BLM and Our ‘White Supremacist Society’

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From the Tom Woods Letter:

Sometimes there’s more to an organization than its name.

People who oppose Antifa are told: “Antifa is anti-fascist — the word itself is short for ‘anti-fascist.’ If you won’t support an anti-fascist organization, you must be a fascist.”

So the possibility that there could be more to an organization than just its name is not raised. Civil Rights: Rhetoric... Sowell, Thomas Best Price: $0.20 Buy New $7.98 (as of 03:25 UTC - Details)

The same goes for Black Lives Matter.

If you suggest that there might be problems with this organization, you must not think black lives matter — I mean, duh, those words are right there in the name!

The program associated with BLM extends far beyond concern for police behavior toward blacks — and even that topic is debatable, because their narrative doesn’t take differential crime rates into account.

(Yes, we do have a problem with the police, as my forthcoming eBook shows.)

I am expected to believe that the United States, among the least racist places on Earth, is really a “white supremacist” society, and that racial disparities in income and other metrics can be caused only by “racism.”

This is so stupid as to be beyond caricature, but in 2020 everyone is expected to believe it.

Thomas Sowell devoted much of his career to debunking this second-grade idiocy — particularly in his outstanding book Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality? — but I’ve heard some left-libertarians repeat this nonsense as if Sowell had never existed.

I was just reading the other day about the Chinese minority in Malaysia, which has been officially discriminated against for decades, and nearly half of whom have indicated a strong desire to leave the country.

This is a country where one race dominates another. White Guilt: How Black... Steele, Shelby Best Price: $13.13 Buy New $10.08 (as of 05:01 UTC - Details)

Of the 56,576 Malaysians who renounced their citizenship between 2006 and 2016, 49,864 were Chinese.

Until 2001, an official government quota system helped keep the Chinese minority out of the university system. Since then, internal quotas have done the job.

Discrimination against the Chinese minority is officially enshrined in the Malaysian constitution. Meanwhile, Malaysian politicians have urged the Chinese to “return to China” or at least “be grateful” for their lives in Malaysia.

There’s no affirmative action for the Chinese minority; the situation is exactly the reverse. There’s no gigantic legal apparatus that can destroy a firm that has not hired Chinese-Malaysians in proportion to their representation in the population.

(Meanwhile, the Chinese minority, even as it has dwindled, has managed to dominate the economy despite the discrimination, earning incomes twice as high as the national average.)

That is what racial superiority looks like, and precisely zero people in the United States are advocating anything like such a system.

Moreover, in the United States we are surely dealing with a peculiar “white supremacist” society: being called a white supremacist, far from a badge of honor, gets people fired from their jobs and reviled by everyone.

In this “white supremacist” society even the so-called “conservatives” cheer the toppling of statues that protesters dislike. A Dream Deferred: The ... Steele, Shelby Best Price: $8.23 Buy New $10.08 (as of 05:01 UTC - Details)

In this “white supremacist” society Japanese-American households were earning just as much as their white counterparts by 1959 — despite having been reviled during World War II — and one-third more by 1969.

Not to mention: it is surely a unique white supremacist society in which nonwhites enjoy special employment advantages, scholarships for which nobody else is eligible, and preferential treatment in academic admissions.

And what does the Borg recommend today?

More of the same.

The thing is, we’ve done all this before, and it isn’t getting to the heart of the problem.

Shelby Steele, an academic now at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, once wrote: “At the university [San Jose State] where I currently teach, the dropout rate for blacks is 72 percent, despite the presence of several academic support programs, a counseling center with black counselors, an Afro-American studies department, black faculty, administrators, and staff, a general education curriculum that emphasizes ‘cultural pluralism,’ an Educational Opportunities Program, a mentor program, a black faculty and staff association, and an administration and faculty that often announce the need to do more for black students.”

More recently, a professor at UC Berkeley released a letter to the school administration — anonymously, of course (remember, this is a very weird white supremacist society, in which the slightest criticisms of the BLM narrative are likely to get you fired) — which read, in part: BLITZ: Trump Will Smas... Horowitz, David Buy New $25.19 (as of 02:44 UTC - Details)

In your recent departmental emails you mentioned our pledge to diversity, but I am increasingly alarmed by the absence of diversity of opinion on the topic of the recent protests and our community response to them. In the extended links and resources you provided, I could not find a single instance of substantial counter-argument or alternative narrative to explain the under-representation of black individuals in academia or their over-representation in the criminal justice system. The explanation provided in your documentation, to the near exclusion of all others, is univariate: the problems of the black community are caused by whites, or, when whites are not physically present, by the infiltration of white supremacy and white systemic racism into American brains, souls, and institutions….

I personally don’t dare speak out against the BLM narrative, and with this barrage of alleged unity being mass-produced by the administration, tenured professoriat, the UC administration, corporate America, and the media, the punishment for dissent is a clear danger at a time of widespread economic vulnerability. I am certain that if my name were attached to this email, I would lose my job and all future jobs, even though I believe in and can justify every word I type.

The range of allowable opinion, opinion that won’t get you demonized and called names that obviously don’t describe you but which are meant to destroy you forever, is shrinking before our eyes. If you consider this something to cheer, and a development that’s likely to contribute to greater understanding, then I get your support for BLM. It is all of a piece.

However, it is quite possible to favor genuine justice for all people without buying into a cartoonish morality play that is altogether divorced from reality.

Yes, I could save myself a lot of grief if I’d just sit still in that examining chair and let them make me repeat that 2 + 2 = 5. But I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.