{"id":7166,"date":"2014-04-01T09:14:51","date_gmt":"2014-04-01T16:14:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=7166"},"modified":"2014-04-01T09:14:51","modified_gmt":"2014-04-01T16:14:51","slug":"the-race-hacks-defend-their-industry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-race-hacks-defend-their-industry\/","title":{"rendered":"The Race-Hacks Defend Their Industry"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/\u00a0FrontPage Magazine<\/a>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

The race-hack usual subjects recently attacked Congressman Paul Ryan for stating that the problems plaguing the poor\u2013\u2013incarceration, fatherless children, drug abuse, rampant violence, and welfare-dependence\u2013\u2013 are a consequence of a dysfunctional culture that scorns marriage, parenthood, education, work, and virtues like self-control. Given that blacks are overrepresented among the underclass, these unexceptional observations\u2013\u2013regularly made by others, including Barack Obama\u2013\u2013called down a firestorm of racialist invective on Ryan. The abuse ranged from the usual clich\u00e9s about \u201cblaming the victim\u201d and racist \u201cdog-whistles,\u201d to a\u00a0New York Times<\/i>\u00a0columnist accusing Ryan of being as callous as the Brits were about the 19th<\/sup>\u00a0century Irish famine. Such ad hominem calumny suggests that somebody\u2019s ox is being gored and doesn\u2019t like it.<\/p>\n

The overfed \u201cox,\u201d of course, is the race industry and its enablers in the federal Leviathan. It\u2019s understandable why these grievance-mongers want to deflect attention away from Ryan\u2019s message. Since the rise of identity politics and anti-poverty programs in the 60s, the plight of the black underclass has worsened, even as the self-selected race tribunes\u2013\u2013professors, \u201cactivists,\u201d lobbyists, government employees, celebrities, politicians\u2013\u2013have flourished. Given that the moral capital financing the race industry comes from the misery and suffering of underclass blacks, race-grievance entrepreneurs must ward off solutions to those problems that challenge the narrative justifying their own power.<\/p>\n

That narrative is simple: white racism explains the epidemic of black-on-black murder, children without fathers, lack of education, and dependence on the government dole. Since Klan-style racist violence and Jim Crow legal racism have disappeared, \u201cracism\u201d has to be redefined in ever more subtle manifestations like \u201cinstitutional racism.\u201d The best example of this scam is the \u201cdisparate impact\u201d standard for identifying racism, a favorite of the current Department of Justice. By this metric, a mere statistical imbalance in minority participation in car loans or home mortgages is a sign of racism even if no intent can be proven or even identified. This kind of thinking led to the federal regulations pressuring lenders to lower qualifying standards for home loans, which was a major factor in the housing bubble and the ensuing Great Recession of 2008. The hysteria over \u201cprofiling\u201d is another example of this racialist voodoo. Even if a group is overrepresented among perpetrators of a crime, identifying suspects from that group when such a crime occurs is automatically racist.<\/p>\n

The biggest victims of the narrative, of course, are those minorities who bear the brunt of the misguided programs and illiberal ideologies that buttress the race industry. The some 80 anti-poverty programs have created well-paying federal and state jobs for bureaucrats and enriched public employee unions, at the same time they reward dysfunctional behavior and punish the hardworking. Rather than gaining the self-respect and sense of achievement that comes from earning one\u2019s daily bread by one\u2019s own efforts, the clients of what Robert Woodson\u00a0calls<\/a>\u00a0the \u201cpoverty-industrial complex\u201d are kept mired in dependence, the passive recipients of largess from above, traumatized victims who, like children, must be taken care of by somebody more capable. In short, their inferiority is institutionalized by government social welfare agencies, and rationalized by the \u201cwhite racism\u201d narrative that excuses bad behavior and absolves those indulging it of all responsibility.\u00a0Meanwhile the public employee unions deliver millions in campaign contributions to the politicians that work night and day maintaining and expanding these programs, despite their 70-year record of worsening the problems they have spent trillions of tax-payer dollars attempting to solve.<\/p>\n

Yet the identity politics at the heart of the narrative is even more destructive because it is more insidious. At the same time that civil rights legislation and the dismantling of de jure segregation were achieved\u2013\u2013clearing away the impediments to access to the opportunities created by the post-war expanding economy and shifting social mores\u2013\u2013a new de facto segregation appeared in the promotion of an illiberal \u201cblack identity\u201d the essence\u00a0of which was separate and distinct from that of white people. This mythic identity embodied old cultural-Marxist critiques of the soul-killing, inhibited, sexually repressive, \u201cair-conditioned nightmare\u201d of white middle class American life, fused with race-hatred and the sick glamor of revolutionary violence. Elite left-wing whites enthusiastically embraced the version of black identity, for they despised a middle class they had long characterized as rubes and squares inferior to the cultural mandarins safely ensconced in tony neighborhoods and prestigious professions into which black\u00a0street-rebels\u00a0rarely ventured. The problem, of course, is that the virtues and habits needed for success\u2013\u2013delayed gratification, self-control of appetite, self-discipline, and education in the skills and mores valued by the larger culture\u2013\u2013were stigmatized as \u201cacting white\u201d and the acts of race betrayal.<\/p>\n

Worse yet, this new identity was in many respects simply the recycling of the old vicious stereotypes racists had used to justify segregation and second-class status for blacks. Those slanders had characterized blacks as less rational, less able to control their impulses of sex and violence, and utterly incapable of the development of mind and character necessary for full inclusion in the dominant culture. Listen to Norman Mailer, in his influential 1957 essay \u201cThe White Negro,\u201d reversing the poles of these stereotypes from negative to positive. Scorning bourgeois \u201cconformity and depression,\u201d Mailer admires the black \u201crebel\u201d and \u201cfrontiersman in the Wild West of American night life,\u201d who free of the \u201csophisticated inhibitions of civilization\u201d lives \u201cin an enormous present,\u201d subsisting \u201cfor his Saturday night kicks, relinquishing the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body.\u201d The old racist \u201cjungle instincts\u201d had been transformed into black \u201csoul,\u201d and tropes of black inferiority once propagated in every Klan Klavern came to comprise authentic black identity.<\/p>\n

For disaffected whites whose social and economic privilege were secure, a black man who dressed like middle-class Americans, spoke like them, and lived by the same codes and virtues became a figure to be mocked and despised, not encouraged and praised. As a result, today comfortable whites enjoy pop-cultural caricatures of black people as glamorous gangsters and rebels who disdain the codes and protocols of respectable society, the very tools necessary for economic advancement. Meanwhile, more blacks are murdered by other blacks in one year than were lynched by racist mobs between 1882 and 1968, more black babies in New York are aborted than are born, nationally black unemployment remains twice as high as white, 1 in 3 black men will go to prison in their lifetime, the black high school graduation rate is 12 points lower than white, black male college graduation rates are nearly 25 points lower than other students\u2013\u2013by almost every measure of social and economic well-being from infant mortality to longevity, blacks lag behind whites despite nearly 70 years and trillions of dollars worth of programs that were supposed to improve these dismal statistics.<\/p>\n

Rather than rhetorically kill messengers like Paul Ryan, those truly concerned with these problems need to address the genuine racism holding back millions of black people: a dysfunctional culture created by the unholy marriage of government social welfare entitlements and the self-interested identity politics of race hacks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/\u00a0FrontPage Magazine\u00a0 The race-hack usual subjects recently attacked Congressman Paul Ryan for stating that the problems plaguing the poor\u2013\u2013incarceration, fatherless children, drug abuse, rampant violence, and welfare-dependence\u2013\u2013 are a consequence of a dysfunctional culture that scorns marriage, parenthood, education, work, and virtues like self-control. Given that blacks are overrepresented among the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[22,120,383],"tags":[1025,12,1036,157,184,1042],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1RA","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":3308,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-unexamined-president-and-his-media-enablers\/","url_meta":{"origin":7166,"position":0},"title":"The Unexamined President and His Media Enablers","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 29, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton Advancing a Free Society As usual, the mainstream media are getting wrong the significance of President Obama\u2019s release of his actual birth certificate. In the liberal-left narrative, the \u201cbirther\u201d issue was always evidence of the Republican Party\u2019s fringe kookiness: as the\u00a0Daily Kos\u2019s Markos Moulitsas crowed, \u201cWhat\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3300,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obamas-race-card\/","url_meta":{"origin":7166,"position":1},"title":"Obama’s Race Card","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 7, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers The liberal media are in full Captain Renault mode, \u201cshocked, shocked\u201d to find race injected into the presidential campaign by a \u201cSwift-boating\u201d John McCain. How shameless can you get? The Obama campaign\u2013\u2013indeed, the whole of Obama\u2019s public existence\u2013\u2013is about nothing other than his perceived\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1138,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/its-the-president-stupid-the-referendum-on-barack-obama\/","url_meta":{"origin":7166,"position":2},"title":"It’s the President Stupid: The Referendum on Barack Obama","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 10, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton RightNetwork.com The people have spoken, and what they have said concerns more than just the wrong-headed policies the Democrats have inflicted upon us in the past few years. This election was never just about policy \u2013\u2013 it was also about Barack Obama and the repudiation of\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":516,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/white-on-the-brain\/","url_meta":{"origin":7166,"position":3},"title":"‘White’ on the Brain","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 17, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online The election of the biracial Barack Obama was supposed to usher in a new era of racial harmony. Instead, that dream is becoming a tribally polarized nightmare \u2014 by design, and intended to assist in the reelection of Barack Obama. Consider the increasing\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Election 2012"","block_context":{"text":"Election 2012","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/election-2012\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":763,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/americas-problem-of-assimilation\/","url_meta":{"origin":7166,"position":4},"title":"America’s Problem of Assimilation","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 28, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton Defining Ideas The current Supreme Court term has been dominated by the Constitutional challenge to the Affordable Care Act, the healthcare legislation better known as Obamacare. But the Court has recently heard another case, this one concerning the controversial Arizona immigration law passed in 2010. Though\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Immigration"","block_context":{"text":"Immigration","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/immigration\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7227,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/what-eric-holder-doesnt-want-to-talk-about\/","url_meta":{"origin":7166,"position":5},"title":"What Eric Holder Doesn’t Want to Talk About","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 16, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/\u00a0FrontPage Magazine\u00a0 Remember when Attorney General Eric Holder called Americans a \u201cnation of cowards\u201d who put \u201ccertain subjects . . . off limits\u201d? Holder, of course, was referring to \u201csubjects\u201d that in fact we do nothing else but talk about non-stop \u2013 the refusal of whites\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/Claude_McKay-237x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7166"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7166"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7166\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7167,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7166\/revisions\/7167"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}