I heard my first genuinely racist rant in many years the other day. It was a guy I’ve known for quite a while, who has always been obviously very rigid, very socially awkward outside formal business relations, and just high strung and kind of an asshole.
He was saying things like “all these things going on, there’s only one group smart enough. It has to be the Jews”.
And “I get along well enough with black people, but I don’t like spending time with them. Do you?” I said yes, which is true. I don’t try and talk black like some white folks I know, but in general I find black folks less uptight, more open, and more sincere than most white people I know.
Now, I may have readers who would agree with him, and I may have readers who think I should have yelled at him and told him the error of his ways. I may have no readers. These are all possibilities.
My thinking, though, was that if he has trusted me with things he knows are Verboten culturally to speak out loud, much less in public, then it is possible I can use that trust to reel him back just a little, which is the only good I can hope to accomplish in that circumstance. If I yelled at him, it would change nothing, and he would never talk with me again. That would honestly not be much of a loss, but I would lose any chance, as I say, of perhaps influencing him for the better.
I told him, for example, that Jews are one of the most heterogeneous groups on the planet. Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand were both Jewish, as were Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, and Emma Goldman. And whole lot of Jews avoid politics entirely.
And it struck me then that racism is really nothing more or less than laziness. It is lazy thinking. It is sitting on your couch and speculating about what might be happening outside your closed shades.
And it struck me this morning that ANTI-racism is actually equally lazy, but in the opposite direction. It is equally stupid to reflexively BLAME a given group as to reflexively DEFEND them.
In a post-truth world–if modernism sought truth and power, postmodernism seeks feelings and tribalism–no one is opening the window and LOOKING. But all morality begins in honesty and information and understanding. This logically means that no purported morality divorced from honest eyes and honest ears can possibly succeed to any larger extent than mostly not making things worse; and sustained intelligent planning and improving is simply impossible when you are blind. How could blind construction builders construct a building without plans and materials and tools? They can’t. They don’t. It’s impossible.
As I pointed out somewhere recently on the interwebs to white intellectual Leftists, black people have feelings too. I don’t think most of them realized they were capable of feeling anything but oppressed by white people. Some of them like Pop Tarts in the morning, and some like oatmeal with raisins because their doctor told them it lowers cholesterol. Some are married, most are not. All of them feel varying levels of anxiety living in dangerous neighborhoods.
A few years ago, Microsoft put out an app that allowed people to avoid violent ghettos. What was heard, and no doubt in large measure what was meant, was enabling white people to avoid violent black places. This was called racist, and perhaps that is a reasonable word, but here is my question: how do you think the people who LIVE there feel?
Even if black folks commit violent crimes all out of proportion to their numbers–at roughly 12% of the population, they commit something close to half the violent crimes–violent people are STILL a very, very small minority within the black community, maybe 5% or so. That leaves a 95% of normal people fearing the same guns and the same crime that white people in general are ABLE to avoid, but they are not.
Do you not think this is traumatizing? Feeling fear every time your kid goes to school, as a mother, or actually BEING the kid, in fear of being bullied by kids who have been made psychopathic by insane home environments filled with poverty, drugs, misery and abuse?
Empathy is about touch. It is about feeling what is out there, about imagining yourself in someone else’s shoes. How would you feel, living in the most violent parts of Chicago or Philadelphia? Imagine all the violence was coming from other white people, and that you could not fully avoid it?
The essence of Sentimentality–as I see it, and which I view as the primary disease of most intellectuals–is interacting with your IDEA of people, and reacting to THAT. I think many white intellectuals EVEN WHEN THEY ARE WITH ACTUAL PHYSICAL HUMAN BEINGS, only see the projection of their own assumptions. They say “poor dear. Those police must be really terrible. I am very sure they are the source of all your problems. Don’t worry, dear. I’m going to fix that for you.”
Black people, though, are PEOPLE. They have common sense and practical views, most of them, in my experience. Sure, they hate police brutality. Sure, many of them take it personally when they see police violence on TV. Many of them have been subjected to much higher levels of interaction with police than white people would. But they also live in places where nearly all the crime is committed by blacks. The cops get racist because all they see is crimes committed by people of a certain skin color.
All of this makes emotional sense. It makes sense that the cops would get jaded and suspicious after years of the same stupid shit, and it makes sense that the persons of color who are genuinely innocent, who are just trying to get along in a hostile world, would resent being thrown in with the thugs and the gangsters.
I had a friend who worked South Central for the LAPD, and he told me he had to get out before he got like the rest of the force. Over some period of time, it is unavoidable. And this holds, I am very sure, even for police officers who are black themselves. In a pretty high percentage of cases, alleged police brutality involves black officers too. As one obvious example, the Officer In Charge in the Eric Garner case was a black female.
In my view, it is stupid to ignore the very obvious reality of disproportionate levels of violent and other crime in black neighborhoods, which in my view traumatizes people–particularly kids–and which leads to multigenerational maladjustments, emotional problems, and obviously long term continuation of the violence and failure to thrive.
The task of well meaning people who deserve to be called Liberal or Progressive, is to be honest about what is happening, to tell the truth about it–which is that almost none of it is related to racism, and certainly not to how white people far from the problem think about or talk about persons of color–and to engage the REAL problems with REAL solutions. This is what people who deserve to be called good would, and hopefully will, do.
And in my own view, the problems boil down to three main elements: single parent homes, lack of access to good jobs, and lack of access to effective educations, which would lead to the good jobs. And I think the single parent homes, and lack of fathers in most homes–I think the statistic is something like 90% in some areas–in turn revolve around the lack of jobs, and those in turn around the lack of solid educations.
So to my mind, the focus should be on figuring out what forms of education WORK. And as far as I can tell, self paced Charter Schools seem to be the most effective medium in inner cities. There is a lot of cultural flack thrown out about being “white” if you work too hard in school. Putting an individual kid in front of a computer and allowing him or her to do self paced tutorials–with teachers floating around to ask questions of–seems to defuse some of this, which in my view would be the main reason such schools seem particularly effective in poverty infused, urban black ghettoes.
And in tandem with this, black leaders who actually CARE about black folks should be preaching the value of learning and education and schooling to all who will listen. They have not been doing this. They get more money and power and votes blaming white people for everything. That is doubly disempowering. First, it denigrates the possibility that black folks have ANY control over their own destinies, and secondly it relegates all progress to a future denuded of white people, which is just not going to happen.
And thirdly, even if a genocide of white folks, of the sort multiple black academics and self appointed spokespeople feel empowered to wish for openly were to happen, NOTHING WOULD CHANGE. This would not teach people the value of work, and the self respect it enables. It would not educate them, such that they better understand their world and how to succeed in it. Such a genocide would simply continue a many generational cultural habit of disempowerment and disconnection, while killing a lot of good people, who in general are the backbone of everything that works in this country. That may not be politically correct, but it is true.
If you look at Africa, you will certainly see the legacy of Colonialism. But white Europeans did not create any of those conflicts, by and large, even if at times they made them worse. Africa has always been riven by ethnic and tribal and religious rivalries. Slavery exists at THIS MOMENT in Africa, and in most cases both the slaves and the slavers are persons of color. Most American blacks, if they could be magically transported to the country of their choice in Africa, would see immediate and enormous decreases in their standards of living, their security, their protected rights, and even their sense of belonging. They would not have tribal affiliations, or ethnic affiliations. “Black” means nothing in Africa. You get no points for a physical trait which is nearly universal, even if it would in many cases be worse to be white.
So this is my small effort to say something REAL, to speak truths which would be obvious if all of these discussions were characterized by sincerity, humanity, a thirst for the common good, and common decency. All of these things are missing from nearly all the words inflicted on the world in the name of race at the moment.