Remnant Review
I want to comment on an article by Fred Reed. It's on black power, or maybe Black power. I get confused on what should be capitalized these days. http://fredoneverything.net/BlackPower.shtml
Let's talk about capitalization. Most white people don't go around talking about white power. They surely don't go around talking about White power. Anybody who is white who talks about White power is likely to be associated with some variation of the White Aryan Nation movement. On the other hand, a lot of white people write "Blacks." I just noticed that when I dictated this, my copy of NaturallySpeaking automatically capitalized Blacks. I get the message!
Anyway, I want to talk about what used to be called the Negro problem. That was what Martin Luther King, Jr. called it, so it's good enough for me. However, because Malcolm X got a lot of traction from his phrase, "the so-called Negro," no one talks about the Negro problem anymore. But it surely remains a problem.
If there is a single failure in American society which everyone acknowledges is a problem, it is this one. Reed talks about it in his article. He makes the obvious point, which is not obvious to liberals, that when we have black-on-white crime, it is not discussed in this way in the media. When a group of black teenagers beats up some white man, or indulges in what has become known as flash mob violence, the perpetrators are always referred to as "teens." Every white person reading the article suspects what took place, but the reporter dares not speak the word, which is a color, and which is usually capitalized. His editor will not tolerate this.
BLACK POWER: AN OXYMORON
There is an insight, incorrectly attributed to Voltaire, that argues along these lines: "To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize." Generally, this is a convenient piece of advice. But in this case, it does not apply.
It is quite true that the more intractable aspects of the Negro problem are not allowed to be discussed in the media, either under the rubric "Negro problem" or its variants, such as the "Blacks problem" or the "African-American problem." But this is not indicative of the power of the Negroes/Blacks/African-Americans. This is because they have little autonomous power. They are merely granted certain marginal immunities by the white Establishment. They are in fact at the bottom of the social hierarchy. They know this. They have known it for a long time. They are tired of this. The problem they now face is this: their invisibility in the media in relation to their problems, at least their self-generated problems, is a sign of their lack of power.
Nobody tells them: "You must get your house in order." This is because those with political power do not believe that (1) they have the autonomous ability to get their collective house in order, and (2) they can function without white supervision.
Does this sound like plantation politics, circa 1859? It does to me. It also does to Star Parker.
LIBERALISM IN THE INNER CITY
Here is what we are really facing. Blacks have little power. They have little power because the social order that was once the Black community has been almost destroyed by liberalism. There are two main aspects of this, although they have many ramifications. The first aspect is the welfare state. Black males have been undermined by the welfare state in much the same way as Native American males have been undermined by liquor and the welfare state. Certain social groups are more susceptible to the lure of free money than others. Just about every social group is lured by it, as Medicare and Social Security testify. But Blacks have been lured in higher percentages. All of the negative effects of the welfare state which conservatives warn about, although not with respect to Medicare and Social Security, have become manifest in the disintegrating Black community. That's the problem for liberals. It was their policies of the welfare state that did this. Any mention of this in public is dismissed by liberals, who blame the Negro problem on white racism. But the problem isn't white racism; the problem is the welfare state. Liberals are not about to rethink this, because it is central to their worldview.
The second area that has been undermined by liberals in the Black community is the church. Liberal Protestantism has undermined the largest denomination within the Black community, the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Theological liberalism undercuts theological commitment. This has been true for 110 years; this is not going to change. So, Blacks have stopped going to church, and there is not much conservative evangelism inside the inner city. I know this for a fact. I have experienced it firsthand, unlike most whites. In the inner city of Memphis, there are black churches, but the ones with any money have members who come in on Sundays from the better parts of town. The inner city itself is generally bereft of any kind of evangelism, other than storefront evangelism and Nation of Islam evangelism.
I need to qualify this. Memphis, for all its crime, and for all the poor performance of the public schools, is a socially decent place to live. There are Black neighborhoods in Memphis that I would be content in. The lawns are mowed, the houses are painted, the income is lower middle class, the kids seem pretty well behaved, and everybody has a black face. There is even a public housing project in Memphis that looks pretty decent from the outside. They have sold every other home to people with steady jobs and middle-class values, but without much money. This keeps them living inside the confines of what would otherwise be a deteriorating welfare housing project. So, I don't regard Memphis as a complete disaster. But I do regard the lack of evangelism in the inner-city of Memphis as a disaster. There, the deterioration is far more visible.
The problem we call the Negro problem is a morals problem. But liberals don't want to discuss social problems in terms of morals, unless it is the morals of the white middle-class, a class that is generally opposed to welfare, other than Medicare and Social Security. Liberals in the media talk about immoral whites, and they explain any immoral behavior on the part of Blacks as the inevitable results of white racism. In other words, society creates immorality, but the only immorality which is allowed to be discussed is the immorality of the whites, who are racists. Logically, this makes no sense, but it has been dominant in liberal media discussions of the Negro problem for 60 years.
IS IQ DESTINY?
The debate comes to fruition in any discussion of race and IQ. White liberals are perfectly willing to admit that Ashkenazi Jews have higher IQs than run-of-the-mill whites. This is because a statistically nonrandom percentage of white liberals are Ashkenazi Jews. But what they are willing to admit at the top end of the bell curve of IQ, they are not willing to admit at the bottom end.
There are white Aryan groups whose members are generally not high IQ people. Their members need to have somebody to compare themselves with favorably. This is not easy for them. So, they keep pointing to the fact that Blacks statistically test with lower IQ's than whites. These people don't want to be at the bottom of the social hierarchy. They never have. Their forebears were willing to accept slavery in the South, even though they never had the money to buy slaves, because they also wanted to have somebody in society who was worse off than they were, a condition they could blame on inherent characteristics of the people at the bottom of the pile. So, they accepted the rulership of slave-owning whites because the slavery system made them feel better about themselves. This reversed after 1877, when the non-slave-owning whites, who really did have lower IQ's and fewer social graces than the slave-owning whites, had the votes to take over politics in the South. It took 90 years to overturn this system.
Nobody wants to blame the plight of the Blacks on the ethics of the Blacks. The liberals are not going to blame the Blacks for this, because liberals don't believe that being at the bottom of the social pile has anything to do with the ethics of the people of the bottom of the pile. They see the problem in terms of the bad ethics of the people at the top of the pile. They blame the bad ethics of racism on whites.
THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS
Liberals surely do not blame the public schools. They call for more money for the public schools. Meanwhile, the average middle-class white, who is as committed to the public schools as everyone else, refuses to blame the public schools for the problem of the Blacks. Yet it's obvious that the primary means of teaching almost everybody in American society is the public school system. But nobody wants to blame it for widespread problems. It is the central institution of the American welfare state, and it is essentially untouchable.
It is not that Blacks run the society. It is that liberals run the society, and middle-class conservatives are so committed to the most important single institution of white liberal control over society, namely, the public school system, that the liberals have been able to run the show in the United States since at least 1900.
The deterioration of the public school system since the days that Fred Reed and I were educated by it is obvious to everybody. Nobody knows how to solve this problem, but almost everybody still has faith in the system. Every group wants to reform it. None of the previous reforms has worked. The only reform that might possibly work is the invasion of the Khan Academy into classrooms. That will not cheer up liberals. The public school system is supposed to be the primary agency of social and economic reform, so the suggestion that a private educational institution, which came out of nowhere, is the only hope of even mildly reforming the public schools, is not something that white liberals want to hear. It is certainly not what the American Federation of Teachers wants to hear.
The basic problem that white liberals face today with respect to the Negro problem is this: there is nothing that the federal government can do, other than pulling out of the inner city, that would offer any possible hope of successful reform in the Black community. Middle-class whites believe this, but they don't want to believe that the public school system has been the primary institutional means of undermining the Black community. They want to blame the welfare system, which in terms of money spent is a fraction of what the public schools spend in the inner-city. But the whites don't want to admit that these schools have failed, because the whites are totally committed to the public schools.
So, the bottom line is this: white racists want to blame lower Black IQ scores, which they see as inherently racial. White liberals want to blame racism on the part of middle-class whites. White conservatives blame the welfare system, but they exempt the public schools. Nobody wants to blame the political liberalism of the public school system and the theological liberalism of the Black Protestant churches.
This is not an IQ problem. IQ is not destiny. Ethics is destiny. Right and wrong, considered as a single unit, is destiny. If IQ scores are the primary problem, then no program of ethical reform has any hope of solving the Negro problem. Ethics and IQ scores are not causally related. So, there will be a continuing battle over who controls the social institutions that spend federal money in the inner city. Every special-interest group will have a reform suggestion, but nobody wants to admit the truth, namely, that the federally funded programs of reform are the problem. Nobody wants to cut off all funding to the inner city, because that would mean cutting off all funding to the public schools in the inner city, which would then mean cutting off all funding to the rest of the public schools. The public school system is America's only established church. The priests who run it, meaning the American Federation of Teachers, are not about to let loose of this lever of control, which keeps them in their upper-middle-class, tenured job security.
We have created a small army of welfare dependents in the United States, and this keeps one possible reform that offers any hope of success from being implemented: the abolition of the welfare system, beginning with the public schools. The public schools remain the great white hope, the great black hope, the great Hispanic hope, the great Asian hope, and the single most important source of the problem.
The failure of the public schools is most visible in the inner cities. The Coleman report a generation ago identified the cause of the problem: the lack of family support for education. The inner city schools are filled with students whose parents do not have books, do not read to them, and who do not monitor their academic performance. There is nothing that the federal government, state government, or local government can do to restore this kind of family commitment to education, other than cutting off the funding for the welfare system. But that is not politically acceptable to anybody. What would happen to all those people who don't get their welfare checks every month? By the way, this was exactly the issue raised by white slave owners prior to 1865. They kept asking this question: "What could we do with the liberated slaves?" The whites in the North had no answer to this. Lincoln wanted to send them all to Liberia. Whites in the North and the Midwest knew only this: they did not want liberated slaves coming into their territory. The liberated slaves were supposed to stay liberated south of the Mason Dixon line and east of the Texas/New Mexico border.
It took the Civil War to liberate the slaves. It will take the Great Default of the welfare state to liberate the descendants of these slaves. Nobody knows how this is going to sort out. Almost nobody is willing to admit that the Great Default of the welfare state is inevitable, let alone morally obligatory.
CONCLUSION
One more time: IQ is not destiny. Race is not destiny. Ethics is destiny. Ethics must rest on a concept of self-reliance and personal responsibility. Liberals do not want that kind of ethics. They also don't want to argue that IQ is destiny. So, they desperately look for some way to reform the welfare system. They will not tolerate any discussion of this problem as being an IQ problem, which is understandable, but they also will not allow it to be discussed as part of an ethics problem in the Black community. They demand that the welfare system be tied to various statistical indicators, not ethical performance. The suggestion that Blacks' major problems are beyond the jurisdiction of the state is automatically rejected by defenders of the welfare state. Liberals only want to impose ethics of the special kind, namely, the ethics of liberal anti-racism. They want this taught in the public schools. And so it goes, and has gone, for over a century.
The Negro problem is an ethics problem, and it comes to visible prominence as part of the welfare state problem. There are very few voters want to get rid of the welfare state 100%, so there is no likelihood that, prior to the Great Default, the Negro problem is going to be solved.
Here is my message to Blacks.
1. Get your house in order.
2. That's because it's your house.
3. It's not my house.
4. If I can help, invite me in.
5. Otherwise, I will stay out.
Here is my recommended strategy for Black mothers on welfare.
1. Ask the Salvation Army for a used computer for each school-age child.
2. Ask for Internet service.
3. Pull your kids out of the public schools.
4. Get them using Khan Academy.
5. Take the courses yourself.
If inner city churches came to white churches in the suburbs and asked for donations of used computers to be used this way, they would get all the used computers they could handle. Used computers are cheap.
There would be hard-core atheists who would donate used computers for this program.
This is real welfare. Khan asks to be invited into homes. They should accept the invitation.
Khan is not white. He is a Caucasian, but he is not white. All the better.
What Blacks need is an inner city church-sponsored free K-12 curriculum on the Web. It should be taught by Blacks who climbed out of the inner city. The project should be self-funded. It would take only time to put this together. YouTube is free. WordPress.com is free.
I know how to launch an Internet-based curriculum: the Ron Paul Curriculum. I am here to give free advice. Just ask.
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