Is the liberal belief in black equality losing its hold over people’s minds?

James N. sends this excerpt from an interview of John Derbyshire at the blog Vox Populi:

VOX POPULI: I get the definite impression that something has changed. You talk about how 50 years ago, you would have had some different opinions more in line with the Standard Model view of race. And certainly 20 years ago, the reflexive anti-racist position was the normal one in educated society. But now things have changed and people are much less terrified of having the race card waved at them. Have you noticed that yourself?

DERBYSHIRE: There are a number of things in play there. One, which I’ve written about more than once, I think, in the United States, is just despair. I am of a certain age, and I was around 50 years ago. I was reading the newspapers and following world events and I remember the civil rights movement. I was in England, but we followed it. I remember it, I remember what we felt about it, and what people were writing about it. It was full of hope. The idea in everyone’s mind was that if we strike down these unjust laws and we outlaw all this discrimination, then we’ll be whole. Then America will be made whole. After an intermediate period of a few years, who knows, maybe 20 years, with a hand up from things like affirmative action, black America will just merge into the general population and the whole thing will just go away. That’s what everybody believed. Everybody thought that. And it didn’t happen.

Here we are, we’re 50 years later, and we’ve still got these tremendous disparities in crime rates, educational attainment, and so on. And I think, although they’re still mouthing the platitudes, Americans in their hearts feel a kind of cold despair about it. They feel that Thomas Jefferson was probably right and we can’t live together in harmony. I think that’s why you see this slow ethnic disaggregation. We have a very segregated school system now. There are schools within 10 miles of where I’m sitting that are 98 percent minority. In residential housing too, it’s the same thing. So I think there is a cold, dark despair lurking in America’s collective heart about the whole thing. That’s one factor. Another factor is the Internet, especially YouTube. Now, you can log on any morning to the Drudge Report and see videos of crowds of black Americans misbehaving. Maybe there should be some videos of white Americans misbehaving, but there just aren’t that many. People are seeing these things and it’s fortifying that despair.

[End of interview excerpt.]

James N. writes:

His thoughts resemble mine almost exactly, it’s amazing how much we didn’t know, back in 1955-64. The premises of the “civil rights movement” remain inviolable, even among realists. But this requires that there be no discussion of the outcomes of the “movement,” at least no discussion that associates those outcomes with the antecedent premises.

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Paul K. writes:

James N writes:

The premises of the “civil rights movement” remain inviolable, even among realists. But this requires that there be no discussion of the outcomes of the “movement,” at least no discussion that associates those outcomes with the antecedent premises.

This strikes me as well. Neocons will freely confess that the great sin of conservatism is that it didn’t embrace the civil rights movement at its outset, as if it were impossible to point to any negative consequences for whites as a result of its triumph. As you have pointed out, this is because whites are no longer permitted to see themselves as a group with its own interests. At the outset of the civil rights movement, whites were still inclined to do so and virtually every one of the negative consequences they foresaw was realized.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 17, 2012 09:43 AM | Send