jacob Riis. Public domain.

By analogy, I asked my kids if they would bother to work at school if they knew they’d get an “A” regardless of effort. Their response was instant and unequivocal. “No!” I explained that their grandparents, like most people who lived in America for the past 150 years or so, had miserable, scrabbling lives but worked away for their survival and the betterment of their descendants. That’s how it goes.

And that’s when the Democrat fired his real arrow: “You believe in incrementalism! That’s racist.”

The anti-incrementalists contend that whites always had an advantage compared to blacks because blacks were victims of systematized oppression. And yes, in the South, blacks were indeed victims of slavery, a pattern of victimization that continued after the Civil War, thanks to the Democrats’ race-based Jim Crow policies. And yes, blacks were victims of less systematized oppression in other parts of America, thanks to banking and housing policies. But slavery ended in 1865, systematized oppression was made illegal in 1965, and cultural oppression began to die then. Blacks should have risen like corks socially and economically with those weights taken off them. But they didn’t.

The reason they didn’t is because the moment America took the old weights off blacks, the Democrats put on new ones. During the 1950s, despite systemic racism, blacks were doing well culturally and economically. Whether it was rising wages or marriage rates, they were one of the fastest upward-moving groups in America. What brought all that to a screeching halt was the Democrats’ welfare state, which taught blacks that hard work, ambition, patience, and a two-parent family were all for suckers.

Had they stayed on that path, blacks could have been like the Asians who flowed into America in the second half of the 20th century. As a San Francisco native, I grew up around kids who had arrived with their parents from war-torn Vietnam or Cambodia or who had escaped the Chinese communists. The parents spoke no English, they were incredibly poor, and their homes were deplorably crowded and dirty. But the core values were to work and, most importantly, for the children to learn. The parents were grateful for liberty and were ready to work hard and be patient so their children could have affluence. And it worked.

The problem with today’s black poverty in America is that those who lacked LBJ’s cynical foresight naively believed that welfare was just a helping hand that could easily be withdrawn. However, Marxists don’t operate that way. Welfare morphed from a helping hand into a lifestyle. Moreover, in the last 20 years, the race hustlers have come up with the Veruca Salt approach to government redistribution: They want and are entitled to all of it (i.e., wealth) now:

The Democrat who’s been reading this will point out that I still haven’t addressed “white privilege.” By focusing on blacks and Asians, I’ve ignored the inherent advantage of being white in America. But that’s just not true. There was an inherent advantage to being someone whose parents had arrived from England before America’s founding. But by the turn of the last century, most white Americans were recent immigrants and had no privilege at all.

And that gets me to my “white privilege” images. Most Fridays at Bookworm Room, I post a meme compilation. And lately, I’ve included images I sarcastically call “white privilege,” many of which come from a Facebook page called Daily Historical Pictures and Videos:

These people were no more privileged than blacks, Asians, Hispanics, or anyone else in America. They simply put their heads down and worked, hoping to improve their own lives and those of their children. And because America is (or, at least, was) a capitalist, free-market, and mostly free society, if people and their children developed habits of hard work and temperance, along with a commitment to education, getting a job, getting married, having children, and staying married, there was a good chance that their lives would indeed improve.

I’ll leave you with a wonderful Prager U video in which Daniel Hannan explains how capitalism is an inherently moral system that improves the lives of those willing to embrace it. It’s no wonder that, when capitalism came along, the world’s wealth exploded.