A Dismal Reality
It Wasn't Supposed To Be This Way
September 7. 2005
I was traveling in China when pictures of the looters in New Orleans
began to appear on CNN. They were black of course. Looting and raping
and burning are what blacks do when the lid loosens. Yes, I could
phrase this more cautiously: These things are what some blacks, etc.
or, more cutely, not all blacks are looters, but all looters....blah
blah.
Yet it happens time and again. There was Los Angeles, burned in 1992.
There have been Cincinnati, Miami, Seattle, Washington DC, Chicago,
Detroit, Crown Heights, Watts, Newark, on and on and on. When the law
loses its grip, the looting begins.
We have come to expect it. Members of my tour group in China to whom I
spoke assumed that the looters were black before watching. They had
seen it before. I knew it before I saw the pictures. The looters are
always black except when, occasionally, they are Latino. If they were
looting for food it would be understandable. But that isn't what is
happening. Few of us eat television sets. Nike's running shoes are
not particularly digestible.*
With the dismantling in the Fifties of apartheid in the United States,
many hoped that blacks would rise, study, progress, and become
genuinely as distinct from formally integrated into the country. I
hoped it too, though my expectations were low. Southerners said it
would never happen, but were dismissed as prejudiced. They were right.
The melding of the races just hasn't worked and, if examined
honestly, shows few signs of working. Fifty years after the Brown
decision, blacks remain unassimilated. They appear to be unassimilable.
This, after endless programs, after the nation has turned itself on its
head trying to encourage, promote, force, or imagine assimilation.
Integration of the schools degraded the schools, but did little for
blacks. Operation Head Start didn't work. Racial quotas in the
universities didn't work, nor did the awarding of unearned degrees or
the establishment of departments of Black Studies. Compulsory
integration of restaurants didn't work. Quotas in hiring, enforced by
the federal government, didn't work. Welfare didn't work.
"Hate-crime" laws didn't work. Nothing has worked.
These attempts have not been without results, but assimilation of
blacks into the country has not been one of them. Compelled hiring by
race instead of merit has produced a black middle class, but those so
hired are regarded as a sort of tax, a cost of doing business. Saying
this aloud is a firing offense, so no one says it in the office. They
say it later over a beer. This was not the intended outcome. It is what
we got.
Neither race shows much inclination to associate with the other. Left
to themselves, they quickly segregate, in housing, on campus, in night
clubs. Only heavy federal pressure produces an appearance of
togetherheid.
As a police reporter frequently in the hearts of the big cities, I saw
the failure with a clarity available to few. The black regions are
huge, and they are purely black. Their denizens share little with a
society of European derivation. In particular, with not enough
exceptions, they seem to regard laws as restraints externally imposed
instead of internally felt: When the police go away, so do restrictions
on behavior. So do televisions. God help you if you are a white woman.
If you don't believe this, check the Uniform Crime Reports of the
FBI. They are on the web.
I am not sure with what instrument one measures passivity, but
passivity is what I sensed in the moldering dark regions-people just
waiting, for what neither I nor they knew, just going from day to day,
except for the gangs, who killed people. There was a smell of violence
awaiting its chance. If you think I am imagining this, reflect on the
looting and burning that erupt when the lid grows loose. Always there
is another city with young blacks carrying television sets from stores.
I do not say these things with rejoicing. Morally it is saddening. For
blacks, for whites, for the country the best thing would be that blacks
genuinely flourish. They do not.
Something seems inherent in the race, or perhaps embedded in the
culture, that does not understand success or morals or responsibility
as others understand them. Perhaps, as many suggest, a history of being
wards of the state, of being given special aid and special privilege,
of having nothing expected of them, has inculcated passivity. Perhaps
the persistently noted difference in measured IQ is the explanation. Be
that as it may, the blacks of the rioting regions seem to labor under a
crippling torpor and a dull, paralyzing lack of concern for those
things that define European societies. Or, for that matter, Chinese or
Japanese societies. Scholarship, reading, study do not seem to appeal.
In Washington, I almost never saw blacks in the art galleries, the
museums, or the public libraries. The races do not appear to want the
same things, do not value the same things.
Writers speaking of the looting in New Orleans regularly say that
poverty causes looting, and that as a society we should do something
about it. But why are blacks poor, and what could society do that it
has not already tried? Blacks are always poor, in Africa, in Haiti and
Jamaica, in New Orleans. It is a global pattern. Would that it were
not, but it is. No one knows what to do about it.
With the inevitability of gravitation, commentators attribute the
incompatibility with what we think of as civilization to oppression or
neglect by whites. Oh? In Washington, the mayor is usually black, along
with a majority of the city council and school board. The principals
are black, as are most of the teachers, almost all of the students, and
their parents. The funding per student is high. Yet the schools are
horrifically bad.
Washington could have any schools it wanted: It is hard to imagine
anyone denying blacks better textbooks or forbidding the assignment of
more homework. I conclude that they do have the schools they want.
Perhaps they don't want schools at all.
Yes, there are exceptions, and they too flee the city's schools.
Unfortunately the exceptions are exceptions.
I will receive mail from blacks telling me that what I am saying is
wrong. I wish it were. Yet the riots continue decade after decade and
the academic necrosis never clears. The unseen downtowns wait, dead in
the water, profoundly isolated from America by their size and
homogeneity. From time to time they have exploded, and will explode.
Years back Carl Rowan, the black columnist, wrote a book called "The
Coming Race War in America." It couldn't quite be ignored, but
could be ignored mostly, and was. Though he had moved extensively among
whites, Rowan had little grasp of how whites think. He believed that
they wanted to grind their heels in black faces. That he was wrong
doesn't matter. If he believed it, one may imagine what the young
black males of East St. Louis think. Rowan wrote also of the anger and
hatred seething in such places. He had seen it. I have seen it.
What will happen if, or when, the economy weakens under rising Asian
competition, if good jobs are shipped to India and gasoline hits
unheard of prices and the standard of living falls hard? Under the
imposed amity of today there lurks powerful resentment on both sides.
Prosperity has held things together. A flourishing nation can afford
affirmative action. But when prosperity goes so will the amity. I can
think of no solution other than a passport and a Euro account.