America has a problem: a subculture of black crime. We see it every day on YouTube or Twitter or your local newscast. Swarms of black teens emptying shelves of drugstores and high end retail shops and jewelry stores. More ominously however are the videos of blacks viscously brutalizing their fellow citizens at gas stations in restaurants or on the street. Every race has criminals, but when 6% of the population, black males, are responsible for over 50% of the murders and violent crimes one has to ask why, and the answer isn’t straightforward.
I’ve just finished the fascinating “Conquests and Cultures” by Thomas Sowell. He talks about the differences between the evolution of societies around the world. The primary take away is the fact that in the last 500 years the Europeans have far surpassed the rest of the planet while Africans have lagged farthest behind. Why? Because whites are genetically superior and blacks genetically inferior? Nope. Mostly because of water and geography.
Europe was graced with a large number of easily navigable rivers, numerous deep water harbors and at the same time almost every spot on the continent was within 500 miles of the sea. That water allowed most Europeans to economically trade with other Europeans and other civilizations around the world. That ability to easily trade foods, manufactured goods, people and most of all, ideas among one another and beyond allowed Europeans to harness inventions such as gunpowder from China and numbers from India to craft a civilization that far surpassed anything found anywhere else in the world. The inventiveness, efficiencies, freedoms and prosperity they developed allowed them to dominate the world for centuries.
Africa on the other hand had few deep water harbors and few functionally navigable rivers. At the same time the continent’s rugged topography made the exchange of goods and people and ideas over large areas difficult at best and almost impossible at worst. As a result of those travel and transportation roadblocks, most of the civilizations in sub Saharan Africa remained relatively insular and isolated and thus didn’t benefit from the exchanges of ideas and goods with one another that would have allowed them to coalesce into powerful, advanced societies as the Europeans did. Demonstrating that this has nothing to do with race, Sowell points out that similar geographic hurdles impeded the development of robust trading mechanisms in a number of places in Europe, including the Scottish highlands, Russia and much of the Balkans, with a similar retardation of cultural development.
Sowell’s lesson clear, America’s issue is not race, it’s culture. The subculture of black crime has to do primarily with victimhood and it shows itself most acutely in violence and a lack of respect for people and property.
What Sowell calls “Cultural capital” must be developed. It involves the ability and willingness to work to achieve desired goals. He contrasts the success of the Germans and Japanese after WWII with that of many of the newly independent states in Africa in the second half of the 20th century. All received massive amounts of money from outside, but the outcomes were far from similar. While Germany and Japan became economic juggernauts, most newly independent African nations became economic basketcases where poverty and corruption reigned while freedom and security were almost nonexistent. He points out that while it was engineers and business leaders who took the lead in Germany and Japan after the war, in Africa it was usually members of the western educated intelligentsia, steeped in “social sciences” and largely lacking in knowledge or experience in demonstrably productive endeavors who took the lead.
Back here in the United States, the same leftist intelligentsia (read Democrats…) have led much of black America into similarly dire straits. Democrats have convinced a significant portion of black Americans that they are victims of systemic racism that cannot be overcome.
The catalyst was of course slavery. While slavery did exist, as did its progeny, Jim Crow, the reality is the problems that bedevil many black Americans today have little to do with either. Slavery has been gone for 170 years and Jim Crow for more than half a century. Since then the country has seen government mandated integration of schools, decades of affirmative action and government welfare programs, and perhaps most harmfully, programs that made it economically viable for women to have children without the father present, resulting in 70% of black babies being born out of wedlock and left to be raised by single mothers.
But America is systemically racist. Despite the fact that between 1947 & 2021 the median individual income for blacks rose 458% while for whites it rose only 297%. But we’re told racism is America’s biggest threat despite the fact that “hate crimes” are so few that there seems to be a cottage industry associated with fakes. Blacks, we’re told, can’t succeed in America despite the fact that the $35,000 median household income of the average black American family is higher than the median household income of every other country on the planet except for Luxemburg, Norway, Canada and Switzerland.
The carnage unleashed by Democrats brainwashing a significant number of black Americans into believing they’re victims of white racism plays itself out on video across the country on almost daily basis. The violence we see today seems to be on a different level than 20 years ago, both in terms of savagery and frequency. In 1998 Jessie Jackson said “There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps… then turn around and see somebody white and feel relieved.” Today, the danger Jackson alludes to exists not only when people are walking down the street, but while they are serving customers in restaurants, working in a drugstore or at the Apple Store or standing on a subway platform.
People ask how the Nazis could kill so many Jews with so little remorse. It was easy. A media campaign of dehumanization. A firehose pumping out propaganda that Jews were not human not surprisingly resulted in a significant percentage of the German people believing that Jews were indeed subhuman, and therefore could be abused and killed by the millions.
The campaign the Nazis used is not so different from what the Democrats are using today to convince black Americans that they are indeed victims of white racism. In just one week during the 2020 election campaign CNN and MSNBC used the term “racist” 4,100 times. The Democrat’s Victim Industrial Complex has been so successful that a recent Rasmussen poll found that 47% of blacks disagreed with or weren’t sure about the statement: “It’s OK to be white.”
But it’s not only the whites we see being punched and kicked and stomped and shot who are on the receiving end of these nihilist attacks by blacks brainwashed to think the world is their enemy; it’s Asians, Hispanics and most of all, other blacks. In many black neighborhoods in American cities crime rates rival those of the deadliest cities in the world. If there’s any question about this, visit two websites and compare the data, Bestneighborhood.org and Neighborhoodscout.com. The first shows the geographic population data for cities by race while the second shows precinct level crime rates. What you’ll discover is that in almost every big city there seems to be a direct correlation between the levels of crime and the percentage of black population within the area.
The violent dystopian reality that too much of black America exists in today is a direct result of the Democrat’s Victim Industrial Complex. They have told too many black people they have no opportunity for success, that negative outcomes in their lives are due to the racist system they were born into. They’ve taught them that math, coffee, physical fitness, and virtually everything else is racist. Simultaneously they’ve allowed many to terrorize their communities with impunity because of “equity”.
The Democrat’s Victim Industrial Complex has sadly destroyed Sowell’s “Cultural capital” for much of black America. And that’s a problem for everyone because as Abraham Lincoln said in 1858 “A house divided against itself, cannot stand.”
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Aristocracy of victimhood, cant lock them up, cant defend yourself, doesnt matter if they have a label, Jewish, Black, Trans, Gay, and the left loves labels and boxes. They also like mental illness and normalizing things that would get you locked away for a very long time in an institution or prison not so long ago, its all so progressive.
I suppose a certain number of every generation think “It’s over”, would like to see past stats on that number compared to today’s.
Noting that the Democrats founded the KKK and tried to intimidate the Blacks freed by the GOP its the DNC that needs to pay for it all
To be clear, blacks have been victims. They were victims of slavery, which retarded their economic development. After the end of slavery, the south (again, read “Democrats”) DID impose systematic and institutional racism. This is why so many blacks migrated north. Then, as Johnson predicted, after Civil Rights, Democrats managed to convince blacks that they were their benefactors and started feeding those in poverty just enough money and benefits to KEEP them in poverty. I think we can all imagine how frustrating that would be and how, given the focus on the prescribed villain, the white man, why victimhood would spread so virally.
So, many black youths turned to crime and it became a competition. They could also be expelled from the new anti-culture if one acted “white”, that is, displaying discipline, personal responsibility, succeeding in school and developing a work ethic. The solution was offered by Trump; an economy so robust and so widespread that black unemployment was the lowest since World War II. Economic opportunity is the answer to victimhood, and the understanding that overcoming the Democrat-induced poverty will not happen over night.
Democrats don’t want their neo-slaves, bound by chains of ideology, to get away, so they assail people like Trump, who don’t target things like racism but simply make the economy, society and life better for all. Racism doesn’t survive in such an environment; only where failure is imposed and racism, not bad policies, is blamed for the failure does racism flourish again. This is what Democrats have to offer.
LBJ’s War n Poverty accomplished all that. It penalized intact families in favor of single mothers who could get more welfare from Uncle Sugar. It penalized getting a job.