Category Archives: Race

The Tyranny of Race

Posted on by

There are a limited number of ways to govern a multi-ethnic or multi-racial society. As much as modern elites believe they are wrestling with new problems, the issues the West faces today are common throughout history. The very first settled human societies were multi-ethnic. The “cradle of civilization” was full of tribal people with identities different from one another, often with different languages. One tribe would come to dominate the others, but the subjugated people maintained their identities. They just paid tribute to the dominant tribe.

One way humans have met this challenge is through hard segregation. This is when areas are carved out for specific groups of people and only those people. The governing authority helps the groups defend their turf from any encroachment from the others. One group is dominant, but a big part of how they maintain their dominance is by keeping the peace between the rest of the groups. The Arab world still functions under this model for the most part. One tribe dominates, but the other tribes run their own turf for the most part.

The opposite of this is compulsory assimilation, where everyone is blended into one identity. The English banning Welsh and other local languages from government is an example of how the ruling group can force assimilation. The Romans would settle barbarians in the Empire with the goal of assimilation. This meant sprinkling them around in small groups so they would adopt the local language and customs and lose their native identity. Their inability to do this with the Goths is often held up as one of the causes of the collapse.

The third most common method for confronting the problems of diversity is soft segregation where you end up with a multi-tier social order. The dominant group gets all the privileges and benefits of society. The lower orders are barred from positions of authority and perhaps have fewer legal rights. Muslims prefer this model. Europeans used to treat the Jews as a guest race of people, with limited legal rights. In America, this was the mode employed after the Civil War to manage blacks. In the North it was implicit and in the South it was explicit.

None of these models are seen as legitimate or moral by modern Western leaders. America still maintains reservations for Indians, but that’s only because no one knows how to get rid of them. The Europeans still have a gypsy problem, but like the Indian problem, no one knows what to do about it so it is ignored. Otherwise, the West has no interest in segregation or compulsory assimilation when it comes to the challenges of diversity. In fact, diversity is viewed as an unalloyed good so any attempt to temper it is forbidden.

That has resulted in the current way of meeting the challenge of diversity in the West, which is Proportionalism. This is where the costs of violating liberal principles are weighed against the perceived benefits from violating the principles. For instance, legal discrimination is wrong as a principle, but quotas and set asides allegedly have benefits that are too valuable to pass up, so the state engages in active racism in hiring. Because the scales are entirely subjective based on one’s point of view and the moment in time, there can be no fixed rules, just a mindset.

A good recent example is the Freddy Gray case in Baltimore. The city charged every cop involved with the highest possible count, even though little evidence suggested they did anything wrong, much less deliberately criminal. The victim was black so the city violated the rights of the cops and ruined their lives because the city thought the benefits outweighed the rights of the cops. In other words, naked racism to counter the consequences of perceived racism was justified based on expected outcomes in this particular case.

The result of this mode of thought, this philosophical outlook, is a thicket of rules and precedents that are incoherent in isolation because they exist only in the moment. America is a land where you can be sued for discriminating against blacks in favor of whites, while simultaneously being sued for discriminating against whites in favor of blacks. Since there are no set rules that apply all the time, you could lose both cases in the same courthouse. It all depends upon the judge and the circumstances.

There’s a word for arbitrary application of the law. It’s called tyranny. That is the inevitable end of Proportionalism because benefits and costs are always subjective. The City of Baltimore looked at the lives of six police officers and said they were not worth another riot. The family of the police officers had a very different valuation of these things. The dozens of dead black guys would probably have a different calculation, but the police went on a silent strike so those black guys got killed and no longer have a say.

The reason tyranny eventually collapses is it devolves into a recursive use of resources in order to maintain itself. Once the law becomes arbitrary, the violations of the law, and the willingness to flaunt flout the law, increase exponentially. The only thing everyone knows is that voluntary compliance has no benefit. This requires an exponential growth of authority to maintain order. Eventually, the cost of order exceeds the resources available to the authority and collapse ensues. It’s why authoritarian regimes tend not to live long past their founder.

Intellectuals Versus Ideologues

Posted on by

I think if I were to produce a defining characteristic of a true intellectual, I would say it is someone willing to consider possibilities that are not already on the table. When I say “true intellectual” I mean to distinguish the real thinkers from the pseudo-intellectual posers. The truly smart and curious are not constrained by or extremely interested in the current fads. When presented with a puzzle, they first try to imagine all of the possible solutions and then begin eliminating the impossible.

One of the useful lessons of mathematics is that there are some problems for which there are many answers. If you are presented with x – 3 = 0   or   x – 4 = 0 then you know x = 3, 4. In other words, X has more than one possible solution. A surprisingly high number of allegedly smart people struggle with that basic concept. When you get into more complex areas like human sciences, the range of solutions to a problem may include a combination of factors interacting to cause the observed phenomenon.

Therefore, the intellectual is someone that starts with the set of all solutions and narrows the list to those that are possible. The religiously minded, on the other hand, reverse the order of things. They first eliminate all the possibilities that fall outside the limits of their faith. A Christian, for example, will never consider the possibility that his faith is nonsense and Jesus was a fictional character. The Muslim will never consider that Mohamed was simply a medieval L. Ron Hubbard.

Throughout history, we have examples of the priestly class convincing the people that the calamity that has befallen them is due to their deviation from the faith. When the plague ravaged Europe, the religious were convinced it was due to God’s wrath. What else could it be? The English blamed the Viking invasions on the faithful falling out of favor with God. Revolutionaries blame the inevitable bad results of their revolution on enemies of the revolution.

Just to be clear, religion is vital to every society. Most people should not be thinking about all the possible causes of what is around them. Islam may be useless to Western civilization, but it serves a needed purpose in the East. Christianity was vital to the development of Western Civilization. In fact, it was what preserved the stock of human knowledge that was the foundation of the modern West. Today, the West would be better off if our leaders were Christians, instead of insane.

Even so, the difference between the intellectual and the ideological enforcer is all about the possibilities. A good example of that is in this post on NRO the other day from someone calling himself Mario Loyola. He is one of the thousands of public intellectuals living off the taxpayer at foundations around the Imperial Capital. His CV is here and you see the word “fellow” turn up a lot in his work history. Most of our “conservative” intellectuals have credentials from the liberal of institutions.

Anyway, his post is about black crime rates and the causes of those crime rates. This bit got my attention. “When America is ready for a real conversation about race, it will start here. It will ask honestly what the causes are. There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that race has absolutely nothing to do with crime rates, and that government policies such as welfare are the real culprit, creating the urban blight and broken families that lead directly to crime.”

Let us first start with the phrase, “have a conversation.” When you want to kill time, you have a conversation about the weather. When you want to let someone else know things about yourself, you have a conversation. When you want to find answers to problems, you do not have a conversation. That is how you get fired. You are fooling around having conversations instead of doing work. In modern America, when a Progressive says she wants a conversation, you better run.

Putting that aside, the first thing Mario does in his “exploration of causes” is eliminate those that fall outside the permitted. In fact, he makes clear that he is not interested in that conversation at all. If you already have the answer, there is no need for further discovery. Once you find the answer, the next job is to tell the world about your wonderful insight. That is why scientists post the results of their experiments. It is how the stock of human knowledge increases.

Of course, Mario is not offering any evidence of his assertion. For this type of Progressive, race falls outside the set of acceptable causes so it is eliminated without further discussion. Because he is from the shadow end of the faith, he also feels the need to eliminate racism so he can focus on the welfare state. His post is not intended to start a conversation or begin the search for the causes of black crime. It is testimony in support of his particular brand of Progressivism.

It is not a great surprise that our public debates are echo chambers. Biology has become forbidden knowledge. So much so that few know anything about it. That is because biology is at odds with egalitarianism, the foundation stone of the Progressive faith. Once you accept that nature does not distribute her gifts equally among all men, Progressivism is untenable. It is akin to saying Christ was fictional or Mohamed was a con-man. That can never be allowed, no matter how many people die.

Barak X

Posted on by

Way back in the olden thymes, there was a guy named Kurt Schmoke, who was the hottest thing in black politics since Martin Luther King. This was the late-70’s and early-80’s so most black politicians were like Jesse Jackson. Schmoke was different. He was charming and smart with credentials from the Ivy League. Most important, he was not standing on ghetto corners yelling about the honkies. Instead, he had moderate political views, worked in the legitimate economy as an attorney and he participated in mainstream politics. He was the sort of well-behaved black guy white liberals love.

Schmoke was supposed to be the example of how Progressive race polices would succeed. He went to public school, but got into Yale, went onto a Rhodes Scholarship and then Harvard Law School. This was how race policy was supposed to work. Given the opportunity to be free of white racism, blacks could rise to the very top of society and compete with whites. No one talked about affirmative action and it probably never played much of a role. Schmoke was a genuinely smart guy, but that did not stop white liberals from taking credit.

Schmoke eventually won office in ’82 and then became mayor of Baltimore in ’87. Everyone assumed he would be governor one day and then who knows. Instead, the politics of Baltimore devoured him. He went into office as a cerebral, race neutral technocrat. He was going to fix the city and avoid the racial politics. By the time he left office, he was wearing a dashiki and waving the flag of the African National Congress. Instead of being the sort of black politician that made white liberals proud, he ended up the sort that made them ashamed.

Twenty years after Schmoke was written off by white liberals, they had found a new great black hope. Barak Obama was a “new breed” of black politician. He was the product of the best schools and, according to Joe Biden, “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” Even better, he had an exotic back story with a white mother, a Kenyan father and a youth spent in Indonesian madrassahs. Obama’s 2004 speech at the Democratic convention made him a star in the party and punched his ticket as the next big thing.

The 2008 presidential was one long sales pitch about how Barak Obama was the salve to what ailed America. Obama was the quintessential example of what post-racial America was going to be. He was a post-racial healer, who would close the books on America’s racist past. The way the Obamasoxers carried on in 2008, you could be forgiven if you thought Obama was the leader of a new cult. They honestly believed he was the fulfillment of prophecy. He was the one to bring about the end to the long civil war in favor of those on the winning side of history.

The Magic Negro stuff was never going to last. It is not how the world works and it is certainly not how things work with the American Left. Obama was always a prop, a pitchman, an actor hired to play a role written for him by old white lefties from the 1960’s. His job was to freak out the squares. People forget that in 2008, the chatter from the Left was that whites feared nothing more than an intelligent, articulate black man. They believed it which is why they hired Obama in the first place. That was the point. They did not care a whit about Obama’s ideas. His job was to read from the teleprompter.

Things did not go as planned. The debacle of health care led to the midterm disaster and the Left decided Obama had to be scarier. The Henry Louis Gates flap was where the shift began. Obama the racial healer could have turned that into a chance to close the books on the bitter racism of Gates, but that would not have freaked out the squares in the suburbs. Instead, Obama made it clear that when the choice was between a black and a white, particularly a white authority figure, the weight of his government would back the black guy.

Here we are at the end of his time in office and America is looking worse on the race front that it has since the late 60’s. Instead of the post-racial leader of a unified America, we have a bitter black guy shaking his fist at the honkies, while homicidal blacks run wild in American streets. All the talk of the new black political leader seems like a long time ago. It is also reminiscent of the end for Kurt Schmoke. The reason Schmoke rose to be a star was that he was black. In order to remain a star, or at least remain in office, he had to keep getting blacker.

That has been the story with Obama. He has gone from the Magic Negro to Barak X.

Magic Honky Theory

Posted on by

For as long as most people reading this have been alive, the cult in charge of America has preached the need for full integration. This has led to endless campaigns to “desegregate” the schools, housing, jobs, sports clubs, etc. These campaigns are often insanely self-contradictory. Fire departments are sued for discriminating against whites, while also being sued for not discriminating against whites. The inherent truth revealed in these contradictions is ignored.

Domesticated conservatives put on their serious face and point out the hypocrisy and idiocy of these efforts. The habit of blacks, for instance, of creating domains exclusively for blacks is politely ignored, while the similar habit among whites is attacked with the fury of the state and state run media. Imagine trying get White Entertainment Television on basic cable. Remember the horror when kids pretended to create white student unions?

The folks out on the fringe, the people who refuse to be house broken by the Left, make sport of this stuff. There’s little point in taking it seriously as the people promoting Magic Dirt Theory are incapable of rational thought. After all, if you think putting D’Shawn and his half dozen baby mommas out in the suburbs will magically transform them into middle-class burghers, you’re immune to reason. It’s better to leave the pointless debating to the kept men of Buckley Conservatism and have fun making sport of the them.

In fairness, the people promoting Magic Dirt Theory will say they are operating from reason. Humans are a blank slate and if trained properly, by growing up in a properly structured environment, they will turn out properly structured. If D’Shawn happens to murder a nice white girl out in the suburbs, it is the price that you must pay so that D’Shawn’ eight kids will turn out better than their parents.

This is where the “appeal to reason” by the Cult is just way of deflecting the unwanted gaze from what they believe onto other topics. After all, if they really thought they could mold these people, they would be in favor of building black-only towns in which to provide the proper structure and training to D’Shawn and his cohort of bastards. That way they would avoid the problem of hate thinkers and bad whites screwing up the project. It is the logical end point of their blank slate arguments.

The way around this has been to argue that “diversity” makes everyone better somehow. This proximity effect only works in your neighborhood, of course. The bunkered enclaves where our betters live are almost all white. Like so much of what these people say in public, it is intended to obscure, not explain. Ask these people why diversity is good and they start mumbling about their favorite Ethiopian restaurant. Western civilization did OK without having a single Ethiopian restaurant for a few millennia, but we’re to believe it is now a necessity.

Anyway, this story from state controlled media gets to one root explanation for the Cult’s integration fanaticism.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development is making it easier for people with criminal records to find housing.

In new guidance, released Monday, HUD tells landlords and home sellers that turning down tenants or buyers based on their criminal records may violate the Fair Housing Act.

Because of widespread racial and ethnic disparities in the U.S. criminal justice system, criminal history-based restrictions on access to housing are likely disproportionately to burden African Americans and Hispanics.

New HUD guidance on criminal records and the Fair Housing Act

People with criminal records aren’t a protected class under the Fair Housing Act, and the guidance from HUD’s general counsel says that in some cases, turning down an individual tenant because of his or her record can be legally justified.

But blanket policies of refusing to rent to anybody with a criminal record are de facto discrimination, the department says — because of the systemic disparities of the American criminal justice system.

What’s going on here is pretty simple. In the suburbs, landlords use credit and criminal records to keep out people who don’t fit the neighborhood profile. They don’t want their property values collapsing anymore than the local homeowners. A bad tenant can consume the profits of a rental property before you can evict them so the landlords try to use good judgement when screening their tenants.

The Cult hates this because they are convinced that if they can situate non-whites within close proximity of whites, the special magic that allows whites to run civilized communities will transmit to the non-Asian minority and transform them into good citizens. In the case of ex-cons, putting them in with the law abiding will magically rehabilitate them. This is the Magic Honky Theory. Stand close enough to the white guys and you start to act white.

As is the case with everything the Cult says, it is riddled with contradictions. If Whites are the racists monsters they claim, then why in the world would anyone want to send blacks to live with whites? That’s like sending Jews out to Idaho to live with skinheads. Of course, there’s no explaining how it is the honky got this magic stuff that lets him dominate the non-honky, but also oppress the non-honky. What if the non-honky gets this magic and begins oppressing the honky?

Of course, we all know the answer to that question and ultimately, that’s the whole point.

Race Unrealism

Posted on by

I’ve often argued that anti-racism has become a religion, maybe something of a cargo cult. The adherents keep replaying the events of the Civil Rights Movement hoping something magical happens. The obvious stuff is the weird obsession with Hitler and the KKK. Every public figure they don’t like is Hitler and every group they don’t like is the KKK.

Then you have the hilariously insane stuff like calling the NBA diverse while baseball is lacking diversity. The word “racist” simply means “bad” for gentry liberals. This Jeff Jacoby column is worth reading for this sort of loony race mongering.

Do gender quotas pose that problem? No. But racial quotas certainly do.

American society is awash with race-based quotas, check-offs, preferences, and diversity policies. In countless settings — from college admissions to workplace hiring, from government contracts to legislative redistricting — opportunities and benefits are tied to racial percentages.

Twelve decades after Plessy v. Ferguson, the notorious Supreme Court decision in which eight justices upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation, Americans are labeled and sorted by race more obsessively than ever. It was in Plessy that Justice John Harlan delivered his ringing dissent: “Our Constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. . . . The law regards man as man and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color.”
Harlan’s fierce insistence that Americans are not to be treated differently on the basis of race became the great objective of the Civil Rights movement in the 20th century. “Racial criteria are irrational, irrelevant, [and] odious to our way of life,” argued Thurgood Marshall on behalf of the NAACP in 1950. “There is no understandable factual basis for classification by race.”

Marshall’s statement was even truer than he could have imagined. Today we know for a fact what scientists in the 1950s could only have surmised: Race is not biological. It is a social construct, not a genetic reality. The DNA of blacks cannot be distinguished from the DNA of Asians or the DNA of whites. Unlike our sex, which is stamped in our chromosomes, our racial and ethnic identities are purely subjective.

“I am an African-American, but in parts of Africa, I am white,” says Stanford professor Duana Fullwiley, an anthropologist of science and medicine. When research in West Africa requires her to fly from California to France to Senegal, she told Harvard Magazine in a 2008 interview, “My race changes as I cross the Atlantic.” In the United States she is black; in France she is considered métisse, or mixed-race; in Senegal, everyone regards her as white.

Of course human beings vary widely in their appearance. Populations from different parts of the world differ notably in their skin color, facial features, and hair texture. But those distinctions are superficial, not racial. They have no immutable significance. They contribute no more to “diversity” than right- and left-handedness do. To rely on such criteria when hiring employees or drawing electoral maps or assessing a corporate board is about as sensible as consulting a Magic 8 Ball.

Exactly no one in the quantitative fields thinks race is not genetic. There’s a debate whether race is the right word as there is great diversity within races. East Africans, for example, are very different from West Africans. East Africans dominate distance running, for example, while West Africans dominate sprint races. This is just one group difference that is well known in quantitative science.

Jacoby may have lost his marbles, but my recollection is he is the token normal at the Boston Globe. To balance his hate speech, they have a thousand hooting maniacs from the Cult of Modern Liberalism. That’s diversity! So, Jacoby may have gone native, but my sense is he is having some fun mocking the the Cult for their anti-racist irrationality.

This is why anti-racism is a religion and not a tactic. From the perspective of the political Left, racism is highly useful. I’m not just talking as a shaming tool. I mean as a political wedge. Demanding proportional representation in legislatures, for example, benefits the Left politically. Demanding head counts by race would help bust up natural rights and replace it with the authoritarianism of positive liberty. But, they can’t do it.

That’s the thing with the religious impulse. It’s largely a theatrical concept. The faithful would rather face the lions than renounce their faith because just before the jaws clamp on their throat, they see the adoration of their coreligionists. Anti-racists would rather damage their own cause than compromise on the faith. It’s what defines them.

Non-Whites Only

Posted on by

Years ago, I was skimming the want ads on Monster, or a similar site and I kept seeing some version of “minorities and women are encouraged to apply” listed prominently in the ads. Like a lot of people, I thought this was just the new bullshit way for companies to announce their wonderfulness. This was back in the early Bush years, so we were not full-tilt Afro-worship yet. We were just at the start of this Great Progressive Awakening.

Just for laughs, I contacted one of the companies that listed a real e-mail address. I asked if the position was open to white men. I never expected a response as I was obviously trying to stir the pot. At least I thought it was obvious. I got back a nice reply from some woman explaining to me that as part of their diversity programs they would be looking for a “well-qualified” minority applicant.

In other words, they were not just displaying their piety, they were telling the honkies they were no longer welcome. The causal, matter of fact way it was written was what got me. The same people hooting and bellowing about racism thought it was just wonderful to openly display their hatred of white men, like it was a sign of enlightened thinking.

Anyway, I thought about that when I read this story linked on Drudge.

CBS’ new Nancy Drew will look very different should the network move forward with the reboot.

CBS Entertainment president Glenn Geller revealed Tuesday that the network’s reimagining of the iconic character will be diverse.

“She is diverse, that is the way she is written,” the executive told THR immediately following his time in front of the press at the Television Critics Association’s winter press tour Tuesday. While Geller said it was too early in the process to explain just what he meant by diverse — whether Nancy is African-American, Asian-American or Latino, he said it would hinge on finding the right actress for the part. “[She will] not [be] Caucasian,” he stressed. “I’d be open to any ethnicity.”

Any ethnicity except one with white skin. Imagine the reaction if the guy said, “we’re not going to cast a negro in the part.” After the requisite “storm on social media” the idiot would spend a week begging for forgiveness and then lose his job. Yet, hanging a sign out that reads “non-whites only” is celebrated like it is an achievement to be copied everywhere.

The only thing new here is the brazen way in which it is publicly stated. This Glenn Geller guy could very well be an idiot, but you see it everywhere in the media. The one group it is OK to shit on are whites and especially white men. The people who invented civilization are being run out of town in favor of people who have yet to figure out how to stack one brick upon another.

The foaming at the mouth hatred for while men is so over the top it is starting to feel like satire. Every TV commercial either features a mixed race couple (white women – non-white man), has a black guy cast as the hero or has the white guy as a dufus. The dopey white guy has become such a stock figure in the media, it looks strange when a normal white guy pops up on screen. It’s like seeing a leprechaun.

It was only a matter of time before white women joined the ranks of the unwanted. The phony-baloney rape hoax culture at colleges hilariously ignores assaults by black guys on white women. In fact, those are covered up because black trumps white, regardless of the sex involved. We’re seeing that in Europe where the elites are throwing a rape-a-paloosa so European girls can be assaulted by Arabs.

This will not end well.

Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tooth

Posted on by

On the list of things you will never hear someone say is “Be careful with those gold bars. They are valuable.” The reason for that, one reason at least, is that everyone knows gold is valuable. It does not have to be explained to people that gold is valuable. It’s obvious.

That’s true of most things. If a thing has universal value, everyone knows it. That’s why they are valuable. Enough people want the thing, so its value rises compared to things that are less desirable. The exceptions are those oddities or specialty items that few know much about, but there are exceptions to everything.

The same is true of people. Anyone who has sat through a “down-sizing” session knows how it works. You look at the employee list and come up with a rule for cutting jobs that keeps the valuable people. Maybe you shuffle the deck so that those valuable people are moved to some new position in order to keep them. If it takes a long explanation as to why someone should be spared, they are not going to be missed.

That always comes to mind when stories like this one get my attention. If black lives really mattered, no one would need to say it. It would just be another item on the list of things everyone knows. Instead, we have this organization financed by a foreign criminal (why is he still alive?) desperately trying to prove to the rest of us that black lives matter.

To make matters worse, these protests are so futile that the activists feel it necessary to assault people in at their school, place of work or on public streets. Back in the summer these idiots were showing up at breakfast joints in SWPLville desperately trying to get people, who should be sympathetic, to pay attention. Instead, they just called the cops and added security.

If your argument needs this nonsense to have a chance of convincing anyone, it’s pretty safe to assume your argument is without merit. In this case that means black lives really don’t matter very much. In my neighborhood that’s obviously true as blacks shoot one another over sneakers all the time. They abandon their children, beat their women, and spend all of their time bringing shame to the black race. In the ghetto, black lives are worthless.

That’s fundamentally the problem with the black lives matters stuff. Instead of helping black people in some way, it just reminds everyone else how screwed up things are with black people. Here we have a library where students give a damn about their lives and, presumably, have enough self-respect to take their schooling seriously. They are stopped from being productive by a bunch of black people trying hard to be a burden on the rest of the campus.

This turns out to be the one time where campus life resembles the real world.

I’m no fan of inter-generational guilt or collective responsibility. You are responsible for you. You cannot pass onto your children the guilt of your deeds so that means your ancestors could not have done that to you. Holding white people in America responsible for the deeds of white people located here 200 years ago is madness. White people owe black people nothing more than they owe themselves as citizens.

But that’s the thing. Like it or not, black, white, red, brown, and yellow are here and we all have to get along as best as possible. As citizens, we have a duty to one another to work in concert so that all of us have a chance to make the most of what nature has given us. If that means special accommodations like affirmative action, well maybe that’s what’s best. I can live with it as it is a small price to pay for peace, assuming that’s what results.

There’s the problem and it is clear in that Black Lives Matter protest. Here we have unqualified blacks on the campus of Dartmouth, displacing better qualified Jews and Asians who would relish a chance at an Ivy League education. Instead of being grateful for the opportunity, these blacks are bitching and moaning, making a nuisance of themselves. Worse yet, they are interfering with the work of others.

Sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless er, Black Lives Matter activist!

In the end, this Black Lives Matter movement is going to be a disaster. More than a few white people I know have had enough of this stuff. People who would never say anything racist are suddenly sounding like John Derbyshire after one too many chardonnays. My bet is most of America is damned sick and tired of Black America sounding like ungrateful children. If black people want to find out their value, keep pissing off the rest of the people with this nonsense.

 

Crime & Society

Posted on by

The big hobbyhorse issue for libertarians is America’s incarceration rate. They love the issue because they get to prattle on about weed, while sucking up to the Left, who are always looking for an excuse to release felons into your neighborhood. In other words, they get to sound tough about small government in a way that is entirely safe from the wrath of their Progressive masters.

While I think our prison system is a mess, my response to libertarians over the issue is always the same. “How many current inmates would you like released into your neighborhood? On which corner of your block should we put the halfway house?” It’s a fun bit because no has yet provide an answer. Just as it is easy to be generous with other people’s money, it’s easy to be kind to convicts from a great distance.

It’s even easier if you are insane. This story I saw posted on twitter was getting passed around by the usual suspects, suggesting that maybe I’m too soft on libertarians.

What Lind doesn’t talk about is the way that the vast, vastly profitable private prison industry created and lobbied for legislation that criminalized more conduct and set out longer sentences for violations, operating in opaque secrecy, running forced-labor camps, profiteering from prisoners and their families, bribing judges to send black kids to jail, and producing a system where the rich can launder billions for drug cartels without a single criminal prosecution, but poor people caught with minute amounts of weed go to jail for long stretches.

In other words: that hockey-stick growth isn’t an accident.

If you follow the links, you find the Alex Jones type paranoia that has always been a part of the modern Left. Instead of secret government agencies in league with space aliens, you have secret corporate agents in league with aliens. It’s The Deep State™ run out of a corporate boardroom instead of Langley.

Putting all of that aside, it does raise an important question and that is how were we able to have relatively low crime rates, adjusting for race, age and sex, while having a stable prison population. Something changed in the 50’s and 60’s that led to the sudden upward turn in crime.

The obvious candidate for what changed preceding the spike in murder rates is the Civil Rights Movement. The greatly diminished status of blacks would have suppressed crime rates in two ways. First, the fear of white retaliation would have resulted in high levels of self-policing among blacks. Second, white indifference to black life would have artificially reduced the crime stats.

The trouble with this explanation is that white murder rates did tick up in the 60’s, just off a much smaller base so it was less obvious.

Black-White-Homicide-Victims-1950-2010

The trouble here is getting good data of crime rates by race from before 1980 is surprisingly difficult. I’ve been searching and this is the best I was able to find. Crime rates by race are slowly becoming forbidden knowledge. Even so, it’s hard to honestly tie the spike in black crime to the Civil Rights Movement without better data showing a bigger spike than we saw in white crime rates.

The more politically correct answer is the proliferation of street drugs and the drug trade. Libertarians love this one, but so does the Left because it conveniently avoids talking about race. The trouble with this explanation is that it assumes people suddenly went insane and started taking massive amounts of street drugs. This is one step away from blaming evil spirits.

The Old Right answer is that general assault on traditional culture that started in the late 50’s and accelerated into the 70’s eventually broke down the traditional ways of controlling crime and other social pathologies like drug taking. The result was a rise in social anarchy. Eventually, we evolved a new way to deal with the problem, which was mass incarceration.

The crime issue is a good example of how public policy is always about trade-offs, Swing the wrecking ball through a social institution and something replaces it. It’s also an example showing how American Liberalism will inevitably end in authoritarianism. As traditional institutions are destroyed, the state flows into the void. The existing organic institutions grow weaker relative to the state, making them easier to knock over.

Blacktopia

Posted on by

A while back, there was a post on Unz about creating a black homeland. The piece was not very well done so there is no point in linking it. It was about how efforts to make race relations work had failed so a two-state solution was the only option. The plan was to turn a few states in the South into the new black homeland. Again, itt was not very well done so the particulars are not important.

What is striking about the idea of a black homeland, is it is an idea you never hear mentioned, even by racists. Lincoln wanted to send the freed slaves to Haiti or other Caribbean islands, but that’s forbidden knowledge these days. Yankee abolitionists would never have gone along with that as they wanted the freed slaves to riot and murder the bad whites in the defeated South. A dream they still nurse.

The American Colonization Society tried to create a black homeland for freed slaves, which eventually became Liberia. This probably would have worked if the demand for cotton had not made slavery so wildly profitable in the American South. By the end of the 18th century, Southern elites saw slavery as a dismal and dying institution, but the spike in the demand cotton changed those attitudes and killed any hope of ridding the nation of slaves and slavery through peaceful means.

The 20th century had some black nationalist movements that wanted to bring the former slaves back to Africa. Marcus Garvey is probably the most notable, but those efforts never went anywhere. The Nation of Islam guys are essentially black separatists arguing for blacks to withdraw from white society whenever and wherever possible, but they stop short of decamping for another land.

It’s not a crazy idea, if you think that blacks and whites can never truly live peaceably in a color blind society. If you’re black and assume the white majority will always have you under their thumb, a separate homeland should be attractive, as long as it does not mean going to Africa or the Caribbean. Those places are terrible and unfixable. A black homeland could only work if it is a part of the Anglosphere.

Some Basic Principles of Blacktopia

If you’re going to set up a black homeland, you have to start from some basic principles. The whole point of the endeavor to arrange things so that blacks can run their own shop and avoid the pernicious racism they must contend with in modern America. It is a form of reparations, just with a more logical end. The trouble with the TN Coates brand of reparations is it is really just a childish tantrum so that a middle-aged man-boy can pay his rent. Real reparations repair the damage and closes the books.

With that in mind, the first rule of Blacktopia is it has to have the promise of making black lives better. No one can know the future so the results of Blacktopia cannot be known in advance. All we can reasonably achieve is an arrangement where blacks are given every chance to succeed, and the results are in their hands. That means the land carved out for the new nation has to have all the natural resources you need for a successful country. It also has to have enough existing capital to provide for a strong start.

Carving out a new nation and moving millions of people into it is no small endeavor. It has to involve the least amount of harm in order to work. Money has to be allocated so the new citizens of Blacktopia can start their new lives with the least amount of hardship. Similarly, the people already living in Blacktopia need to be compensated where necessary. It’s not going to be cheap, but this is about trade-offs and the trade-offs need to be a consideration when creating this new nation.

Finally, it has to be sustainable and by that, I mean it has to settle the issue of race in the long term. Whites from Yankeedom have been making war on the bad whites over race for centuries. The point of Blacktopia is not just to provide closure for black victims of white racism. It has to close out the cold civil war between Yankeedom and the rest of America. That means the final configuration of this new nation has to be such that Yankeedom can no longer complain about the racism of whites.

Location

Finding a habitable spot that can support roughly 40 million people is not so obvious. The temptation is to find the least populated states and use those or maybe carve out part of Canada, but Blacktopia is not going to survive in a tundra or desert. Again, the first principle here is it has to have a chance to thrive. At the minimum, that means a decent climate, access to the sea and usable land.

The most obvious choice is California and maybe Oregon and Washington. Despite the massive flow of Mexicans into the state, California still has a low population density of 246 per square mile. New Jersey, by comparison, is 1210 per square mile. Washington state is 105 and Oregon just 41 souls per square mile. Without moving anyone out and just relocating black people to those states, the population density climbs to 311, which somewhere between Pennsylvania and Florida.

The trouble is Hispanics are not very friendly to blacks. Compton, which was made famous by the hip-hop group NWA, has slowly turned Hispanic, pushing out the blacks in a slow motion ethnic cleansing. This is a pattern seen all over America, one that liberals are fond of using to gentrify their strongholds. Washington DC imported Salvadorans, for example, as a way to freshen up the city.

That’s going to be a problem in the other lightly populated coastal area, the American South. Geographically, it is about perfect. You have mild climate, great agricultural areas, access to the sea and many good ports. There’s also the long history of blacks in the South, good and bad. In many respects, turning the South into Blacktopia would close the books on the Civil War. After all, the Abolitionists hoped the freed slaves would murder all of the white Southerners.

But, there’s a big problem. Southern whites have always been awful to blacks and there’s no reason to think that will change. Blacktopia would quickly look like South Africa circa 1975. One of the rules here is to make sure the new nation can survive. In theory the blacks could overwhelm the whites, but it is not a given and history says it is not the way to bet. The whites from Yankeedom would never tolerate it so this would lead to another civil war. Therefore, this option fails the basic principles outlined above.

That leaves New England. The population density of the six New England states is around 200 so there’s room for a lot more people. If you throw in New York, you have loads of room. The population of those seven states is roughly 35 million. Add in 40 million new people and you have a population density of Pennsylvania. Given that there are big cities like Boston and New York City, the density in the hinterlands would be quite low.

This region also is blessed with two world class cities and several smaller vibrant cities like Providence and Hartford. The current population is educated and productive. Most important, they have been lecturing the rest of us about race for 300 years. They fought a bloody war to help black people and fought a legal war to end segregation. Today, no people on earth fret over racism like the old Yankees of New England. They love black people!

Logistics

Now that we have the perfect location for Blacktopia, there are a few things that will need to be done. One is the current population of these states, and anyone born in these states are automatically citizens of the new nation. If you were born in New Hampshire, but now live in California, you are immediately a citizen of Blacktopia, but will be issued a visa for one year so you can decide to move back to your new country.

The reason for this is the new nation needs more than natural resources. The indigenous population is educated, rich and resourceful. They have built out the social organizations that a new nation will need in order to thrive. There’s also the goal of separating the old Yankees from everyone else as that has been a source of problems for 300 years. By keeping the current population in Blacktopia, we satisfy the core goals of the project.

Now, moving 35 million people to New England is no easy trick. The way to do this is to pay these folks $50,000 per head for relocation expenses. That’s well more than necessary, but there’s a hassle factor involved. The cost of that will be roughly $2 trillion, but in a big economy like ours that’s very manageable. There are trade-offs to everything and continued racial strife has costs well above this figure, I’m guessing.

The one last bit here is what to do with the people now living in New England and New York who were born elsewhere and wish to remain Americans. They would be allowed a year to move back to their home state. You can’t let this go on forever, so after a year, they either become a citizen of Blacktopia or they remain in the new nation. This solves the long term problem of people claiming rights in America, despite not having lived in America for decades. No more anchor babies either.

Conclusion

This little exercise has turned out better than I imagined. My instinct was to assume it was economically and logistically impossible, but once you think it through, it is very workable. Not only does it solve the problem of black people being treated poorly by whites, but it also solves the problem of whites warring on each other over the issue of race. The good whites are separated from the bad whites and that long running feud can be ended.

Of Course It Is About Race

Posted on by

In one of my more popular posts, I made the rather obvious point that black people are the most bigoted people in America. I did not mention it at the time, but I don’t think you can really blame them. It’s only prudent for a distinct racial minority to be paranoid about the majority. That’s inevitably going to sound like bigotry, but racial solidarity is never going to sound sunny and open.

The upside of this is black people in America tend to say what everyone thinks but is too afraid to admit. This story about the never ending Tom Brady drama is a good example.

Brandon Marshall isn’t afraid to speak his mind, and that was on full display on Tuesday night.

Discussing the nullification of Tom Brady’s four-game suspension on Showtime’s “Inside the NFL,” the Jets’ wide receiver theorized about how race might have played a role in Judge Richard M. Berman’s decision.

“White players, specifically at the quarterback position, are treated differently,” the five-time Pro Bowler said.

Marshall told host Adam Schein that many black players feel that they are held to different standards than their white counterparts.

“Absolutely,” Marshall said. “At times, at times, at times, yes.”

The 31-year-old stressed that he’s not alone in this thinking. Rather, it’s a widespread belief around the league.

“I think that the important role that I play on this show is to give the viewers (an) inside look of the locker room,” Marshall said. “I am a player right now. This is not just from our locker room; this is from the locker rooms across the States. This is how guys are feeling. This is not just my opinion. These are conversations I’m having with guys.

“It’s just not African-American players. I’ve had this conversation with Caucasian players as well. The most important part of this whole discussion is the process for the players. They just want the process to be fair and right. They just want to get it right.”

Brandon Marshall is not terribly bright so we should not expect deep insights from him. But, he is not so dim to not notice that race has played a role in this ridiculous story. Black players are arrested all the time and that means the league is handing down punishments to black guys all the time. Look at the league’s police blotter and you see nothing but brothers.

When a white guy gets jammed up, the league has to consider the race issue and throw the book at the honky. It’s simply prudent. Otherwise, you end up with Soros funded mob outside your door, threatening to burn your league down. It’s the cost of handing deviant weirdos and bitter freaks a veto over public morality. In 21st century America, black people are sacred so you tread lightly around anything remotely connected to race.