Without having read this article, I assumed it was the first step in the Left’s jettisoning of blacks from the coalition. The Left has been uncomfortable with their alliance with black America for years, probably going back to the Civil Rights Movement. Political expediency has kept blacks in the boat, but that may be changing. Hispanics look like a far more promising partner. I figured this post would be about what I think will be the next big deal in American politics and culture. A little hint of it can be found in the exchange I had with Steve Sailer in this post. But, that’s not where this is heading after all. What got my attention right out of the shoot is this:
Five years ago, while fervently supporting the candidacy of the man who would become America’s first black president, I came to the realization that I didn’t actually know any black people. Most of the people I did know (i.e., other white people) didn’t know many black people either. One, maybe two, was the norm. I asked one white guy I knew if he had any black friends, and he replied, “You mean ones that aren’t on television?”
My first thought was, “I bet the kid writing this is from the northeast.” I thought he was a kid because it contains that juvenile amazement at the realization there are a lot of things new to you that are not all that new. Young, smug climbers of the meritocratic age suffer from this more than anyone. They have been told since the cradle that they are the brightest little stars in the world. When they suddenly find out they have been walking around with incorrect ideas in their head they naturally assume they have discovered something new to the world. The northeast assumption is the fact that whites in the northeast (there are no black people named Tanner) put a lot of distance between themselves and black people. They love MLK, but only at a great distance.
I went looking for his bio and found this:
Tanner Colby was born in Houston, Texas, in 1975. He grew up in Louisiana and Alabama and graduated from Tulane University in 1997. After graduating from college, he served as head writer for the National Lampoon Radio Hour for two years, then co-wrote a biography of “Animal House” and “Saturday Night Live” star, John Belushi. Following “Belushi,” he co-wrote the New York Times bestselling “The Chris Farley Show,” a similar oral history of the star of “Tommy Boy.”
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Tanner Colby
I may be wrong, but I’m thinking you are an extremely self-absorbed person if you are providing websites with your biography. Regardless, this guy grew up in the deep south and has had no black friends. That tells me he is a son of privilege. He hit school long after integration and surely spent a lot of his life around black people. At the ripe old age of 39 he suddenly realizes he knows no black people, his friends have no black friends and he looks at black people like the rest of us see furniture. Maybe Tanner is just a sociopath, but I’m thinking this guy has spent the bulk of his life gazing at his image in the mirror.
Anyway, low expectations are not a bad thing. I think this is a good start:
The pernicious effects of Republican attitude on race are plain to see. But one of the more subtle consequences of the right’s willful incompetence is that there is rarely any thoughtful critique of the left when it comes to race. Affirmative action is unfair to white people and the Democratic Party is a plantation—that’s about as incisive as the rhetoric usually gets. Even when Republicans have a legitimate point to make about the shortcomings of some government program, it’s almost as if they can’t help blowing their own argument. They’ll start off talking sensibly enough about educational outcome disparities and within seconds they’re rambling incoherently about how black men don’t take care of their babies. It’s really astonishing to watch.
But the fact is that a lot of liberals hold on to some really bad ideas about race too. Some of the arguments they keep trotting out amount to little more than unexamined platitudes, riddled with holes. Fifty years after the March on Washington, America’s high school cafeterias are as racially divided as ever, income inequality is growing, and mass incarceration has hobbled an entire generation of young black men. Do we really think this is entirely due to Republican obstruction? Or is it also possible that the party charged with taking black Americans to the Promised Land has been running around in circles?
What I find endlessly fascinating about the modern American Left is how little they know about the people they are sure are hiding under their beds, ready to assault them. The Right, for good and ill, really knows a lot about the Left and the intellectual history of the Left. It is not always a good thing (Glenn Beck, Michelle Malkin), but it is an obvious thing. The Left knows little of their history and they know nothing about the vast sea of opinion and ideas that they call the “right.” The fact that this moonbat conflates “conservative” and “republican” is a good example. Putting Pat Buchanan and George Bush in the same bucket is a category error.
His discussion of busing in Detroit is hilarious in how it reveals the paranoia at the root of every leftist cult. His gripe seems to be that busing would have worked in Detroit if only Tricky Dick Nixon had not stacked the court with right wing bigots. His gripe with the Left boils down to not taking seriously the power of the vast right-wing conspiracy against the black man and his liberal allies.
Today, whenever the failure of integration comes up, the usual political posturing always follows. Conservatives accuse liberals of destroying neighborhood schools with their big-government social engineering, and liberals accuse conservatives of exploiting race to pander to white voters. What nobody ever points out is that both of these things can be true at the same time. But in the left’s narrative, the bad guy always stays the same: conservative courts killed the wonderful progress that was being made. Yes, conservative judges were out looking for ways to kill integration in any way they could, but integration was hobbled and bleeding by the time those judges showed up. Rehnquist and Scalia just dumped the body in the river.
Now, if you harbor any wild ideas about the Left rethinking their disastrous race policies or this guy maybe coming to his senses, this part should disabuse you:
So far, nobody seems to have a solution that works, but a good start would be an honest assessment of what went wrong the first time and why. It would also be useful to go back to Brown and recall what the Supreme Court actually instructed schools to do. Its directive was clear: eliminate the last vestiges of state-sponsored segregation “root and branch.” In that formulation, segregated schools are really just the branches, growing out of racially homogeneous neighborhoods and towns. If we want any kind of long-term solution to this problem, we have to look at housing, zoning, mass transit, property taxes. That’s where the roots of our racially balkanized and economically stratified cities lie. We can hack away at the branches all day long, but if we don’t deal with the root of the problem, we can’t expect anything different to grow back in their place. We won’t solve the problem of segregated schools by shuffling black kids around the map. We have to give black families the agency and the opportunity and the leverage to decide where on the map they want to be. “True integration,” King said, “will be achieved by true neighbors who are willingly obedient to unenforceable obligations.” That may sound like a lofty mountain to climb, but if we set our sights on anything less, we’re not attacking the right problem.
When he said he was becoming more conservative at the start of his piece, he meant the liberal definition of “conservative.” That would be violent and crazy. Basically what he is saying here is the effort to integrate schools was well intentioned, but poorly executed. The evil whites and their allies in the GOP outflanked them by moving away from the blacks, just like Tanner has done his whole life. The remedy is to send in the army and shoot anyone who tries to move away when Tanner and his fascist allies set about integrating every nook and cranny of the nation this time. Well, except where he and his co-religionists on the Left live. They will be busy pushing out the last of the brown people from their hipster enclaves.
I’m fond of saying, scratch the paint off a lefty and you always find a swastika. Tanner is another fine example of it.