…the problem isn’t … racism. For example, I have no racial aversion to the Japanese, whom in fact I quite admire. Yet if every time I passed a Japanese on the street, he punched me in the face, I would quickly come to detest the Japanese. Would this be racism? BY FRED REED
America faces disaster in its relations with blacks. We don’t admit it. Those in power seek desperately to hide this. Governments, politicians, the media and academia insist that what is happening isn’t. But it is. Censoring expression is easier than preventing awareness, though, and awareness grows.
What is happening is both awful and of grim portent. Blacks kill each other in thousands annually in the cities. They murder dozens of whites and Asians monthly in unprovoked attacks. The killers are often groups of young blacks of both sexes. The Knockout Game flourishes. Coverage of this is either nonexistent or duplicitous. For example, The constant attacks on Asians,, not infrequently involving a strong black man punching out an aging Asian woman, are described as racism. They are, but the racism is of blacks, blacks commit all of the attacks on Asians.
In city after city, violent crime runs at appalling levels and grows: Philadelphia, St. Louis, New Orleans, New York, Baltimore, Chicago. The accounts never mention who the criminals are. Cameras do. Surveillance videos of black mobs ransacking stores in malls—of black shoplifters calmly sweeping merchandise from store shelves into bags—do not appear on CNN, but they traverse the internet.
This can´t go on forever. Anger grows among nonblacks, among targeted Asians and whites and Latinos, among businesses forced out of cities, but the anger too is censored (video) by the media. Journalists don’t write about crime as that would be racist, and read only each other, and so don’t know what, likely, is coming.
Crime is not the only component of the collapse. The maleducation of blacks is a parallel disaster. Here again society prefers censorship to amelioration. An example was the discovery that in Baltimore whole schools lacked a single student reading at the “proficient” level. Many other schools had only a few. It later turned out that many were in fact reading at the first-grade level and that administrators were hiding it. This is not news. It is catastrophe. Those kids will be angry and unemployable for the next half-century.
The failures of blacks are variously attributed to the lingering effects of slavery, to poverty, discrimination, racism, or genetics. It makes no practical difference. None of these can be changed in the short run, meaning at least the next decade. The short run is where we live.
It is worth knowing what the problem isn’t. It isn’t racism. For example, I have no racial aversion to the Japanese, whom in fact I quite admire. Yet if every time I passed a Japanese on the street, he punched me in the face, I would quickly come to detest the Japanese. Would this be racism? If mobs of Japanese turned cities into abattoirs, looted stores, and beat people of other races unconscious, would disliking them be racism?
Here we arrive at Fred’s First Law of Practical Sociology: It’s the behavior, stupid. The majority of Americans will accept members of races that are productive, Anglophone, agreeable, and not criminal. If your new dentist turns out to be a Chinese woman, do you reach for your gun?? Or think of more pressing things, like folding your laundry?
A few examples. My wife, a Mexicana, has been perfectly accepted all across America. My son-in-law, a Salvadoran, has risen to semi diplomatic status in the Pentagon. The (then) young Vietnamese woman who came out of Saigon with me in that now-ancient evacuation married a young white fellow who retired some years ago as a bird colonel, She has experienced no opprobrium in the military. Sixty-some million Latinos have come to America. Given the magnitude of the influx, the lack of race riots and the like astonishes. Asians such as Chinese and Indians prosper. While it is not quite true that they are all programmers at Google, it is importantly close to true. Few notice. Inattention is the highest form of acceptance.
Most races assimilate with little difficulty. A couple of years ago a friend got me an appointment with an ophthalmologist at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. This turned out to be Dr. Yassine Daoud, Lebanese, a former street urchin raised largely in a Palestinian refugee camp who, by a combination of brains, luck, and Harvard Med, ended up a star surgeon at Hopkins. On another occasion I saw an ophthalmologist at EDOW, Eye Doctors of Washington. She turned out to be Dr. Deepika Shah who, by a brown cast and her name, I placed from somewhere east of Suez. University of Virginia, med school at Penn, highly impressive resume, and pretty (look, I’m a guy. Deal with it.) The clinic’s insurance woman was named Martinez. On the same trip at my bank the assistant manager and perhaps a teller were Mexican, perfect but slightly accented English. In Austin the eye doctor was Dr. Annie Chan, Chinese, and her clinic’s admin staff were Mexican women. A friend in Austin told me that it was common for Mexican girls to take two years of junior college and move into low-level office—i.e., white-collar—jobs.
This is a poor fit with nativist predictions that immigrants would not learn English, live twelve in a room on welfare, live by crime, spread bedbugs, and try to turn America into something called Aztlan, a mythical form of Mexico.
Is the current behavior of blacks inherent, perhaps genetic? It would seem not. In the Forties, when racism was real and virulent, illegitimacy, crime, illiteracy, and unemployment among blacks were much lower. New Yorkers of my acquaintance describe recently arrived Nigerians as courteous, honest, and self-supporting. When I was in high school in rural Virginia, back before the invention of fire, white kids went to King George High, blacks to Ralph Bunche, but there was no crime, shooting (unless you were a deer), or the horrendous illiteracy of today’s urban blacks. Walter Williams, the now-deceased black professor of economics and conservative columnist, at George Mason University, grew up in the housing projects of Philadelphia in the Thirties. He reported that there were the usual schoolyard fights, but no weapons, no attacks on teachers, and that kids could read. Anyone interested in the life of blacks in Mississippi in the Twenties might read Richard Wright’s Black Boy and Uncle Tom’s Children. There was no resemblance to today’s Chicago. There was horrendous racial discrimination.
Well and good. But what is or isn’t inherent matters not at all. We live in the short term and have to deal with what is.
While most races get along, blacks don’t. They assimilate too slowly to ward off whatever looms. A blowup is far from impossible. Note that it would be much worse for blacks than whites. Nonblacks are far more numerous. Food comes from distant farms owned by whites. Blacks depend on nonblacks perhaps much more than they realize. The cities would not recover for many years from a levantamiento, nor would race relations. We had better figure out how to prevent something we won’t like at all. Any of us.
The black center of gravity is the sprawling urban ghetto, a place where you can ride for long hours with the police, as I often have done, without seeing a white face. These places amount to a distributed foreign country. Rejection of the surrounding culture is intense, as evidenced by the adoption of unusual names like Latoya and Deewan. Little to no contact with the greater country exists. The social pathologies—illegitimacy, chaotic schools, drugs, welfare dependency, gangs, illiteracy—seem intractable. Whether they will remain so decades down the line is a question for the long term for people as yet unborn. Now is the short term. It is where we are.
The gravamen of the problem lies in the crime. It is this that swells the ranks of nativist groups and arouses growing anger in whites, Asians, Latinos. Without the lawlessness, various cures or palliatives might be tried. With the crime, growing anger among nonblacks leads to desire for harsh measures, long sentences, more police better armed and less restrained, segregation, anything to end the loss of civilization. What can be done about it? Most likely, nothing. Criminality is so out of control that a police solution would seem a war against blacks with burning of cities. Something akin to martial law would be needed even to make the attempt. Governments know this. They will do nothing.
Curiously, current policy in many jurisdictions is to eliminate bail so that serious criminals as well as shoplifters are released within hours of being apprehended. This increases a sense of impunity among black criminals that is much easier to grant than to take back.
It is worrisome that as the horror stories traverse the internet, videos of beatings, accounts of sharp increases in car jackings and lootings, non-whites who in the past would have said nothing become more openly angry. A friend in St. Louis, as decent a man as I have known, of liberal background, now says privately it is time for whites to begin shooting back. He loathes the nightly gunfire, the uncontrolled drag racing on public streets, the death of culture, the flight of the tax base.
We are winding a spring.
The solution? Nobody is even looking for one. The politics of race consists entirely of warring groups calling each other names and pols trolling for votes with actual problems being innocent bystanders. Naming streets for Harriet Tubman and tearing down Confederate statues are feelgood measures for some that increase anger and division while doing nothing for or about blacks. Guns cannot be eliminated any time soon, the issue being at most a rallying cry of Bidenites against Deplorables. Throwing money offers little prospect. Building Olympic gyms for inner-city schools will produce schools with Olympic gyms and unchanged pathologies. Increasing the salaries of teachers? Teachers with more money and unchanged pathologies.
Similarly, railing against drugs is political theater. Drugs are too important a part of the American economy with too many pols on the take and too many banks wallowing in laundered money. Suggesting that black girls should marry before reproducing evokes shrieks of fury from feminists and the media, though rafts of studies have revealed that black kids with two parents do much better is school and engage in much less crime. And so on. In sum, anything that is politically possible won’t work, and anything that will work is politically impossible.
What now, Kemo Sabe?
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Since everybody and his insane aunt in the attic is emoting over the sabotage of the Nordstream pipelines and who done it, I’ll throw in my thoughts, such as they are. The question is who benefits? The answer is the United States, which has been trying desperately to block Nordstream II for years. Why sabotage now? In Europe, heating, electricity, energy for factories, and fertilizer come from cheap Russian pipeline gas. All of the foregoing, including inflation, go up sharply without it. When things get cold and ugly come, say, January, European publics might start thinking, To hell with the Ukraine, we better drop sanctions on Russia and get our gas back. This would screw Washington’s war against Russia and end all hope of shutting down Nordstream II. Solution? Blow up all the pipelines, which has the added advantage of forcing Europe to buy expensive US gas. The Europeans, fragile things, won’t have the courage to say this.