Every time I write about my positive experiences attending black L.A. public schools in the early 1980s, I get pushback. Sometimes gentle pushback from friends, sometimes angry pushback from furious, red-faced men.
To stitch together two themes I’ve touched upon recently—the use of “demographics is destiny” as a crutch, and the deadly fatalism that’s gripped the right of late—the pushback seems to revolve around the fact that if what I say I experienced is true, if I did attend perfectly decent black schools during the height of the crack epidemic in the city that was crack central, then demographic fatalism is a flawed worldview.
Demographic fatalists, of course, don’t want to hear that. Like all ideologues, their beliefs are a source of comfort. Even pessimism can be comforting; the belief that certain things can’t be changed is reassuring to those too lazy to effect change. “I’d throw in with a hardworking Mexican laborer over a white college-educated female any day of the week.”
Leftists rarely have such issues. They, too, are demographic fatalists in a way. Whites (especially men) are the problem; whites must be eliminated. It’s a simplistic worldview well-suited to the tiny leftist brain. It works for them because when your only goal is to destroy, unthinking simplicity serves you ably.
But if you seek to build, or at least preserve, you need something more thoughtful than “Hulk smash.” So let’s be thoughtful about my youthful experiences. Why, in the middle of the crack epidemic, in Cracktown USA, was my school not a hellhole?
Well, to start with, in the 1980s the largely white LAPD was ruthless. You might not recall this—you likely don’t—but one of the things that came out during the Rodney King “reckoning” (yes, Fentanyl Floyd was hardly a pioneer) was that certain LAPD officers would begin their shift by declaring, “It’s monkey-slapping time!”
Now, I’m one hard-assed unsentimental SOB when it comes to racial matters, but that’s harsh even for me.
So you had vigorous policing and unapologetic incarceration, with no revolving-door book-and-release. And the policing extended to inside school grounds: narcs (almost always white girls, because that would guarantee they’d get invited to all the best drug parties; a Crip’s suspicions about that new blond “transfer student” would always be overruled by the yearnings of his cock), and routine LAPD drug and gang sweeps that would cleanse the school of troublemakers.
The point? Proper enforcement trumped demographics. That’s a blow to your fatalism right there. I’ll give you another, more recent one (and my thanks to colleague Steve Sailer for bringing this to my attention): The murder rates in border towns on the Mexican side are astronomical. The murder rates in Hispanic-majority border towns on the U.S. side are massively below the U.S. national average.