Polls show that racial relations have gotten much worse under Barack Obama. Why has that happened?
by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media
Why do polls show that racial relations have gotten much worse under Barack Obama, who won the White House with over 95% of the black — and 45% of the white — vote?
A recent New York Times/CBS News poll [1] just revealed that about 60% of Americans feel race relations are not good. Some 40% think that they will become even worse. Yet when Obama was elected, 66% of those polled felt race relations were generally OK. All racial groups, according to recent polling, believe that Obama’s handling of racial relations has made things worse since 2009. Another recent Pew poll confirms these tensions, and suggests whites are now about as pessimistic as blacks.
What has happened to racial relations?
Crime. A small cohort of urban African-American males under fifty — no more than 3-4% of the general population — is responsible for about 50% of many of the violent crimes committed. Blacks are 5-8 times more likely to commit rather suffer an interracial crime, which makes up less than 10% of most violent crime. Both the analysis and solution have become taboo subjects. Writing the above is a near thought crime.
The non-African-American community of all races largely feels that if blacks were committing crimes commensurate to their percentages in the general population, the police would come into contact with young black males with much less frequency, diminishing the opportunities for jaded police-community flare-ups. In turn, would crime decline in the inner city if there was more emphasis on curbing illegitimacy, drug use, and single-mother families, while privileging study and academic excellence over sports and the cult of machismo?
Black leaders counter that racism is still the engine that drives a sense of despair, which insidiously is at the root of all pathology. Equality-of-result federal programs are ultimately seen as the answer that will catapult the disadvantaged into the middle class. The legacy of slavery and Jim Crow is said to trump the horrors that other immigrant and minority groups experienced — the Irish who were declared to be inhuman by mid-nineteenth-century essayists, the Asian exclusionary laws and the Japanese internment, the Holocaust and the deliberate polices of the State Department and War Department to refuse entry of Jews fleeing the gas chambers, the Native Americans who lost their tribal landscapes, and on and on.
One can see why this back-and-forth argument about cause and effect has no solution by reading a typical story about black crime in any online mainstream newspaper or wire-service report. The journalistic narrative is embedded within politically correct tip-toeing around the race of the perpetrator, with interviews of family members attesting to complete astonishment that a son, brother, or friend, with a previous arrest or criminal record, would ever do such a heinous thing. Police overreaction is thematic. Crimes such as assault are downplayed. Little concern is accorded to a victim who was robbed, murdered, or raped. The news accounts of black crime are the written versions of the edited George Zimmerman 911 tape, his photoshopped picture, and his new identity as a “white Hispanic.”
But read what follows these daily crime stories in the online comments section. (Do the usually censorious PC editors encourage uncensored commentary in their news websites, in the sense of bread-and-circuses entertainment or efforts to gin up sagging readership?) The readers’ editorialization could come right out of the Old Confederacy. If elites doctor our news to massage racial themes, the mass displays a furor at the political-correctness and lying. And in their wrath, online commentators ironically end up confirming stereotypes that many whites are getting angry to the point of becoming racists.
Obama never seriously raised the topic of inordinate black crime other than a few ephemeral pre-election throat-clearings about personal responsibility. We were left instead with his administration’s cheap editorializing on Trayvon, Ferguson, “nation of cowards,” and “punish our enemies.” Few see resolution of the half-century-old argument, except that much of non-white America (Asians, East Asians, Arabs, Latinos, etc.) does not yet see racism as the cause of a lack of parity; e.g., so far there is not a Korean Al Sharpton, a Latino Jesse Jackson, or a Punjabi Louis Farrakhan.
As the country moves beyond the old 90/10% white/black binary, race becomes more complex, and the charge of racism less effective as an exegesis for pathology. We fear the familiar script of 2014-5 will play out for the rest of our lives: a young Michael Brown-like inner-city African-American, with a past record of felonies and often unarmed, will be manhandled or perhaps even shot during a police encounter, usually as a result of either resisting arrest or attacking the officer. He will be immediately lionized as “gentle” or “on his way to college,” and become emblematic of reckless government violence in a way hundreds of murders each month of blacks by blacks are not indicative of inner-city pathologies. Mention of rap sheets will remain taboo. The media insists that more numerous examples of police shooting whites (who comprise a larger population, but are far less likely on a percentage basis to be arrested for suspicion of committing a felony) are irrelevant; so are black-on-white instances of crime, or black officers killing those of other races. Police will react by pulling back from the inner city in fear their careers will be ruined should they use greater force to counter initial force. Black community leaders will fire back that derelict racist officers are not protecting the community. Police will reenter the inner city in proactive fashion. Another Freddie Gray or Michael Brown case will follow, with demands that police leave the community alone.
The cases quickly become iconic and mythographic: Obama evokes “Ferguson” as an example of racism, without any context that Michael Brown resisted arrest, was under the influence and walking down the middle of the street — after recently committing a felony. If the president’s own attorney general can exonerate Officer Darren Wilson and the president can still persist in referencing Ferguson, racial relations, as the polls suggest, are going to get even worse.
So far we have read only in the elite media about black furor over white privilege. Yet the white elite that most certainly has Ivy League pedigrees, Washington/New York insider leverage, and corporate/Wall Street Clintonian-like help seems to encourage black anger as a sort of personal penance. Yet the elite has no clue of the growing anger of the white middle class and underclass that has no white privilege, and is tired of hearing that it does and being smeared as Neanderthal racists. When those who have no privilege hear “white privilege” from those who most certainly enjoy it, their reaction is similar to Denzel Washington’s in Man on Fire [2], who tires of hearing ad nauseam only “I’m just a professional.”
Jobs. A second problem is the static pyramidal Obama economy that has made labor participation historically low. Overregulating and overtaxing are fine for elites, who have enough money to either pay or find ways to avoid higher taxes. They don’t care much if their power, gas, or health costs go up — at least if they are led to believe that is the proper green atonement to pay for cooling the planet, putting a bait fish back into a delta, or shutting down a coal plant. Obama in recompense for favoring the aristocratic elite feels that by expanding food stamps, disability insurance, housing, legal, and education subsidies, etc., the lower classes will be satisfied in lieu of a high-paying job on a fracking rig, in construction, or welding on the Keystone pipeline.
Yet in such a fossilized European system, the subsidized lower classes still see little chance of getting all the stuff they see advertised on television and computers, or the opportunities of the middle classes, and don’t wish to accept that their smart phones, Kias and air conditioning make them princes compared to the wealthy of 1970. Throughout history, the absence of parity, not the lack of means, has been the criterion for revolution. I’d go further: the more affluent the consumer underclass becomes due to Chinese-made goods, inexpensive high-tech appurtenances, and federal and state largess, the angrier it become that others have even more. Looters focus on sneakers and electronic goods, not flour and vegetables. Should Obama cut taxes, lift regulations, become pro-energy and pro-growth, and reform entitlements and the tax code to expand the economy at 5-6% growth per annum, would not all sorts of new opportunities open up for African-Americans?
If 1 million illegal aliens a year were not pouring across the border, would not employers vie for labor rather than seek to import it cheaply? Instead, the Democratic Party is mostly about an elite on top that, as penance for its privilege, supports subsidies for the mass below that remains distant and out of sight and mind. By that cheap fillip, I mean the Obama daughters don’t walk into the inner city any more than Chelsea Clinton lives in Jamaica Queens or Barbara Boxer has a granddaughter in the Madera city schools.
The Implicit Bargain. African-American elites envision the urban underclass the same way that some La Raza third-generation Latinos view impoverished illegal immigrants from Oaxaca. Social disparities among the poor become arguments for affirmative-action leverage for elites, as if Barack Obama getting into Harvard Law or Lisa Jackson serving as EPA administrator will lower the crime rate in Baltimore or help change attitudes about illegitimacy in Oakland. Until we confess class is a greater barometer of privilege than race, I see no solution to the escalating tensions. How odd that upscale, one-percent African-Americans at NPR, the New York Times, and MSNBC monotonously blast white privilege, as if their own lives are always far more hurtful than those in Appalachia or rural Oklahoma.
Progress is Impossible? Ta-Nehisi Coates writes that he has no affinity with the firemen and police who were incinerated on 911 [3], given his grievances over endemic racism and the inability of blacks to gain parity with the majority due to systematic exclusion, formerly overt, today insidious. Currently, blacks make up about 12% of the population. The president of the United States, the present (and former) attorney general of the United States, the secretary of Transportation, the secretary of Homeland Security, the former head of the Environmental Protection Agency, and the head of NASA are African American. Twenty-one percent of the Postal Service employees are African-American; seventeen percent of the entire federal work force is black. Seventy-eight percent of the NBA are African-American. Sixty-seven percent of NFL players are black. Sixteen percent of the teams have African-American head coaches; twenty-four percent of the teams have black general managers. Has the definition of diversity become that overrepresentation in some areas (the Left’s word, not mine) of African-Americans, based on percentages in the general population, is still diversity, while underrepresentation of blacks in the physics department at Caltech is proof of endemic racism? Or does a physics professor enjoy more perks and money than a NFL general manager?
We are asked to believe that Mr. Coates encounters crippling racism more so than my quite dark, quite accented, and quite turbaned Punjabi neighbor, who lives in a sea of non-Punjabis. We are asked to believe that an entire generation of lower middle-class white and mixed-race Americans who came of age not during Jim Crow and the civil rights movement, but during the half-century of affirmative action and diversity set-asides are guaranteed winning slots in American because of their “white privilege.” When I see the local, broke, and white tire-changer, somehow I don’t think his coming of age in the 1980s was easier than that of Jeh Johnson or Eric Holder. When I see a video in which a privileged young white elite at $65,000-per-year Wellesley or Amherst confesses to “white privilege,” I wonder how many hours he has welded in Tulare or she has done data entry in a carrel in San Jose. Many of our problems derive from black elites feeding off the guilt of compatriot white elites of a like class in a similar landscape, who claim to speak for all whites, as if they shared something when in fact they share nothing much at all. I suspect that more white males feel an affinity, a stronger one based on shared ideas, with Ben Carson than any affinity on the basis of race with Hillary Clinton or John Kerry.
Because of our dishonesty on matters of race and the elite’s use of it for their own privilege, we will see not only little progress, but also much retrogression. Look at the world abroad: anytime a man or woman identifies by race, violence mounts and chaos follows. The times they are a changing — for the worse.
Article printed from Works and Days: http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson
URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/racial-relations-tragic-collapse/
URLs in this post:
[1] New York Times/CBS News poll: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/07/23/us/document-new-york-timescbs-news-poll-on-race-relations-in-the-us.html?_r=0
[2] Man on Fire: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_on_Fire_%282004_film%29
[3] with the firemen and police who were incinerated on 911: http://townhall.com/columnists/marknuckols/2015/07/17/tanehisi-coates-cheers-deaths-of-911-rescuers-david-brooks-apologizes-for-being-white-n2026881
Copyright © 2015 Works and Days. All rights reserved.
What if in inner city schools, the “Progressive-Retardnation” worldview education was defunded by law?
Rather, the only funds allowed for education K-12, university and Journalism schools were for “Tragic-Liberty” worldview? (In other words the ed pedagogy reverted back to what it once was, before Progtard hijacking!)
Would not race relations improve, even as Journalism stopped being a PC-lynch party for socialists?
In the fifties and-early sixties we would at times visit the black jazz clubs on Chicago’s south side without a hint of trouble. After the great society this experience became harder until now there are no longer black Jazz clubs and if there were it would be dangerous to visit these neighborhoods. We have digressed mightily since the great society
Many will become very uncomfortable as they read this article and confront the realities that lie behind the deterioration of racial relations over the Obama years.
The ugly truths about black crime rates, the media snippets of perps who always seem to be ‘thinking about going to college’, the refusal of the media, politicians, and liberal activists to tell the truth and in not doing so creating a whole new generation of whites furious at being treated as naive stooges – we have indeed met the enemy and he is us.
Some will conclude that voting for a person of color was a bad decision. Others will gloat ‘I told you this would happen’. How tragic.
What a shame. What a tragic waste of a historic opportunity.
Thank you, especially for that penultimate paragraph. I can’t get over the “white privilege” nonsense. I’m white, and I have had privileges, but I think that they are due to my parents’ sacrifices. Neither went to college, but they saved so I could. They paid tuition, and I took out loans. I don’t remember using my “white card” to get in. I remember getting all A’s in high school.
I think about Vietnamese boat people, my Econ professor whose parents were interned during WWII, Indian immigrants, blacks who have recently come from Africa, and I wonder how all these counter examples of people who’ve suffered great oppression much more recently than 1860 squares with this “legacy of slavery” scapegoat.
I know a Mexican immigrant woman who came here illegally, was beaten, abused, worked multiple jobs, raised children alone and suffered all that in silence without whining about some lack of imaginary privilege. Now, in retirement, she’s legal, her children are married, middle-class, with spoiled grandchildren, and she has a happy life, modest house, and a good man. She didn’t obtain some “white privilege” along the way.
Whatever this “legacy of slavery” and “white privilege” nonsense is, it doesn’t seem to affect people who aren’t in gangs, committing crime and dropping out of school.
Good article but we’re still not looking at the “last chapter of the book”. Dr. Byron Roth in his 2010 book “The Perils of Diversity: Immigration and Human Nature” states that the debate over immigration policy in the Western world is critically uninformed by the sciences of evolutionary biology and psychology. In his work he examines the intersection between culture, genetics, IQ and society. He states, “Prominent among the fundamental features of human nature is a natural bias toward one’s own kind, making harmony in multi-ethnic societies problematic at best. It is also extreme in the viciousness with which it attacks those who differ on this issue. These attacks are accompanied by a very generalized and one-sided denigration of Western traditions and Western accomplishments, and claims that a collective guilt should be assumed by all Europeans (whites) for the sins of their forebears.
Very good as to your overall point. I think a several points should be raised:
>> the Irish who were declared to be inhuman by mid-nineteenth-century essayists <> the Asian exclusionary laws <> the Japanese internment <<
Not one of our finest moments but surely something to be viewed in context of the aftermath of a dramatic and deadly act of war on the part of Japan. As a Canadian author observed of a similar Canadian removal of Japanese from the west coast of Canada, at least they didn't get a bayonet in the stomach as had been the experience of Westerners after the Japanese took over Singapore.
Context is everything, much like lynching in the U.S. Depending on what you take as the upward limit of Soviet executions, beatings, starvation, freezing, and torture, the Soviets blew past the U.S. tally of one lynching every 5 days between 1860 and 1920, say, in an astonishing way. 5-10,000 every five days over its entire 72-year history, in point of fact, and that includes decades when the worst of the Leninist/Stalinist/Red Army excesses were no more. In this context, the American record bears reconsideration along the lines of something other than homo horribilus americanus.
>> the Holocaust and the deliberate polices of the State Department and War Department to refuse entry of Jews fleeing the gas chambers <> the Native Americans who lost their tribal landscapes <> and on and on <> The readers’ editorialization could come right out of the Old Confederacy. If elites doctor our news to massage racial themes, the mass displays a furor at the political-correctness and lying. And in their wrath, online commentators ironically end up confirming stereotypes that many whites are getting angry to the point of becoming racists. <<
A lot of readers comment and express rage at the wholesale destruction of Albany (Ga.), Atlanta, Baltimore, Birmingham, Bridgeport (Conn.), Buffalo, Camden, Charlotte, Chicago, Cleveland, Columbia (S.C.), Compton, Columbus (Ga.), Dallas, Detroit, St. Louis (ill.), Fairview Village (N.J.), Ferguson, Flint (Mich.)(rated America’s most dangerous metropolitan area), Gary (Ind.), Indianapolis, Jackson (Miss.), Jacksonville, Kansas City, Macon, Memphis, Miami, Milwaukee, Montgomery (Ala.), New Orleans, Newark, Oakland, Orlando, Paterson, Philadelphia, Rochester, Rockford, Savannah, Selma, St. Louis (north), Stockton, Trenton, Tulsa, Wilmington.
You don't have to be a racist to take note of that and to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that 50 years of pandering, coddling, privileging, bribing, and cowering at the feet of black thugs has been for naught in the face of black pathology and rank dishonesty. They are hopeless as proved by their inability to get a grip. The Irish faced their problems squarely and honestly, certainly with the aid of a leader who did not play on the themes of helplessness, revenge, and the so-called privileged status of the people who owned the country to which they had come.
For every reader who confirms the stereotypes of the Confederacy — another slur — there are a boatload who confirm only stark, cold reality of how blacks are determined not to integrate or conform to civilized standards. We notice and we're sick of the lies about the joys of diversity and how blacks will thrive if we but condemn our own racist ways and give them more money and legal racial privilege. We think it's a sick, weak society that allows lies about race to flood the airwaves, newspapers, and court decisions. Disparate impact, my foot.
My previous attempt to post had some formatting that caused some text to disappear.
Again:
Very good as to your overall point. I think a several points should be raised:
*** the Irish who were declared to be inhuman by mid-nineteenth-century essayists ***
I’m not a student of the Irish experience in America but I suspect that those essayists were British not American. We do hear always and forever of the NINA horrors but it seems to be fair to say that the Irish who were transported or otherwise arrived here demonstrated significant dysfunction in their ranks. This was recognized by a Catholic bishop of New York IIRC, who mounted a sort of moral rearmament campaign to get the Irish to clean up their act. Which they did in a major way. Any one living in a dysfunctional community (aka a “ghetto”) has the keys to his liberation therefrom in his pocket but, as you point out, the black option of choice is passivity and blame shifting. And a ton of hypocrisy and shucking and jiving.
*** the Asian exclusionary laws ***
The Chinese Immigration and Exclusion Acts came about because Chinese in America were willing to work for what were essentially slave wages. This adversely affected whites who experienced significant downward pressure on their wages. Were they supposed to adopt an attitude of equanimity and accept that foreigners and their habits and abilities would determine their economic future? Shades of the present day where foreigners flood into the country illegally and drive wages down — and citizens out — of much more than stoop labor. Much more. Good luck getting a job in construction when the majority on the job are Hispanic. No Gringos Need Apply or Remain.
I don’t believe there was any innate hatred of Orientals at work. My own father was born in the 19th century and had no visceral hatred of any other race. Why would others of similar origin, temperament and competence be any less decent and willing to take men as they were? If that’s unacceptable anecdotal evidence it’s no less invalid than the implication I think you make that the Chinese Immigration and Exclusion Acts were premised on “racism.”
*** the Japanese internment ***
Not one of our finest moments but surely something to be viewed in context of the aftermath of a dramatic and deadly act of war on the part of Japan. As a Canadian author observed of a similar Canadian removal of Japanese from the west coast of Canada, at least they didn’t get a bayonet in the stomach as had been the experience of Westerners after the Japanese took over Singapore.
Context is everything, much like lynching in the U.S. Depending on what you take as the upward limit of Soviet executions, beatings, starvation, freezing, and torture, the Soviets blew past the U.S. tally of one lynching every 5 days between 1860 and 1920, say, in an astonishing way. 5-10,000 every five days over its entire 72-year history, in point of fact, and that includes decades when the worst of the Leninist/Stalinist/Red Army excesses were no more. In this context, the American record bears reconsideration along the lines of something other than _homo horribilus americanus_.
*** the Holocaust and the deliberate polices of the State Department and War Department to refuse entry of Jews fleeing the gas chambers ***
Unless Jews were able to make passage on ships coming to the U.S. during the war when U boats were operating off North Carolina, I think this refers to FDR turning back one ship of Jews prior to the outbreak of war. I am not a student of this phenomenon but if it was a pre-war event, it took place before there were any gas chambers in use by the Nazis.
*** the Native Americans who lost their tribal landscapes ***
As to which, boo frigging hoo, to quote Michelle Malkin in another context. Native Americans practiced slavery as between the tribes (and against whites) and, for the Sioux, warfare was an essential, even required, element of manhood before whites arrived. The Comanche and Apache were feared fighters and neighbors and I do not doubt that the Navaho gave them and their lands a wide berth. The Iroquois were some vicious people whose parents were not married to each other. One Jesuit priest was slowly roasted over a fire, had burning pitch dripped on his head, and had his lips cut off — all without a murmur of pain. No doubt one of our most fearsome warriors, imperialists, and all-around depredators.
Any Indians who inhabited North America at any time held title to the land they inhabited because they took it or defended it with military force against the attacks of other Indians. One other aggressive tribe in the mix was not a moral tipping point or even something not out of the ordinary. Of betrayals and dispossessions there were many but rather than chest beating about the Indians we need the above to be factored in, as well as some 20,000 years of human history. Caesar slaughtered a bunch of people in Gaul, the Manchu took over China, the Arabs took over vast areas after their psychopath founder set them loose. Are we the only ones who have to explore the equities of the colonization of N. America with the exactness of the scholastics or can we revisit the horrors of the Muslim conquest of India and points west, Austro-Hungarian aggression, Czarist imperialism, and Bantu adventurism and colonization? Can we get Russia to hand back the territory stolen from the Finns or is there some statute of limitations there, say 70 years for the Russians but 500 for us? And, let’s get busy on that treatise on how to lovingly and smoothly take over empty lands or the lands of people who took it by force themselves. The U.N. is supposed to enshrine a better way of handling matters but it was silent on the infiltration of the Albanians into Kosovo, the Chinese takeover of Tibet, the ISISian operations in the ME. It did well in Korea but that seems to be it by way of solid accomplishment.
*** and on and on ***
An unsubstantiated slur against Americans.
*** The readers’ editorialization could come right out of the Old Confederacy. If elites doctor our news to massage racial themes, the mass displays a furor at the political-correctness and lying. And in their wrath, online commentators ironically end up confirming stereotypes that many whites are getting angry to the point of becoming racists. ***
A lot of readers comment and express rage at the wholesale destruction of Albany (Ga.), Atlanta, Baltimore, Birmingham, Bridgeport (Conn.), Buffalo, Camden, Charlotte, Chicago, Cleveland, Columbia (S.C.), Compton, Columbus (Ga.), Dallas, Detroit, St. Louis (ill.), Fairview Village (N.J.), Ferguson, Flint (Mich.)(rated America’s most dangerous metropolitan area), Gary (Ind.), Indianapolis, Jackson (Miss.), Jacksonville, Kansas City, Macon, Memphis, Miami, Milwaukee, Montgomery (Ala.), New Orleans, Newark, Oakland, Orlando, Paterson, Philadelphia, Rochester, Rockford, Savannah, Selma, St. Louis (north), Stockton, Trenton, Tulsa, Wilmington.
You don’t have to be a racist to take note of that and to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that 50 years of pandering, coddling, privileging, bribing, and cowering at the feet of black thugs has been for naught in the face of black pathology and rank dishonesty. They are hopeless as proved by their inability to get a grip. The Irish faced their problems squarely and honestly, certainly with the aid of a leader who did not play on the themes of helplessness, revenge, and the so-called privileged status of the people who owned the country to which they had come.
For every reader who confirms the stereotypes of the Confederacy — another slur — there are a boatload who confirm only stark, cold reality of how blacks are determined not to integrate or conform to civilized standards. We notice and we’re sick of the lies about the joys of diversity and how blacks will thrive if we but condemn our own racist ways and give them more money and legal racial privilege. We think it’s a sick, weak society that allows lies about race to flood the airwaves, newspapers, and court decisions. Disparate impact, my foot.
I have been a longtime admirer of Dr Hanson but have found his unwillingness to face this issue for the last couple of years quite frustrating. I even had the temerity to write him an email about it.
He now appears to have allowed his undoubtedly observant and analytic brain to start putting it together. I am grateful for that, but he will no doubt now be vilified even more as a “racist.” As he says, simply pointing out facts about Black crime rates is the crime of “hate fact.”
Once a very pro-Black White liberal, my attitude has done a quite complete reversal over the last several years. I regard the concept of “racism” –which only ever means unwelcome White attitudes, no one else’s– as a complete fraud, the exact functional equivalent in modern terms to the pre-modern “witchcraft.”
As for “White privilege,” many forms of privilege exist in every culture. They are inherent in the structure of culture itself and necessary for any society’s functioning. To put it more simply, “privilege” means “group reputation.” That, too, is unavoidable and no crime.
And I have come to the very sad conclusion that our race relations are insoluble and cannot be fixed. Barring some miraculous Great Awakening, we have become The Balkan States of America and can expect, eventually, a similar outcome.
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” Look at the world abroad….” Power in the hands of a few can rationalize any conquering evil. A quote from Tibet online peoples daily—- ” Tibetans now live a free, prosperous and civilized life, and with the loving care and efforts of the Central Government.” Look for more creeping Central Government efforts to spread the love. Newly formed strategic ties with Turkey— The New Silk Road. Developing countries resent the West—– and are sliding into a severe economic downturn. Changing alliances.
2VictorDavisHanson 4ObamistRaceRelationsRedux
The Affirmative Action Paradigm as a tool for governance espoused by the Democrats never really worked as intended by the purveyors thereof. Good intentions always paved the road to hell with its luggage of unintended consequences. Pres. Obama being the only Affirmative Action President in recorded history, proved to be the champion of racial divisiveness. The Founding Fathers never had a chance, given the national dyslexia that has submerged the country like a tsunami of epochal proportions.
As I emphasized on pp.220 ff of Flirting with Misadventures, etc. ~> That Barack Hussein Obama ascended into the Oval Office is symptomatic of the political dyslexia that the country has sunk into, thanks in part to sustained assault on American educational institutions perpetrated by the so-called “Progressives,” that goes as far back as the turn of the last century, and the philosophical ideas of John Dewey, purportedly “…the most eloquent and arguably most influential figure in educational Progressivism” Cf., http://www.friesenpress.com/bookstore/title/119734000001612306/Constancio-Sulapas-Asumen-Flirting-with-Misadventures
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Appearing on CNN recently, Social Justice activist Julius Jones actually had the temerity to accuse anyone politely countering, in true Dr. King fashion, the ethno-centric chant of ‘Black lives matter’ with the transcendent response ‘all lives matter’ of essentially promoting genocide in the Black community. According to Jones’s irresponsible, racially charged rhetoric, “we are in a terrible war with our own country.” Nevermind the pink elephant in the room which is the daily slaughter of blacks by other blacks, Jones’s trite morality tale not only beggars belief in light if the progress we’ve made in race relations over the past 50 years, but, more disturbingly, was intended to smear critics who ask awkward questions in the hopes of avoiding an honest, civil discussion of the topic.
In John McWhorter’s fine book, Losing the Race, he (bravely) describes three ‘cults’ within the Black community in general that are having such a detrimemtal effect on black lives. They are (1) the cult of anti-intellectualism; (2) the cult of separatism; and (3) the cult of victimization. The Black Lives Matter crowd (BLM), which has the ear of our president, is being intellectually dishonest when it ignores the well documented pathologies of sky rocketing illegitimacy and high school dropout rates, absent fathers, and drug and alcohol abuse and asserts the only causes for the horrific carnage in their communities is vague non-specific racism and Police malfeascence. The BLM is also wrapped up in such a blind sense of grievance that it believes no matter what society has done in the past 50 years (ie: massive transfer payments, decades of Affirmative Action (AA) in employment and college admissions, and the rewriting of Federal case law to accomodate some of the legally dubious aspects of AA) to address the problems wrought directly or otherwise by Slavery and Jim Crow we still live in a racist hellhole. One wonders what this intransigent movement with its cheap appeal to racial solidarity could morph into. Could American cities collapse into the violence and calcified divisions of Belfast?
I’m encouraged by the calm, intelligent voice of Dr. Ben Carson, who recently suggested that the BLM crowd redirect their rage at the Planned Parenthood (PP) abortion mills that kill thousands of black lives on a regular basis and that seem to be overrepresented in their communities. He also pointed out PP’s founder Margaret Sanger’s genocidal racism in which she compared blacks to “weeds that need to be exterminated.” Let’s hope truth and reason prevail over emotion and ignorance.
The more one: refuses the excuses of political correctness, embraces the common sense of believing what appears before one’s eyes more than the echoes in one’s ears, observes the successes of those who have come here with only the clothes on their backs before becoming independent and at least moderately successful at moving beyond handouts, ignores simplistic chants,meaningless slogans,and baseless culpability charges, the more one believes the era of the same old tattered excuses for failures might be near the end of its believability. Judge all men for their actions alone while turning the sound off. Who is doing all the difficult grunt work around here anyway? Ask yourself why mostly those and not others?
Food stamps and other payments are just the “panem et circenses” of 2015. They are buying votes.