Replies

A few.

For one there are “independent black educational institutions,” and they seem to spend too much energy teaching: “White people are not going to just let you implement your program” ;“They have created laws, rules, and regulations that are designed to keep black people down.”; and “I will never stop showing up when one of my brothers or sisters is harmed by some white person.”

As to the first there is no sense that black educational institutions aren’t just as overrun with Cultural Marxist and socialistic claptrap as much of the rest of academia is. Being racially independent is meaningless if the commies have moved in and moved in to stay. So right off the program that this young man says would be opposed, which the writer sums up as “to do for self”, will be vigorously opposed by BLACK academia both in these independent institutions and in others which are just ordinary colleges.

White Liberals at these last will go along with Black Liberals on this both because they seem to tend to have a negative attitude about blacks being able to do for themselves (which it why they need handouts and give always) but mainly because when you scratch either the Red they are just beneath the surface (though less so now that they don’t have to hide it as much) isn’t just because of blood AND ANYONE doing for themself without needing Leftist is contrary to the progrom of advancing the Left.

And while we’re at it, let us not presuppose that White Liberals came up with things like these talking points the young man regurgitated, they just found their own reasons to believe.

This brings up the next point, that the We vs They that pervades these three talking points is one that some, but not all, of the figures that the writer respects were also pushing. Their elixir which they proposed, being proactive and industrious, may have been one agreeable to actually achieving measurable good but there was still something at times and from certain individuals listed that could still manage to put some the old kibosh on bootstrapping advised and THAT is in line with the second talking point:

“They have created laws, rules, and regulations that are designed to keep black people down.”

We vs They has an interesting effect on people, it encourages them to think in terms of abstract entities and how belonging to an entity confers things upon flesh and blood Persons that may have nothing to do with what those Persons actually face. The “We” has in the past experienced real opposition from without, of the sort that makes what folks whine about these days pale by comparison. The “We” transmits this sense of injury from the Persons who actually suffered to those that haven’t. And so the past wrongs are evergreen, they never wilt and fall from the tree, and because of this Persons are ideologically encumbered by the suffering of their forebears even as they may be lamentably unburdened by the positive examples of their forebears as they look to Liberal solutions and collective responses.

To be absolutely blunt: very few black Persons after the Civil War went on to establish fortunes ... but at the same time very few previously poor white Persons at the time of the Civil War went on to establish fortunes as well. This remained true all during the worst of segregation all across the South when all anyone could do was to do for self or starve (so very few of anyone in that era lived lives if indolence).

So on one level, if men thrown into the mix in destitution lacking education were able to achieve wealth amid terrible opposition are these somehow spurious exceptions that squeaked by white people noticing them?

This is another aspect of these We vs They constructs: as myths, as truisms of belief, they do not admit falsification. Whatever seems to reinforce them is adopted without question as verification even if they’re spurious where whatever might falsify them is seen as spurious.

That poor whites didn’t become rich under similar conditions where poor black people didn’t means that the common circumstances and more or less median abilities are what mattered. Success isn’t about getting lucky and a late 19th century black man who succeeded has something in common with a rags to riches white just as still in rags, black or white, have things in common that have nothing to do with race. The rules and regulations that the second talking point decrys were not enough to stop success while they still existed ... how are they still holding blacks down now that they’ve so disappeared that race mavens have time and energy to be offended by statues or the words to Ebony and Irory?

The We vs They becomes an anchor, a mill stone hung around the neck, a poison for those who drink of it. People become trapped by a reality they’ve never experienced and will never experience because it’s yesterday’s reality and not today’s.

And We vs They underscores the whole of the third talking point. The young man may as well have said “I’m my skin’s, and I’m going to help other people with skin like mine because I assume people possessed by skin different than mine are substantively different from me.”

No, none of that not judging men by the content of their character and what they actually do guff from the Left, no matter if White or black. That’s a hopelessly unhip way to think about race. Just as thinking things change is unhip, or that people don’t inherit alternately suffering or culpability is uncool.

C.S. Lewis, a terribly white fellow one must confess, briefly wrote of people addicted to misery in his tale The Pilgrim’s Regress. These are people who just can’t be properly happy unless they think they’ve got something to be unhappy about. Lewis’ misery addicts were neither described as white nor black, they were just people ... but maybe just maybe were we to observe such creatures as he described how many would be Leftist?