My good friend William Teach wrote:
Oh, good grief. There are three races, as called originally: Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid, with a small classification of Dravidians through the India region. Is this biology? Some will argue that it is, some will argue that it isn’t. Especially with all the inter-breeding over time.
Naturally, that got me on a rant!
We use race as a kind of shorthand for describing different concentrations of characterizations in the human gene pool, but in a lot of ways, it is misused for many things. The lovely Rachel Dolezal decided that she was black, perhaps as a scam, or perhaps she felt ‘culturally’ black. There really is a ‘black culture’ in the United States, something heavily concentrated in our larger cities, but that culture is not dependent upon the members of it being black; under other circumstances, it could have been adopted by whites or Asians. Just as easily, our American ‘white’ culture could have been generated among black people, had circumstances been different.
But here’s more to it than that. The entire, if never stated, purpose behind integration was to homogenize the American culture among all Americans, white and black alike. The assumption, by the white liberals who pushed it, was that that homogenized culture would have been the white American culture, with either no or very little ‘contamination’ by the black culture. Integration would eventually result in some very dark-skinned white Americans, with race being an insignificant concept socially. The apparently odd notion that homogenization results in all of the parts being combined and mixed together seems not to have occurred to them; they knew what they knew, which was the predominant, adult, white liberal culture of the 1960s.
Brookings published an article entitled “Are Asian Americans people of color or the next in line to become white?“, discussing the term “white adjacent”, and a Google search for “white adjacent” returned roughly 43,800 returns. Americans of Asian descent are ‘white adjacent’ because so many of them have been successful in our American culture and economy, in ways that black Americans have not, and every bit of that can be explained by the greater — not total — adoption of white American culture by Asian immigrants.
It’s actually pretty simple, but it is simple in a way that the left are loathe to accept: certain behaviors and cultural norms are just more economically efficient than others. Working hard and staying in school, trying to get the best grades and win the best collegiate admissions is a way to get ahead, and Asians — as well as American Jews, who are predominantly white — not only do this well, but they have been doing it even better than whites as a whole. Jews were doing this so much better than other white Americans that Harvard actually imposed a ‘Jewish quota‘ in the mid 1920s.
But black Americans, as a group, have not. Obeying the law, to not wind up in jail, and not devastating your neighborhood, is an economically efficient behavior, and black Americans have not adopted this behavior to as large an extent as Americans of Asian or European descent.
The result? A significantly larger percentage of black Americans with felony convictions, and spending time behind bars. And a felony conviction, something far more probable at a young age, late teens or early twenties, is a mostly unrecoverable-from error.
Naturally, several cities, including Philadelphia, have tried to help, not by stressing that people need to obey the law, but by banning police stops for minor traffic violations, which they said was criminalizing “driving while black.” The message was simple: black Philadelphians simply couldn’t be expected to be responsible enough to have their vehicles inspected — Pennsylvania state law requires annual inspections of vehicles at a state-certified garage — their head, tail, and signal lights working, or stop at stop signs.
There has even been active resistance in some predominantly black areas when it comes to assimilating ‘white’ culture, though, quite naturally, some on the left have pushed against the notion that internal culture can have positive or negative impacts on economic and social success. And waiting until full adulthood before realizing these things ignores the fact that getting behind as a child normally results in never catching up as an adult.
There is no particular reason to believe that black Americans can’t be as successful as whites or Asians in the larger economy, if they engage in behavior which is socially and economically useful and productive, and, in fact, many black Americans do just that. But racial statistics take in the aggregate, and a larger percentage of the black community have resisted assimilation, which results in the aggregate numbers showing less black success in the economy.
The integrationists of the 1960s actually had it right: if integration in the public schools, starting from the very beginning, socialized black children into the more successful white economy, black Americans would soon become just as successful as white Americans in the United States. But what they never foresaw was that black and white Americans would simply not have the kind of homogenized culture for which they had hoped, and that Asian and Hispanic immigrants — of which there were far fewer at that time — would wind up demonstrating that as those groups came far closer than black Americans to assimilating into the more successful parts of the economy.
Let’s forget about ‘social engineering’: it just hasn’t worked! White Americans can never somehow fix the problems of the black community. Rather, the social and cultural problems which plague black Americans can only be changed by black Americans, and we ought to recognize that.
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Also posted on American Free News Network. Check out American Free News Network for more well written and well reasoned conservative commentary.
