Posted on October 3, 2022

Life in the Short Run: Desperation Examined

Fred Reed, Barely A Blog, September 29, 2022

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. {snip}

{snip}

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?

{snip}