Glibertarians.com 2017 Archive

Author: Suthenboy

  • Identity Politics Part III: There is More to a Person Than Meets the Eye

    Previously: Part One – If You Can’t See the Chains, Does it Mean They Aren’t There? & Part Two – Let’s You and Him Fight!

    by Suthenboy

    I grew up in a home where racism was not a thing.  We acknowledged that racism existed but it was only ever discussed fleetingly and in vague terms. I spent my early years in Catholic Schools where racism was essentially non-existent. My brother and I had groups of friends that looked like rainbow parties. I was completely ignorant of the language, behavior, and thought processes that were more prevalent in the wider world outside of mine. My rude introduction to that world came when our Catholic School closed down, and I began seventh grade in the wonderful world of public schooling.

    Acclimating to this new world meant making friends. I was moderately successful at that. I had decent social skills and could size up candidates in short order. One of the guys I kept running into I will call Ronnie. Ronnie was a tall, lanky Black kid who seemed good-natured. We didn’t have very many Blacks in that rural school district and though they mostly kept to themselves, there wasn’t any noticeable tension between the Blacks and Whites. Ronnie and I had a few friendly conversations and interactions in passing, and it seemed like our friendship was off to a good start.

    One morning while changing classes, Ronnie and I passed each other in the hall. He blindsided me with a punch to my shoulder (something that was commonly meant as a gesture of friendship). My arm cramped up and I dropped my armload of books. I laughed because I hadn’t seen it coming, he had ‘gotten me’.  Just as he was laughing and turning away I caught him on the shoulder with a quick jab. He laughed. I scrambled to pick up my books and head to my classroom, pointed my finger at him and jokingly said, “Watch out boy!”

    Ronnie hit me hard in the face and I was on my ass. That was not a friendly punch and he was pissed. I was confused. I asked him why he had done that. His face was twisted and angry when he said, “You called me ‘boy’”.

    What? What the hell was he talking about? ‘Boy’ was a common term built into the language of the 13-year-old ‘boys’ in my circles back then. It was just a word and an accurate one. It was inconceivable to me that such a harmless word would bring about a schizophrenic change in the guy I thought I knew.

    Ronnie and I never spoke again despite finishing out our schooling and graduating in the same class. I felt bad for unwittingly insulting him, and he felt bad for reacting the way he had when no slight was intended. We found ourselves at odds in a world neither of us created because of a complex stew of economic and social reasons we did not understand. We were too young and naïve to know how to bridge that gap. The divide between us was not racial, it was cultural.

    A simplistic misconception in the minds of most people is that the differences they see in people of different ethnicities is due to innate differences in those ethnicities, instead of the cultural influences one is subject to during their formative years. That those innate differences do not exist is painfully obvious for anyone who cares to look. Yet solving problems related to race remains difficult primarily because that conflation is actively perpetuated by those who gain from poisoning society with identity politics.

    The first place I look is a small High School in Washington D.C. that was founded in 1870 named Dunbar High School. It was the first public High School in the country devoted exclusively to educating Blacks. Its founders operated on the premise they developed after noticing the stark differences in IQ scores between northern and southern Whites. In descending order, the regional IQs in the country were northern Whites, northern Blacks, southern Whites, and lastly southern Blacks. They sought to displace the culture that southern Blacks had absorbed from their White contemporaries with that of the north.

    By holding the southern Black students to the same standards, or higher, as those of northern Whites, their students achieved a remarkable result. When IQ tests were given again in 1899, the students at Dunbar, the only black school in the city, scored second highest in the city. While the average IQ for Blacks nationwide was merely 85, the average for Dunbar students was over 100 every year until 1955. The majority of Dunbar High graduates were accepted into college, making Dunbar unique in all the country. Nearly 30% of numerous Dunbar grads who attended Harvard, Amherst, Yale, Williams, Cornell, and Dartmouth graduated Phi Beta Kappa. Dunbar grads became the first Blacks to: rise from enlisted man to commissioned officer in the Army, the first Black graduate from Annapolis, the first female Black to earn a Ph.D., the first Black federal judge, the first Black general, the first black cabinet member, Dr. Charles Drew who pioneered blood plasma. During WWII, large numbers of officers from captain to general were Dunbar graduates.

    It is glaringly obvious that the success Dunbar graduates achieved was due to the cultural influences they received at their school and this was met with no small amount of criticism from both the Black and White communities as identity politics sought to poison it.

    Dr. Thomas Sowell on Dunbar:

    “What is relevant to the issue of culture was that this was a school which, from its beginning, had a wholly different cultural orientation from that of the ghetto culture. Seven of its first ten principals were educated in a New England environment. Four had degrees from colleges located in New England and three had degrees from Oberlin, which was established by New Englanders in Ohio as a deliberate project to plant New England Culture in the Midwest. Dunbar High School issued a handbook on behavior to its students that spelled out how one should act, not only in the school but in the world at large. The values and deportment these students were taught would today be called by critics “acting white.”

    Nor did the difference in Dunbar students behavior go unnoticed by the local black community. Dunbar High School became so controversial among blacks in Washington that the late Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post columnist William Raspberry said that you could turn any social gathering of the city’s middle-aged blacks into warring factions by simply saying the one word “Dunbar”.

    In the end, identity politics and ghetto culture won out. Dunbar was demolished and the program dismantled by the cause to banish Black elitism.

    While racism in the United States is mild by comparison to other countries, it still plays a very prominent role in our politics and public discourse, kept alive by those who benefit from a divided citizenry. Conflating race and culture is a strategy used by self-appointed elites to set people with common interests against one another, dividing them along the wildly ridiculous line of race. Vast oceans of human potential have been squandered before and after Dunbar’s existence by the absurd fallacy that a person’s potential is determined by the skin color of one’s parents, and we are all poorer for it. We are all human. Potential is individual, not racial. As my Grandfather was fond of reminding me “It don’t make a shit who your Daddy is. The only thing that counts is what YOU do.”

    We should be looking to build a culture that maximizes everyone’s ability to achieve their potential regardless of race. We can rebuild Dunbar. It needn’t be for Blacks. It should be for Americans.

     

  • Identity Politics Part 2: Let’s You and Him Fight!

    By Suthenboy

    A divided people are more easily conquered. The Imperialist European powers were well aware of this and commonly drew borders in their overseas colonies to encompass competing indigenous peoples so that those groups would fight with each other and not the conquering Europeans. Additionally they gained political capital by putting themselves in the position of arbiters of the disputes and alleviators of grievances for those indigenous people. The political left in the modern United States is also well aware of this strategy.

    Their most powerful weapon today is identity politics and the trump card in that deck is racial identity. They actively and deliberately fan the flames of racial animus and stoke grievances among minority populations. By playing the part of arbiters and alleviators they gain loyal voter support of minorities and by cobbling together a number of those minorities seek to gain a majority. They use the threat of labeling one a racist as a gag for those that disagree with them. The problem of course is that it is injurious to our society and culture to set a common people against themselves. Fortunately it appears to be a failing strategy of late yet they are doubling down on it.

    They have targeted every minority but the primary recipients have been Blacks. Until recently Black Americans were the largest minority in the United States. Constant reminders of the history of slavery, of real and imagined grievances, and relegating them to second-class citizenry have divided our country politically along racial lines. Over time and with great effort many of the rifts between Black America and the rest of the country had largely healed but they are intent on re-opening those wounds. Their post-racial America looks more like the mid-nineteenth century than the early twenty first.

    My own children belong to groups of friends that include mixed couples and members of all races, including a number of Blacks. In their direct experience those rifts don’t exist, but ask them about it and they can tell you all about the ignus fatuus that animates their politics.

    The left has actively and deliberately perpetrated resentment among the races for their own political gain successfully for decades. Many of them focus exclusively on that goal and profit handsomely from it. In order to do this they necessarily must cast away the very foundation of liberty – self-ownership. Self-ownership does not tolerate the assignment of collective guilt – that some are guilty of the sins of others. Personal responsibility is an anathema to those pushing to redistribute wealth from the descendants of slave holders to the descendants of slaves. No members of either group are victims or perpetrators and one of those groups barely exists at all.

    Their assignment of guilt is built on the absurd assertion that one is guilty of acts they neither performed or had any hand in deciding. The inevitable conclusion of the assertion that whites are guilty by mere virtue of their skin color, something they can cannot decide or change, refutes the agency of a large portion of the human race. Simply put it is the very dehumanizing bigotry that gave rise to slavery in the first place.

    How then to remedy this? What would be enough? If mere whiteness is guilt then nothing will ever be enough because we cannot change the past nor can anyone change their skin color. The repugnant answer to that question can only be total theft and extermination. Their answer is not to end oppression but to have the oppressed and oppressors exchange places. The morality of our society would decay to the primitive.

    The most grotesque aspect of this strategy is that the very premises of it are smoke. Racial differences are will-o-the wisps and focusing on them distracts us from solving real problems. It deprives all of us of the benefits of solidarity with our fellow countrymen. It wastes vast amounts of human potential. It creates unnecessary strife and poverty.

    The first step in solving this problem is to identify the problem. What if it turns out the problem is not a problem at all. That in a calculated way the left has manufactured straw giants and murky definitions which is a much bigger problem than race or class?

    See that Black dude over there? We have a common humanity. He isn’t a Black dude. His name is John and he is my countryman. So I ask you what does race mean?

  • Identity Politics Part 1: If You Can’t See the Chains Does it Mean They Aren’t There?

    By Suthenboy

    Without modern mechanized methods of farming it is necessary that humans hands perform that labor. That doesn’t mean mass human labor is necessary to become wealthy; without sophisticated machinery, daylight to dark toil is necessary just to have enough to eat. This economic reality gave rise to forcibly capturing people and coercing labor from them. It goes by the common name of slavery and it was universally practiced by all cultures on earth at one time. It was seen as a normal practice and though everyone would object to becoming a slave, neither slave nor master objected to it as an institution. It was just considered the way things are. As technology advanced and our means for creating wealth became greater, the need to co-opt the labor of others lessened. With the spread of the ideas born of the Western Enlightenment slavery quickly became regarded as less the way things are and more the way things should not be. It is now rightly reviled by Western Civilization, but in many ways its shadow hangs over us. The cost of slavery was high in lives and in moral currency. Slavery debases not just those held but the slaver as well. Slaves are deprived of their freedom and the slaver of his humanity. The stone age indigenous peoples of the Americas could not be successfully enslaved. The kind of confinement and structure it required was so alien to them that they simply died when it was imposed on them. The solution was, of course, to replace them with Africans. The slave trade was as old as time in Africa and still thrives today. Europeans desperate for labor in their new colonies eagerly stepped into that market.

    I live in the deep south. The Antebellum plantations that pepper my state mostly operate as tourist attractions these days. A few are still profitable as farms but tractors perform the backbreaking work, not humans. If you drive the River Road between Natchitoches and New Orleans, braving the stifling heat and humidity to tour some of these vast forerunners of modern industrial agriculture, you will get an idea of what a monumental struggle it was to produce wealth in the wild and expansive Mississippi flood plain. If you have ever worked in agriculture, your experience will give you a better idea of the scale of the superhuman effort that required.

    Of the 12-13 million Africans brought to the Americas as chattel, only a small fraction, some 400,000, were transported to the United States. Right from the start, this practice was controversial. Western European culture was more enlightened than any on earth at the time. The idea of individual liberty blossoming here and the glaring conflict that holding men as property presented with liberty was…I won’t sugarcoat it… problematic to say the least. Charles Carroll, signer of the Declaration of Independence, summed up the prevailing opinion nicely when arguing against slavery “Why keep alive the question of slavery? It is admitted by all to be a great evil.”

    In the United States, the slave trade was somewhat unique in that it had strong racial overtones. Everywhere else, a person’s race had little to do with slavery. Historically, slavery was an equal opportunity employer. The slaves here, aside from those held by the indigenous people, were exclusively Africans. The feeble justification was that blacks were inherently inferior, that exposure to western civilization would improve them and advance their race.

    That evil practice was ended and not just by the advent of modern machinery and cheap energy or the dawning of a new morality. The intractability of those advocating for slavery eventually had to be overcome with powder and shot. The scale of that destructive war, both in lost property and blood, exceeded anything up to that time and every war after it until WWI. With that the barbarism of enslaving human beings was extinguished in the United States.

    Still, the ghost of slavery haunts us all. The advent of 1863 saw President Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation, and after the war he attempted to repatriate those who had been enslaved by birthing the nation of Liberia on the west coast of Africa. Still, there are remnants of that ghastly practice with us. The gussied up corpses of those plantations are still here. Driving south from Alexandria on the old Baton Rouge highway, you will see cabins that housed slaves still standing, now housing renters. The fields and orchards are still here, worked by the relentless plodding of tractors.

    At the end of the Civil War, the vast majority of those that had failed to perpetuate a primitive and outdated economy gathered what they could in wealth and property, fleeing to lands more amenable to their culture. The war had brought to a head the animosity between the conflicting cultures of enlightenment with primitivism, so they slipped away from the wrath of the victors. They would have been fools to stay and dead ones, at that. Anyone curious enough can travel to remote towns in various Latin American countries and find bizarre places where Antebellum America still lives, places where those seeking to escape revenge found a refuge to perpetuate that way of life.

    Despite the reminders around us, are those ghosts really ours? There is not a person alive in the United States today who has been held in bondage, nor a person alive today who has held another in bondage. Though the struggle was great, every descendant of slaves today enjoys equal standing before the law, on paper anyway, to every other citizen. Those that care too often thrive on equal footing with every other ethnicity.

    The vast majority of the white population here does not even have ancestors who held slaves. I can trace my own family back to the late seventeenth century in the Americas, and not one of those individuals held slaves. On my mother’s side, there are only abolitionists, and on my father’s side, no one wealthy enough to afford the purchase of slaves. The majority of white Americans are descended from immigrants that arrived on these shores after slavery was abolished. This is the most common legacy of white Americans today.

    In history, the United States is remarkable in the social and cultural progress it has achieved. In less than 200 years, we progressed from a culture that more resembled the old world order, to one that is most unique, one that holds liberty and the sovereignty of the individual above all else. Our founding principles allow us to cast off the yoke of history and forge ahead to new, better cultural ground. In many ways we have dragged the rest of the world with us, though they still have some catching up to do.

    These days, my old bones are more comfortable at home. I prefer good food, a warm fire, and, most of all, the company of my wife; but this was not always the case. I have travelled to many places in the world, and one of the things that struck me was the racism and tribalism outside of the U.S. The perception of the U.S. by the rest of the world of America as a country eaten alive with racism, appears to me to be projection. Racism as it exists here in America is mild in comparison to the rabid, virulent racism almost everywhere else.

    Why, then, we still struggle so much with the question of race is an interesting and important question. Go ahead, give it your best shot.