Thank you.
I agree with your argument in this powerful and concise article.
I have just a couple of additions or qualifications to suggest.
First, you correctly point out that the more privileges and power and recognition blacks have, courtesy of white America, the more blacks complain they are being harmed by white America. But you don’t directly address why this is the case. I would argue that the main reason is liberalism. In the argument I’m about to present, the first part is familiar and has been stated by me numerous times; the second part is new, or at least I think it is.
1. Liberalism says that all racial and ethnic groups are equally endowed with intelligence, and prohibits any disagreement with that idea, on pain of the destruction of one’s career and place in society. But in reality blacks are significantly less capable than whites and significantly more badly behaved than whites according almost every socioeconomic indicator that matters. Since liberalism holds that all groups have the same abilities, and requires that everyone believe that all groups have the same abilities, the inferior performance of blacks cannot be due to their lesser abilities and aspirations; it must be due to some force outside themselves. And since the Civil Rights movement established it in people’s minds that whites are guilty for all black problems, the idea of white guilt continues to be applied today. Blacks’ lesser performance and outcomes are caused by something whites are doing to, or failing to do for, blacks. Whatever the specific bad thing whites are doing, or whatever specific good thing they are failing to do, it always comes down in the end to white racism. White racism is the cause of black failure.
2. Therefore, even as blacks, or at least the black elite, keep gaining more and more privileges and power and recognition, blacks’ overall performance as a people does not improve. As a race they remain as far behind whites as ever (or, because of greatly increased illegitimacy and related disorders, all unleashed by liberalism, they are even farther behind whites than ever). The upshot is that blacks have more privileges and power and recognition than ever, even as their actual inferiority in abilities and performance is as great as ever. What this means is that the gap between blacks’ expectations of equality with whites, on one hand, and their actual performance compared with whites, on the other, has vastly increased. The gap between black expectation and black outcome has increased, and so blacks’ anger against whites increases, even as their power and their opportunity to express that anger and to have it heeded by whites has increased.
And this is why, the better off blacks are, the angrier at white America they become.
I’m not saying that this is the only possible explanation; but I think it explains a lot.
On another point, while your slogan Black Run America is effective and contains a lot of truth, I think it needs some qualifications. “Black Run America” implies that literally everything in America is run by blacks and for the sake of blacks. But of course that is not true. There is a great deal in America that has nothing or little to do with blacks, and that is not run by and for the sake of blacks. So I would put it like this instead. Wherever black issues come up, there is an automatic privileging of blacks, in which they are given far more than they deserve, while their dysfunctions, failures, and sins are systematically covered up and downplayed and blamed on whites.
Another problem with “Black Run America” is that blacks aren’t actually running America. White liberals are running America. Any power blacks have, has been yielded to them by white liberals. As an example, consider the case of Al Sharpton. After the Tawana Brawley charges were revealed as a complete lie in 1989,Sharpton, by any “normal” calculus, should have been wholly discredited and humiliated. He should have disappeared. Instead, his power kept increasing, until even Republicans were embracing him. Why? Because whites, instead of treating him as a persona non grata as he deserved, treated him as legitimate. All the power he has accrued since 1989 is a function of whites’ acceptance and legitimizing of him.
So, on one hand, I like the slogan Black Run America because it draws attention to the extraordinary and undeserved and mostly wrongly exercised power blacks now enjoy in America. It also draws attention to the fact that the power unjustly given to blacks is the template by which power has been unjustly given to other minorities as well. On the other hand, the slogan is not exact enough to convey the reality of actual racial power relations in America, and a more exact phrase is needed. However, I admit that it would be hard to come up with something as concise and attention-grabbing as “Black Run America.”
Jim C. writes:
Jim C. writes: