What black rule (over any society, any institution) is like

James P. writes:

The Washington Times describes the Metro system as having a “culture of complacence, incompetence, and lack of diversity.” With 97 percent of the bus and train drivers being black, seems to me that they’ve got altogether too much diversity! [LA replies: by lack of diversity, they mean too black.]

Some telling quotes:

“a black man who spent eight years in prison for dealing PCP was promoted to a high-level management position soon after his release, and whites in the same positions as blacks with far less seniority are inexplicably paid less.”

“hardworking employees are actively excluded and those who rise are those willing to do the bare minimum.”

“a white male engineer near completion of a Ph.D. was passed over for a management position in favor of a black man who was barely literate.”

“Metro’s affirmative-action plan notes that the 1.4 percent of its bus and train operators who are Hispanic and the 25 percent who are female of any race are ‘less than reasonably expected.’ It does not make note of the 1.5 percent who are white.”

“There appears to be an entrenched network of African-American employees at WMATA that is able to steer jobs, promotion, training and other career enhancing benefit to persons of their own racial or ethnic group.”

“White and Hispanic employees who allege discrimination have found a deaf ear at Metro’s civil rights office, whose 17 employees are black.”

“It is common for midnight-shift [maintenance] workers to “lock the doors and go to sleep, because they’ve got other jobs,” and equally common for supervisors to turn a blind eye.”

Welcome to black-run mass transit in black-run America!

LA replies:

That is just an amazingly frank description of a black-run institution. Mainstream conservative outfits such as the Washington Times never speak about blacks in such honest terms. Is this the sign of a turn? Is the nation of cowards—or at least its conservatives—about to start speaking the truth about race?

But I’m being silly. Of course conservatives are not about to start speaking the truth about race. Conservatives will see the above-described problems in the Washington Metro system as due to affirmative action and race preferences, not to the character of black people. Get rid of the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” and blacks will do just as well as us!

But as I’ve said many times, the ultimate problem is not race preferences; the ultimate problem is the characteristics of blacks. If you have a city that is overwhelmingly black, then your municipal employees, your transit officials, your police officers, etc. are going to be overwhelmingly black. And because blacks operate at a vastly lower level of intelligence and probity than whites, such a city will sink into African-style incompetence and corruption, even in the complete absence of black racial preferences. But conservatives NEVER see or acknowledge this basic truth. Being liberals at their core, they only see the problem as procedural (caused by bad policies such as affirmative action), not as substantive (caused by the nature of black people).

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A reader writes:

I saw a quote somewhere a few years ago by a black businessman in South Africa to the effect that you had to keep a certain percentage of whites as employees, because when a deadline came up for completion of a project, etc., ONLY the whites would continue working until the job was done, no matter how long it took.

I think he was talking about salaried professionals, accountants for the most part if I remember correctly. If overtime pay was available, blacks might be willing to continue working, but if they were on salary, and staying late is a matter of honor, or a matter of fairness to the others who WILL be staying late (“teamwork”) then it didn’t happen.

Deadlines are for white people, and so is appointment etiquette. Blacks show up when they feel like it, if they feel like it. If they show up late, they expect to be accommodated anyway, and if they fail to show up, they expect a new appointment WITHOUT being criticized or questioned about any of their prior missed appointments.

And with black co-workers, you are always walking on eggshells. Can you imagine what it would be like to be one of the token whites working for the D.C. transit system?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 27, 2012 02:53 PM | Send