Yesterday's piece has evoked the usual hail of denunciations, as any Gentle Reader of Liberty's Torch could easily have predicted. But we haven't yet gotten to the fun part of this investigation, which makes me wonder if the moral relativists and multiculturalists have any outrage left. I suspect they'll need it.
The late Lawrence Auster once promulgated a generalization about "liberal societies" that neatly expresses the moral relativist / multicultural dynamic:
(Thanks to commenter dondiego at Crusader Rabbit for this link.) I know of no exceptions to this observation over the past fifty years. It should tell us clearly how to correct our sociopolitical mistakes...if, indeed, they're still correctable. However, it becomes even more significant when applied to the origin of our troubles with querulous and belligerent minorities.
The problem of the petulant and antisocial black minority arises from two sources:
- A susceptibility to propagandization;
- Propagandization itself.
The social workers of the "New Frontier" and "Great Society" years might have had only the best intentions. (I know that sounds farfetched, given the consequences of their work, but we must concede the possibility.) However, they committed a catastrophic error in telling their clients-to-be that American society owed them the benefits they were to receive. That fostered a sense of entitlement -- a word that has come to have a pernicious political meaning -- in any of their targets with a "condensation nucleus" for it. In the case of the American Negro, that condensation nucleus was ready and waiting: resentment about having been excluded from the opportunities of the larger society, accumulated over the decades since the Civil War.
White guilt over past racial exclusion was the motivating factor in such pronouncements; Negroes' resentment, long suppressed in the interest of retaining what acceptance and opportunities were open to them, was easily brought to the forefront of race relations as the era's racialist hucksters sensed their opportunity.
Ironically, the mechanisms that had worked to marginalize American Negroes in Northern cities were not rooted in racial preferences, but rather in the desire of the commercial firms of the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century to "consolidate their gains." Firms with an urban base, alarmed by the rapid influx of energetic migrants, colluded with machine politicians to erect ever higher, ever stronger barriers against new competitors. The earliest migrants to the Northern port cities -- i.e., those preponderantly from Mediterranean Europe and eastward -- were able to "get in under the wire." Later migrants were less fortunate -- and those included the majority of Negro migrants from the rural South.
As psychologist Peter Breggin has observed, the migrant ghettoes of the late Nineteenth Century were places of tremendous enterprise. Their residents were busy: creating small businesses, offering their services in their various trades, and generally doing the sort of ground-state commerce characteristic of an infant capitalist economy. It took time, but those with determination and energy prospered. Their children prospered still further.
As we advance into the Twentieth Century, we see the proliferation of barriers to new businesses and trades: zoning regulations; licensure laws; restrictions on the size and construction of commercial buildings; limitations of the hours of labor and commerce; ever-rising property taxes; and so forth. Much that was utterly essential to the prosperity of the earlier wave of migrants had been barred to the later wave. A Negro migrant from the South, who'd been attracted northward by the promise of the urban dynamism that had uplifted the earlier migrants, arrived to find that he was no better off than he had been in the South...sometimes worse.
Did racial preferences play a part? Perhaps to some extent. But the prejudice among Americans of Northern and Western European stock against the waves from Southern and Eastern Europe proved incapable of thwarting their rise. It took the political machinations enumerated above to create a really strong barrier against the later arrivals from the American South.
Negroes' history of marginalization plus their readiness to believe in willed oppression synergized with social workers' statements about entitlements and the efforts of racialist hucksters to mobilize them for collective action. The brew proved lethal to race relations, particularly in the Northern cities.
Really, how long can you tell a man that he's "owed" before he stands up and demands to be paid? If "payment" to his liking is not forthcoming, he's likely to act out -- and the probability of serious acting out rises according to a number of factors:
- Inherent aggressive propensities;
- The sense of "strength in numbers;"
- Perception of weakness on the part of the targets;
- Appeasement or conciliation in response to early probes.
Starting roughly in 1965, all these things were in play.
The question next to be answered is why white targets for government largesse didn't behave in such a fashion. For one thing, social workers didn't show poor whites the solicitude they extended to poor blacks. For another, economically disadvantaged whites seldom concentrated geographically to the extent urban Negroes did; more, they exhibited a greater degree of mobility than did blacks. Third, one of the worst of the social pathologies -- unwed motherhood -- was far slower to take root among lower class whites. Thus, the terrible plague of fatherless, disruptive young men afflicted Negro communities far more seriously than communities of lower class whites.
We cannot know at this remove from the seminal period what the dominant causal factors were. But that doesn't mean we can't candidly recognize that the problem correlates strongly with race.
It's likely that the key to the tragedy was and remains whites' willingness to encourage blacks' resentment coupled to whites' willingness to protect disruptive and violent blacks from the consequences of their behavior. Remember that in the years prior to the explosion of welfarism, there was no significant problem of Negro unrest. Granted that we can't turn back the clock; nevertheless, it is imperative that a mistake recognized not be repeated. The excuse-making for black violence and lawlessness, and the appeasement shown to black race hustlers, must cease if America is to know peace between the races. Peace rests upon a foundation of justice -- and a justice that stays its hand when the accused's skin color is a certain shade is no justice worthy of the name.
A different sociology (than the one you emphasize here, though not incompatible with it) can be found in Thomas Sowell's 'Black Rednecks and White Liberals.' See the title essay. The rest of the book is top shelf as well, with a real history of slavery, a fresh look at anti-Semitism and its origins (though I'm not entirely satisfied by Sowell's theory), and a look at the destruction of black education.
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