One law shall be to him that is homeborn, and unto the stranger that sojourneth among you (Exodus 12:49).Ye shall do no unrighteousness in judgment: thou shalt not respect the person of the poor, nor honor the person of the mighty: but in righteousness shalt thou judge thy neighbour (Leviticus 19:15).
These two passages are the original sources of the West's concept of the rule of law.
This brief essay is an application of the biblical principle of the rule of law. Specifically, it is an analysis of a widespread violation of this principle.
BLACKS MURDERING BLACKS
A site member posted a link to the following video. The speaker is Michael Smith. It is a TEDx talk: "not ready for primetime TED."
This video is an impressive talk. Once the speaker got into the talk, which I’m sure he has given many times, he really rolled along. It is worth watching from the point of view of analyzing effective rhetoric. But his logic is always there to support his rhetoric.
He does not answer the question that he raises. The question is this: "Why does black society give a free ride and black rap artists get big bucks to praise the practice of murdering other blacks? What is behind this?"
He should have asked me.
OPPOSING THE RULE OF LAW
The problem began when blacks were kidnapped out of Africa and brought to the United States to live as slaves. The regional laws, officially based on Christianity, did not apply to them within the slave system. They were assumed to be of an inferior race.
This was true of Jews' outlooks toward blacks. It was true of Muslims' attitude. It goes back to an ancient interpretation of the account in Genesis 9 of the curse of God on the son of Ham: Canaan. Scholars are aware of this history, but the general public has never heard of it. Wikipedia has an excellent account of this. You can read it here. Supposedly, blacks are part of an inferior race because of this curse. Historically, this is preposterous. The Canaanites produced the ancient trading civilization of Phoenicia. It culminated in the classical civilization of Carthage.
The idea became widespread in the 17th-19th century in the Western Hemisphere because of the slave trade, which began in the middle of the 15th century. This idea was used to justify the slave trade. It was used to argue that blacks were being brought to America to be civilized. But this process did not involve granting them access to citizenship. This was totally hypocritical.
In the South after the Civil War, and especially during the period of the Jim Crow laws from 1880 until approximately 1970, it was assumed by whites, who ran the police forces and the courts, that they did not have a responsibility to police black communities with the same rigor and the same standards that applied to white society. This was an extension of the idea that the rule of law does not apply to everyone, especially to criminals in the black community when they committed crimes against blacks. It was only if blacks committed those same crimes, and much lesser crimes, against whites, that the white community brought negative sanctions on blacks.
All of this came from one concept: the denial of the rule of law.
Every society wants to make exceptions to the rule of law for the ruling class, and it also makes exceptions for those in separate communities who are not allowed to become part of the ruling class. This is why medieval civilization set up Jewish ghettos, within which the rabbis had legal authority. The Christian city around the ghetto did not attempt to impose its legal standards on Jews who lived inside the ghetto. They had their own law-order, but they did not get to exercise legal authority in the courts of medieval Christian cities, which were bound by Christian oaths that Jews could not affirm. Jews could not be citizens for this reason. Modern scholars, with the exception of Max Weber, generally have ignored the importance of Christian oaths in the establishment of medieval cities. You never find this concept in textbooks on Western Civilization. It is rarely discussed in textbooks on medieval Europe. I did not find it when I studied medieval history for my master's degree. I only heard about it when I read Weber as a graduate student in a class taught by Robert Nisbet.
The whites of the South had a dual view of blacks. With respect to their activities within their own neighborhoods, they were regarded as children in need of supervision. With respect to their activities in the white part of town, they were regarded as potential devils who might need to be lynched. The blacks were never regarded as human beings who needed to obey the law, and who would be punished systematically if they did break the law within their own communities. They were not allowed to be citizens because citizens could exercise authority on an equal basis with whites. So, they were allowed a degree of judicial independence that subsidized lawbreakers within their communities. That same attitude is dominant within American white society today. This is what Smith is talking about. I reprinted my article from 2001 on this site in June 2018: "The Judicial Theory of White Liberals and Bull Connor."
A HORROR OF MURDER
The Mosaic law mandated this form of sacrifice. I have never heard a sermon on this, but it is a crucial verse in our understanding of the biblical concept of human life as sacred because men are made in the image of God.
If one be found slain in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee to possess it, lying in the field, and it be not known who hath slain him: Then thy elders and thy judges shall come forth, and they shall measure unto the cities which are round about him that is slain: And it shall be, that the city which is next unto the slain man, even the elders of that city shall take an heifer, which hath not been wrought with, and which hath not drawn in the yoke; And the elders of that city shall bring down the heifer unto a rough valley, which is neither eared nor sown, and shall strike off the heifer's neck there in the valley: And the priests the sons of Levi shall come near; for them the Lord thy God hath chosen to minister unto him, and to bless in the name of the Lord; and by their word shall every controversy and every stroke be tried: And all the elders of that city, that are next unto the slain man, shall wash their hands over the heifer that is beheaded in the valley: And they shall answer and say, Our hands have not shed this blood, neither have our eyes seen it. Be merciful, O Lord, unto thy people Israel, whom thou hast redeemed, and lay not innocent blood unto thy people of Israel's charge. And the blood shall be forgiven them. So shalt thou put away the guilt of innocent blood from among you, when thou shalt do that which is right in the sight of the Lord (Deuteronomy 21:1-9).
This law mandated that the Hebrews had such a horror of an unsolved murder that they were required by God to perform a ritual of civil law in order to keep the judgment of God away from them. We do not have this attitude today. We could use this attitude today.
This is why society should never turn a blind eye to gang behavior of any kind that seeks to execute members of rival gangs. The inter-gang assassinations of rival Chicago gangs during Prohibition were front-page news. Gangsters were celebrated in the movies. At the end of these movies, they were either murdered themselves or brought to justice. That was because the Jewish moguls who ran the movie industry knew that this kind of criminal behavior was not acceptable within American society. They lost control of the content of the movies in 1960, as film historian Michael Medved has argued. After that, the old restraints were weaker. Even so, Bonnie and Clyde came to their well-deserved end in the 1967 hit movie about them. It happened to them again in The Highwayman (2019). But the criminals win enough of the time in Hollywood movies these days so that we never know in advance if justice will be upheld at the end. Example: The Sting (1973). It is beloved. It is about con men stealing from a gang leader. The only representative of justice is an FBI agent who murders a supposed assassin before the person does anything illegal -- a pre-crime -- in order to protect a criminal he knows is a criminal.
CONCLUSION
If there is a single definition of civilization, it is this one: the rule of law. If everyone inside the jurisdiction of civil government is not protected by the rule of law, then the foundation of civilization is on shaky ground.
Gangsta rap is an assault on civilization. We should see it as such. Companies that in any way profit from this so-called art form are unindicted co-conspirators.
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