Black America's Moment of Truth
D'Souza, Dinesh
Dinesh D'Souza Black America's Moment of Truth The problem facing black America today is not white racism or GOP budget cuts. It's a culture that embraces violence and celebrates ignorance— and...
...Black conservatives," he says, "are really frustrated slaves crawling back to the plantation...
...Today they pose a serious threat to the survival of blacks as a group, as well as to the safety and integrity of the larger society...
...Activists denounce criticism of black pathologies as a callous form of "blaming the victim...
...I don't speak street talk and I never did...
...Yet June Jordan exults, "If it's wrong in standard English, it's probably right in Black English...
...Vital institutions such as the small business, the church, and the family are now greatly weakened...
...African Americans in this group seem divided into two following excerpts: "The pepel from wen Martin Luther King Jr...
...Farrakhan's intimations of a homicidal white plot are not unique...
...Yet rejection in this country produced what Du Bois termed a "double consciousness," so that blacks experience a kind of schizophrenia between their racial and American identities...
...Anderson argues that the women, too, are using the men, although in a less blatant and irresponsible manner...
...I cute their hair, because they need it...
...This crisis did not exist a generation ago...
...It was three boys with some mast up hair coming into my house...
...We can trace the underclass, as a persisting social phenomenon, back to this group...
...Government can help, mainly by doing no harm...
...Instead, African Washington outlined almost a century ago: the mission of building the civilization-al resources of a people whose culture is frequently unsuited to the requirements of the modern world...
...Several studies have shown, contrary to popular wisdom, that the self-esteem of young black males is in fact higher than that of any other group...
...The problem must be viewed in the context of the educational crisis facing black America: A large proportion of the African-American population is illiterate, many adults cannot read beyond the fourth-grade level, the performance of blacks in school lags behind that of whites on every measure of performance, and only about one-third of blacks who go to college graduate within six years...
...population overall, and more than 50 percent of children with AIDS are black...
...Williams is not finished...
...Take they brain right out...
...For many black scholars and activists, such proposals are anathema because they seem to involve ideological sellout to the white man and thus are viewed as not authentically black...
...Still, the bottom line remains: Society must do its part, and blacks must do theirs...
...I said...
...That protection from cradle to grave comes at the cost of self-reliance and private initiatives that offer better long-term rewards and, perhaps more important, an abiding sense of personal freedom...
...Partly as a consequence of black crime, American crime rates are the highest in the industrialized world...
...The welfare economy, he argues, supplements the underground economy as a source of income for young black males...
...According to U.S...
...The government don't want any of us to get no kinda good jobs...
...Yet his perspective on his stalking days seems exactly the same today as it was then...
...Political scientist Manning Marable defines "the contemporary challenge" as calling for "a renaissance of black militancy" in order- to generate "new organizations for collective resistance...
...We must continue to push, continue to agitate, continue to get the government to say yes when it may have a desire to say no...
...I don't deal with other people if I can help it...
...They say they want to help you, they say they are helping you, but then, really, they ain't doin' nothing but killin' you off with 42 The American Spectator October 1995 words...
...These interrelated pathologies are evident in the Robert Taylor Homes and Cabrini Green, the largest and second largest housing projects in Chicago...
...Du Bois had in mind with his Talented Tenth...
...Tell him Joker...
...To the brain, you know...
...Scholars estimate that around 80 percent of African Americans use some form of black dialect...
...Because of the relative security and emancipation that illegitimate children can bring, Anderson argues that bastardy has—despite the condemnation of some churches—lost most of its earlier stigma and now become "socially acceptable...
...It's a culture that embraces violence and celebrates ignorance— and a leadership that doesn't have the courage to say so...
...Kasarda points out that economic solidarity helps Koreans to keep capital circulating within their community...
...One of the main sources for this violence is the African-American cultural archetype of the "bad nigger...
...Blacks who came from diverse tribes, speaking different languages and practicing varied ways of life, forged a distinct African-American identity in the new country—an identity that was solidified under segregation, when blacks were involuntarily united by the one-drop rule...
...I don't risk exposing myself to the rage that will get me arrested...
...Today, if the statistics are any indication, the culture of the "bad nigger" flourishes in a permissive social climate...
...As urged by black reformers, both conservative and liberal, the task ahead is one of rebuilding broken families, developing educational and job skills, fostering black entrepreneurship, and curbing the epidemic of violence in the inner cities...
...Historically whites have used racism to serve powerful entrenched interests, but what interests does racism serve now...
...Black success and social acceptance now are both tied to rebuilding the African-American community...
...But if, as a reaction to being victimized, a group develops dysfunctional or destructive patterns of behavior that perpetuate a vicious cycle of poverty, dependency, and violence, then continuing to inveigh against the oppressor cannot offer the victim much relief...
...The supreme challenge faced by African Americans is the one that Booker T. W e can sympathize with the magnitude of the project facing African Americans...
...and "Why are you using a white man's book...
...Through their struggle over two centuries, blacks have helped to make the principles of the American founding a legal reality not just for themselves but also for other groups...
...After remaining relatively stable for the first half of this century, the black illegitimacy rate seems to have reached a critical mass during the 1960s and has exploded since then...
...I saw it...
...The result is what sociologist Andrew Cherlin terms an "almost complete separation of marriage and childbearing among African Americans...
...In this view blacks are portrayed as living largely involuntary lives, wholly manipulated by the structures of visible and invisible racism...
...Apparently confronted on another occasion with an affirmative-action candidate seeking a tenured appointment, the colleague expresses to Williams the hope that the university will find more qualified African-American scholars like herself...
...For many scholars and activists, whites who criticize black pathologies are racist, and blacks who do so are mouthpieces for white bigots, craven apostates and black impersonators who deserve ostracism, if not physical punishment...
...If I'd been younger, with less to lose, I'd have robbed them, and it would have been easy...
...And when you 11 years old and you get you a gun, you got to be a little shook up...
...In Cabrini Green, with a population of fourteen thousand, the single-parent families number about 90 percent, and 70 percent are supported by welfare...
...The author noted "many similarities between present-day USA and early stages of the Nazi Third Reich in prewar Germany...
...Harnessed constructively, the oppositional stance of the "bad nigger" can be converted into revolutionary or reformist zeal, as the The American Spectator October 1995 41 examples of Frederick Douglass, W.E.B...
...Very few people in the civil rights leadership recognize this: Convinced that racism of a hundred varieties stands between African Americans and success, most of the activists are ready to battle once again with this seemingly elusive and invincible foe...
...in some areas, they are on the verge of collapsing altogether...
...Couples locked arms or reached for each other's hand when they saw me...
...Despite the opportunities provided by entrepreneurship, and the limitations of government in solving social problems, many black leaders continue to counsel resistance as a means to secure greater transfers of wealth from the public treasury to the African-American community...
...The life of hoodlums like "Monster" Kody, as he was formerly known, is vividly described by journalist Leon Bing in her book Do or Die...
...He is blind to the immaturity and strangeness of his conduct...
...171 The American Spectator October 1995 45...
...Civil rights activist Julian Bond says that blacks are much more likely than whites to view government as "a positive helpful force," for the simple reason that they "have seen government make an enormous difference in their lives...
...Now an attitude of rejection seems to have set in, and values identified as white are spurned by many blacks...
...It is not hard to envision the scene: A white colleague, probably eager to please, tells Williams that he tries to judge her by her ability rather than her skin color...
...The Rage of the Privileged Class A second dysfunctional aspect of black culture, a feature mainly of middle-class African-American life, is a rage that threatens to erupt in an orgy of destruction or self-destruction...
...As W.E.B...
...The main problem facing African Americans is that they have developed a culture that represents an adaptation to past circumstances, but one that is now, in crucial respects, dysfunctional and pathological...
...Make a big hole...
...The basic right of blacks to equal protection of the laws was recognized in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which was somewhat incongruous with the rest of the document in that it was passed to expand federal power...
...Blacks are between two and five times more likely than whites to receive means-tested cash assistance and food stamps, and to live in subsidized or public housing...
...Popular fruit juices they are deficiencies that need to be corrected...
...are taking food out of the mouths of black children...
...T oday many black scholars affirm their faith in political struggle and state provision...
...A columnist for the Los Angeles Sentinel, the largest African-American newspaper on the West Coast, offered the King verdict as further proof that "the United States is on the verge of becoming a police state, if it is not there already...
...This has been especially true for black conservatives...
...African-American psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint articulates a view popular among African-American leaders: "For blacks to mindlessly strive to be like the white middle class in a white racist, capitalist, exploitative society is without question detrimental to the cause of black people...
...Almost 95 percent of black teen mothers are unmarried, compared with 55 percent of their white peers...
...We ask for jobs," the trio complained, "yet when they bring us jobs, it's only 10 jobs, but there are 500 gang members...
...In Racism: American Style, Dempsey Travis accuses heads of major companies of being "Klansmen in pin-striped suits...
...38 The American Spectator October 1995 boiling, exhausting...
...Nelson, however, calls herself a "race woman": She seems both uncomfortable and angry about being a successful African American working in a mainstream profession...
...Blacks in the past who did try to assimilate white values often found themselves rebuffed and scorned...
...And beat on her too if she try to hold back...
...They'd have me killin'—everythin...
...Yet in a free society, the government necessarily has a limited role in shaping the private lives of citizens...
...Middle-class behavior by African Americans is seen as inauthentic, while lower-class behavior is seen as genuinely black—a reversal of what W.E.B...
...Black students at the school, the Times reported, avoid the company of whites and accuse blacks who are on honors tracks of being "nerds" and "sellouts...
...The psychological warfare games thatincident, described by legal scholar Patricia Williams: A man with whom I used to work once told me that I made too much of my race...
...Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson remarks: There was a distinct underclass of slaves...
...A 1990 poll of black Americans found that 60 percent thought it was true or possibly true that the govsuch as Tropical Fantasy are secretly manufactured by white supremacist groups, once again to reduce black sexual potency...
...We have to remind ourselves that this is a highly paid professor at a distinguished university, and one of the leading black female scholars in the nation...
...Cuz, in the 'hood...
...And Kaboom...
...Some scholars view black culture as largely, if not wholly, imposed from the outside...
...In May 1994 Louis Farrakhan asserted that white racism was responsible for black people killing other blacks...
...Unmarried With Children Perhaps the most serious of African-American pathologies—no less serious than violence—is the normalization of illegitimacy as a way of life...
...He was all squirmin' and s---, sufferin' and stuff, so . . ." "I put this," Joker said, pulling out a Colt .45 from his waistband...
...Travis writes: --• As Eugene Genovese says, "What constituted strategies for survival under one set of circumstances have now emerged, in an entirely different context, as celebrations of self-indulgence and irresponsibility...
...Racism remains the culprit, now accused of having taken an even subtler and more insidious shape...
...Historian John Henrik Clarke goes even further...
...And Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison proposes an abandonment ofsocietal restraints and a return to the elemental urges of nature...
...Virtually without exception, these morally anaesthetized muggers, drug pushers, and rapists refuse to consider themselves responsible for their behavior, placing the blame instead on whites and the government...
...One step from suicide...
...But those institutions have been greatly weakened since the 1960s, and in a new environment of social permissiveness and government subsidy, black pathologies have proliferated...
...In addition, 50 percent of blacks (more than 15 million people) live in households that receive some form of welfare, compared with 19 percent of whites...
...In the twentieth century, black leaders found themselves compelled to turn to the federal government to combat state-sanctioned segregation and private discrimination...
...Why do you talk like you're white...
...Anti-racist militancy is carried to the point of virtual mental instability...
...Former NAACP chairman Benjamin Chavis offered similar credibility to gang leaders when he invited them to a "summit" where they declared "truces" and signed "peace treaties" like diplomats...
...All this impermissible danger floats around in me, The black cultural orientation toward government solutions is understandable...
...These scholars are structural determinists: Like Marxists, they tend to view culture as the epiphenomenal product of external forces such as poverty and oppression...
...I come in here and talk to my assistant...
...Black males are about twice as likely as white males to be victims of robbery, theft, and aggravated assault, and seven times more likely to be victims of murder...
...Yet, ever since Daniel Patrick Moynihan issued his infamous 1965 report on the black family, mainstream black scholars and civil rights activists have been quick to attribute public notice of African-American pathology to white racism...
...According to the recent book I Heard It Through the Grapevine, blacks are remarkably susceptible to rumors that there is a racist plot to destroy them...
...In her intriguing study Twice as Less, Eleanor Wilson On argues that, because of its use of unorthodox terms and tenses, Black English hampers African-American students in their logical and mathematical reasoning, because relationships of time, place, and number become garbled...
...Another problem is that by focusing almost entirely on the cause of pathologies, excuse theorists offer no coherent vision of what to do about them...
...In the black underclass, however, fathers are scarce, and male relatives are either in prison or themselves responsible for producing illegitimate offspring with one or more women...
...My rage feels dangerous, full of physical violence, like something that will get me arrested...
...Instead many students seem to have adopted, with the approval of their elders and civil rights leaders, a hostile stance toward the values of the white world—including the values of scholarship and study...
...Today a large fraction of middle-class blacks work for the government...
...Government was recruited as an ally out of necessity, not preference...
...The government plays a big part in why we kill our own kind...
...it is also a powerful instrument in shaping those circumstances...
...Yet, although blacks as a group have an annual income that exceeds the gross national product of many industrialized nations, very little of this money is spent on products sold by black-owned business...
...This crisis points to deficiencies not of biology but of culture...
...While most immigrant groups tend to look to their most successful citizens for emulation and self-definition, on many issues the moral tone in the black community is set from below...
...Black scholars who write about underclass violence typically do so in a tone of moral neutrality...
...Whites, too, have a problem with illegitimacy, but the white norm still remains the two-parent household...
...These are the observations of relatively well-placed men and women: an executive, a government worker, and a college professor...
...Marian Wright Edelman of the Children's Defense Fund puts it more bluntly: "We have a black child crisis worse than any since slavery...
...We are in danger of becoming superfluous people in this society," says African-American scholar Anthony Walton...
...Although African Americans routinely receive racial preferences in universities and the work force, this does not seem to have inhibited imaginative accusations of racism where none seems evident...
...Yet he goes too far in asserting that "cultural values do not determine behavior or success...
...When I try I sound really weird...
...This incentive is the prospect of a check from the welfare office," Anderson writes, "which is much more dependable than the irregular support payments of a sporadically employed youth...
...Many of these young men are lacking in the most basic skills required for steady employment: punctuality, dependability, willingness to perform routine tasks, and acceptance of authority...
...For much of the twentieth century, sociologist Sidney Kronus reports, "The personal standards of conduct and behavior of the black middle class were modeled after the prevailing norms of the middle-class white community which stressed responsibility and the leading of the respectable life...
...A typical comment came from Della Simmons, who told the Wall Street Journal: "Employment is the big issue the government needs to be dealing with...
...Yet if the problems endured by African Americans today are substantially the result of cultural pathologies on the part of blacks, these individuals would not be victims but perpetrators...
...In his autobiography Parallel Time, New York Times writer Brent Staples describes how, as a graduate student, he spent his time stalking white people in order to scare them—relishing a game that he, to his great amusement, calls "Scatter the Pigeons": I became expert in the language of fear...
...The black gene pool has not changed substantially since mid-century, and racism then was far worse...
...Why we are hanging onto it, I don't know...
...In short, much of the black community is parasitic on government for its basic livelihood...
...For society as a whole, promiscuous charges of racism are dangerous because they undermine the credibility of the charge and make it more difficult to identify actual racists...
...I really wouldn't care...
...Yet most African-American scholars refuse to acknowledge the pathology of violence in the black underclass, apparently convinced that black criminals as well as their targets are both victims: the real culprit is societal racism...
...Afterward, you might feel like you want to throw up...
...The next generation of young blacks is especially vulnerable...
...None of these problems can be addressed by marching to Selma or signing more legislation...
...I don't pronounce words wrong like wif, birfday, bafroom, and things like that...
...What is this business that you have to finish school at 18...
...They were compulsive liars...
...Racism as an Excuse The first dysfunctional aspect of black culture is racial paranoia—a reflexive tendency to blame racism for every failure, even those that are intensely personal...
...But what blacks need to do is "act Nobel Prize—winner Toni Morrison proposes an abandonment of societal restraints and a return to the elemental urges of nature...
...Recalling these incidents many years later, Staples might be expected to have some regrets about his bizarre youthful behavior, perhaps to offer critical analysis of what was wrong with the situation and his response to it...
...The conclusion is hard to avoid: One of America's leading black intellectuals gets kicks out of playing hoodlum, and then proceeds to accuse whites of racism for engaging in what, under the circumstances, can only be termed a rational avoidance of blacks like him...
...Lived and did not wrly get along...
...He articulates an unconventional approach to the work ethic: "Work does not always constitute shooting someone, though this is the ultimate...
...instead, it provides illuminating insight into some blacks' precarious grip on reality: I come in here and scream...
...So you will go out and try to hurt whoever you can...
...For blacks, the risk of exaggerated charges is that they divert attention from the possibilities of the present and the future...
...Wilson is right to see ghetto pathologies partly as a response to lack of opportunity...
...Several studies have shown, contrary to popular wisdom, that the self-esteem of young black males is in fact higher than that of any other group...
...Commenting on the writings of Thomas Sowell, columnist Carl Rowan of the Washington Post observed that "Sowell is giving aid and comfort to those who...
...There is no self-esteem to be found in Africa or even in dubious ideologies of blackness...
...Monster relays several stark accounts of his comrades-in-arms boasting about their shootings: "So what's up with them niggas across the way...
...It thus becomes unfair to criticize the culture of the failing group, because to do so is to avert one's gaze from the conduct of the oppressor...
...Like: Hey, I did this...
...A few steps beyond them I stopped and howled with laughter...
...They were idle...
...it was also generated from within...
...When middle-class blacks found their opportunities severely restricted under segregation, black rage was either submerged or nonexistent...
...By contrast, the civil rights industry now has a vested interest in the persistence of the ghetto, because the miseries of poor blacks are the best advertisement for continuing programs of racial preferences and set-asides...
...But the degree of black reliance on government is dysfunctional because it prevents many African Americans from being "spurred by necessity," as John Kasarda puts it, into the risks and rewards of entrepreneurship...
...Welfare is not the reason for getting pregnant, Anderson insists...
...Aw, Monsta, I f---ed cuz up...
...Moreover, such criticism is said to reinforce the oppressor's self-serving racist perception of the victim group as somehow inferior...
...whites, were vastly lower than they are today...
...Nearly 70 percent of young black children born in the United States today are illegitimate, compared with 22 percent of white children...
...But the contemporary problems of blacks are less susceptible to a federal solution...
...Undoubtedly the state has the responsibility of providing police protection in the inner city, and of ceasing to subsidize illegitimacy and provide incentives for socially destructive behavior...
...Yet if these individuals are cranks, they are in respectable company...
...Among some blacks, "getting ignorant" is considered a virtue and 40 The American Spectator October 1995 a source of self-esteem...
...Some youths even speak of "mother's day," a reminder to visit their girlfriends when the welfare check has arrived...
...In some cases even extreme forms of violence constituted a reasonable adaptation, because they were the only way to preserve dignity...
...On a scale of one to ten, my level of anger is a ten...
...Du Bois, and Malcolm X suggest...
...African Americans currently start and run less than 3 The American Spectator October 1995 39 percent of the nation's businesses, and take in less than 1 percent of the nation's gross receipts...
...James Farmer of the Congress for Racial Equality wrote, "We might think of the demonstration as a rite of initiation in which the black man is mustered into the sacred order of freedom...
...She eventually resigned from the Post after being suspended for forging an editor's initials on one of her expense reports...
...prove that you down...
...After all," he said, "I don't even think of you as black...
...Some crossed to the other side of the street...
...Yet once they become pregnant, they find that having illegitimate children "becomes a rite of passage to adulthood...
...Consequently, blacks are in a struggle that they always lose...
...They would say: Why do you talk so proper...
...Among the false reports that have received widespread circulation and serious attention in the African-American community: • The Ku Klux Klan owns Church's Fried Chicken, which uses ingredients that make black men sterile...
...andernment was deliberately encouraging drug use among African Americans, and 29 percent suspected that scientists deliberately created AIDS in order to decimate the black population...
...In Living With Racism, Joe Feagin and Melvin Sikes document the state of mind that seems to paralyze many middle-class blacks...
...Yet the agenda of securing legal rights for blacks has now been accomplished, and there is no reason for blacks to increase the temperature of accusations of racism...
...The most telling refutation of racism, as Frederick Douglass once said about slavery, "is the presence of an industrious, enterprising, thrifty and intelligent free black population...
...As African-American scholar Milton Morris puts it, "When black people slaughter other black people on the street, they all come back to: look what the white people made us do...
...Proviso West is a racially mixed school outside of Chicago at which the grades and test scores of black students fall consistently behind those of white students...
...It's a White Thing—You Wouldn't Understand A further dysfunctional feature of black culture is its repudiation of standard English and academic achievement as forms of "acting white...
...Many of us are convinced there is a conspiracy to anesthetize and ultimately do away with as many blacks in American society as possible," the Rev...
...Waters introduced three young men as "friends, brothers, who are leaders in my community...
...I can't kill and I can't teach everyone...
...Despite his training as a student of psychology, Staples's recollection is devoid of analytical self-consciousness...
...Part of the reason for this is the common practice of poor black women exchanging sex for drugs...
...She's even seen me cry because I'm so angry until I am to the point of violence...
...The life expectancy of black men in central Harlem is shorter than that of men in Bangladesh...
...Congressman John Lewis offers advice that is more mod, crate but just as futile: "We have an obligation to organize and mobilize the African-American community like never before...
...T he vehemence and ferocity of this rhetoric is unrivaled in any other area of contemporary debate...
...Meanwhile, blacks have done very poorly in the one area that is a rapid source of jobs and social mobility for other groups: small business...
...African-American scholar Robert Hampton writes that "sexual abuse, physical child abuse, and family violence are arguably among the most serious social problems in the black community...
...Despite a few modestly successful "buy black" campaigns, African Americans famous for their political solidarity have to date shown no comparable sense of economic solidarity...
...Formerly a beacon of moral argument and social responsibility, the civil rights leadership has lost much of its moral credibility, and has a fair representation of charlatans who exploit the sufferings of the underclass to collect research grants, minority scholarships, racial preferences, and other subsidies for themselves...
...Blacks in America seem to have developed what some scholars term an "oppositional culture" which is based on a comprehensive rejection of the white man's worldview...
...This is what used to happen in the black community during segregation," Kasarda says...
...The Rodney King beating, according to black scholar William Mandel, means that "Negroes are lynched in America...
...Marc Elrich, who teaches fourth grade in suburban Maryland, writes that black students treat fellow students of color who try and succeed as white "wannabes...
...You've become good for parts...
...These figures suggest that the dire circumstances of the black community are not the result of genes or racism...
...simply quoting its members' descriptions of their lifestyle: When I was younger I was a straight killer...
...So you feel as though, well, I need money and I need it now...
...It was federal intervention in the 1860s that freed the slaves...
...The caliber of writing submitted by African-American students is conveyed by the Perhaps one of the clearest ways for black students to distance themselves from whites is to communicate with each other in the distinctive lingo of Black English...
...When we finally achieve the right of full participation in American life," Ralph Ellison wrote, "what we make of it will depend upon our sense of cultural values, and our creative use of freedom, not upon our racial identification...
...Indeed the only concern that whites seem to have about 44 The American Spectator October 1995 the underclass is its potential for crime and its reliance on the public purse...
...Bernard Boxill even argues that black pathologies should be classed as a cultural injury which entitles African Americans to further subsidies from the government...
...You got to prove a lot when you first start, see...
...They were the incorrigible blacks of whom the slaveowner class was forever complaining...
...Other policies, such as vouchers for school choice and enterprise zones to boost urban investment, may also prove beneficial...
...According to sociologist Bart Landry, about half of black professional males and two-thirds of black professional females work for some arm of the state...
...Blacks as a group have made a vital contribution to the expansion of the franchise of liberty and opportunity in America...
...Although black culture contains elements of Southern rural culture, modern urban culture, and lower-class culture, it has fused these elements into a distinct amalgam...
...Anything from spitting on someone to fighting—it's all work...
...In the face of this crisis, one might expect a vigorous campaign to improve vocabulary skills, clarity of expression, and educational standards among African-Americans...
...Yet high black illegitimacy rates cannot be blamed on slavery or segregation...
...The little nuclear family is a paradigm that just doesn't work," she writes...
...So I protect myself...
...In his recent book Monster, Sanyika Shakur, a former Los Angeles gang member, offers candid reflections on the life of the black underclass, "armed and dangerous," as he describes it, "prowling the concrete jungle...
...The alliance between gangsters and mainstream civil rights activists came into public view after the Los Angeles riots, when Rep...
...Today, that oppositional culture has become an obstacle that prevents blacks from taking advantage of rights and opportunities that have multiplied in a new social environment...
...And the symptoms of systemic decline are both numerous and ominous—extremely high rates of criminal activity, the normalization of illegitimacy, a preponderance of single-parent families, high levels of drug and alcohol addiction, a parasitic reliance on government provision, hostility to academic achievement, and a scarcity of independent enterprises...
...thing elicits more N cries of racism, however, than the criminal justice system...
...Du Bois put it, "There are no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes...
...Michael Williams, an African American who promoted race-neutral scholarships as a senior official in the Bush administration, was denounced by Spike Lee as an Uncle Tom who deserved to be "dragged into the alley and beaten with a Louisville Slugger...
...And a recent article in a black studies journal declared, "Whites should not become reference points for how black children are to speak and behave...
...According to a recent survey, 67 percent of blacks believe that the government, rather than private business or individuals, has the greatest responsibility for creating jobs...
...Moreover, black rage arises out of the recognition that, even as middle-class activists deplore the pathologies of the underclass, by moving out of inner-city neighborhoods they have sometimes contributed to those pathologies, and are dependent on their continuation for the race-based privileges they enjoy...
...These enemies of people's democracy and Pan-American culture must not be allowed to prevail...
...Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton argue that residential separation accounts for the formation and persistence of the underclass...
...said Li'l Crazy De...
...Their intellectual presence makes a stink across the campus like the corpses of rotting Nazis...
...Indeed, even the sympathetic listener begins to suspect that we are dealing with cases of people who live in a world of make-believe, in mental prisons of their own construction...
...Vidkun Quisling in his collaboration The American Spectator October 1995 35 with the Nazis surely did not do as much damage...
...See, when you shoot someone, like with a .45 automatic, one that goes, pow-pow-pow, like that—br-r-r-r-r...
...Yet it seems equally clear that if African-American students wish to succeed in American society, they cannot do it with Black English...
...What is needed after the revolution, Fanon wrote, is "the liberation of the man of color from himself...
...If blacks can achieve such a cultural renaissance, they will forever dispel rumors of inferiority and bring America to the promised land that has eluded the nation for so long—a destination that we can call the end of racism...
...Poor and middle-class blacks alike shared this belief...
...Most whites have no economic stake in the ghetto...
...However painful it may be for me to accept this conclusion, I am obliged to state it: for the black man, there is only one destiny, and it is white...
...The distinguished African-American urban anthropologist Elijah Anderson points out that unmarried fathers typically do not provide for their children but frequently use government child support to provide for themselves...
...And I was a hard worker...
...The FBI was responsible for the killing of twenty-eight black children in Atlanta as part of an experiment in the genocidal elimination of all blacks in America...
...It is dangerous to euphemize the problem of broken families, because it is connected with a range of other social pathologies...
...Even under the extreme deprivations of slavery, segregation, and racism, black culture was never entirely controlled from without...
...My price...
...Suddenly these sad young women have something that they can call their own, and "the teenage mother derives status from her baby...
...Nature wants it done then...
...In dealing with pathologies such as black-on-black crime, it may be the victim who is in the best position to address the problem, even though the victim was not primarily responsible for causing it...
...Those pathologies have existed in the black community since slavery, but they have been restricted and contained both by white-imposed discipline and black-imposed norms enforced by churches and local community institutions...
...A single dollar would turn over five or six times, because it would be spent on goods and services provided by other blacks...
...The body is ready to have babies...
...The book is intended to spotlight white racism...
...factions: perpetrators and potential victims...
...We must unmask these powerful Klansmen," Baraka said...
...Monsta, we caught this fool the other night in the hood, writin' on the wall...
...Although the treaties turned out to be short-lived, Chavis announced at the time, "This summit has demystified who gang members are...
...Asians, who make up 3 percent of the population, owned 350,000 businesses with receipts of $33 billion...
...I'm a volunteer slave," announces Jill Nelson, an African American, upon being hired as a reporter for the Washington Post...
...Within a few weeks, Wilson counted ten murders and thirty-five woundings by gunshot in the project...
...Just sittin' there, watchin' somebody's brains come out...
...William Julius Wilson reports that at Robert Taylor, with a virtually all-black population of twenty thousand, 90 percent of the households are headed by women, and 81 percent receive welfare...
...As Eugene Genovese writes, "Oppressed peoples cannot avoid admiring their own nihilists, who are the ones dramatically saying No...
...Frantz Fanon, a leading black anticolonialist writer, did not agree...
...Black enterprise is so fragile that a large portion of its receipts come from the government...
...In the 1950s black crime rates, while higher than those for Dinesh D'Souza, the John M. Olin fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of The End of Racism (Free Press), from which this article is adapted...
...Government, of course, has a legitimate role in providing needed services and a safety net...
...Yet, by dressing these pathologies in sociological cant, complete with the familiar vocabulary of disadvantage and holding society to account, this is precisely what leading black scholars and activists do...
...The leadership," remarks Robert Woodson, "has successfully imposed a gag rule on the black community...
...The underclass exercises such a powerful influence in shaping black cultural norms because this group is perceived as the most oppositional of all: It is remote from, and organized in resistance to, white middle-class standards...
...Reflecting on similar cases in a kind of stream-of-consciousness rhetoric, she eventually explodes: I am afraid of being alien and suspect...
...One of the three said he had been in prison for three years, another for ten years...
...Resistance to "acting white" is widespread among the African-American underclass, but it also seems to exist for many middle-class blacks...
...Of course, no one is to blame for being a victim...
...Then, like I said, you get used to it—it ain't no thing...
...I don't think a female running a house is a problem...
...It is difficult to envision how the government can keep black families intact, or force mothers to monitor their children's study habits, or counteract the strong peer appeal of juvenile gangs...
...They are some of the best members of society, who just need a chance and some encouragement...
...Until recently, historian Eugene Genovese writes, "there was hardly any room for blacks at the top or in the middle who tried to play by the rules of bourgeois society...
...Maxine Waters brought gang leaders before the Congressional Black Caucus to denounce white racism and demand public funding...
...The displacement of personal or group problems onto the bugaboo of racism inspires a frenetic assault on society at large...
...Only about 4 percent of African-American spending each year goes to black-owned enterprises...
...while many whites have traditionally viewed the state as a potential threat to personal liberty and opportunity, government has been the leading protector and guarantor of black rights and freedom...
...Many teachers acknowledge the pressures that African-American students fall under—peer pressure not to succeed, but to fail...
...The third, who did not reveal his prison record, told a news photographer that together they had probably killed about thirty people...
...Their rage is utterly disproportionate to any injustices that they claim to have suffered...
...Economist John Kasarda argues that many Asians establish small businesses in order to overcome the obstacles that newcomers to this country face: problems of language and access to credit...
...many black businesses would collapse instantly if they were taken off government contracting preferences and set-asides...
...They have absolutely nothing to gain from oppressing poor blacks...
...All of them together...
...government data, in 1987 blacks, who make up 12 percent of the population, owned about 420,000 businesses in America, with receipts of $19 billion...
...Black self-criticism becomes a form of self-hate...
...It represents post–affirmative action we have to play every day just to survive...
...It is not hard to see how this oppositional culture would develop in the black community, which has historically suffered so much at the hands of whites...
...I do not believe that we can restore and expand the freedoms that our lives require," June Jordan writes, "until we embrace the justice of our rage...
...We're not accepted by black people because they think we're too smart...
...Mine has had time to grow over the years more and more until I now feel that my grasp on handling myself is tenuous...
...F or all their regional and economic diversity, blacks in America do share a culture, one that emerged out of the crucible of racism and oppression...
...He compares various job rejection letters that one of his friends received, and is struck by the ominous similarity of their tone and language...
...Becoming a mother," Anderson writes, "can seem to be a means to authority, maturity and respect...
...Government as the Big House Another destructive stance that seems deeply ingrained in African Americans, especially those in the middle class, is a heavy dependence on government, accompanied by the belief that public programs are the way to solve virtually all social problems...
...The typical young woman does not seek children outside of marriage—on the contrary, "she wants desperately to believe that if she becomes pregnant he will marry her or at least be more obligated to her...
...Couldn't stand to see the b ----- made m----f---- sufferin' and s...
...Yet statistics and scholarly description do not convey what the culture of the "bad nigger" means on the street level...
...But since racism is not the problem, the assault proves futile...
...No one is more committed to the status quo, and more likely to resist its demise, than those professional blacks whose livelihoods depend on maintaining a large and resentful African-American coalition...
...In 1960, 78 percent of all black families were headed by married couples...
...One problem with this approach is that by emphasizing how poverty and deprivation cause crime and other pathologies, excuse theorists cannot explain why the majority of poor people remain law abiding...
...Anyway, we roll up on boy and ask him: 'Yo, what the f--- you doin'?' Boy breaks and runs and .. ." "I cut his a-- down wit' a thirty-oh-six wit' a infrared scope...
...she insists that "being on welfare is hard work...
...It's a wonder we haven't all gone out and killed somebody or killed ourselves...
...today that figure is less than 40 percent...
...The violence unleashed by blacks seems to have reached a point where it threatens the future of the African-American community and the stability of society as a whole...
...We are not essential or even integral to the economy...
...Culture is not simply an expression of external circumstances...
...Activists recommend federal jobs programs and recruitment into the private sector...
...When you're killing each other, they can't wait for you to die," Farrakhan told an audience in Toledo, Ohio...
...Looked like oatmeal...
...Groups that succeed through the private sector don't need many civil rights leaders, only entrepreneurs...
...Under slavery it made sense to do as little work as possible, because slaves received no share in the master's profits...
...Yet her sentiments are shared by others...
...While blacks detour themselves into the racism industry, other ethnic groups are selling cars and computer software, and moving to the suburbs...
...They become part of what Anderson calls the "baby club": Many women in the same situation welcome the newcomer into their fold...
...Sixty-eight percent of blacks, compared with 36 percent of whites, insisted that increases in government spending were the way to invigorate the economy and provide employment...
...In the view of many blacks, his very badness becomes a symbol of heroic resistance to white oppression...
...The black cultural orientation toward government solutions is understandable...
...Laura Banks, a senior, complains, "We're not accepted by the white people because they think we're not smart enough...
...In some cases government programs may help, yet none of them show any prospect of reducing the pathologies themselves...
...For this one has to turn to the real experts: members and former members of the black underclass...
...Booker T. Washington warned almost a century ago of the existence of black pathologies that both strengthened white 36 The American Spectator October 1995 racism and inhibited black development...
...A house, a Volvo, and the illusion of disposable income...
...Publicly inconsolable about the fact that racism continues, these activists seem privately terrified that it has abated...
...In order to succeed, they must rid themselves of aspects of their past that have become aspects of themselves...
...I talk to my friends...
...This seems to be the kind of servitude that most Americans of any background would settle for...
...Why we are hanging onto it, I don't know...
...They seemed immune to punishment...
...Such wannabes invite amusement and contempt, according to Elrich, "because they pretend to be what they can't be...
...Although less than 1 percent of Chicago's population lives in the project, residents commit about 10 percent of all the assaults, rapes, and murders in the city...
...white"—that is to say, abandon idiotic Back-toAfrica schemes and embrace mainstream cultural norms, so that they can effectively compete with other groups...
...William Julius Wilson argues that "cultural values grow out of specific circumstances and life changes and reflect one's position in the class structure...
...The vicious, self-defeating, and repellent nature of these pathologies can no longer be rationalized or ignored...
...It look real nasty...
...B lacks as a group stand at a historic junction...
...But the "bad nigger" has always had a gross and homicidal underside...
...By contrast, whites were far less likely to look to government for jobs...
...The Big Lie While mainstream black leaders refuse to criticize African-American pathologies or to seek internal reform, the scholars and activists of the civil rights establishment offer only what may be termed excuse theory—an extensive literature offering literally hundreds of reasons why external constraints make it impossible for blacks to succeed...
...While many whites have traditionally viewed the state as a potential threat to personal liberty and opportunity, government has been the leading protector and guarantor of black rights and freedom...
...I think that now I would strike out to the point of killing, and not think about it...
...Leading African-American writers and scholars seem to share their persecution complex and its attendant rage...
...Cult of the "Bad Nigger" Violence has now become a tragic defining feature of life in the black underclass...
...Du Bois put it, "There are no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes...
...Yet here is how Williams reacts: I felt myself slip in and out of a shadow, as I become non-black for the purposes of inclusion and black for the purposes of exclusion...
...They are frequently taunted, "Why are you in a class with all the white kids...
...Such gatherings could be called a conspiracy and it is undeniable that such schemes are in place...
...A reporter for the New York Times found an atmosphere of ignorance: Herbert Hoover was identified as "the vacuum guy," and Lloyd George was confused with "Boy George...
...I don't think a female running a house is a problem...
...But I know that I have to really, really be cognizant of what I'm doing, because why go to jail for nothing...
...The American Spectator October 1995 37 The letters of rejection are so similar in tone and content that they raise the specter of corporate officers from across the country gathered in back rooms deciding on a kinder and gentler language for rejecting black applicants...
...But first, the specific nature of the civilizational crisis facing the black community must be recognized...
...Ironically this points to the fact that, used correctly, ethnocentrism can be a business asset...
...This rage is not so difficult to comprehend...
...Then you get used to it, no problem...
...White values have been historically identified with an assertion of Western cultural superiority, which provided a justification for racism...
...Can you believe that s...
...In this Fanon is right: for generations, blacks have attempted to straighten their hair, lighten their skin, and pass for white...
...and reminding others that there are worse things than death...
...It is hard to imagine whites feeling secure working with such persons: Surely such inflamed ethnic sensitivities are not what companies have in mind when they extol the diversity of work environments...
...Cecil Williams of San Francisco's Glide United Methodist Church told Newsweek...
...Through their struggle over two centuries, blacks have helped to make the principles of the American founding a legal reality not just for themselves but also for other groups...
...You gotta Moreover, there is some evidence that even when jobs are available, many young blacks refuse them, apparently on the grounds that the jobs don't pay enough or that crime is more profitable...
...But, as Genovese says, "what constituted strategies for survival under one set of circumstances have now emerged, in an entirely different context, as celebrations of self-indulgence and irresponsibility...
...tered through a black frame of reference, which includes the use of Black English...
...As W.E.B...
...interrupted Li'l De...
...As with mainstream black scholars, leading African-American politicians and civil rights activists have endorsed the activities of criminals and gang members...
...Even many middle-class and upper-middle-class blacks routinely permit blackness to be defined by the underclass...
...And that's based on the color of our skins...
...People from a homogeneous group who trust each other can avoid the legal and bureaucratic structures that are necessary to adjudicate the transactions of strangers...
...Welfare even encourages young women to endorse the denial of their male sexual partner who does not want to claim paternity...
...Sadly, the habits that were needed to resist racist oppression or secure legal rights are not the ones needed to exercise personal freedom or achieve success today...
...For William Julius Wilson, black pathologies are the product, not cause, of a lack of jobs: In Wilson's view, blacks just happened to arrive in the cities around the time that unskilled jobs were leaving...
...Gang member G-Roc says: The big enemy is the system, this government...
...Yet it seems unrealistic, bordering on the surreal, to imagine underclass blacks, "Aw, nigga, I thought you knew...
...Since external factors are always to blame, these activists cannot do better than propose societal remedies such as redoubled federal funding, more social engineering, or a renewed campaign to root out white racism...
...Who was he...
...Illegitimacy and single-parent households are not exclusive characteristics of the black underclass: College-educated African-American women have children outside of marriage at a rate about seven to eight times higher than college-educated white women...
...People who were carrying on conversations went mute and stared straight ahead, as though avoiding my eyes would save them...
...Yet sometime later, when another black woman became engaged in an ultimately unsuccessful tenure battle, he confided to me that he wished the school could find more blacks like me...
...This outlaw figure has been revered since the period of slavery...
...Many young black women frequently offer sex "as a gift in bargaining for the attentions of a young man...
...Let the sun be proud of its achievement," Frederick Douglass said...
...The reason that whites do not stop black-on-black violence, he added, was that whites need the organ donations...
...Black reliance on government, once justified, may now have become a liability...
...Bing offers further insight into the pathological behavior and rationalizing that have become commonplace in the African-American underclass, and provides vignettes of underclass black culture by with their gold chains, limping walk, obscene language, and arsenal of weapons, doing nine-to-five jobs at Procter and Gamble or the State Department...
...T he last few decades have witnessed nothing less than a breakdown of civilization within the African-American community...
...Richard Majors reports that wife abuse is four times more common among blacks than among whites, and that black men kill their wives at a higher rate than any other ethnic group...
...In most societies young men cannot readily impregnate The American Spectator October 1995 43 and leave young women, because these women are protected by their fathers and male relatives...
...My homeboys be doin' rapes...
...Here is a fairly typical angst, the frustration of pursuing unearned privileges and then bristling when they do not bring something that has to be earned—the respect of one's peers...
...They ran away...
...They'll just rape a girl, any girl, if she look good and she don't warm kick in...
...Black children's encounter with the white world should be filAmong some blacks, "getting ignorant" is considered a virtue and a source of self-esteem...
...The reason for the moral paralysis of mainstream black intellectuals is that their relativist framework makes it impossible to identify black pathology without placing the onus for it on society at large...
...It's a mental health problem...
...This is genocide, 1990s style...
...Racism itself becomes a scapegoat: It is blamed for problems it has little or nothing to do with, such as blacks performing poorly on math tests...
...Excessive charges of racism set up a battle with an adversary that sometimes does not exist...
...Only now, for the first time in history, is it possible for African Americans to transcend this inner polarization and become truly modern, unhyphenated Americans...
...But now that middle-class blacks find themselves on the receiving end of racial preferences and government set-asides, many are beside themselves with anger...
...Nomathombi Martin, a 19-year-old student at the University of California at Berkeley, recently recalled the intense pressures he encountered in high school to avoid speech and behavior identified as white...
...When black poet Amiri Baraka was denied tenure at Rutgers University in 1990, he accused fellow professors and administrators of being Nazis and Ku Klux Klansmen in disguise...
...When blacks have publicly engaged in criticism of those pathologies, they have often as not found themselves castigated and reviled...
...The effect of this molten frustration is what William Grier and Price Cobbs, in their book Black Rage, term "a posture close to paranoid thinking and mental disorder...
...Consequently the government is not in a good position to reform the socialization practices of African Americans, and the primary responsibility for cultural restoration must lie with the black community itself...
...even among the poorest whites, less than 50 percent cited the government's responsibility...
...The little nuclear family is a paradigm that just doesn't work," she writes...
...State and local agencies that service a poor and predominantly black clientele, such as housing and welfare, employ substantial proportions of African Americans: 38 and 23 percent respectively...
...I got a lot of criticism about speaking proper speech," he says...
...The problem endures, and the frustration mounts...
...Radio commentator Julianne Malveaux is appalled that anyone would question the lifestyle of welfare mothers who live off taxpayers or seek to impose work requirements on them...
...Americans should take genuine pride in their collective moral achievement in this country's history...
...Since the civil rights movement led us to the view that all races are equal in their natural endowments, inequalities between groups have been considered to be the unnatural product of historical and continuing oppression...
...S---, we ain't heard yet...
...But it does afford "a limited but steady income" that becomes the means for teenagers to escape the often painful circumstances of their own homes, establish their own independent single-family household, "and at times attract other men who need money...
...I felt the boundaries of my very body manipulated, casually inscribed by definitional demarcations that did not refer to me...
...In the District of Columbia, black residents are more likely to be killed than are people in war-torn regions such as Northern Ireland and the Middle East...
...According to the Centers for Disease Control, the AIDS rate among African Americans is about three times higher than that of the U.S...
...There is little doubt, as linguists point out, that the ghetto idiom does possess, like most forms of communication, its own coherent form and structure...
...Y'all been droppin' bodies or what...
...Hey, if they want it bad enough, they gonna take it...
...Government eliminated discrimination in the ballot box, government ended segregation...
...It has shattered the stereotype that gang members are social deviants...
...I felt a surge of power: these people were mine: I could do with them as I wished...
...Yet despite the scandalous pain generated by illegitimacy in the underclass, leading African-American intellectuals abstain from criticizing, and go so far as to revel in, what they describe as another alternative lifestyle...
...Skepticism toward the values of whites may be a cultural stance that served blacks well in the past: It was a technique for refusing to be defined by the categories of the oppressor...
...Although blacks make up 10 percent of the civilian work force, about 24 percent of blacks (compared with 14 percent of whites) are employed by the federal, state, and local governments...
Vol. 28 • October 1995 • No. 10
