At only 13% of the U.S. population, blacks account for almost half of all total homicide victims, and more than half of all murderers. These figures are even more troubling once you consider that it is not black women, but young black men who are committing most of these violent crimes. The white progressive intellectual class is committed to propagating the very resentment that, if there ever is a race war, will surely be its source. Like sulking children in the schoolyard, white progressive intellectuals don’t want to move on from history. They’d rather walk around with their heads bowed low, crying “I’m sorry, sir” all day long.
by Christopher DeGroot for TAKI’S MAGAZINE
Writing in the The New York Times, Ekow N. Yankah, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, tells a sad story for progressives, who, poor things, have found it so disturbing that they could not enjoy the usual multiculturalist pleasure afforded by the cacophonous sound of an African name. Rachel Maddow, in particular, has been all broken up. She even had to cancel her plans with BFF Chris Hayes, who, finally off the rag, had been looking forward to a night of yoga, tofu, and organic shakes, which was to be capped off by waxing each other’s respective gender identities as Ani DiFranco played forward-thinking music in the background.
My oldest son, wrestling with a 4-year-old’s happy struggles, is trying to clarify how many people can be his best friend. “My best friends are you and Mama and my brother and…” But even a child’s joy is not immune to this ominous political period. This summer’s images of violence in Charlottesville, Va., prompted an array of questions. “Some people hate others because they are different,” I offer, lamely. A childish but distinct panic enters his voice. “But I’m not different.”
It is impossible to convey the mixture of heartbreak and fear I feel for him. Donald Trump’s election has made it clear that I will teach my boys the lesson generations old, one that I for the most part nearly escaped. I will teach them to be cautious, I will teach them suspicion, and I will teach them distrust. Much sooner than I thought I would, I will have to discuss with my boys whether they can truly be friends with white people.
As against our gauzy national hopes, I will teach my boys to have profound doubts that friendship with white people is possible.
In other words, even to his own 4-year-old, that poor child, Professor Yankah will perpetuate the confusion and divisive resentment that have long hindered blacks, all while being a great boon for the global capitalists and their bedfellows, the war-machine Democrats and neocons. If anybody should have supported the Trump presidency, it was blacks, because no American ethnic group has fared worse in the global knowledge economy, when so many of our jobs have been exported to Asia.
The American people are not as dumb as progressives think. (Some say blacks are, but being a good team member, I leave that for others to decide.) It is progressives, on the contrary, who have something to learn from them. They were not duped by “Russian interference.” They had long been betrayed by the moneygrubbing elite, and they knew it perfectly well. President Trump was elected because he frankly addressed the loss of American industry and also a related issue: illegal immigration. Having formerly allowed for a middle-class life for American citizens, blue-collar jobs now go, in many instances, to illegal Mexican immigrants. They naturally find the work preferable to the poor options available in Mexico, nor is it reasonable to expect Americans to work for the meager wages that they do.
Bernie Sanders was the only other candidate to recognize the awful effects of the new global corporate class, which stands to gain immensely from dirt-cheap Mexican labor. A typical naive liberal sentimentalist, Sanders’ solution was to increase the welfare state. Send everybody to college! After all, the professors themselves can no longer read. Alas, silly old man, the welfare state is already unsustainable. Have the rich pay their fair share of taxes, cheered Sanders, as if they didn’t already pay most taxes, and as if mere redistributive economics could create jobs and a life worth living. For the most part, the Democrats consist of such well-meaning but harmful fools and shameless manipulators like the pay-to-play Clintons.
Indeed, Hillary Clinton, not President Trump, is the demagogue whom blacks should distrust. In the past, black leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Booker T. Washington, well aware that blacks depended on American industry, were strongly against illegal immigration. While there are some exceptions, on the whole, black intellectuals have gone the way of the liberal utopians. Their god is resentment, and so we have Professor Ekow N. Yankah, who is willing to make his own child a sacrificial lamb. Most black intellectuals support open boarders, even though nobody suffers from that policy as much as blacks do. Black intellectuals generally want a bigger welfare state, even though, as Thomas Sowell has demonstrated, nothing has been more destructive to black culture. Even Michel Foucault, an extreme leftist, conceded that the welfare state produces dependency, just as it runs counter to the motivation needed to become self-reliant. It has been found, as far back as there are national statistics for crime, that blacks have committed crimes at higher rates than whites. In the welfare state, the rates have soared, since the 1960s in particular. The welfare state, along with the decline in Christianity and the sexual revolution, has found a staggering number of black women effectively married to the state. The illegitimacy rate among blacks is a depressing 74%. Without fathers to teach them how to live and show them proper outlets for their masculine energy, many young black men turn to gangs and crime.
For that way of life does at least provide a sense of masculine value, the young belonging with other men. Like soldiers in war, they live against the (law-abiding) grain. Although progressives, driven by anxious resentment, believe men and women are interchangeable, both the teaching and the enforcement of moral conduct require male leadership. Morality derives historically from religion—a distinctly male affair. You men reading this will remember being young and ignoring what mom told you to do—until dad, that bigger, fearsome fellow, came along. That is the natural order of the family. Once its government became dominated by women, Sweden soon became the rape capital of the Western world. That is the collective folly, the herd sentimentalism of female leadership. When it comes to obedience, men are by no means inclined to submit to women, nor, as a general rule, to anyone who does not cause them to feel fear, something that usually only other men can do. Accordingly, proper authority has always been and must continue to be a masculine business.
The global knowledge economy, having already eliminated many jobs, shall render many more superfluous. While this shall affect every race, it would seem to be especially dire for blacks, who are already struggling. What shall become of them? Given that there are already millions of blacks who are not doing well, will not the future of black America, when work is even more scarce, be worse than it is now? Will it not see a lot more crime, too? Would not universal basic income—really just more of the welfare state—merely exacerbate the problem of black crime in our cities?
Certainly, our cities are already ravaged by black crime, violent crime in particular. At only 13% of the U.S. population, blacks account for almost half of all total homicide victims, and more than half of all murderers. These figures are even more troubling once you consider that it is not black women, but young black men who are committing most of these violent crimes. As you might infer from a good look at Chicago or Baltimore, the percentages are much higher in cities. Meanwhile, the media, in its lucre worship, grossly exaggerates the statistical minority of unjustified black deaths at the hands of police. From a statistical point of view, the actual crime epidemic in this country is black-on-black violence: Almost 90% of black homicides—which, as we just saw, make up a disproportional number of total homicides—consist in young black men killed by the same. About this few people seem to care, least of all Black Lives Matter, those hypocrites. Then there is the tremendous amount of black-on-white crime—an unmentionable subject, for since black crime is supposed to be caused by poverty (an explanation that nobody makes about nonblacks anywhere in the world), urging blacks to become accountable is deemed racist.
So, for various reasons, whites seem to be moving toward a dangerous state of affairs with respect to blacks. The white progressive intellectual class is committed to propagating the very resentment that, if there ever is a race war, will surely be its source. Like sulking children in the schoolyard, white progressive intellectuals don’t want to move on from history. They’d rather walk around with their heads bowed low, crying “I’m sorry, sir” all day long. Far from commanding respect and inspiring a just disposition, the message they are sending to blacks is: “I am weak—take what is mine.” (And so it is also, of course, when it comes to the white progressive intellectual class and the jihadists.) It is exceedingly naive to assume that a people whose history constitutes an affront to their pride will respond to your generosity (i.e., the welfare state that is largely funded by white men) and never-ending guilt with a sense of fairness and goodwill. The converse is far more likely.
“In South Africa,” my friend Ilana Mercer notes, “we find a criminal class, born into freedom after 1994, that burns with white-hot hatred for whites.” The reason is that “South Africa—with its space program and skyscrapers—was not the product of the people currently dismantling it. Rather, it was the creation of British and Dutch settlers and their descendants.” It follows that “for what they’ve achieved and acquired—and for the original sins of apartheid in South Africa; slavery in America—whites are the objects of envy and racial enmity.”
In an apt comparison, Mercer counsels us not to believe “the American ruling Idiocracy, that minorities in the U.S.—soon to form a majority—will relinquish race and tribe as unifying principles, in favor of the U.S.’s constitutional design.” After all, “like South Africa, America is a creation of (northwest) European settlers. And it is in Man’s nature [as we see from Professor Yankah] to dislike those who are unlike him—all the more so when they, as a group, have accomplished what he has not.”
For where there is no bond of kinship or of community—and so, no sympathy or loyalty—other people are essentially perceived as competitors. The reason is that in this world anxious need and poverty are our natural condition. Therefore, people who are not with us understandably appear to be against us. Progressive white intellectuals, largely sons and daughters of wealth who have never wanted for anything, cant about tolerance and diversity and the like fashionable idols in a manner that could not be more contrary to our egotistical human nature.
Mercer also touches on what I have referred to as human nature’s difficult need for esteem. Man is the esteem-needing animal. He is determined by his desire to matter in the eyes of others, because it is only by comparison to them that he can embody merit in the social sphere. Yet this competition is a source of fierce envy. Today, the nonwhite peoples of the world are more and more like the hungry young boxer who burns with envy at the sight of the lazy and flabby old champion. The former used to be great. Then he got rich, his ego grew inflated, and decadent habits—needless guilty and excessive pity—corrupted him, causing his elite skill and courage to become diminished. Now what? His own people seek to engender his demise, a madness that they call virtue. Who shall stop them? Shall America become like South Africa, where whites are routinely slaughtered because they are white? Can it ever become what it should be, a color-blind meritocracy?
The stakes are grave, and those who have much to lose—namely, the wealthy—shall be the most timid and cowardly. Therefore, it falls to the ordinary man to both preserve and improve his nation, the same man who has long suffered because of the conceited ignorance of the white progressive intellectual class and the black resenters who find them so appealing.
