Recently by Fred Reed: The Receding Tide
Our current poster for successful racial policy is, as all the world probably knows, the shooting of the improbably named Trayvon Martin, black, by an Hispanic improbably named Zimmerman. The death has been improbably termed, by professional blacks, “genocide.” Whatever happened to dictionaries, I wonder.
Perhaps the worst thing about the case is the appalling English it revealed, “He dont be doing nothing aint right he just….” Usually the brighter and more literate of a group spend time on the Internet. Heaven help us. These inarticulate mutterings devoid of punctuation or any grasp of the structure of the language illustrate what we know but ignore: We are screwed. In 2012, in a technological society that sends space craft to Mars, we have millions of illiterates, or close enough that it doesn’t make any difference.
This, not genocide, is the worst thing afflicting blacks. Years back I walked a foot beat with a cop on Capitol Hill. The cop started chatting with a black kid of maybe eleven. He suggested mildly that the boy ought to be home reading instead of hanging out on the street. “I ain’t read no boo-oo-ook,” said the child with infinite scorn. Exactly.
Also visible in the prop-wash of the shooting is the seething, unreasoning hatred for whites. Of course not all blacks hate whites equally, or at all. If you are white, the black economist next door probably doesn’t hate you and wants for his children what you want for yours. Well and good. But I can show you parts, many parts, of Washington or Chicago or Los Angeles where, if you are white, you wouldn’t last an hour after the sun went down.
The web groans under furious denunciations of Zimmerman as a racist, cracker, redneck thug, bigot. Various blacks vow revenge. The characteristic self-pity and sense of victimhood run in full flood without a trace of thought. If Jesse Jackson has been quoted correctly, he said, “blacks are under attack” and “targeting, arresting, convicting blacks and ultimately killing us is big business.” Oh sure. Jackson, no fool, knows better, but plies his trade.
Practically speaking, it doesn’t matter what happened to Trayvon. Millions of blacks are going to believe that an innocent upstanding young black kid was murdered by a racist white because he as black. The view is visceral, irrational, unconcerned with facts, and based on the bedrock of the understanding of blacks: We are victims of Whitey.
The facts are that racial attacks by blacks against whites, against Asians, are far, far more common than attacks by whites or Asians against blacks. A glance at the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, or the National Crime Victimization Survey, makes this obvious. Every cop knows it. I suspect that almost everyone knows it, though many don’t want to say it.
Where does this lead?
A symptom of the underlying corruption of American society is that in matters racial neither the government nor the media are impartial. Both (if one regards media and government as separate entities) carefully bury horrific crimes by blacks against whites and Asians while amplifying any crime, real or imagined, by whites against blacks. This has gone on so long that whites in general must be aware of it.
But what effect does this highly directed coverage have on blacks of no education? On those who can’t read or who read so poorly that they don’t? In eight years as police reporter for the Washington Times, I went into many homes of urban blacks who had called the cops. I do not recall ever seeing a book. We are speaking of a people whose only source of information is television.
Which tells them over and over that innocent blacks are being killed, beaten, jailed, and falsely accused. Disposed to self-pity and more emotional than reasoning, they readily accept this message. It comes often from prominent blacks who maintain their power by ridiculous warnings of genocide and the like.
In all the outpourings of fury from blacks over the shooting, I have not encountered the slightest appreciation that it might have been a matter of self-defense. Not the slightest recognition that blacks indeed commit a great deal of violent crime and that whites might reasonably be wary of hooded young black males. The races are on utterly different pages.
Where does this leave us? The racial impasse is just that, an impasse, and not getting better. The hatred is deep and widespread. Television encourages it.
The very names of blacks reflect a profound distaste for European civilization, a desire for separate societies. Trayvon, Lateesha, Keeshawn – these all form part of an insuperable wall erected against a polity that blacks don’t like and don’t understand.
The divide extends to the White House. Obama said nothing unreasonable about the shooting, only that the country needed to get to the bottom of it. But he says nothing of the constant series of beatings and killings of whites by blacks. Various commentators have called him the first post-racial president. No. He is the first black president.
The policy of integration and the cult of diversity haven’t worked. Over and over the hatred boils up and underlines the immiscibility of black and white. OJ, Rodney King, Trayvon, the Duke case, Towana Brawley, all the gang. Racial crimes against whites are buried, but now show up on Drudge in cell-phone videos. The races are not melding culturally. We have hate crime laws, unidirectional as they are, because we have hate crimes. We have to have laws forcing togetherness because we don’t want togetherness.
Societies work best when they have a uniform culture. The next best thing is a dominant culture to which small numbers of people of similar culture must accommodate themselves. We see this in America with the Chinese, who are studious, industrious, abide by the laws, and do not set themselves in opposition to the ambient European ethos. They are few enough, similar enough, and quiet enough that it works.
But blacks are too many, too different, and too culturally raucous. Some syncretism occurs around the edges, yet even the middle classes of the two races mix seldom and somewhat awkwardly.
I do not see how things can change. The sprawling black regions of the cities are so homogeneous, so big, and so isolated from the white world, television aside, as not to be susceptible to outside influence. Whites do not go in, and blacks do not come out. A steady-state model of the universe, so to speak.
We are screwed.
Fred Reed is author of Nekkid in Austin: Drop Your Inner Child Down a Well, A Brass Pole in Bangkok: A Thing I Aspire to Bem, Curmudgeing Through Paradise: Reports from a Fractal Dung Beetle, Au Phuc Dup and Nowhere to Go: The Only Really True Book About Viet Nam, and A Grand Adventure: Wisdom’s Price-Along with Bits and Pieces about Mexico. Visit his blog.
