Sultan Knish
The respected black commentator and philosopher Thomas Sowell has described
the growing toll of black-on-white violence as a race war. I would take
issue with that only because "war" implies a level of organization that
supersedes that of the flash mobs.
Most of the riot organizers have moved on to cozier job titles, like Al
Sharpton, who has gone from organizing riots and boycotts to holding
down a desk at MSNBC and serving as the unofficial White House liaison
to the black community. The old riots were usually a combination of
organized protest and opportunistic violence. The organized riot is on
the decline, but the opportunistic violence is still very much with us.
There are no shortage of what, the media occasionally describes as,
"racially-motivated-attacks". Every society has its outside groups
targeted for opportunistic violence. The people you beat up and rob when
you're bored and there's nothing good on television. These are people
whose lives are worth less than yours, against whom your group holds an
enduring grudge against and whom the authorities will not intervene to
protect. In America, the outsider is perversely the majority. There was a time
when opportunistic violence was white-on-black, but the authorities,
both legal and cultural, have done an excellent job of stamping that
out. Black-on-white opportunistic violence remains commonplace because
it's safe in the same way that a 19th Century lynch mob was safe. While
technically illegal, there is little public outrage over it, and the
odds of being prosecuted for it are better than any other form of
violence. The flash mob, like the lynch mob, relies on safety in
numbers, the complicity of the authorities and the weakness of the
system to beat the law.
Imagine for a moment that you are a black teenager or twenty-something,
living in a blighted neighborhood, with few job prospects, a lot of free
time and a lot of social networking. You know that white people are
"bad", not so much because of the street agitators telling you that
white people are the devil, but because the entire society that you live
in has been telling you that from Day One.
If you made it through high school, which you probably did because every
city and town is obsessed with making sure that every student gets
through twelve years of educational promotion, then you learned that
there is a race war on. A war of white-on-black that began with the
slave ships, continued through segregation, and continues today with
every report on white racism. Everything you learn tells you that you
are on the losing side of a war, that your people are just as good, if
not better, yet are being kept down, kept in prison and kept out of
power, because of white power.
The Nation of Islam believes that white oppression is genetically coded,
but that's a view that is marginally distinguishable from mainstream
liberalism, which insists that white privilege makes all people part of
the oppressive side to an extent that leaves them unable to understand
the oppressed or to pass judgment on their suffering and outrage.
Your textbooks, unlike Malcolm X, a man you are far more likely to
respect than Martin Luther King, who was a doughy preacher type, don't
say that white people are the devil. They do however convey that same
exact message. The world is a messed up place, and most of your
textbooks tell you that white people made it that way. The news, when
you watch it, talks often about white racism. The movies only
occasionally have black heroes, but they always have white villains.
Take all that in, bake it in a 103-degree oven on a hot summer day, mix
it with the natural xenophobia that every group has for outsiders, baste
it with some envy, throw in gangsta culture's fake macho posturing, so
typical of a generation of feral men with broken families and absent
fathers, and the rest is utterly unsurprising.
Why would our hypothetical assailant have any great degree of respect
for a white person's humanity? Asking that question is far more
dangerous than speculating on IQ points, because it cuts at the heart of
the cultural blight. Humanity, in its natural state, is vicious.
Civilization is imposed on man from without, it does not develop
naturally from within. The question is never why is an evil committed,
but what influences are there to keep it from being committed.
Americans of all races, are subjected to a constant stream of
information and innuendo that trains them to see one race as oppressive
and the other as oppressed. This narrative shapes their worldview, it
feeds their prejudices and makes it impossible for them to see past it.
The narrative teaches them to disdain objective laws as cold and
sterile, and to view racism as a fixed pattern that emerges out of any
power wielded by a white person. The rest is just a matter of
opportunity on a hot summer day.
For the most part it isn't black people teaching other black people to
be racist, the white liberal establishment has done much of that on its
own. The Nation of Islam is penny-ante compared to network newscasts
bombastically turning the Zimmerman-Martin story into another episode in
the tale of white racism.
Black people came north, like so many immigrants, to take on jobs in an
industrial sector that died away leaving them stranded. The plight of
the urban ghetto and that of the Rust Belt have more in common than
either side realizes. The manufacturing jobs that might have made a
thriving black middle class possible have gone to China, and there
aren't nearly enough government jobs to compensate.
The new generations of immigrants have hacked their way up through
street-level retail, often in black communities, to finance their
children's education and progress up the ladder, as the only remaining
access point to the American Dream. But that's a narrow ladder, and not
one to which Irish, Jewish or Italian immigrants were limited.
Immigrants adapt, the black community has not. Instead, its adaptations
have all been maladjustments, destructive responses that leave them with
fewer options than before.
Black leaders, individually, wield a great deal of power, but the black
community has little power. Their "helplessness" is an excuse for the
exercise of power on their behalf. That "helplessness" is what makes men
like Obama or Sharpton or the neighborhood fixer and machine politician
so powerful. He wields a collective tool of group votes, racial
grievance and simmering violence-- but the practical benefit of this is
limited. Black communities receive a sizable proportion of taxpayer
money directed at services and entitlements which leave them more
maladjusted than before.
All those gifts carry a dangerous price with them, creating an addiction
to freebies and learned helplessness. And when the latest government
giveaway implodes, as the housing market did, they are left stranded
with no clue how to get back up without government intervention. The
more community centers open up, the fewer businesses remain. The fewer
people in the community that have real jobs, the more blighted the
neighborhood becomes.
Crack is a minor addiction compared to entitlements. You can break the
drug habit because you know it's killing you, but how do you break a
habit of getting free things and special benefits because of the color
of your skin? It's a hard habit to break, and despite racist claims
otherwise, white people are not any better at breaking that habit. It's
just that white people are given far less of the free stuff to learn to
be fully addicted to it.
Imagine for a moment that you didn't really have to work, that you were
surrounded by ads offering you free food, endless free training programs
and benefits, special opportunities to get everything from jobs to
government contracts, without having to work for them. Imagine that at
any job you held a "Get Out of Work" card by filing an accusation of
racism. What's more, imagine if you were surrounded by ads and people
encouraging you to do just that? Imagine if you had been brought up in a
dysfunctional community by a broken educational system and its even
worse entertainment partners to believe that all of this was just
because you were oppressed by white people? Then go ahead and break the
habit.
This isn't typical life for black people in America, but it's the
background that's always there. Most black people know someone that
lives this way. They've known people who behave this way at work or who
go from job to job, or never hold down any job at all. And while they
may not admire them, the blame is assigned to a white society which made
them that way.
Black America has been robbed of responsibility and once you take away
responsibility from people, it doesn't just grow back. What began with
labor slavery turned into serfdom and then into political slavery. In
all these incarnations black people helped sustain a broken system with
their bodies. They are still doing it now, except the system that they
are sustaining is the liberal system, which depends on warm bodies to
collect benefits and justify task forces and collectives to provide
social justice.
Race wars need soldiers, but this isn't a race war, no more than World
War I was about the Huns raping Belgian nuns; it's about power. The
racial element justifies the power of those looking for power and adds a
moralistic element to their tyranny. They aren't oppressors, rather
they are liberating the oppressed from their true oppressors, wielding
absolute power in the name of social justice.
Like all things, this one is not new under the sun, but it can be hard
to see it when staring directly at it. Fish know little of the water
they swim in and the 21st Century Homo Americanus, fed racial mythology
along with his mother's milk, often knows less. He sees the racial
tensions, but not the reason why. "Divide and conquer" is something he
associates with ancient Greek generals or episodes of Survivor,
not with the tactics of the unelected bureaucracy that has seized
control of his country in the name of an ideology that he thought died
when the Berlin Wall fell.
21st Century America is a strange place, bankrupt and omnipotent,
bristling with advanced technology in every pocket, yet barely able to
keep its infrastructure operating; the least racist place on earth that
imagines it is the most racist of all places and times. It isn't torn by
a war between races, but by a conflict among its elites over how it
will be run. This conflict only marginally involves the common man, who
is occasionally hustled out to march for a cause and then sent home so
the big men can talk it over a closed-door meeting..
This isn't about race or class, it's about power and the ideology of
power. That conflict has its collateral damage. The kid who knows little
else but that white people are fair game is damage, but he's not an
innocent victim, for, while he may not know the nature of the game, his
cruelty is active. The man or woman he attacks is more innocent, but not
truly innocent either if they have played a role in sustaining an
ideology that makes this entire dysfunctional cycle possible.
The players in the conflict care very little for either of them. They
are not completely inhuman, but they are playing for different stakes,
and both believe in a Post-American order with no borders and no
national identities. The only question is how this Utopia will be run
and on what principles. But they both agree that it can only be properly
created by destroying the nation in the name of some post-national
virtue, whether it's social justice or free enterprise.
On the streets though, when it's 103 degrees in a hot summer, the plans
don't matter, the men cutting deals over the body of a great nation,
over its decaying cities, are an afterthought. Human power is an
ephemeral thing. It is better at destroying than at creating. It leaves
behind scars easily. These streets are scars, the racial tensions are
scars, the attack is a scar. It is not the first and it will not be the
last.
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