Emancipation Provocation

"Ain't no money in the world can get me on my feet before we hit Memphis! And if I never see a 
bale of cotton no more in life, that'll be too soon."

Riverboat worker Bill (Bill Robinson) in 'Stormy Weather,' 1943

At Those Who Can See, we recently postulated that in a Euro society, Afros on average need stronger social controls than other groups in order to conform to Euro behavioral norms.  Where these controls are tightest, such as a slavery system, black criminality will be lowest; and where such controls are loosest, black criminality will be very high.  We also hypothesized that when a new freedom or right is obtained by Afros, a statistically significant percentage of them will 'act out' in response, in ways that include antisocial and criminal behavior.


We suggested four such periods in U.S. history in which to test our hypothesis:

(1) the Reconstruction South in the years after Emancipation 

(2) Northern cities absorbing waves of southern Blacks fleeing Jim Crow during the 'Great Migration' (1910-1950) 

(3) the post Civil Rights-era U.S. of the 1960s and 1970s 

(4) the period following Barack Obama's inauguration as first Afro president of the U.S.

Last time, we examined (2), the change in crime statistics before and after the Civil Rights era of the 1960s.  Today, we shall look at  period (1), the South post-Emancipation.

This is the most delicate of questions, as human bondage, while common throughout history, is seen with strong revulsion today in the West.  Is it to be expected that he who moves from slavery to freedom will lash out in violence at his past oppressors?  The more optimistic writers of the time, Black as well as White, believed the freed slave would quickly use his liberty to educate himself and lead a productive, civilized existence alongside 'the superior race.'  The more pessimistic thought emancipation of Afros could only lead to chaos.

Waiting for a Mississippi riverboat to Missouri

Who was right?

Empirical data on the question is tricky to come by, for a variety of reasons.  And it is important to distinguish Reconstruction from the period following it. The years 1865-1876 were topsy-turvy for all the South, under military occupation and with illiterate Afros being shoehorned by the occupiers into State Houses and judgeships. Things didn't return to 'normal' until the late 1870s, and the men quoted below are mainly referring to the period beginning then. We shall start with their observations, then move on to the statistics.



I. Anti-social behavior after Reconstruction: Anecdotes


1) A general increase in crime

 

Inmates at the Negro Prison in Houston, Texas

Post-Reconstruction era writings are rife with anecdotes of high black crime, from both Southern authors and visitors to the South.  W.E.B. DuBois, 1899:

Throughout the land there has been since the war [between the states] a large increase in crime, especially in cities.  ... The Negro began to rush to the cities in large numbers after 1880, and consequently the phenomena attendant on that momentous change of life are tardier in his case. His rate of criminality has in the last two decades risen rapidly...(1)

Blogger has bugged, enormous apology to all unpublished commenters

 

It is with extreme embarassment that I admit that although I was surprised by the total lack of comments on the last few posts, I thought, 'so it goes, people are busy, it's a quiet few weeks.'

Turns out Blogger was not sending e-mail alerts for each new comment as it should, and I blithely didn't check the 'comments awaiting moderation' box.

I have thus let pile up in limbo a slew of thoughtful comments from thoughtful people.  I beg your pardon for this technical bêtise; as I have mentioned before, tech is not my friend. And I shall set about reading them at once.

Self-policing and the Afro-American

A young subject struggles with  the infamous marshmallow test.

In the U.S., as we have seen, Afro crime has always and everywhere been higher than Euro crime.  For progressives today, the culprit in this befuddling situation is 'institutional racism.'   As discrimination subsides, so the theory goes, black criminality will converge with white.

The U.S. government began its regular census of prison populations in 1926.  For its first ten years, the ratio of black to white imprisonment rates looked like this:

That is, in 1930, the black imprisonment rate was 2.7 times the white rate. In a blank-slatist world, all other things being equal, this number would always be 1.

If the equalist theory holds true, then, seeing as institutional bigotry has greatly diminished in the past century, this coefficient should have already reached 1 or nearly 1.  As here:

In reality, the last ninety years have looked like this*:

Bring low the enemy of Multiculturalism

 'Comrade, come to our kolkhoz!'

We have seen how the free press in a liberal democracy can spout the reigning dogma in ways that call to mind the old Pravda or Izvestya.

The parallels do not end there.  Many Westerners today have the growing sense their children's schools as well as pop culture are becoming propaganda fountains, and that questioning the orthodoxy entails real risk.  Are we mad to make such comparisons?  To orient ourselves, it can be helpful to look back at examples of overt scholarly and artistic indoctrination in the U.S.S.R.  How near are we to them? How did we get here? What comes next?


1) From the time a child can toddle

Images of industrious Soviet children

W.H. Chamberlin in 1934:

From the time when a child can toddle, a red flag is pushed into its hand; it learns the new Soviet songs and is taught in nursery and kindergarten to lisp Soviet slogans. The stream of propaganda, all directed to the purpose of making a new type of man and woman, entirely devoted to Soviet and Communist ideas, becomes intensified as the child grows older.  

No one can visit a Soviet school without being impressed by the thorough manner in which the pupils are taught to hate "capitalism" and the "bourgeoisie" and to regard the Soviet system as the best in the world.  (1) 

In today's West, Great Britain has led the charge in punishing Wrongthink in its youth:

The mother of a seven-year-old boy was told to sign a school form admitting he was racist after he asked another pupil about the colour of his skin.  Elliott Dearlove had asked a five-year-old boy in the playground whether he was ‘brown because he was from Africa.’

‘I was told I would have to sign a form acknowledging my son had made a racist remark which would be submitted to the local education authority for further investigation,’ she said.  ‘I refused to sign it.' ... '[Elliott] kept saying to me, “I was just asking a question. I didn’t mean it to be nasty” and he was extremely distressed by it all.’

British thought criminal Elliott Dearlove, seven

Five-Year Plan in Four Years

'We will get from the virgin soil a rich harvest!

Two weeks before Walter Russell Mead of The American Interest decided to shut down commenting at his blog, on a post about an Arab riot in France the following exchange took place:

'PC is intellectual Stalinism. It is also a betrayal of Liberalism in all its historical incarnations...'

'Intellectual Leninism might be a better way to characterize PC than intellectual Stalinism....Stalin just follwed suit.'

     '… like reading TASS and PRAVDA, one learns to interpret what is unsaid by what IS said.'

To Right-Thinking Americans, these comparisons might sound laughable.  We're a liberal democracy, after all, with the strongest free speech protections in the world.  What could we have in common with an iron-fisted one-party totalitarian state whose dissenters were sent to die in massive slave camps?

A better question might be, how is it possible that a liberal democracy in the 21st century is home to phenomena that so readily call to mind those of an iron-fisted one-party totalitarian state?

'Absurd,' you may say. We'd be tempted to say it ourselves. To all such people, we here at Those Who Can See can only ask: Won't you take our hand, Comrade, and come with us to the back of the four-hour toilet-paper queue as we seek out just where the parallels may lie?

Arab Autumn?

Image source

The Arab Spring, eighteen months on.  Has a passion for freedom of speech, separation of religion and State, and the 'free marketplace of ideas' seized the Arab world?  Two weeks ago a Coptic Christian living in California,  in no way affiliated with any U.S. government entity, published a comically low-quality 13-minute film trailer ridiculing Mohammed and Islam.  The Arab world's reaction?

In Egypt:

In Lebanon:

In Kuwait:

In Palestine:

In Tunisia:

In Yemen:

What about the Muslim world generally?

Were you Assimilable?

'The Mortar of Assimilation--And the One Element that Just Won't Mix'

(standing is an Irishman)
Puck Magazine, June 1889

A great many people today can look at this map...

Image source

...and conclude, 'This can only spell good things for America.'

Why?

'Anglo-America absorbed millions of alien immigrants in the 19th century, then went on to become the biggest superpower in world history!'

As it happens, both these statements are true. It is also true that after metal helmets replaced leather ones, the number of soldiers' head injuries increased. So did America become a huge superpower because, or in spite of, these aliens? Or a little of both?

And if these waves of 19th c. foreigners did make her stronger, can the same be said of the millions streaming in yearly now?

The question is by no means flip.  Many of the arguments used by immigration restrictionists in 2012 are identical to those used a hundred years ago.  It's a case of Chicken Little, says our open-border contingent--'Your predecessors said the sky would fall; it didn't, and this time it won't either.'

Who's right?

Why, just look at this mosaic:

Image source

A propositional nation, n'est-ce pas?

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?