One of the unfortunate results from the BLM "summer of love," was the founders of BLM made out like bandits from the outpouring of funds by all kinds of corporate interests and otherwise. The founders are literal communists who previously met with and praised Venezulea's former dictator Nicolas Maduro.
“Systemic racism” is a feature of narcissism in several ways. First, failure is someone else’s fault. No ability to be self-reflective. A pathological resistance to constructive criticism. We see all of this and more in black academia (and by default, academia in general); what “racism” means is that there’s a “white” way of being that is distasteful if not unattainable by the hue and cry class. It’s resentment and contempt.
I have been privy to unbridled racism in Brooklyn, black against white, absolutely no interest whatsoever in achieving harmony and acceptance. Meanwhile your white friends will pounce on you for stating facts about crime etc.
I disagree that most black Americans do not participate in this. Most do. And until they stop, systemic racism will continue. It’s just not coming from the purported source; it’s narcissistic projection.
Excellent summary, of note the atomisation o family structure is hitting rural whites with the same force it did urban blacks decades earlier, minus gang violence, but with high rates of anomie, drug addiction and suicide.
I'm reminded of the Zoot Suit Riots in L.A. after the second world war, when Mexican gangs roamed East L.A. and fought with other, and in the 1950s, in East L.A., when Mexican gangs went around looking for white people to beat up. The Black people, who lived mostly in South L.A., were relatively quiet and minded their own business. East L.A. was relatively poor and the houses and businesses were run down. The people who lived there got fed up with their situation and there were local riots until, eventually, wages began to increase and those people's lives took a turn for the better. It seems that money and education does make a difference.
Yes education does make a difference. But it cuts both ways doesn't it? The thrust of my essay is not really about what uneducated mobs get up to....it's about the foolish, counter-productive ideas that privileged liberals emerge from their university 'higher education' with.
TL:DR: in the contemporary West, victim status is highly prized and therefore such status is both carefully curated and zealously defended against those who would claim a greater number of Wokemon points.
WOW! Great read! I would have used this essay in my curriculum as a Social Studies teacher. I retired from education in the summer of 2020, mainly because I would be reprimanded for using the essay as a teaching tool. It would be an excellent source for critical thinking. Nope, that wouldn't fly.
Excellent article and historical breakdown of how the left has viewed and been the actual perpetrators of real ongoing racism.
The left always attaches itself to an "opportunity" for them to signal virtue essentially because they lack any real belief structure resulting in their embracing of a more nihilistic view of the world.
As a result they must attach their own identity to an "opportunity" for them to signal the virtue that they truly lack in reality.
Good essay, but you left out crucial factors. As usual, there is no mention of the civil war. Why not? It's only the deadliest war, by far, that the USA has ever fought. It is the war of white against white, brother against brother, and democrat against republican. Guess which side was fighting FOR slavery. That's right, democrats. Republicans fought to FREE them. So, why do we whitewash that history to imply that all European whites favored slavery?
What elected officials stood against MLK? ONLY democrats. Who enacted and enforced every Jim Crow law? Democrats again. What political party rules every black ghetto in America, and hired every cop who ever killed a black man in the ghetto? Democrats.
The biggest snow job ever is that democrat 'influencers' have deluded Americans into thinking that everything they have done, and are doing, is Republicans' fault.
I think this line of reasoning is meaningless. For example, in the author's native country the Labour Party once represented the working man; they were a product of the Labour movement after all. Now working class whites have been abandoned in favour of the richer tapestry of non-British people whom they cultivate with great energy. No grievance is too small for the modern Labour Party. Except with the white working class who are to be destroyed.
That is to say, like the Democrats, things move on. A characteristic of today is the way cultural destroyers infiltrate institutions and and wear them like a disguise. In Britain the Royal Society, an old and venerated institution until recently, were early adopters of climate change and settled science. All nonsense. But it demonstrated they had been captured. Almost everything is. This is why they are hard to stop. For the cultural destroyers it is a religion. They never stop. They have to be stopped.
So Democrats, Republicans or Libertarians. Doesn't matter. We must identify them by their destructive deeds and tune out the great institution they claim to represent.
There's that old parable about the wolf in sheep's clothing. Those stories weren't told just for entertainment, they were meant to teach a lesson. These days, 'influencers' call themselves whatever they want, 'liberal', 'conservative' etc to get next to the people that they want to control.
Illegal aliens are now 'migrants'. Trump supporters are 'right wing extremists'.
Yes. As far as I'm concerned, anyone can say whatever they want. As they say, talk is cheap. Silly me, but when it comes to lying, I blame the people who believe the lies as much or more than I blame the liars.
It's when any group starts trying to enforce their beliefs on others that we have a problem. Anyone who wants to wear a mask, wear a mask. Anyone who wants to believe it's actually good for something, go ahead an believe it. But if they want to make me wear one, THEN we have a problem.
Good point on one hand; labels are meaningless after about 10 minutes. On the other hand, philosophies live on and the Democrat party retains its condescending demeanor toward all people considered their inferior, or just about everyone. The policies of today are redolent of the stench of 250 years ago, and of Sen. John C Calhoun.
This American is not deluded. I know who has done what to who. I've lived in a staunch dumbocrap city in a red state my entire life. I have seen the racism up close. I will never say that there are no racist Republicans, I'm sure there are, somewhere. Just as there are probably some non-racist dumbocraps, somewhere. I just sure don't know where.
Republicans aren't the guilty ones, we're just white, and therefore get blamed.
I enjoyed this essay and from my perspective, it showed a lot more insight to the pre-progressive/woke era than I have ever seen.
I was of college age during the mid-60s, on the US west coast, and subject to the draft. I attended college mainly to avoid being drafted. People like me automatically sympathized with what were obviously society's underdogs, and at the moment it was the mid-stage of the Civil Rights movement. So there was a generational unity that evolved between college middle class white youth and black culture in general, which was very evidently innocent of reasons for their underclass status. This seemed patently true, black society's public face being fronted by MLK, the NAACP, and CORE. The radical offshoots came later, and by then the affinity and sympathy for black causes *no matter what* were firmly established amongst my peers--and me, too.
This all carried forward into the 70s, and at least a part of the 80s. This is important, and I've been questioned and criticized by younger progressive college types over this, but there was during the 70s/80s a sort of mutual acceptance between the emerging black and white post war generation that there were significant cultural differences, and to some degree, priority of values, between mainstream black and white cultures, and *very likely there always would be some significant differences*.
...and that this was OK.
This created a kind of spicy social intermixing, unforced and freely chosen, when parts of either groups' culture was basically ignored by the other, without insult. A sort of symbolic representation was the tacit recognition that most/many blacks seemed to be much better dancers, and, by God, that was just the way to was going to be. I feel pretty sure that blacks, for their part found similar activities favored by whites as equally inaccessible or incomprehensible to them, and all of this seemed to be understood and accepted by both parties, and life went along pretty smoothly.
The very best way I can describe what it was like if you were not there at the time was that, as unlikely as it may sound, black/white interactions in period films by Quentin Tarantino really get close to capturing the sort of playful, sort of competitive social interactions between young blacks and young whites at that time. It was largely mutually respectful and positive.
Recalling this on internet forums, during interchanges with Millennial or Gen Z folk, I'm met with frank disbelief, with underlying innuendos of untruthfulness, and I'm basically lectured that none of the black people with whom I socialized, drinking and smoking, was anything other than my black friends being too afraid to speak openly with me, thus feigning contentment with their lives.
This uttered with absolute certainty by people who would not be born for 20+ years after the era I described, while I was a direct participant. Clearly, there is an overwhelming willingness to believe the current ideas about the nature of interracial relations for all eras, regardless of anything to the contrary.
Interesting perspective. I only had one black friend as a young man (we were both oddball/serious types). When I think of what's gone wrong with black culture in my time, I always come back to the great falling off of black music from the marvels of Swing then R&B, then Tamla, Soul and even Disco....all gone now and replaced by the (to me anyway) ugly snarling phenomenon of Rap.
Progressivism distorts reality in an attempt to justify itself. It distorts the past, making it darker to make the present appear brighter. It distorts the present, hiding its deficiencies opaque. It distorts the future, holding out the promise of 'continued' improvement seem more likely. The trend from where to where we're going is not from darkness to light, but the opposite.
The story of mankind as told in the Bible is from innocence to fallenness, and its story of redemption points to a future state, not a present one. Our hope is not one of rebuilding--certainly not of ourselves--but of a future transformation in a re-created earth. Even science, in its rare honest moments, recognizes that "The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that the state of entropy of the entire universe, as an isolated system, will always increase over time."
"But wind the clock back seventy years or so and the Black Lives Matter narrative would have been a substantially correct one. It is probably fair to say that, until the 1960s, a majority of white Europeans and Americans would – and without feeling any need to give it much thought – think of black African ethnicity as inherently inferior. One could call this a time of systemic racism."
I cannot speak for Americans but doubt that this was true for Europeans. For a start, there were very few black Africans around. Negroes, we used to call them, and I still do, since there is nothing pejorative about the term. The first real contact with negroes for the bulk of the British population was during the war when they came over in the US army. There was a separation in that army between blacks and whites which the British found quite shocking. Our own armies had long had people of different ethnicities from different parts of the empire going back to Victorian times. Different cultures, yes, but not "inherently inferior". My mother told me that off duty white American soldiers objected to their black comrades using the same pub as them and the former could not understand the British allowing anyone into the bars. Fortunately, British law prevailed off the American bases.
The domestic Brits were also exposed to dark skinned foreigners (negroes and indians) through cricket - teams from the West Indies, India, Pakistan etc toured England and played international matches. Many of these guys were heroes or models for boys. There was nothing inherently inferior about them! When the first waves of immigration from the West Indies occurred, there was obviously a feeling of difference about these people - not just their looks, but their diet, culture and - oh yes - their music. If they were regarded as inferior by some, it was because they were inferior in education. This is not a racial prejudice. The same would apply to poorly educated native Brits. Some also brought some bad habits with them. Dislike of these was not racially based.
So systemic racism in the UK before the 1960s? Not at all. What "racism" that apparently emerged after that was rather a preference for one way of life (orderly and polite) over another which the immigrants brought with them and was rooted in very different cultural traditions.
Well, hardly, but it was the one that stuck out as most were unexceptional - in the sense that I didn't take exception to them. The cross that writers have to bear is that they sweat over their work, assessing it critically at each paragraph, revising a bit here, deleting a bit there, changing words to produce a different shade of meaning - and all this takes time. Yet someone comes along, reads the article in a small fraction of the time the writer put into it, and only comments on one part of it. And the writer is disappointed. No one appreciates one's work as much as one self. PS I too am a writer (or was).
One of the unfortunate results from the BLM "summer of love," was the founders of BLM made out like bandits from the outpouring of funds by all kinds of corporate interests and otherwise. The founders are literal communists who previously met with and praised Venezulea's former dictator Nicolas Maduro.
https://en.panampost.com/panam-staff/2020/06/23/the-links-between-black-lives-matter-and-nicolas-maduro-revealed/
“Systemic racism” is a feature of narcissism in several ways. First, failure is someone else’s fault. No ability to be self-reflective. A pathological resistance to constructive criticism. We see all of this and more in black academia (and by default, academia in general); what “racism” means is that there’s a “white” way of being that is distasteful if not unattainable by the hue and cry class. It’s resentment and contempt.
I have been privy to unbridled racism in Brooklyn, black against white, absolutely no interest whatsoever in achieving harmony and acceptance. Meanwhile your white friends will pounce on you for stating facts about crime etc.
I disagree that most black Americans do not participate in this. Most do. And until they stop, systemic racism will continue. It’s just not coming from the purported source; it’s narcissistic projection.
Those who replied to "black lives matter" with "all lives matter" were castigated, including a Democrat presidential candidate.
So the Chauvin Jury was intimidated.
As we know.
That was not the first directed verdict, nor the last.
Excellent summary, of note the atomisation o family structure is hitting rural whites with the same force it did urban blacks decades earlier, minus gang violence, but with high rates of anomie, drug addiction and suicide.
I'm reminded of the Zoot Suit Riots in L.A. after the second world war, when Mexican gangs roamed East L.A. and fought with other, and in the 1950s, in East L.A., when Mexican gangs went around looking for white people to beat up. The Black people, who lived mostly in South L.A., were relatively quiet and minded their own business. East L.A. was relatively poor and the houses and businesses were run down. The people who lived there got fed up with their situation and there were local riots until, eventually, wages began to increase and those people's lives took a turn for the better. It seems that money and education does make a difference.
Yes education does make a difference. But it cuts both ways doesn't it? The thrust of my essay is not really about what uneducated mobs get up to....it's about the foolish, counter-productive ideas that privileged liberals emerge from their university 'higher education' with.
"higher education," now there's an oxymoron for you.
TL:DR: in the contemporary West, victim status is highly prized and therefore such status is both carefully curated and zealously defended against those who would claim a greater number of Wokemon points.
There’s a lot more to this article than you presume to summarize.
In that case, please share your takeaways...
LOL no follow-up. Maybe, I presume, being a self-righteous dick _is_ a victim category.
🫡 Wokemon points 🤣🫡
WOW! Great read! I would have used this essay in my curriculum as a Social Studies teacher. I retired from education in the summer of 2020, mainly because I would be reprimanded for using the essay as a teaching tool. It would be an excellent source for critical thinking. Nope, that wouldn't fly.
Thank you Mary for that kind endorsement.
Excellent article and historical breakdown of how the left has viewed and been the actual perpetrators of real ongoing racism.
The left always attaches itself to an "opportunity" for them to signal virtue essentially because they lack any real belief structure resulting in their embracing of a more nihilistic view of the world.
As a result they must attach their own identity to an "opportunity" for them to signal the virtue that they truly lack in reality.
You hit another home run here Grant.
Keep up the great work.
Thank you Brandon
Good essay, but you left out crucial factors. As usual, there is no mention of the civil war. Why not? It's only the deadliest war, by far, that the USA has ever fought. It is the war of white against white, brother against brother, and democrat against republican. Guess which side was fighting FOR slavery. That's right, democrats. Republicans fought to FREE them. So, why do we whitewash that history to imply that all European whites favored slavery?
What elected officials stood against MLK? ONLY democrats. Who enacted and enforced every Jim Crow law? Democrats again. What political party rules every black ghetto in America, and hired every cop who ever killed a black man in the ghetto? Democrats.
The biggest snow job ever is that democrat 'influencers' have deluded Americans into thinking that everything they have done, and are doing, is Republicans' fault.
I think this line of reasoning is meaningless. For example, in the author's native country the Labour Party once represented the working man; they were a product of the Labour movement after all. Now working class whites have been abandoned in favour of the richer tapestry of non-British people whom they cultivate with great energy. No grievance is too small for the modern Labour Party. Except with the white working class who are to be destroyed.
That is to say, like the Democrats, things move on. A characteristic of today is the way cultural destroyers infiltrate institutions and and wear them like a disguise. In Britain the Royal Society, an old and venerated institution until recently, were early adopters of climate change and settled science. All nonsense. But it demonstrated they had been captured. Almost everything is. This is why they are hard to stop. For the cultural destroyers it is a religion. They never stop. They have to be stopped.
So Democrats, Republicans or Libertarians. Doesn't matter. We must identify them by their destructive deeds and tune out the great institution they claim to represent.
There's that old parable about the wolf in sheep's clothing. Those stories weren't told just for entertainment, they were meant to teach a lesson. These days, 'influencers' call themselves whatever they want, 'liberal', 'conservative' etc to get next to the people that they want to control.
Illegal aliens are now 'migrants'. Trump supporters are 'right wing extremists'.
Indeed. But to focus on Democrats, then accuse them betraying some grand principle, is a waste of time. Better to judge them by their actions.
Yes. As far as I'm concerned, anyone can say whatever they want. As they say, talk is cheap. Silly me, but when it comes to lying, I blame the people who believe the lies as much or more than I blame the liars.
It's when any group starts trying to enforce their beliefs on others that we have a problem. Anyone who wants to wear a mask, wear a mask. Anyone who wants to believe it's actually good for something, go ahead an believe it. But if they want to make me wear one, THEN we have a problem.
Good point on one hand; labels are meaningless after about 10 minutes. On the other hand, philosophies live on and the Democrat party retains its condescending demeanor toward all people considered their inferior, or just about everyone. The policies of today are redolent of the stench of 250 years ago, and of Sen. John C Calhoun.
This American is not deluded. I know who has done what to who. I've lived in a staunch dumbocrap city in a red state my entire life. I have seen the racism up close. I will never say that there are no racist Republicans, I'm sure there are, somewhere. Just as there are probably some non-racist dumbocraps, somewhere. I just sure don't know where.
Republicans aren't the guilty ones, we're just white, and therefore get blamed.
You are only incorrect on one point. Not all republicans are white.
Blacks who vote Republican aren't really black, so there is that. Applies to browns as well.
I enjoyed this essay and from my perspective, it showed a lot more insight to the pre-progressive/woke era than I have ever seen.
I was of college age during the mid-60s, on the US west coast, and subject to the draft. I attended college mainly to avoid being drafted. People like me automatically sympathized with what were obviously society's underdogs, and at the moment it was the mid-stage of the Civil Rights movement. So there was a generational unity that evolved between college middle class white youth and black culture in general, which was very evidently innocent of reasons for their underclass status. This seemed patently true, black society's public face being fronted by MLK, the NAACP, and CORE. The radical offshoots came later, and by then the affinity and sympathy for black causes *no matter what* were firmly established amongst my peers--and me, too.
This all carried forward into the 70s, and at least a part of the 80s. This is important, and I've been questioned and criticized by younger progressive college types over this, but there was during the 70s/80s a sort of mutual acceptance between the emerging black and white post war generation that there were significant cultural differences, and to some degree, priority of values, between mainstream black and white cultures, and *very likely there always would be some significant differences*.
...and that this was OK.
This created a kind of spicy social intermixing, unforced and freely chosen, when parts of either groups' culture was basically ignored by the other, without insult. A sort of symbolic representation was the tacit recognition that most/many blacks seemed to be much better dancers, and, by God, that was just the way to was going to be. I feel pretty sure that blacks, for their part found similar activities favored by whites as equally inaccessible or incomprehensible to them, and all of this seemed to be understood and accepted by both parties, and life went along pretty smoothly.
The very best way I can describe what it was like if you were not there at the time was that, as unlikely as it may sound, black/white interactions in period films by Quentin Tarantino really get close to capturing the sort of playful, sort of competitive social interactions between young blacks and young whites at that time. It was largely mutually respectful and positive.
Recalling this on internet forums, during interchanges with Millennial or Gen Z folk, I'm met with frank disbelief, with underlying innuendos of untruthfulness, and I'm basically lectured that none of the black people with whom I socialized, drinking and smoking, was anything other than my black friends being too afraid to speak openly with me, thus feigning contentment with their lives.
This uttered with absolute certainty by people who would not be born for 20+ years after the era I described, while I was a direct participant. Clearly, there is an overwhelming willingness to believe the current ideas about the nature of interracial relations for all eras, regardless of anything to the contrary.
Interesting perspective. I only had one black friend as a young man (we were both oddball/serious types). When I think of what's gone wrong with black culture in my time, I always come back to the great falling off of black music from the marvels of Swing then R&B, then Tamla, Soul and even Disco....all gone now and replaced by the (to me anyway) ugly snarling phenomenon of Rap.
Progressivism distorts reality in an attempt to justify itself. It distorts the past, making it darker to make the present appear brighter. It distorts the present, hiding its deficiencies opaque. It distorts the future, holding out the promise of 'continued' improvement seem more likely. The trend from where to where we're going is not from darkness to light, but the opposite.
The story of mankind as told in the Bible is from innocence to fallenness, and its story of redemption points to a future state, not a present one. Our hope is not one of rebuilding--certainly not of ourselves--but of a future transformation in a re-created earth. Even science, in its rare honest moments, recognizes that "The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that the state of entropy of the entire universe, as an isolated system, will always increase over time."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFjjO_lhf9c
That Youtube link is actually embedded in the opening line of the essay?
crazy year
More than crazy - at least amongst the chattering classes - more like mass psychotic.
Hope you'll free sub to get my future posts.
Remember.
Yes remember... and hope will too subscribe to get my future posts free to your inbox.
"But wind the clock back seventy years or so and the Black Lives Matter narrative would have been a substantially correct one. It is probably fair to say that, until the 1960s, a majority of white Europeans and Americans would – and without feeling any need to give it much thought – think of black African ethnicity as inherently inferior. One could call this a time of systemic racism."
I cannot speak for Americans but doubt that this was true for Europeans. For a start, there were very few black Africans around. Negroes, we used to call them, and I still do, since there is nothing pejorative about the term. The first real contact with negroes for the bulk of the British population was during the war when they came over in the US army. There was a separation in that army between blacks and whites which the British found quite shocking. Our own armies had long had people of different ethnicities from different parts of the empire going back to Victorian times. Different cultures, yes, but not "inherently inferior". My mother told me that off duty white American soldiers objected to their black comrades using the same pub as them and the former could not understand the British allowing anyone into the bars. Fortunately, British law prevailed off the American bases.
The domestic Brits were also exposed to dark skinned foreigners (negroes and indians) through cricket - teams from the West Indies, India, Pakistan etc toured England and played international matches. Many of these guys were heroes or models for boys. There was nothing inherently inferior about them! When the first waves of immigration from the West Indies occurred, there was obviously a feeling of difference about these people - not just their looks, but their diet, culture and - oh yes - their music. If they were regarded as inferior by some, it was because they were inferior in education. This is not a racial prejudice. The same would apply to poorly educated native Brits. Some also brought some bad habits with them. Dislike of these was not racially based.
So systemic racism in the UK before the 1960s? Not at all. What "racism" that apparently emerged after that was rather a preference for one way of life (orderly and polite) over another which the immigrants brought with them and was rooted in very different cultural traditions.
Was that the only paragraph you read?....you give that impression.
Well, hardly, but it was the one that stuck out as most were unexceptional - in the sense that I didn't take exception to them. The cross that writers have to bear is that they sweat over their work, assessing it critically at each paragraph, revising a bit here, deleting a bit there, changing words to produce a different shade of meaning - and all this takes time. Yet someone comes along, reads the article in a small fraction of the time the writer put into it, and only comments on one part of it. And the writer is disappointed. No one appreciates one's work as much as one self. PS I too am a writer (or was).