Sweet Little Lies

'Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.'

--Honore de Balzac  
(Image source) 

Two hundred thirty years ago, Thomas Jefferson opined:  

I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.

Today, Euro America (like Euro South Africa) has pushed aside such ideas.  We are sure that God the Universe has created us all equal, as we go out of our way to tell each other at every opportunity.

But do we believe it?  Talk is cheap. When a man's actions don't back up his words, we call him mistaken--or a hypocrite.

'Black and White are equal in every important way,' proclaim a great number of Euro-Americans today. We here at Those Who Can See are not so sure that they really believe it.  We argue, on the contrary, that progressive white Americans are in the habit of treating Afros as if they were slightly mentally retarded.  And that Blacks themselves often seem to agree. 


What is our evidence?

Diversity and the North, Yesterday and Today

 Luncheonette in Lancaster, Ohio, 1938

Paul Kersey at SBPDL has been informing us better than anyone about the housing merry-go-round on which Afros and Euros have been riding for forty years.

Humans have a way of sniffing out their own interests, platitudes be damned. If you want to know what a man believes, don't watch his lips; watch his feet.  The young urban White may boast of his 'edgy' neighborhood (enduring daily street crime makes him more authentic), but come baby-making time, he finds his way to paler pastures with startling speed. The only 'diversity' which interests him past this point is of the Chinese, Indian, or talented-tenth Mulatto variety.

Given that this gentleman cheers the loudest about the joys of racial mixing, and weeps the most bitterly before maps like these,

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...whence this paradox?  While his mouth is singing 'Fair Housing Act' hosannas, his feet are doing the 'Restrictive Covenant' two-step.

We know why: Afros bring down property values. And for good reason. From a Euro perspective, they don't make good neighbors.  Their children tend to commit more crime, as do their adults, they make transport unpleasant, degrade swimming pools, chase out merchants, shut down nightclubs, disrupt cinemas, mistreat animals, volunteer less, litter more, weaken schools, cripple school boards, waste police resources, and generally make life less pleasant for their white neighbors than it was before their arrival.

Since the Brits' ill-fated decision to import Africans to this land, the 98% of Euro-Americans who haven't own slaves have been forced to live with its consequences.  Broadly speaking, three approaches have been tried: (1) segregation de jure (the old South), (2) segregation de facto (the old North), and (3) attrition (today). 

We are all familiar with the South's de jure approach, their state lawmakers seeing to it that schools, housing, transport, and public accomodations existed in 'white' and 'colored' versions.  This apartheid system and its architects have been throughly villainized in all modern textbooks.

We may be less familiar with the old North.  Those of us born there have been told all our lives how warmly we opened our arms to these suffering Afros, saving them from the noose or at least the colored water fountain. 

Or did we.

Portland, OR, 1943

Overcoming our Asian Privilege

 

"We swim in a sea of whiteness, it's the norm," Ellen O'Neill, one of the campaign  organizers, said. 
"If we're white we don't have to think about it, we don't see it. 

So the first step is getting white people to see it."

Headlines you may have seen recently:

• 'Duluth's "unfair" campaign tackles white privilege'  

• 'No Longer Colorblind:  Portland teachers must rank themselves by their self-assessed "White Privilege" score'

• 'What James Holmes and the Colorado Movie Massacre Tell Us About White (Male) Privilege'

Let us step into another mental world: that of the Blank-slatist.

In his universe,  all human beings are interchangeable, their differences only skin-deep.  If the U.S. population is 64% white, 16% Hispanic, 13% black, and 5% Asian, these same break-downs must apply in every area of human endeavor: Standardized testing, educational accomplishment, politics, the arts, the sciences, the military, criminal justice, sports, etc.  Anywhere a group is under-represented (or in the case of prison, over-represented), this reflects an attack on them by...

...well, by whom?

'Institutional racism,' some have said, and have spilled much ink over it since the late 1960s (h/t Audacious Epigone) :

But as we have seen, in a country where de facto quotas routinely push out qualified Euros in favor of less qualified Afros and Hispanics in both the public and private sectors, this argument has become a tough sell.

So the Blank-slatist has settled on a new culprit: 'white privilege.'

'What is it?,' we ask him.

     'It is systematic, institutional exclusion of non-Whites,' he says.

'But we have looked at the facts and figures, and found the opposite is true--today institutional racism favors Blacks and Hispanics,' we reply.

     'We swim in a sea of whiteness.  White is the "default setting." Minority groups suffer simply from being the minority.'

'But Whites are the minority in many places--Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta, Houston; even entire states like California or New Mexico, or countries like South Africa--and yet still show superior life outcomes to Blacks and Hispanics.'

     'None of that matters. The very fact of being white gives them an unfair advantage. Check your privilege.'


Taking him at his word, that this nebulous White Privilege beams out its rays twenty-four hours a day and forces Afros, Hispanics, and Asians to under-perform their Euro subjugators, let's fire up our privilege radar and see if his argument holds up.

Dirty Little Secrets

Still on holiday, but wanted to take a moment to dispel a small myth.  From our day-to-day dealings as well as the media, many Euro-Americans are under the impression that the Afro community--affluent and ghetto alike--are all cut in the Jesse Jackson mold of endless mewling victimization and race-baiting.  Not true.

Of course we all know the few Afro rightists, the Sowells and Steeles and Williams, but their 'risky' remarks rarely diverge from 'ending the welfare state will fix what ails us.'  And even they are but lone surfers paddling furiously against the black victimization tide.

'I'd like to be a fly on the wall,' once said the White, 'while Blacks sit around the water cooler and talk amongst themselves.'  Happily, the arrival of the internet in almost every home means that today he can.  This amazing series of tubes has coughed up from its depths some dirty, hairball-covered secrets, and the anthropologically-inclined would do well to take a look.  Here then, a brief survey of some of the more surprising Afro honesty the internet has delivered us of late.

The conundrum of Afro governance

 
Detroit City Council meeting, 2012

You may have seen Walter Russell Mead fretting of late about the hash Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick's cronies have made of the city pension fund. (h/t Heliogabalus)  Mead is wowed by both the scale of the graft--

...corrupt and incompetent trustees appointed by Democratic officials over many years in Detroit are responsible for almost half a billion dollars in investments gone wrong.

--and the indifference of the press:

I honestly don’t know why there is so little national outrage about this despicable crew and the terrible damage they have done. ...The 41 year old Kwame Kilpatrick may well be the worst and most destructive American of his generation; his two terms as Mayor of Detroit are among the most sordid and stomach churning episodes in the storied history of American municipal corruption.

The question of Afro governance has long intrigued Euro-Americans, especially in the South.  The latter feared the former's great numbers meant they would one day take control, a disaster because (1) they would trample Whites' rights and (2) they were unfit to govern.  The ten-year Reconstruction nightmare, they say, proved them right.  J.W. Garner:

In some instances the board [of supervisors] was composed entirely of illiterate negroes. Although their duties necessitated calculation and computation, there were instances in which no member could do the smallest operation of arithmetic, and their highest mark of erudition was the ability of the president to sign his name to a record, the contents of which he could not read. In Issaquena County, in 1874, every member of the board was alleged to be an illiterate negro.

... In Madison County, every member of the board was colored, and the maximum of learning among them was the ability of one to sign his name mechanically. There was not a justice of the peace in the county who could write his name.  [...] shortly before the meeting of the grand jury, they usually got some friendly white neighbor to write up their dockets for presentation at the proper time. (1)

J.W. Burgess, on the outrageous expenditures of the all-Negro South Carolina legislature:

It was the most soul-sickening spectacle that Americans had ever been called upon to behold. ... In place of government by the most intelligent and virtuous part of the people for the benefit of the governed, here was government by the most ignorant and vicious part of the population for the benefit, the vulgar, materialistic, brutal benefit of the governing set.  (2)

Men of the 19th century drew their conclusions about Afro governance from simple observation. They watched Haiti, they watched Liberia, they watched Afro-Americans conduct their own affairs.  Today the data-set is richer--50-plus African nations now independent for half a century, as well as a growing number of American cities led by wholly black government.  In surveying this landscape, two words come to our lips again and again--'corruption' and 'ineptitude.'  Why?

The temptation to blame outside forces, as we have seen, is strong.  The instinctive pity and revulsion we feel when faced with a group of people so seemingly inept can cause us shame, so we attempt to redirect blame.  'Other people made them this way,' we say. 'It is inconceivable that their problems could be rooted in their own make-up.'

At Those Who Can See, we argue that the evidence points strongly in the other direction.  We propose that in the aggregate, traits which lead to good governance are in acutely short supply in Sub-Saharan Africans.  Let us examine the evidence.

Hunting the Yeti: Institutional Racism in the 21st Century

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Omar Thornton, the beer-filching delivery man who, upon hearing he was to be fired for his thieving ways, unloaded a Ruger SR9 into ten of his co-workers then himself, has a posthumous website (h/t Crimes of the Times).  Created by his mother. Why?

It's hard to swing a cat these days without hitting someone decrying Institutional Racism.  It has become the catch-all excuse for Afro under-performance in relation to other ethnic groups...

Top Chicago Cop Links U.S. Gun Laws to Institutional Racism

Failing the Test of Fairness: Institutional Racism and the SAT

DC Million Hoodies March Denounces Institutional Racism

...And so forth.

Like the elusive Yeti, it has to be out there--we've heard stories, terrifying stories, of it ambling hither and yon leaving carnage in its path. Its footprints are visible everywhere. And yet...when pressed, no one seems able to cough up hard proof of its existence. 

Just as great footprints in the snow are no proof of the Yeti, the fact that Blacks do not score as highly as Whites on firefighter exams is no proof of Institutional Racism.  But the charge is a serious one. It deserves a serious response. Our question is not, however, 'did institutional racism exist in decades past?'--it unquestionably did--but rather, 'does it exist today?'  We at Those Who Can See have taken our snowshoes and our rucksack and gone in search of this beast:  Down what trail lies the evidence that Institutional Racism continues to harm Afro-Americans in 2012?

'In a Word We Suffer on Each Side'

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Afro-Americans have long committed violent crime at much higher rates than other ethnic groups.  With the election of our first black president in 2008, many predicted this would end, as seeing a face like their own in the Oval Office would lead young Afros to lay down their arms and pick up a schoolbook.

Was such a prediction reasonable?

We argue that it was not.

Culture, affirm conservatives, is what poisons the young Black mind. Welfare payments slacken it, lack of fathers stunts it, hip-hop perverts it.  Could we erase the Great Society and the sexual revolution, young Afro-Americans would revert back to the industrious strivers they once were.

The children represented by the Brown vs. Board of Education suit, Topeka Kansas, 1951: Vicky, Donald, Linda, James, Nancy, Katherine.

Progressives, on the other hand, admit some nefarious effects of black culture but attribute them to the lingering pain of 250 years of slavery and one hundred years of segregation.  Any day now, they insist, Afro-Americans will begin to behave just like everyone else.

The progressive view is relatively easy to dismiss, as black dysfunction has in fact increased as Jim Crow recedes further into the past.

And the conservative view? Seductive, but incorrect.  As it happens, Afro-Americans are not only well-known today for their violent exploits, but were so known far back in history.  Reading the police blotter from one hundred years ago can be a startlingly familiar experience. Then as now, Afros chose to act out aggressively in a variety of milieus.

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On public transport

Portland, April 2012:

A 57-year-old man who asked a group of teenagers to quiet down on a MAX train was assaulted on Friday... When officers arrived, they learned the man had asked a large group of around 15 to 20 black male teenagers to keep it down. That apparently didn't sit well with the teenagers and some of them allegedly attacked the man.

Baltimore, 1913:

The Mis-education of Afro-Americans, Yesterday

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Paul Kersey leads with this story--Nutshell: Teachers in failing black school districts routinely change kids' test scores to comply with No Child Left Behind, fraud investigation ensues, hands are thrown in the air, shall anyone ever succeed in closing The Gap?


It may surprise us that one hundred years ago, as today, much ink was spilled over the question of educating American Blacks.  Two generations had passed since Emancipation; what progress had been made on the great project of lifting up this 'race in its childhood'? W.H. Collins, in 1918:

But notwithstanding the fact that the illiteracy of the Negro race had been reduced by 1910 to about thirty-three per cent, there is a widespread feeling of disappointment in Negro education. Not that it has made the Negro more criminal as has sometimes been said, however, this is not yet well determined, but rather that it has failed to make him a greater producer, or to aid him to adjust himself to economic conditions. Instead of firing him with the desire to do more and better work, too often he quits it altogether.   (1)

They [Southern men around 1904]  unite further in the opinion that education such as they [Blacks] receive in the public schools, so far from appearing to uplift them, appears to be without any appreciable beneficial effect upon their morals or their standing as citizens. But more than this; universally, they report a general depravity and retrogression of the Negroes at large in sections in which they are left to themselves, closely resembling a reversion to barbarism.   (2)

Aside from some unqualified successes like the Hampton and Tuskegee Institutes, Afro education had not yet produced the desired results.  Blacks still had higher rates of illegitimacy, criminality, and disease and lower levels of wealth than white Americans.


A century on, what has changed?  Much ink is still spilled over the question of educating American Blacks.  Two generations have passed since the end of Segregation, and...

...and Blacks still have higher rates of illegitimacy, criminality, and disease and lower levels of wealth than white Americans.  Now, via standardized testing, we also know that they lag far behind in the classroom.

The Guilty Party

Olave d'Estienne has been kind enough to post this leaflet which lays out the plight of Blacks and Hispanics wronged by the tech industry.

Although they are 12.6% of the population, we are told, Blacks make up only 1% of internet company founders and 1.5% of Silicon Valley employees.   The latter, in addition, are subjected to a humiliating yellow badge-wearing regime which bars them from riding company bicycles.

The leaflet also shares with us the troubling facts that (1) Blacks' higher melanin content makes it harder for face-tracking software to sense them and (2) the disproportionately high crime rates in black ghettos tempt U.S. pedestrians to avoid them, with technology.

Who shall pay for these sins?

The detectives at OnlineITDegree.net claim to have sniffed out the culprit:  Its name is 'tech' and its weapon is 'racism':

Mulatto History Month

Mulatto historian Carter G. Woodson, an attendee at Chicago's 1915 Exposition of Negro Progress (celebrating 50 years of Emancipation), was so inspired by the crowds' enthusiasm that he went on to promote the very first 'Negro History Week' in February 1926.  A roaring success, this yearly event was expanded to an entire month in 1976, when President Gerald Ford urged all Americans to 'seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.'

But what is a Black American?

Let us take a moment to gaze upon the visages of those individuals held up as most honorable and praiseworthy during this month.  First, 'Negro History Week's' creator, Mr. Carter G. Woodson himself:

POLITICS

Our first 'black' president needs little introduction, but what of our first 'black' Secretary of State?:

Who's Fleeing Whom?

Michigan's largest city, Detroit, has been in the news of late due to its imminent bankruptcy and takeover  by the state.  We have considered its demise (as have others) in light of dysfunctional Afro governance and a misbehaving Afro populace (83% of the citizenry).

Though Afro criminality in North America has always surpassed that of Euros, and the latter have known it, separating oneself from Black neighbors was not difficult for the first 350 years of British North America / the United States.  Even in the North, segregation in housing was permitted de facto where it was not de jure.

The 'Great Migration,' waves of Afros moving from the South to the North, began in earnest in 1910, with its second wave after WWII (1945).

However, the flight of Euro-Americans out of the cities did not truly begin until Blacks were free to live where they pleased-- the 1960s.  Since then, a sort of merry-go-round has ensued:  Whites, suffering under Afro dysfunction, flee to suburbs, only to be pursued by the Talented Tenth fleeing same.  The latter are followed, as night follows day,  by the Untalented Nine-Tenths, who promptly re-create the urban hellscapes they left behind. Euro-Americans are forced to pack up, and the musical chairs begin again.  Section 8 vouchers have revved this carousel up to warp speed.

Instructive, perhaps, to watch the flight unfold before our eyes via U.S. Census numbers.

We give the figures from 1960, just before Segregation ended. We then fast-forward twenty years to 1980 to see what the first wave of 'White Flight' has wrought.  Finally, we give the most recent figures (2010), which contain some surprises, especially re: Hispanics, who did not even exist as a census category two generations ago.  For selected cities, we have also given the figures from 1910, before the Great Migration got underway.  Asians have been included where their historic presence has been strongest.

So: Who's fleeing whom?



We start with the Midwest, industrial center and destination of choice for the Great Migrators:

The Blind Leading the Blind, Part II

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We have considered Detroit's demise in light of Afros' seeming inability to capably take over the reins of Euro-created government, be it in Port-au-Prince, Johannesburg, or Birmingham.

But it takes two to tango.  Inept city leaders can do harm, but an inept population can double the damage.  Consider Orange County's surprise bankruptcy in 1994. Referendum-loving Californians having made it nearly impossible for local government to raise taxes, county treasurer Bob Citron began to invest what little they could raise into ever-riskier securities.  November 1994: The bomb dropped, with $1.7 billion up in smoke, also known as Citron's Barings Bank moment.

Or see New York City's famous near-bankruptcy in 1975 ('Ford to City: Drop Dead'), when the Big Apple was humiliatingly taken over by New York State.  In addition to the oil shock, stubborn unions, and shoddy bookkeeping, the city had recently seen a sudden flight of net taxpayers and an inflow of the government-dependent:

The 1970s saw New York lose more than 800,000 residents, almost all of them non-Hispanic whites.  This was the first significant population decrease in more than 150 years.
      

Residents with household incomes below federal poverty standards increased by 25 percent from 1970 to 1980, while all other income groups diminished in number.  Whereas the number of impoverished white residents decreased by 12 percent, the number of poor blacks increased by 40 percent, and poor Hispanics by 52 percent.

Rona Stein opines that

There is some evidence that New York City and other industrial regions may have unintentionally encouraged the poor to move in by offering relatively generous levels of welfare benefits. 

Perhaps, but the post-war boom that had made sure everyone who wanted a job had one was already waning in the 1960s.  Afro-Americans were now, as they had been after the Civil War, thrown into sudden competition with other ethnies.  W.H. Collins in 1918 had bemoaned the newly freed blacks' reticence to work, predicting:

The Blind Leading the Blind

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Detroit, the largest city in Michigan, is about to join its sisters Flint, Pontiac, Benton Harbor, and Ecorse in being stripped of its municipal authority and ceded to an 'emergency manager.' Well-covered by commentators who can see, the story has also attracted observations such as:

“How come all of the jurisdictions put under emergency management are majority African American? Has anybody noticed that?” asked Rep. John Conyers (D), who has represented Detroit for 47 years.

How come indeed.

As Congressman Conyers implies, majority-Afro cities tend to elect majority-Afro city governments.  As the average Afro is less well-endowed than other ethnies in future-time orientation, commonweal-orientation, industriousness, and logical aptitude, majority-Afro governments tend to govern poorly.

.             .            .

Haiti, the world's first Black Republic, stunned the planet in 1804 by driving out her European masters and embarking upon true self-government.  A century later, adventurer and journalist Hesketh Prichard ambled from one end of the island to the other, to report on what one hundred years of freedom had wrought.

On the capital city:

Our Crimes, Ourselves, Part II

As we have seen, white people's criminality has varied greatly over time and space.  W.A. Bonger in the 1940s walked us through Jewish, Mediterranean, Alpine, Nordic, Ugro-Finn, and Dinaric (Slavic) crime rates from his time period.  Such differences, we've argued, are nothing to wring one's hands over, but a simple reality for policy-makers to take into account.

Similarly, for as long as Africans and Europeans have co-existed on North American soil, these two admittedly large and diverse groups have, in the aggregate, shown markedly different criminal tendencies.  The differences seem to be getting more and more marked, and it has become conservative dogma that post-1960s Great Society programs are to blame.

This is true to a point.  As we've seen, any human can be incentivized to be parasitic, be he the son of West Africans or Albion's seed.

But long before public welfare handouts were even a twinkle in LBJ's eye, Afros and Euros committed crime differently in America.  How differently?

Provisioning...or Mating?

Morality or Biology?  Those engaged in the culture wars tend to focus on the first; those combing through the genome, the second.  In 'Paternal Provisioning versus Mate Seeking in Human Populations,' Edward M. Miller offers us tantalizing insight into the why of some of our African brethren's puzzling behavior.  An exercise of historical interest, perhaps, to compare his conclusions with the anthropological observations of those who've gone before us.   

Says Miller [all emphasis ours]:

'In some species, males devote more effort to seeking mating opportunities. In other species, they devote more effort to assisting their offspring. In each species, males evolve to use the strategy that most promotes their fitness.

'[...] In warm climates, females typically can gather enough food for themselves and their children. In cold climates, hunting is required to survive winter, and females typically do not hunt (other than for easily captured small game). Hence, offspring survival requires male provisioning in cold climates. Thus, cold climate males were selected to devote more efforts to provisioning, and less to seeking matings. In warm climates, such male provisioning was not essential, even if desirable.'

Ethnic Co-existence, Yesterday

People of our age have adopted the curious habit of considering ourselves more advanced, better informed, more wise, than the people of any generation who came before us.

This is new.

Peoples past always looked backwards toward a "golden age" of prosperity and wisdom whose great men were giants of philosophy, of whom we today are but a pale reflection.  Why this change of heart among moderns?

Our technical innovation?  Cuisinarts and contact lenses and polystyrene beer cozies are the proof that we have transcended our forebears in sagacity?

It would appear so, as even the opinions of our most prominent ancestors from two or three centuries past are today often held up to ridicule.  This is particularly so when it comes to that most delicate of modern questions, ethnic co-habitation.  The zeitgeist of our age, here in the West at the start of the 21st century, holds that each neighborhood should be an even blend of many ethnic groups:  salt and pepper and cinammon and cumin put into the same shaker, thoroughly mixed, and sprinkled liberally.

Our forebears, even the most illustrious, would find such a thought curious indeed.

African-American Crime, Today and Yesterday

from the archives...

         Stories of looting leaking out of tornado-stricken Minneapolis recently have brought to light this 2007 article from Minnesota Public News, revealing two salient points about her sister city St. Paul's African-descended population:

     1) 70% of all St. Paul's aggravated assaults the year before were 

          committed by this population, although they make up just 12% of the 

          city's inhabitants.

     2) Surprise is the correct reaction to this.

          Being of passing familiarity with this particular branch of American jurisprudential history, we imagined it of possible historical interest to present excerpts from the aforementioned article, alongside some voices from the past [all emphasis ours; list of works cited follows the text]:

African History in the U.S.--References

Regarding a request to provide some resources for those interested in the history of Africans in the U.S (North and South) before WWII, we present the following short bibliography, with comments to help guide you to something of possible interest.  


[Links provided where online versions are available.  Online libraries charging a small yearly fee are a treasure trove for such sources; we, for example, highly recommend Questia.]

HISTORY of AFRICANS IN THE U.S.