Posted on April 5, 2013

Race: The Central Question

Gregory Hood, American Renaissance, April 5, 2013

Americans live by lies. Or they are ignorant. Or they deliberately refuse to think. There may even be conscious deception, borne out of a sense of noblesse oblige or misplaced morality. Whatever the reason, race has been removed from any serious policy discussion.

The result is a society dependent on ignoring reality. Sure, we pretend to debate issues. We pay billions to support a huge bureaucracy supposedly designed to solve our problems. Our leaders attend prestigious schools for years and commission dozens of studies. All the while, we explicitly ignore the one thing that would make it possible to understand our problems. The result is policy by comedy. White advocates know our political leaders are either lying or stupid when they announce “solutions” to policy dilemmas.

Take education. Just as race realists would predict, white American students perform at levels roughly equivalent to other First-World nations. Just as race realists would predict, the achievement gap between racial groups persists across all geographic regions and economic levels. And yet, with tiresome predictability, television will give us a parade of supposed experts, liberal and conservative, all with new ways to help us ignore what is right in front of our eyes. Be it Head Start, small class sizes or “school choice,” we’ll do anything rather than acknowledge the reality of race.

What we are told is the greatest nation in the world contains dozens of decrepit wastelands that were once some of our greatest cities. Camden, New Jersey; Cleveland, Ohio; and Detroit, Michigan have been more permanently destroyed by diversity than Hiroshima was by the atomic bomb. Yet, we can count on the Left to explain to us that racism and oppression doom what are delicately called “urban youth.” As for the so called Right, they will come up with even more absurd explanations, blaming socialism, unions, “Democrats,” or other baleful forces which have somehow spared prosperous, progressive cities like Portland, Pittsburgh, or San Francisco.

The city of Chicago, the community once “organized” by the President we elected to prove we are not racist, is today more dangerous than Afghanistan. Blacks commit 75 percent of the murders, despite only being a third of the population. Blacks also refuse to talk to police officers trying to stop the violence, creating a situation akin to a low-level insurgency. In response, the city’s white Chief of Police Garry McCarthy says that in order to understand the violence you have to go back to the Pilgrims. Meanwhile, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s top priority is pressuring banks not to lend to gun manufacturers.

The state of California, which was once a symbol a middle-class paradise, is now all but insolvent. The city of Stockton has declared bankruptcy and Hispanics are now a plurality in the “All America City.” That city’s situation might be preferable to that of Bell, where the almost entirely Hispanic city has seen practically its entire government arrested for corruption. The mayor’s defense is that he did not know what he was doing, because he is illiterate. Hundreds of thousands of Californians are fleeing the state, the first time there has been “white flight” from an entire state. The left-libertarian magazine Reason, an enthusiastic cheerleader for illegal immigration, blames it all on “big government.”

Even the most fundamental questions about the nature of our society cannot be answered because we refuse even to consider race. The Left claims to be mystified by the collapse of the middle class, the destruction of private sector unions, and the end of class mobility in America. The Right cannot seem to understand why the state of Ronald Reagan will never vote Republican again, why the public is no longer afraid of socialism, and why the American soccer team is cursed at and booed at a “home game” in Los Angeles while illegal immigrants parade under foreign flags in the streets. Neither side can even began to grapple with the basic questions of class, values, identity, or economics that supposedly define them, because of their deliberate blindness about race.

But it’s not just the big questions. It’s the little things that affect us every day. It’s not being able to understand a clerk at the store because he can’t speak English. It’s the trash on the floors and the shouts of obscenities if you try to take your kids on the subway. It’s having to sit in traffic for an hour each day, to and from work, because your former middle-class neighborhood close to where you work has mysteriously turned into a “ghetto.” They tell us diversity is a strength. Actually, it’s just a word that means we can no longer have nice things.

Each day it gets more absurd. Nothing seems to work. Nobody does what he is supposed to do. The Border Patrol is filled with Hispanics and we act surprised when they ignore the law to help their co-racialists. We put Chinese in charge of military secrets and pretend that nobody could have predicted they would spy for their homeland. We pretend we don’t know what is happening when black elected officials run their cities into the ground but their constituents are more upset when a white person is put in charge to try to help.

Race is at the center of all of this. Race is not just a social construct. It is a biological fact that exists no matter how much people pretend otherwise. There is no issue in American life, be it crime, health care, the environment, education, defense, or even public transportation that can be addressed intelligently without confronting the central role of race.

Refusing to accept this means that official opinion and public policy grow ever more outlandish and divorced from reality. Even free speech becomes a thing of the past as we have to lie more and more to ourselves and each other to prevent us from seeing that the Emperor of Diversity has no clothes. Thus, we end up with a country where after Army soldiers are gunned down by a non-white, the Army Chief of Staff General Casey says, “As horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.” We have to recognize that to actually believe this is to confess to being a madman.

Killed by Nidal Malik Hasan at Fort Hood.

Killed by Nidal Malik Hasan at Fort Hood.

Theodore Dalrymple once said of egalitarian propaganda, “When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.”

To have to live this way imposes costs beyond an incompetent government, a wasteful economy, and a collapsing culture. Ignoring race creates a feeling of alienation from everyone around else. In a diverse society, social trust plummets. Instead of being surrounded by kin, community, and real culture, we’re put into a war of all against all, even as we are lectured that we are all brothers and sisters. It’s no surprise that many modern Americans feel life is meaningless. They isolate themselves from the larger society and throw themselves into the accumulation of material goods, or simply indulge in pleasure as a distraction from the reality of American life.

Thomas Jefferson said, “There is not a truth existing which I fear or would wish unknown to the whole world.” Race is one of those truths that cannot be ignored. It is the key to the rise and fall of civilizations, the collapse or rise of a city, the hidden pattern behind a thousand everyday social interactions. As Benjamin Disraeli wrote, “All is race, there is no other truth.”

We can no longer afford to ignore this central reality of human existence and wonder why our society is failing and our culture collapsing. Race must retake its central place in the public debate. We cannot make public policy without acknowledging it. We cannot improve our everyday lives without understanding it. And most importantly, we cannot give meaning to our existence as individuals and as a nation if we continue to lie and deceive ourselves about the reality of race.