Realities Ruefully Regarded

     Brace yourself, Gentle Reader. Once again the subject is race, and I know how cringe-inducing it can be.

     The stimulus is a missive I just received from a dear friend who confronts a serious race-related problem. He owns a home in a neighborhood that’s slowly turning black. Here’s his assessment:

     My neighborhood is on the verge of turning bad. I can feel it. Black percentage is tipping 20%, and the attendant crime is coming with them. So I'm listing and getting out before my equity starts to suffer....
     Neighborhoods are turning quick down here. I think there's some funny business - most of these new people shouldn't be able to afford these homes.

     I must emphasize: this gentleman is a gentleman. He treats each individual on his merits. Moreover, his eyes really see, and his ears really hear. If he says crime and disorder are increasing around him, then they really are.

     But like so many of us, he must deal with constraints on his decisions:

• He can only carry so much debt;
• He can’t commute an infinite distance to his day job;
• His wife has certain requirements which, if not met, could create domestic discord;
• It’s not just his neighborhood that’s metamorphosing; others nearby are doing so as well.

     Some time ago, long before I acquired my current convictions, I faced the same situation. I asked a friend what she thought I should do. She told me, without equivocation, that it was my moral and social duty to remain where I was.

     Yes, she was a left-liberal. She also lived in a very expensive, lily-white neighborhood with property taxes that would choke a tyrannosaur. Which brings us to our first citation:

     So much of the media, academia and politicians have no skin in the game which is why they rake individuals and groups they don't like over the coals; there is little or no cost to them. If a student pays for college and can't finish because the rules and regulations make it impossible, he or she loses all his or her time and money but the school gains whatever tuition has been paid and loses nothing. If their degree is worthless? No worries, the individual is out of luck and the school postures about the PC majors they include.

     Politicians make all kinds of laws and regulations on healthcare such as the ACA even if they don't work because their own healthcare is fine. The media glorifies killers and blares their antics 24/7, giving the next mentally unhealthy person the urge to copy such crimes -- but they never pay a price. In fact, they get higher ratings so there is no reason for them to restrain themselves or think that -- ethically -- it might not be the best option.

     We are fast becoming a society where some people have little or no skin [in] the game (such as those who pay no taxes) and others have a lot of skin in the game (those who pay high levels of taxes). Where will it end? What are the repercussions to our society? How different would our institutions be if administrators had skin [in] the game?

     Indeed. When the possible consequences of one’s decisions are death, injury, or impoverishment, it pays to heed only those with “skin in the game.”

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     It’s commonplace for a man who wants to believe certain things to avert his eyes from countervailing evidence. Even smart people will do so. Wishful thinking isn’t confined to the subliterate.

     Smart people I’ve known – and I’ve known one hell of a lot of them – have routinely, even ritually blamed the pathologies common to black districts on factors other than race. Among conservatives, the most common retreat from race as a contributing factor is this one: “It’s the schools. They can’t get a decent education.” If you haven’t heard that evasion, you might be the only person in America who hasn’t.

     Which brings us to our second citation:

     I have more sympathy with the bromides of the Right, but let’s face it, they are bromides. Yes, bourgeois behaviors like education, marriage, and hard work still forge the way out of poverty in America. But I’ve seen schools in poor black neighborhoods, and I’ve met children there, and I think if you’re eight years old and your dad is gone and your mom’s on drugs and all your role models are gangsters...well, maybe it’s not so easy to get your bourgeois game on.

     No one can reasonably dispute Andrew Klavan’s bona fides as a serious and realistic thinker. Yes, the schools in which most American black minor children are incarcerated several hours per day, nine months per year, are mostly inferior to those that serve predominantly white districts...but there are questions to be asked about that:

• Who teaches in those schools?
• Who administers them and sets standards for performance and discipline?
• Are the standards, whatever they might be, enforced?
• What adults, apart from the official staffs, are allowed into those schools, and what do they do there?
• Are the students being educated, or merely housed, harangued, and / or indoctrinated?

     To the best of my knowledge, honest answers to these questions don’t exonerate race as a factor. Rather, they emphasize and amplify it.

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     The shibboleth of “diversity” has been used to energize immense amounts of destruction – of people, places, and social harmony. One commentator, whose name I’ve unfortunately forgotten, opined that the calls for “diversity” really amount to a policy of “chasing down the last white person.” Indeed, when we review regions known for prosperity and public order, it becomes clear that:

• Such districts are almost all nearly completely white or Asian;
• The migration of blacks is toward such districts, not away from them;
• When such a migration occurs, prosperity and public order suffer.

     Yet the madness will not abate. The wholeheartedly vicious way in which the apostles of “diversity” treat the subject is best exemplified by the James Damore scandal, and by the testimony of a recent emigre from YouTube – a wholly owned subsidiary of Google – that YouTube had established a “no white or Asian men” policy for hiring:

     YouTube last year stopped hiring white and Asian males for technical positions because they didn’t help the world’s largest video site achieve its goals for improving diversity, according to a civil lawsuit filed by a former employee.

     The lawsuit, filed by Arne Wilberg, a white male who worked at Google for nine years, including four years as a recruiter at YouTube, alleges the division of Alphabet Inc.’s set quotas for hiring minorities. Last spring, YouTube recruiters were allegedly instructed to cancel interviews with applicants who weren’t female, black or Hispanic, and to “purge entirely” the applications of people who didn’t fit those categories, the lawsuit claims....

     People familiar with YouTube’s and Google’s hiring practices in interviews corroborated some of the lawsuit’s allegations, including the hiring freeze of white and Asian technical employees, and YouTube’s use of quotas.

     Hiring on the basis of race is certainly not hiring on the basis of merit. It will most certainly increase social pathologies and reinforce the attitude among blacks that whites “owe” them.

     Along with those effects, this “diversity” scheme will worsen avoidable prejudices. I wrote some time ago:

     When a society makes special provisions for a particular class of persons, such that those persons have a good expectation of not suffering for illegal or antisocial behavior, it has committed the worst imaginable injustice against the persons in that class who honor their society's laws and norms: it has equalized the legal, social, and moral positions of good citizens and thugs. Thus, if ninety percent of such a class is law-abiding and decorous while ten percent is violent, dishonest, or disruptive, the latter category will come to overshadow the former in the perceptions of persons outside the class -- not because ten percent is a majority, but because that anti-social subgroup is identified with the class's special set of privileges.

     A class is defined by its legal and social privileges. The aristocrats of medieval times were not distinguished by their lineages or their deeds, but by the things they were allowed to do, without penalty, that commoners were not. There is reason to believe that the majority of medieval aristocrats were fairly responsible stewards of their lands and of public order within them. That does not justify the creation of a class of men who could wield high, middle, and low justice over others, but who would normally escape all consequences for deeds for which a commoner would be severely punished....

     Success breeds emulation. If there are advantages to be had from the ruthless exploitation of a class privilege, over time more and more members of the class will be drawn into doing so. Thus, the coloration given to the class by its privileges will become stronger and more inclusive over time.

     It cannot be made plainer than that.

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     If there’s an ultimate irony to close with, it would be this one:

     Increasingly news is coming out of South Africa that white farmers are being murdered in ever greater numbers and the government there has made the first moves toward confiscating their prime agricultural lands.

     How did this racism get so far along before you heard about it?

     It’s because it goes completely against the Leftist meme that only whites can be racists and indeed the mainstream media told us that South Africa was to be the beacon for the new multicultural world calling it the Rainbow Nation. It is all BS of course as we have reported in previous posts archived here....

     More than 12,000 people have signed a petition asking President Donald Trump to let white people in South Africa emigrate to the U.S. amid a vote by the country’s parliament favoring a motion that could see South Africa’s constitution amended to allow for land to be stripped from owners without any compensation....

     The online petition calls on Trump to “take the steps necessary to initiate an emergency immigration plan allowing white Boers to come to the United States.”

     Boer is the term used to describe South Africans of Dutch, German or Huguenot descent, who are also commonly referred to as Afrikaners.

     [Applause to David DeGerolamo for the link.]

     To be fair, for those white Afrikaner farmers to come to the U.S. or Europe wouldn’t be a case of “jumping out of the frying pan into the fire.” Rather, they’d be “jumping out of the frying pan into a somewhat cooler frying pan that’s heating up rapidly as we watch.” Present trends continuing – especially trends in American and European immigration policies – the First World is only a couple of decades behind South Africa in rate-of-descent to “multiracial” savagery.

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     Reality refuses to be disregarded without consequences. Consequences are upon us, and upon other nations that have disregarded race as a causative influence in crime, violence, public disorder, and social disharmony. If Herbert Stein were here, and if this were a discussion of some aspect of economics, government budgeting, or fiscal policy, he might say something like “If a trend cannot continue, it will stop.” But he’s not here, and anyway we’re not talking about such matters today. Not even the most cockeyed of cockeyed optimists could say plausibly that the “diversity” trend that has already harmed so many Americans and American localities will stop. Indeed, there are indications that suggest that it’s about to accelerate.

     Let the hate email commence.