Systemic Racism

An eminence grise named Thomas Sowell tells us there’s no such thing as systemic racism.

He’s wrong. Let’s see. Today, Breitbart acknowledged Lewis Hamilton by griping about his Breonna Taylor Tee-shirt. (They’ve never noticed him before, greatest black living athlete that he is...) Limbaugh was eloquent about how many white Americans voted for Obama because they thought voting in a black President would put all the racial misery behind us. I said at the time it wouldn’t. Thing is, at a certain level, BLM is absolutely right. They’re just wrong about why and how it happened, and how to deal with it.

Two things happened in the Sixties. Lyndon Johnson promised to fix it all with his Great Society. He bulldozed their neighborhoods, built faceless ghetto “projects” instead, paid women welfare based on the number of illegitimate kids they had, made abortion into a commodity akin to drive-thru liquor stores, and promoted the most damaging set of laws and conventions ever instituted — far worse than Jim Crow — that the most elite schools should lower their standards by 30 or 40 percent to make sure there were as many black graduates of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, by percent, as whites. At the same time, the party of minorities, again the Democrats, decided that women were an oppressed minority and cleared the way for their speedy rise to the top of the capitalist food chain despite more than a century of underutilized education from Seven Sisters Vassar, Smith, Wellesley, Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, and Radcliffe (not to mention Pembroke, Douglass, Cornell, and Penn) while black men were still trapped in a ghetto life that did not reward fatherhood, religious faith, marriage, or hard work.

The last half of the Sixties was when the smartest of the black men turned their backs on the whole Civil Rights enterprise and turned to Eldridge Cleaver, Malcolm X, and Bobby Seale. Wouldn’t you have?

Johnson’s Great Society and Affirmative Action were the two biggest lies ever told to black people since “separate but equal” and “Martin Luther King changed the world through peaceful résistance.”

Where did it get us? Or them? The Democrat lies. Nearly half of all black pregnancies in NYC end in abortion. More than a third of young black males wind up in prison by their early twenties. They are most notorious these days for dressing in baggy prison pants, screaming in rap doggerel that all the women they fuck, or want to, are ho’s or white bitches, and joining murderous gangs that kill children in drive-by shootings because they can’t learn how to shoot without holding the firearm sideways. And did I mention drugs? Where did they come from? They came from, guess who, the (yes!) privileged white kids of the Sixties who found the first routes to smuggle in marijuana, peyote, cocaine and its derivatives in high volume from countries far away from the south Bronx.

So. There is no systemic racism because Oprah Winfrey, Denzel Washington, and that guy at your Golf Club? How is it not YOUR problem that the majority members of a race we swear and affirm and declare to be completely equal to ourselves are killing each other and their own progeny at a terrifying rate? Meanwhile, you know what’s what. Forget The Talk. You hear The Voice. The one you hear when the MBA you don’t quite trust from Harvard Business School or the doctor from Johns-Hopkins poised to operate on your little girl gets exercised and dispenses with his ghetto camouflage with a burst of Ebonics. Why this is called Secondary Racism, of the Post-60s Democrat Kind, and it will never end until you take a fucking stand against the race hustlers, corrupt politicians, and incredibly evil hucksters of psychobabble non-education and used-car-dealer-mentality abortionists. Systemic? You bet your fucking ass it is. Systemic as opposed to trailer park nativism. Bigger problem than that now.

Hypocrites. Hypocrites all who don’t ask themselves these questions in hard terms, acknowledge that the easy answers of the last 50 years absolutely HAVE TO BE THE WRONG ANSWERS. Giving them stuff is like buying off your kids with toys because you have no time or inclination to talk to the little bastards. Which you don’t.

It’s A problem. A Societal Problem. (Need more federal programs, more laws, more political bullshit that keeps bankrupting cities, overlooking violence, and conspiring actively in the murder of “family” as it relates to black people. Right. WRONG.) It’s just not YOUR problem.

Because we all know in our upper middle and upper class neighborhoods that even if black people are equal in general, existential terms, the current crop ain’t equal to you and yours, and fucking-A, nobody’s ever gonna fix it.

Except maybe a president who doesn’t regard them as a glob of votes to be exploited election cycle after election cycle without ever reaching out to listen, innovate, show up where they live, and help.

Done witcha.

I don’t hold Dr. Sowell responsible. He is an eminent scholar, a national treasure, a living proof of his own best points about the mistakes of nativist racism past. But that brand of anti-black prejudice is irrelevant, hugely outnumbered now, except in the ranks of the elite and majestically powerful. How we get plagiarists in major publications nobody fact checks. How we get no black CEOs at major Wall Street brokerage and banking firms, etc, et al.

An apocryphal anecdote about Clarence Darrow. Asked about his ideal jury, he replied, “Twelve Episcopalian men. They may be prejudiced, bigoted, judgmental, but what they are above all else is fair. I’ll take their verdict any day.”

I was raised in a now defunct, politically poisoned religion called the Episcopal Church. But my faith came from my dad, who was fair to a fault, to the end. I don’t see this trait anywhere anymore. Why I think the nation is probably doomed, no matter how the young’uns vote.