Let us speak of race in America. We live in an interesting time.
The grave troubles black America has long inflicted upon herself, and secondarily inflicted upon the rest of us, are of course drearily familiar to us all—pervasive violence, omnipresent vandalism, rampant illegitimacy, illegal drugs, a culture of deliberate career failure and so on. Though in some ways worse than they used to be, black America’s troubles are hardly new. What is new is white America’s emerging attitude toward them.
White America has ceased to believe that she were responsible for black America’s troubles. She has ceased gradually but nonetheless, for a time was when she did believe. Another, middle time followed, during the late 1970s and through the 1980s, when she began to doubt, and thus when she obstinately erected a first-class taboo against the doubt. Today the taboo remains. The belief is quite dead.
The taboo indeed remains—a tall, forbidding totem pole, casting a threatening shadow, painted in garish colors, carved in hideous faces; yet the paint fades and peels. The totem pole is now feared rather than venerated. Each rain washes away a little more of the earth at its foot which holds the pole upright. Each sun further blanches the pole’s paint. Perversely, we still demand that our fellow white Americas give obeisance, genuflecting habitually to the terror of the pole as they pass—for, so long as they genuflect as cravenly as we do, so long as they will not insult the vain dignity of the hated pole, we will leave our fellows free to go peaceably about their business. Yet even as we enforce the pole’s vain dignity we also watch, furtively, expectantly, for the pole to topple and fall.
Does it not grow obvious to every white American?
- That the specter of white racism is an insubstantial phantasm; while incredibly, after all these years, there still exists no commonly accepted definition of the boo-word racist—not that it would matter now if there did.
- That white Americans are substantially unlike black Americans, that black Americans have largely ceased to seek a common future with the rest of us, and that there is nothing especially wrong with either of these broadly observable facts.
- That the American black is the greatest athlete and, from a certain perspective, the most creative musician in the world; but that he has made it increasingly unpleasant, ever more disheartening, to appreciate his evident natural excellence in either respect.
- That normal white Americans have essentially nothing in common with the black kid—you know the one—prowling the streets near you in his car, the windows down, the stereo up, the spotless baseball cap turned sideways on his head.
- That the black kid who does that is too obviously up to no good to be allowed to do it near us. (A note to any black kid who might read these words: If it is not your intent to upset white people, if you are going to be mixing among them, then press yourself a casual, light-colored button-down shirt and a pair of slacks—no suits, please—and add to it a clean, brown pair of business-casual shoes with dark socks and an unelaborated short haircut; then subtract jewelry, abolish sports-team logos, hide tattoos, kill the hip-hop—pre-1964 music of any kind is probably safe—stow the big-bad attitude; and you’ll be surprised how relaxedly acceptable such a uniform and manner will render you in white precincts. This is not hard. Moderately used clothes will suffice if they fit, but clothes which make a personal statement of any kind are out. President Obama understands this; so should you. I have no idea how many or few of you care, but that’s the advice. As you know, whites will lend you a certain social allowance to overdress them so long as you don’t look as though you meant to sound a trumpet to announce your departure for Bible study. My counsel, were it asked, would be to take advantage of the allowance. Don’t analyze it. Just try it, and be consistent about it. How fellow blacks react is neither my problem nor something I especially wish to understand, but normal white people are not displeased when you “act white,” so long as you don’t overdo it to the point of affectation and so long as you keep your hands off their women—for if you are after a white woman then you are playing a treacherous game according to very different rules. Otherwise, to the extent to which you will mix among whites, to the extent to which you wish to get along with them when you do, you’ll be glad that you tried the advice. Now, until digressing here, I was mostly addressing nonblack Americans, so let me return attention hence to the intended audience. By the way, I am in favor of Bible study.)
- That the only obvious reason the state does not publicly beat convicted thieves and vandals (of whichever race but disproportionately of the black) with a cane Saturday mornings in the city square is that so essentially harmless a chastisement might prove too simple, too effective and too inexpensive for contemptible, self-loathing white liberals to bear.
- That the fevered notion that black America were “vulnerable” to white America—the same black America which incessantly escalates her attempted physical intimidation of the rest of us; which vandalizes our public property, steals our private possessions, and rapes our beloved daughters in the normal course of a day’s unreciprocated enmity—is exactly as contemptible and precisely as absurd as it would have seemed to our grandparents’ grandparents.
- That America’s increasingly remote legacy of slavery interests a rapidly dwindling number of Americans who are not black.
- That, by white standards, an awful lot of blacks are regrettably but nonetheless impenetrably dimwitted, and that this unfortunate fact has pervasive consequences to racial relations.
- That black women have been promoted comically beyond their competence almost wherever they work.
- That there is hardly a sign to be discerned, anywhere you look, in the United States or elsewhere (possibly with the interesting, but lonely, exception of the isle of Barbados) that blacks can handle democracy or maintain a civil society.
- That there is little more than she has already done that white America can do to lift black America up; that talk is cheap; that whether black America is honorable or contemptible is not for white Americans by their attitudes but for black Americans by their acts to prove.
It remains taboo for whites to speak of such things in public. Taboos demand respect; this writer will not deny it. Yet has the time not come to accelerate this taboo into a dishonorable retirement? Has the time not come to topple the totem pole?
I suspect that it has.
The Civil Rights era is over. The era is dead. The era is done. The era began that overcelebrated day in 1955 on which Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus. The era ended that confused day in 2009 on which Barack Obama took his oath. The era is gone beyond recall now. Except as a zombie, except as a ghoul, it shall not again be revived.
Despite the incomprehensibly dense insistence of leading, white U.S. Republicans to the contrary, black Americans simply do not wish to be honorary whites. Even did they wish, there is little reason to believe that they ever could be. Black Americans are who they are. We ought to have the decency to accept this.
What white America should not accept is incompetence on the part of overpromoted black women, intimidation on the part of threatening black men and harassment on the part of self-loathing white liberals. What black America should not accept, at a minimum, is continued white patronization. Gradually, white America is ceasing to accept such things, and maybe black America is, too; though the jackals who feed on the corpse of Civil Rights will likely snarl and snap at us for ceasing during the decades to come. The effects of such a change are unpredictable by me. We live in an interesting time.
There will be those readers who ask, “If you’re so smart, Harrison, then how do you propose to solve such problems?”
But I have not proposed how to solve them, have I? Not really. Not other than to begin in the obvious way by ceasing to deny that problems exist. No, my critics shall have to do better than that. Times are changing, and mere abuse no longer suffices to distract. The critics are going to have to keep up.
Howard J. Harrison
The Economic Nationalist