June 06, 2018

Is America's Racial Divide Permanent?

Pat Buchanan, who writes below, has had a very long involvement in American politics so he knows where the bodies are buried. His interest in history makes him a formidable commentator. So his comments below on how wide and how acrimonious race differences have become in America cannot be lightly dismissed. I want to add some commentary on the reality he sets out.

Particularly since the advent of Obama, black/white relationships have become very bad. Seldom have hopes of a president been so badly disappointed as were the hopes that Obama would be a racial healer. Just about everything he did and said that had a bearing on black/white relationships made things worse rather than better. Obama regularly took the side of blacks in disputes with the police when mere caution should have told him that judgments should wait until all the evidence was in. He referred to black thug Trayvon Martin, for instance, by saying that ‘If I Had a Son, He Would Look Like Trayvon’. So the great hope of racial healing in America was lost.

But the big question is: "Why"? Other populations in America that look different, such as the Chinese and the Indians, do brilliantly well for themselves and fit seamlessly into the best strains of American life. They bother nobody and nobody bothers them.

The Left have no answers other than their constant empty-headed and parrot-like cry of "racism". They blame anybody and anything for black failure other than blacks themselves. Buchanan is wise enough not to challenge that directly. To challenge it would invite a wearisome torrent of Leftist hate down on his head. Challenging Leftist pieties makes you an enemy not only of the Leftist establishment but also of Leftist young people as well. The consequences can be serious. Only Mr Trump seems to sail on unruffled by all the Leftist abuse and accusations that are hurled at him.  No wonder they hate him

So Buchanan's comment on the causes of the racial divide consist only of his final sentence: "Is white America really black America's biggest problem?". His answer clearly is that blacks themselves are their own main enemy.

But that does not go far towards answering why. What could be the problem is however as plain as the nose on your face: Blacks just cannot perform well in any problem that white society normally encounters. They just cannot do well most things that normal Western society puts before them. Their educational performance is dismal and their success at just about anything other than a few physical tasks is rare. The only way many of them can make money is through crime. They are just not fit for a good life in a modern society.

And that is true of blacks worldwide. In other countries -- such as Britain -- and in Africa itself, they live at a very low level in just about anything that matters. It is clear that they are genetically disadvantaged. America's Leftist educators have turned themselves inside out trying to find something that will bring average black educational achievement up to general community standards but the gap remains profound. Most blacks just cannot do the tasks set before them in the classsroom so they act disruptively and often drop out entirely.

So what is to be done? -- as Lenin famously asked in 1901. The first thing is to stop telling lies. Stop pretending that blacks can perform in ways that they cannot. Affirmative action is based on a myth of black equality and therefore hinders rather than helps. Blacks CAN be fitted into productive society. Most do have jobs, if generally rather low level jobs. Without equality mythology standing in the way, the black rate of unemployment could fall to the same level as in the community in general. And without the impossible expectations of them that Leftists have generated, they would surely be less hostile to a  community that accepts them as they are.


For Roseanne Barr, star of ABC's hit show "Roseanne," there would be no appeal. When her tweet hit, she was gone.

"Roseanne's Twitter statement, is abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values, and we have decided to cancel her show," declaimed Channing Dungey, the black president of ABC Entertainment.

Targeting Valerie Jarrett, a confidante and aide of President Barack Obama, Roseanne had tweeted: If the "muslim brotherhood & the planet of the apes had a baby=vj."

Offensive, juvenile, crude, but was that not pretty much the job description ABC had in mind for the role of Roseanne in the show?

Roseanne also tweeted that George Soros, 87-year-old radical-liberal billionaire, had been a Nazi "who turned in his fellow Jews 2 be murdered in German concentration camps and stole their wealth."

The Soros slur seems far more savage than the dumb racial joke about Jarrett, but it was the latter that got Roseanne canned.

Her firing came the same day that 175,000 employees of 8,000 Starbucks's stores were undergoing four hours of instruction to heighten their racial sensitivities.

These training sessions, said The Washington Post, "marked the start of Starbucks' years-long commitment to new diversity and sensitivity programs after two African-Americans were arrested at a Philadelphia Starbucks on April 12."

The Philly Starbucks manager, a woman, had called the cops when the two black men she took to be loiterers refused to leave.

Rachel Siegel of the Post describes the four-hour session:

"At first the employees are prompted to find differences. They watched a video in which (Starbucks head) Howard Schultz talks about his vision for a more inclusive company and country. They reflected what a place of belonging means to them. And they examine their own biases.

"Each group viewed a documentary underwritten by Starbucks and directed by Stanley Nelson. In the film people of color talk about experiences of being followed in stores. Footage from the civil rights movement quickly progresses to 21st-century cellphone videos capturing people being dragged off a plane, threatened in a New York deli and choked at a North Carolina Waffle House."

On reading this, the terms "Orwellian" and "re-education camp" come to mind.

Earlier in May, the NFL issued a rule saying players who refuse to stand for the national anthem must remain in the locker room. If they take a knee on the field this coming season, they can be punished and the team fined.

Great was the outrage when this ruling came. The First Amendment rights of black players were being brutally trampled upon.

Yet the NFL has always had restrictions on behavior, from evicting players from the game for unsportsmanlike conduct to curtailing end-zone dances.

What is the common thread that runs through these social clashes from just this last month?

It is race. Each episode fits neatly into the great media narrative of an irredeemably racist America of white oppressors and black victims.

Had it been two white guys hanging out in that Philly Starbucks, who were told by the manager to buy a cup of coffee or get out, the spat would never have become a national story.

These incidents, coming as they do 50 years after the historic advances in civil rights, induce a deep pessimism that this country will ever escape from the endlessly boiling cauldron of racial conflict.

Today, because of cellphone videos, social media, 24-hour cable and the subsequent nationalization of even the most trivial incidents, our national conversation is more suffused than ever with matters of race.

For many, race has become a constant preoccupation.

And in each of these incidents and disputes, the country divides along the familiar fault lines, and the accusations and arguments go on and on until a new incident engenders a new argument.

The America of the 1960s, with its civil rights clashes and "long hot summers," was a far more segregated society than today. Yet the toxic charge of "racist" is far more common now.

And how much do these conversations correspond to the real crisis of black America? Here is a sentence culled from another Post story this week: "Three fatal shootings ...over the Memorial Day weekend brought the (Ward 8 total) to 30 homicides so far this year."

Are white cops really the problem in Ward 8, Anacostia, when 30 people in that black community have been shot or stabbed to death in the first five months of 2018?

Washington, D.C., spends more per student than almost any other school district. Yet the test scores of vast numbers of black kids have already fallen below "proficiency" levels by the time they reach fourth and eighth grade, and the high school truancies have reached scandalous levels.

How does ABC's cashiering of "Roseanne," or apologies to the two guys at Starbucks, or restrictions on the rights of millionaire NFL players to kneel during our national anthem address the real crisis?

Is white America really black America's biggest problem?

SOURCE







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