Young black men in America are eight times more likely than young white men to commit murder and five times more likely to commit other violent crimes. On the basis of that data, is it fair for me to conclude that a young black man standing in front of me is a mugger and murderer?
No, of course not. The vast majority of black men are not violent. Logically speaking, general information about a group is unreliable evidence about an individual. Legally speaking, it’s inadmissible as evidence in court. Morally, it’s racist.
Racism is hard to overcome because in an anthropological sense it’s quite natural. Our DNA has programed us to be wary of unfamiliar faces. Back on the savanna, unfamiliar faces were from other tribes, many of which were unfriendly. Hominins whose DNA did not include this programing tended not to propagate it.
You can see the wariness of unfamiliar faces in infants. The first few times they see a person of another race, they’re confused. In immature minds, and many mature ones, confusion produces fear. That’s instinctive.
The fact that racism is partly instinctive, however, does not make it right or good. And it doesn’t make it insurmountable. It’s also instinctive for people to kill when they feel threatened and to steal when they feel covetous. Until relatively recently in human history, that’s indeed what we did.
But in civilization, we control such primitive instincts. We may feel threatened, but we don’t kill. We may have material wants, but we don’t steal. We’ve rightly determined that killing and stealing damage society.
To deter people from committing these destructive acts, we established a system of legal punishment. We call that system “justice.”
In conjunction with the justice system, moral and religious codes evolved in nearly all cultures that deem such actions to be wrong. People who engage in them get threatened with hell or bad Karma or other unpleasant fates.
Racism, I’m glad to say, has joined murder and stealing as societally impermissible. Think what you want about people of other races – we don’t criminalize thought yet—but don’t bring racism to the public square. Or even to my house.
Though not perfect, this has worked reasonably well. Until now.
Now it’s not only permissible but fashionable and even compulsory to judge people on the basis of their race. We’re told to stereotype black people as hapless victims, notwithstanding a twice-elected black president, wildly rich and idolized black entertainers and athletes, and prosperous black businessmen and women.
On the flip side, we’re told the white race is a racist race. White people who try not to be racist, and think they’ve succeeded, are the most racist of all for failing to recognize that they’ve failed.
White people are required to confess that they’re racist even as they try not to be, and further confess that they always will be no matter how hard they try. The intelligentsia now make a big show of such confessions because it makes them feel virtuous and, a bit weirdly, like victims themselves.
Their cheap talk goes something like, “I’m so sorry I’ve acted badly. It’s because my bad race has given me the racism disease. If only I hadn’t been born white.”
In short, in the name of anti-racism, we’ve legitimized racism by declaring that white people are racist because of their race. Black lives matter, but the racist lives of these racist white people don’t, and it’s racist to suggest that they do.
Maybe they should be enslaved. Until then, they should grovel.
Now that racism is no longer prohibited, it’s unsurprising that other societal prohibitions are getting lifted as well. Even some of the elite now suggest that murder is OK if the victim holds “wrong” political beliefs. And thievery is OK if the thieves are of the “right” race.
They call this new paradigm “social” justice. It’s applied not on the basis of your acts but on the basis of your skin color. Individuals deemed oppressed due to their race have license to oppress individuals deemed to be oppressors due to their race.
Now that two wrongs make a right, how long before three or four wrongs make something even righter? Anarchy, here we come.
We’re devolving back much further than the Reign of Terror and even further back than the Huns that sacked Rome. We’re heading back to the caves.
the Aspen beat 
IO, Information Operations. Don’t get taken in, start pounding thighs.
US IC / FPE / Press are intentionally driving us towards conflict, they are intentionally divisive. Their target / enemy is us. Don’t let them set us against fellow Americans.
IC = Intelligence Community
FPE = Foreign Policy Establishment
Perfect summation of our present dilemma. Is this a fad, and short lived, or is this crap here to stay? I do think if it continues there is going to be some inevitable backlash, and it will be ugly.
Devolution is a good metaphor for what is occurring, being a retreat from diversity. The dandelion is an asexual organism that devolved from sexually-reproducing ancestors, with flowers that were true sex organs, whereas the dandelion flower produces seeds that clone the parent. Every dandelion in your yard is like every other dandelion.
And thus the irony of our half-century mania for diversity and “multiculturalism”: we have steadily less of these things as the growing anti-white, anti-Western Cancel Culture tolerates only one kind of thinking and one set of values. Even our conventional sexual identities are no longer tolerated.
Another metaphor is suicidal ideation, writ large across the culture. Western Civilization has been in a progressive state of self-loathing since the 18th-century Enlightenment, and is now poised to give up the ghost. The Catholic Church, for example, has ceased to believe or accept much of what Jesus actually said and did, and is hemorrhaging poorly catechized parishioners and priestly vocations at a fatal rate.
A third metaphor, brought to the fore by our supposed “pandemic,” is disease pathology. As is all too visible in our cities, our culture is being invaded by a virulent pathogen, and we are starting to see organ failure in key institutions, most notably our courts and system of justice. On a more metaphysical level, we are living in the pages of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, or The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Our only response, it seems to me, is to remember who we are and were, and say no to what is overtaking us — to say, I will fight for life and liberty, for God, for the honor of my ancestors, and for my children.
“Devolution is a good metaphor for what is occurring, being a retreat from diversity.”
I don’t see a retreat from diversity — at least the “diversity” that’s incessantly touted today — as devolution. What’s the **benefit** of ethnic and racial diversity to a society?
As Thomas Sowell wrote:
“Is diversity our strength? Or anybody’s strength, anywhere in the world? Does Japan’s homogeneous population cause the Japanese to suffer? Have the Balkans been blessed by their heterogeneity — or does the very word ‘Balkanization’ remind us of centuries of strife, bloodshed and unspeakable atrocities, extending into our own times?
…
“America’s great good fortune in the past has been that Americans have been able to unite as Americans against every enemy, despite our own internal differences and struggles. Black and white, Jew and Gentile, have fought and died for this country in every war.
“It has not been our diversity, but our ability to overcome the problems inherent in diversity, and to act together as Americans, that has been our strength.”
Similarly, Brenda Walker wrote at VDARE: “We all prefer to be around others who speak our language, share our values and understand our jokes. Human community is based upon similarities, not differences. Wouldn’t it be better to develop public policy on the basis of human nature as it really is?”
And for the definitive, long-form takedown of “diversity,” see Jared Taylor’s classic: https://www.amren.com/news/2010/06/the_myth_of_div/
Thank you. I agree completely with you, Sowell, and Walker. In any culture, an excess of diversity and heterogeneity can be counterproductive, if not deadly. Since I mentioned the Catholic Church, I’ll point out that it’s on the rocks because of irreconcilable doctrinal differences. Either abortion is a grave sin, or it isn’t. Either homosexuality is a disorder, or it isn’t. Either Hell exists, or it doesn’t. Either the family is the inviolable heart of our wellbeing, or the socialist welfare state is. A body of belief that can’t agree on such things, that entertains and even embraces “heresy,” clearly can’t function.
What I tried to convey in my second paragraph is my view that the superficial racial and cultural diversity that we have sought has indeed been destructive to the health of our culture — especially to the extent that it has produced a counterculture narrative causing the new thinking to be utterly intolerant of the old thinking, which had “evolved” over three or four thousand years but must now be “cancelled.” Hence the notion of devolution, whereby true intellectual diversity and freedom of thought are taking a backseat in the development of human society.
Reign of Terror resonates today in the composition of the Demo/Bolshevik party, equivalent to the “Committee of Public Safety” and the “Cult of the Supreme Being”. Kamala Harris in her baritone voice dripping with self righteousness is Robespierre, Biden as just an avatar, an electronic hologram with American flags in the background.
One of our political parties has been fairly successful in dividing us into “tribes”! All of this has been attempted (and again to some extent is being successful in instilling hatred for one “tribe” by another. That political party wishes to control the United States, but before us is the evidence of why it cannot be allowed to happen. This is destroying us not uniting us, and no good results where hatred grows.
Another great column. The idea of declaring the whites as, “Racist,” based on their whiteness reminds me of a similar procedure that was promulgated by the leftist liberals a few years, ago, “Lets get in the car and drive over to the anti-fracking rally…”
Really excellent. I have one bone to pick. You say: “We’ve rightly determined that killing and stealing damage society.” Killing and stealing (and racism, as you later note) damage not society but the individual victim(s). It is not society which is murdered but an individual (or individuals); it is not society that is stolen from, but one or more individuals. Racism is a crude form of collectivism, and hurts the individual discriminated against. Society is not a super-entity apart from its individuals members. It is a collectivist notion (to speak of harm to society) that has been foisted on us long ago (and continues today) by the left to take our minds off the fact that it is individual rights that are violated, that society has no rights apart from the individual rights of it members, that it is the individual that is the unit and standard of value. I would like those of us who know better to stop buying into and using leftist terms, ideas allowing them to accomplish their agendas.
I agree that killing, stealing and racism damage the individual victims. But it also damages society as defined in the dictionary as “the aggregate of people living together in a more or less ordered community.” An injustice to me echos as an injustice to you because it leaves you wondering if you’re next. Llikewise, a theft from my store injures you because it forces me to increase prices and ultimately drives me out of business.
I’m no socialist (believe me!) but that doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as agrregations of people. If what you’re driving at is that “society” per se has no rights, I agree. Rights are held by persons which can be indivuduals and to some extent entities such as corporations and (alas) government.
All that said, I understand your point, I think, that the word and notion of “society” have undermined individual rights because it sometimes implies that societal rights trump individual ones. Perhaps I shoould have used a word more neutral than “society” such as civilization.
Agreed.