Intellectuals and Race (20 page)

The built-in excuse has become as standard in discussions of black crime as it is unsubstantiated, except by peer consensus among the intelligentsia. The phrase “troubled youth” is a common example of the unsubstantiated but built-in excuse, since those who use that phrase usually feel no need to offer any specific evidence about the specific individuals they are talking about, who may be creating big trouble for others, while enjoying themselves in doing so. An all too common pattern across the country was that in an episode in Milwaukee:

          Shaina Perry remembers the punch to her face, blood streaming from a cut over her eye, her backpack with her asthma inhaler, debit card and cellphone stolen, and then the laughter… “They just said, ‘Oh, white girl bleeds a lot,’” said Perry, 22, who was attacked at Kilbourn Reservoir Park over the Fourth of July weekend… Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn noted Tuesday that crime is colorblind… “I saw some of my friends on the ground getting beat pretty severely.”… Perry needed three stitches to close a cut above her eye. She said she saw a friend getting kicked and when she walked up to ask what was happening, a man punched her in the face. “I heard laughing as they were beating everybody up. They were eating chips like it was a picnic,” said Perry, a restaurant cashier… Most of the 11 people who told the Journal Sentinel they were attacked or witnessed the attacks on their friends said that police did not take their complaints seriously… “About 20 of us stayed to give statements and make sure everyone was accounted for. The police wouldn’t listen to us,
they wouldn’t take our names or statements. They told us to leave. It was completely infuriating.”
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Variations on such episodes of unprovoked violence by young black gangs against white people on beaches, in shopping malls or in other public places have occurred in Philadelphia, New York, Denver, Chicago, Cleveland, Washington, Los Angeles and other places across the country, often with the attackers voicing anti-white invective and mocking those they left injured or bleeding.
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But such episodes are often either ignored or downplayed in most of the media, and by officials— and the
Chicago Tribune
even offered an excuse for not reporting the race of the attackers in a series of such episodes that alarmed the Chicago public.
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Yet race is widely reported when it comes to imprisonment rates or other racial disparities. For example:

          In March of 2010, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan delivered a speech that highlighted racial disparities in school suspension and expulsion and that called for more rigorous civil rights enforcement in education. He suggested that students with disabilities and Black students, especially males, were suspended far more often than their White counterparts. These students, he also noted, were often punished more severely for similar misdeeds. Just months later, in September of 2010, a report analyzing 2006 data collected by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights found that more than 28% of Black male middle school students had been suspended at least once. This is nearly three times the 10% rate for white males. Further, 18% of Black females in middle school were suspended, more than four times as often as white females (4%). Later that same month, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary Duncan each addressed a conference of civil rights lawyers in Washington, D.C., and affirmed their departments’ commitment to ending such disparities.
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The very possibility that there might be behavioral differences behind the punishment differences does not surface in such discussions. To believe that there are no behavioral differences between black and white school-age males is to assume that the large and undeniable differences in crime rates— including murder rates— between black and white young adults suddenly and inexplicably materialize after they finish school.

Professor David D. Cole of the Georgetown University Law School expressed views similar to those of Tom Wicker and many others among the
intelligentsia of the multicultural era, when he lamented the increasing imprisonment of black men:

               In the 1950s, when segregation was still legal, African-Americans comprised 30 percent of the prison population. Sixty years later, African-Americans and Latinos make up 70 percent of the incarcerated population, and that population has skyrocketed. The disparities are greatest where race and class intersect— nearly 60 percent of all young black men born between 1965 and 1969 who dropped out of high school went to prison at least once on a felony conviction before they turned thirty-five.
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Professor Cole posed the issue explicitly in the cosmic justice terms of John Rawls:

          Were we in John Rawls’ “original position,” with no idea whether we would be born a black male in an impoverished urban home… would we accept a system in which one out of every three black males born today can expect to spend time in jail during his life.
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The preemptive assertion in passing that it is the
system
— something external, created by others in the larger society— that is the cause of the problem arbitrarily puts off limits at the outset the very possibility that the problem may be elsewhere. By sheer verbal virtuosity, rather than by any facts or evidence, collective responsibility is put on those in the larger society. There is clearly
something
in the circumstances into which many black males are born that makes it far more likely that they will commit crimes than is true of the population in general, including the majority of the black population that does
not
end up behind bars. But that tells us absolutely nothing about what that something is. If it is being “impoverished,” then clearly there is a lot less poverty today than in 1950, when the imprisonment rate among black males was lower, even though invoking poverty remains at least as much a part of the rituals— as distinguished from arguments— of intellectuals today as then.

Professor Cole adds some other statistics, that “only 5 percent of college-educated African-Americans” have spent time in prison, while the imprisonment rate for black male high-school dropouts “is nearly fifty times
the national average.”
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He also notes, “Children with parents in prison are in turn seven times more likely to be imprisoned at some point in their lives than other children.”
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None of this supports the claim that the cause is an external “system,” as asserted by Professor Cole, rather than an internal counterproductive culture, perhaps aided and abetted by outsiders who excuse or even celebrate that counterproductive underclass culture— an underclass culture which has produced very similar results among lower class whites in Britain,
¹⁷
where similar ideologies of envy and resentment have long been promoted by the British intelligentsia.

Both in Britain and in the United States, as well as in other countries, there has been a steady ideological drumbeat of rhetoric from intellectuals depicting “gaps” and “disparities” as grievances against those who are better off. In both Britain and America, this resentment and hostility generated by the intelligentsia has been directed by those who accept it, not only against members of the larger society, but also against those members of their own group who are working to do well in school, in order to have a better life later on.

What is truly remarkable in its implications is the contrast between the higher rate of imprisonment among young men in the black ghettos of America today compared to the 1950s, and how that undermines the very argument in which these imprisonment rates are cited. Surely the supposed “root causes” of crime— poverty, discrimination and the like— were not
less
in the 1950s, before the civil rights laws and policies of the 1960s. And what of those blacks who do
not
drop out of high school but who go on to college instead— and seldom end up in prison? It should also be noted that, from 1994 on into the twenty-first century, the poverty rate among black husband-wife families was below 10 percent.
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Are these blacks living in a different external “system” or do they have a different internal culture, representing different values in their families or among others who have influenced them?

Yet such questions are seldom asked, much less answered. Instead, today’s higher rate of incarceration is blamed on drug laws, tighter sentencing rules, and a general failure of society. In short, society is to blame, except apparently for those members of society who actually commit the crimes. But, whatever the reasons for the higher crime rate now than then, or
between blacks and whites, it is indeed a tragic injustice—
from a cosmic perspective
— to be born into circumstances that make it more likely that one will commit crimes and be imprisoned, with negative consequences for the rest of one’s life. If some personified Fate had decreed this, then that would be the perpetrator of the injustice. But, if this is just part of the way the world has evolved, then it is a cosmic injustice— if something as impersonal as the cosmos can be considered capable of being unjust.

As noted in
Chapter 4
, a
cosmic
injustice is not a
social
injustice, and proceeding as if society has both the omniscience and the omnipotence to “solve” the “problem” risks
anti-social
justice, in which others are jeopardized or sacrificed, in hopes of putting some particular segment of the population where they would be “but for” being born into adverse circumstances that they did not choose. It is certainly no benefit to blacks in general to take a sympathetic view of those blacks who commit crimes, since most of the crimes committed by blacks— especially murder— are committed against other blacks.

Whatever the injustices of society that might be blamed as “root causes” of crime, the black victims of crime are not responsible for those injustices. Here, especially, “social justice” in theory becomes
anti-social
justice in practice, sacrificing innocent people’s well-being— or even their lives— because some other individuals are considered not to have been born into circumstances that would have given them as good a chance as others have had to achieve their own well-being without becoming criminals. Moreover, it is wholly arbitrary to imagine oneself in Rawls’ “original position” as a potential black criminal, rather than as one of the far more numerous blacks who are victims of criminals.

Those who say that we should “do something” seldom face the fact that everything depends on just what specifically that something is. Being lenient with criminals has not worked. Relieving poverty has not reduced crime. And certainly being “non-judgmental” has not done so either. Crime rates skyrocketed when all these things were tried, whether among blacks or whites, and whether in America or in England.

The automatic “celebration” of cultural differences, or the non-judgmental view of socially counterproductive behavior, for example, cannot be continued if the goal is to improve the well-being of actual flesh-and-blood people, rather
than seeking cosmic justice for an intertemporal abstraction. One can be humane or inhumane only to living people, not to abstractions.

Nowhere have intellectuals seen racial issues as issues about intertemporal abstractions more so than in discussions of slavery. Moreover, few facts of history have been so distorted by highly selective filtering as has the history of slavery. To many people today, slavery means white people holding black people in bondage. The vast millions of people around the world who were neither white nor black, but who were either slaves or enslavers for centuries, fade out of this vision of slavery, as if they had never existed, even though they may well have outnumbered both blacks and whites. It has been estimated that there were more slaves in India than in the entire Western Hemisphere.
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China during the era of slavery has been described as “one of the largest and most comprehensive markets for the exchange of human beings in the world.”
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Slaves were a majority of the population in some of the cities in Southeast Asia.
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At some period or other in history, as John Stuart Mill pointed out, “almost every people, now civilized, have consisted, in majority, of slaves.”
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When Abraham Lincoln said, “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong,”
²³
he was expressing an idea peculiar to Western civilization at that time, and by no means universally accepted throughout Western civilization. What seems almost incomprehensible today is that there was no serious challenge to the moral legitimacy of slavery prior to the eighteenth century. Christian monasteries in Europe and Buddhist monasteries in Asia both had slaves. Even Thomas More’s fictional ideal society, Utopia, had slaves.

Although intellectuals today may condemn slavery as a historic evil of “our society,” what was peculiar about Western society was not that it had slaves, like other societies around the world, but that it was the first civilization to turn
against
slavery— and that it spent more than a century destroying slavery, not only within Western civilization itself, but also in other countries around the world, over the often bitter and sometimes armed resistance of people in other societies. Only the overwhelming
military power of Western nations during the age of imperialism made this possible. Slavery did not quietly die out of its own accord. It went down fighting to the bitter end, in countries around the world, and it has still not totally died out to this day, in parts of the Middle East and Africa.
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It is the image of
racial
slavery— white people enslaving black people— that has been indelibly burned into the consciousness of both black and white Americans today by the intelligentsia— and not simply as a fact about the past but as a
causal
factor used to explain much of the present, and an enduring
moral
condemnation of the enslaving race. Yet two crucial facts have been filtered out of this picture: (1) the institution of slavery was not based on race and (2) whites as well as blacks were enslaved. The very word “slave” is derived from the name of a European people— Slavs— who were enslaved for centuries before the first African was brought in bondage to the Western Hemisphere. It was not only in English that the word for slave derived from the word for Slav; the same was true in various other European languages and in Arabic.
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