If You Want to Be “Attached to Slavery,” You’re Going to Remain Permanently Enslaved
Thanks for reading what I wrote and for taking the time to respond to it. I welcome reasoned engagement, whether it’s supportive or critical. I’ll offer some thoughts on your comments.
You wrote:
Blacks have every reason to be attached to slavery because the current state that Blacks are in in this country (socially, economically, politically) is a direct result of the system of slavery, which birthed Jim Crow and the current system of mass incarceration ( have you read Michelle Alexander?).
While I am familiar with Michelle Alexander’s work, the empirical evidence actually shows that — just as in the case of similarly unsupported phenomenon such as the toxic media-manufactured meme that there’s an epidemic of cops killing unarmed blacks or the myth of “implicit bias” — that there is no “mass incarceration,” if, by that, you mean black people being imprisoned for crimes they didn’t commit or black people being imprisoned en masse for low-level drug possession crimes. Here is a good article setting forth the evidence on that:
I’ll quote this particular passage on the myth that blacks are being primarily nabbed for marijuana possession or other silly “crimes” like that:
It is not marijuana-smoking that lands a skewed number of black men in prison but their elevated rates of violent and property crime. A 2011 study of California and New York arrest data led by Pennsylvania State University criminologist Darrell Steffensmeier found that blacks commit homicide at 11 times the rate of whites and robbery at 12 times the rate of whites. Such disparities are repeated in city-level data. In New York City, blacks commit over 75 percent of all shootings, according to the victims of and witnesses to those shootings, though they are only 23 percent of the city’s population. They commit 70 percent of all robberies. Whites, by contrast, commit under 2 percent of all shootings and 4 percent of all robberies, though they are 34 percent of the city’s population. In the 75 largest county jurisdictions in 2009, blacks were 62 percent of robbery defendants, 61 percent of weapons offenders, 57 percent of murder defendants, and 50 percent of forgery cases, even though nationwide, blacks are 12 percent of the population. They dominated the drug-trafficking cases more than possession cases. Blacks made up 53 percent of all state trafficking defendants in 2009, whites made up 22 percent, and Hispanics 23 percent, whereas in possession prosecutions, blacks were 39 percent of defendants, whites 34 percent, and Hispanics 26 percent.
If you want to get into the numbers on white policing of blacks and unjustified shootings of blacks, I give my highest recommendation to this super detailed and thoroughly documented piece of analysis by David Shuey:
I keep finding that when I start looking behind all the evidence of ongoing “institutional racism” that we keep hearing about — and I try to look at a variety of sources and make sure to play the “liberal” and “conservative” sources off against each other to make sure I’m not getting biased groupthink — all the dominoes start falling. Some of the best evidence of the fact that “institutional racism” against blacks doesn’t exist in any significant way is that blacks from Africa or the Caribbean are largely unaffected by such racism, at least as far as their average incomes are concerned; on average, many of these immigrant groups, such as Nigerians, actually overachieve compared to average American whites.
I wouldn’t be surprised if much of what gets called institutional racism is just a result of the fact that so much of the academic and media establishment is so heavily skewed to the left, resulting in filter bubbles and a lack of anyone influential voicing different views or even to serve as a sounding board to keep researchers honest, a sad situation that has been documented in great detail by the people at https://heterodoxacademy.org/, a politically diverse group of academics dedicated to combating the harm wrought by the general lack of political diversity in such institutions.
You wrote:
Additionally, why is it Blacks responsibility to detach from and no longer adhere to a system of race we #1 didnt create and #2 that victimizes us daily? Our lack of awareness of it further perpetuates our genocide in this country.
First, as I noted above, as far as I’m aware, there is no “system of race … that victimizes [you] daily.” I am sure there are racist incidents that happen, and there are various biases people hold, such as the one documented in that study with the résumé with the typical “white” name vs. the typical “black” name that resulted in different callback rates. But those kinds of biases are inevitable so long as blacks remain an underclass in America and will only get dissolved once blacks integrate into the middle class and beyond, just like every other previous group of immigrants that came here poor and uneducated and faced enormous bias until the group eventually worked its way up and out of bias.
But, you ask, why is it “Blacks[’] responsibility to detach from and no longer adhere to a system of race [you] … didn[’]t create”? It’s everyone’s responsibility, not just that of blacks. When you think about it, virtually none of the people who live in this country now, in 2018, whether black or white or Asian or Hispanic or anything else, created the system of race. I came here at four years old with my family as an economic refugee from a repressive communist society. What did I have to do with creating any system of race here? Why is it my responsibility to write these kinds of articles combating racism and the very notion of race, which is what I see myself doing? I’m doing it because I care deeply about this country’s future and my own future. I’d expect you’d feel responsible for the same reason. If you want to cast yourself or your whole “race” as a hapless victim, then you’ll remain a hapless victim for the rest of your life. If you get mired in anger and blame and self-pity, then that’s the level of thinking on which you’ll stay, but anger and blame and self-pity have never helped anyone build anything or lead a fruitful, productive life. More generally, one of the main reasons I’d think that blacks would be very interested in doing their part to unravel the ideology of “race” itself is that, empirically speaking, it’s a much better approach to combating racism than yelling and screaming at white people to check their supposed privilege, purge supposed biases of which they’re not even conscious and dismantle a supposed system of institutional racism of which there is very little evidence. I describe here, citing empirical evidence, why attacking the very notion of race rather than aggressive anti-racism is the better approach to take:
You wrote:
For us to not talk about our racial oppression absolves White ppl of guilt. I know White ppl want to be guiltless sooooo bad but you reap what you sow and it’s just untrue.
As I said, I wasn’t even born here and fled here from a different kind of oppression. I feel no guilt for slavery or racial oppression. But even for white people who were born here, many of their parents or grandparents were immigrants who had nothing to do with slavery or racial oppression. And even for white people whose ancestors were slave-holders or other participants in racial oppression, why should they feel guilt for something their ancestors did? If my great-great-great-grandfather was a murderer, am I supposed to feel guilt? Even if my father was a murderer, am I supposed to feel guilt? Obviously not. I didn’t make him a murderer. We do not, as a general rule, hold children responsible for the sins of their mothers and fathers. So, sorry, no guilt-trip here … and no guilt-trip is proper for whites as a whole.
I already hear the usual backpedaling rejoinder: but you and your ancestors and all white people are/were beneficiaries of this system of white supremacy and white privilege. Speaking first about myself, my family came to the U.S. with a grand total of $400, because that’s all you were allowed to take with you when you left the former Soviet Union behind. Growing up as a kid during the height of the Cold War, I faced all kinds of “commie” taunts and prejudices on the part of my teachers and other kids. My parents learned English, worked hard and eventually worked their way up, while I worked hard in school and did well and benefited from my own efforts. So, no, I didn’t benefit from anything other than my and my parents’ own hard work, coupled with whatever innate ability I might’ve had.
But that’s just me. Maybe some other people benefited from “white privilege.” Maybe, and maybe not. You have to look at individuals as individuals. Everyone has a different story. This is why creating race-based labels like “white privilege” is a classic case of racism. But even if they benefited from it, why should they in any way feel guilty about it? If I had inherited a fortune from my parents, I’m supposed to feel guilty about that? What people should feel guilty about is if they didn’t take what they had and make the best of it. If they had a little and turned it into a lot, that’s great, and if they started out with a lot and turned in into even more, than that’s also great, and I’m not just talking in financial terms. The people I respect the most are ones who spend their life learning and growing in all kinds of ways. The people I don’t respect are the ones who idle away their time, sitting in front of bright flashing screens of one sort or another, and then complain that their lives didn’t turn out quite the way they’d thought they should.
So, again, no, your statement that “White ppl want to be guiltless sooooo bad” is untrue. They don’t need to “want” to be guiltless. They are guiltless … or, at least, guiltless if the guilt is supposed to come from the mere fact that they are “white.” The fact that there are too many black people today who want to blame someone else for their problems “sooooo bad” doesn’t turn fantasy into reality.
You wrote:
Also, the heroes of our culture are not simply musicians and athletes. Black culture celebrates a number of activists and intellectuals (Martin, Malcolm, Dubois, Tubman, Douglas, Washington, Marshall, Carver, Garvey, Parks, etc).
I think you’re still completely missing my point. All the “heroes” you’ve described are black. If I describe my heroes, some of the people on your list would also make the cut, but there would also be others who are white and Asian and Hispanic and everything else. I don’t have a canon of heroes that I comprise on the basis of race. Nor is it the case that just because I’m Russian, the heroes of “my culture” are just Russian. That would be juvenile. The whole point I was making in that article of mine that you responded to is that culture belongs to everyone. There’s no reason for some racial pantheon of culture heroes.
You wrote:
We are obsessed with gaining liberation from oppressive systems.
The main “oppressive system” keeping many blacks down in 2018 is a system of thought that is “obsessed with gaining liberation from oppressive systems.” That unhealthy obsession isn’t helping anyone actually achieve anything. It’s keeping people mired in blame and anger. It’s also creating more racism on all sides. So if you really wanted to gain liberation from an oppressive system, you might want to try liberating yourself from that blame and anger and starting “obsessing” over something more productive — hard work, education, constant self-improvement, etc. I’m not saying you personally don’t do these things already, as I know nothing about you, but I’m making this point more generally. History has shown again and again that the surest and best path out of racism is full economic and social integration. Too many people today have it precisely backwards. They think they can browbeat white people into being less racist, and then all their problems will be solved. I’ve never seen any examples in history where that’s worked. When most people get yelled at and accused and vilified, whether on the basis of race or anything else, they don’t take it very well. They become more angry themselves, and they start identifying more with their own race, and then they go join extremist groups of their own, and they vote for politicians who cater to them on the basis of race. I’ve documented some of this here:
So that’s where we stand today: racism is indeed keeping many black people down … but not in the way you think. Many blacks’ own burgeoning racism against people who have paler skin is feeding the very kind of slave mentality that Kanye West’s over-the-top comments were intended to address. It’s time to set yourself free from that mindset. It’s time to set yourself free from the regressive paradigm of whiteness and blackness and join ordinary humanity.
