This is a series of historical questions and sociological speculations, including many of my doubts about the racial-historical narrative that many people want to turn into a kind of unquestionable moral orthodoxy.
Our understanding of history has become simpler, more distorted, and more moralistic in recent decades. This is nowhere more true than when it comes to our conception of race. When we say ‘race’ in the United States, we’re usually talking about the distinction between white and black citizens. This is a ludicrously incomplete picture, of course. The modern account goes something like this: slavery was a universally evil and tremendously important institution in the United States. Slavery both created and was created by anti-black racism, and that racism persisted until the Civil Rights era, when black Americans finally won shreds of freedom from an implacably hostile system. The burdens and disadvantages of those centuries are still with us, though, and they account for group disparities today and are an urgent argument for intervention and assistance to correct them. Rather than being discussed or debated, these claims are simply presumed to be true, and any skepticism towards them is often categorized as ‘racist’ itself. But history is complicated and society is endlessly multivariate. Perhaps the modern account is incomplete. Perhaps it is, in certain respects, incorrect.
There is tremendous pressure all around us to broaden the definition of racism as much as possible (anti-black racism at least - anti-white racism is sometimes, improbably, asserted to be impossible) and to conflate historical forces with current disparities and to paint American history as a dark and hateful story. This has nothing to do with the actual truth of the matter; when inconvenient or counterfactual truths emerge the people who are seeking to expand the concept of racism, and use it as grist for a radical agenda, ignore and erase them.
If this isn’t an honest quest for historical fact, then, what is it? It’s a political strategy: by attributing many varied social realities to racism, activists feel that they can better expand the reach and power of the organizations which they’ve established to address racism. In other words, more and more urgent racism means more power and status for themselves and their class. Simultaneously, a general perception of American history which is shameful, angry, and cynical helps to erode institutions like church and family and patriotism, and it increases fear and division within the population. That fear can be met with social programs, advertisements, educational initiatives, and hiring advantages (increasing the power of the activists and the bureaucrats). That division weakens the natural, locally-rooted bonds of community and mutual aid. Without those networks, people become more reliant upon the bureaucracy and the educated classes (just as, without husbands and fathers, women and mothers become more reliant upon them).
In short, the exaggeration and overblown psychological hysteria around racism (which I call racial maximalism) is very important to many powerful people: academics, journalists, bureaucrats, social workers, politicians, government contractors, race grifters. Racism is now very much considered to the the worst thing that’s ever existed by many educated people, such that any sober discussion of its actual dynamics or effects (or even its history) is regarded as a kind of thoughtcrime. How much is racism fueling disparities in crime or academic failure? The maximum amount! All of it! This is no exaggeration. Try to introduce complicating variables (personal agency, cultural values, family structure, genetics, economic incentives, etc.) into such conversations and you’ll be met with discomfort and then a kind of incredulous rage.
It’s not hyperbole to say that the concept of racism has eaten most of the social sciences (sociology, education) and it’s working to digest psychology and law and public health (public health might have already been swallowed, actually).
This phenomenon, of thought-terminating absolutism and unearned moral certainty is strangest when it comes to history. After all, the past was much different than the present, and our ancestors are no longer around to be offended. History is immensely complicated, such that acquiring a fulsome picture of any past society is completely impossible. Subtlety and mental flexibility and the ability to try to understand the perspectives of very different humans are all premium qualities in the study of history. Unfortunately these qualities interfere with the rigid and totalizing ideas of ‘white supremacy’ which are so popular nowadays, and so they are suppressed and neglected in the educational system.
This is a speculative and brief counter-narrative to the picture which is being painted by the racial maximalists. I don’t claim that any of this account is true or accurate (and it’s certainly not precise). On most questions, the truth lies somewhere in the middle… but that’s the point. These questions are very much open for debate. Pretending that they’re settled or urgently relevant today (when they’re neither) is an invalid move.
There’s one more curious fact that I’ve noticed: the racial maximalists seem disinclined to actually debate dissenters or to vigorously defend their narrative. Thomas Sowell, Wendell Berry, Donna Jackson, Glenn Loury, Wilfred Reilly, plus dozens of traditionalist black historians (most now dead) have been shouting into the void. Their claims and ideas haven’t been attacked by the racist maximalists - they’ve been ignored. They’ve been suppressed.
The racial maximalists are certainly ascendant (even dominant) in most relevant institutions. Unfortunately for them, the past already happened. It’s a matter of fact (or non-fact) and can’t be willed into a certain shape by the earnest desires of the present. It’s arrogant to believe otherwise, as arrogant as it is to believe that soft, status-hungry, cowardly people in the modern world can truly judge the actions and decisions of the people of the past. By our standards, the people of the 18th century (ALL of them) were horribly marginalized, oppressed, and traumatized. Almost no one had an easy life, and while we might have more comfort and technology and access to information than they do we have less experience and courage and wisdom. We should try to keep that in mind.
I think the perspective of the racial maximalists is flawed and shallow, replacing evidence and logic with a kind of shrill, moralistic pressure. Such a dynamic was never convincing to people, but it was sufficiently frightening to a bloblike mass of influential (but timid and ignorant) white people to force the assent of the crowd. Their consensus is fake, though. It’s artificial. Because it rests on social pressure and the threat of reputational or professional harm, it’s fragile - susceptible to preference cascades and to the infuriatingly reasonable objections of those rare independent minds who look back over reality and see what they see… rather what they’ve been told to see.
A Counter-narrative
The Slave Years
The history of European-black interactions began in the 16th century, with the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The idea that white people were biologically or socially or spiritually superior was a natural result of three discrete factors:
The human tendency to sort outsiders into groups and regard them differently, especially if their appearance and behavior is highly variant
The human tendency to regard one’s own group as better, sounder, more natural, and more moral (which every human does to some extent)
The primitive and undeveloped state of the African societies that Europeans tended to encounter
Slavery had been practiced around the world since the rise of state-level societies (and doubtless before) and it was enthusiastically pursued in Africa among black people before Europeans ever arrived. More slaves went Eastward, towards near Asia and the Ottoman Empire, than West across the Atlantic. Very few traces of these millions traded to the Muslim world now remain. From a Darwinian viewpoint (if not necessarily a humanitarian one), the slaves who were sold into servitude in the New World were relatively lucky.
Society was much less connected and developed and homogenous, and so the idea that there was some monolithic ‘white supremacy’ (at any point) is a modern and presentist conceit. Africans owned black slaves. Africans owned white slaves. Black slaves won their freedom and opened stores and smithies and stables. White Europeans worked in servitude under black slaves, and under black freemen. Black freemen became rich, earned degrees, traded goods, and amassed power.
Nevertheless, we can say with certainty that there was some kind of profound stigma (which varied according to place and circumstance) attached to black skin. In matters of sexual and romantic exchange the stigma was even more profound, but this may have just been a kind of evolutionary distaste at the idea of a group’s women outbreeding. In the Southeastern United States the stigma was especially trenchant, but this wasn’t just (necessarily) unthinking bigotry. Some if it was familiarity, and a kind of paternalistic sense of racial order which seemed natural to many of the people involved (black and white).
Slavery is the great blot on American history. The ‘genocide’ of the native Americans was really (in the United States and its territories and frontier areas) more a matter of very different and mutually-incomprehensible cultures meeting: one was stricken by illness (which transmitted in both directions but certainly devastated the natives to a much greater degree, being introduced into the human vector by various animals alongside which Europeans had been living closely for millennia) and that culture was therefore was depopulated. The other culture was growing, surging, developing at an unprecedented pace. One was often nomadic and always neolithic in terms of its technology and lifestyle. The other was on the cusp of the greatest technological and wealth accumulation ever experienced in human history until that point. One was scattered, demoralized, living at a subsistence level, and it lacked cultural mechanisms to deal with such an onslaught of frightening novelty. The other was the novel force. There could never be a lasting accommodation or a meeting as equals between two such groups, and there wasn’t. From the 15th until well into the 19th centuries the Europeans and their descendants pushed the natives back through a long iterative process of pioneering, settlement, development, treaty, war, and slaughter. However, there was never any concerted effort to kill all indigenous people (the pressing issues were regional and local, spread out amongst hundreds of federations and tribes and clans) and both sides exhibited real themes of humanitarianism and compassion, even if they usually yielded to the pragmatic human need for land and resources and opportunity. The awkward fact for modern progressives is that their current activities and decisions evidence no less brutal prioritization of money and power than did the wagon train settlers of the 18th century. How much money do modern white Americans devote to rescuing the +1 million black slaves who still exist in Africa? Just as American society at that time mostly recognized the need to push the border and establish settlement in what were mostly empty grazing lands and the mostly vacant territories of long-dead indigenous nations and proto-nations, modern people almost universally assent to the brutal extraction of cobalt in the Congo, which is useful in making batteries and alloys. Historical figures could have banded together and made decisions based purely upon ethical abstraction and compassion for alien cultures (who usually demonstrated little compassion for the American settlers) but that is rarely how individuals and never how groups behave. Modern Westerners could band together and comprehensively reform the cobalt mining practices (and cacao, and diamonds, and a dozen other products while they’re at it) for a relatively cheap (per-unit) price but we do not because we’re making decisions based upon realism and pragmatism (profit), and not concern for a group of people we’ve never and will never met. Progressives (who enthusiastically consume the smart phones and laptops and electric cars yielded by cobalt mining, and whose entire fantastical planned energy infrastructure would depend upon 20x more of it being taken out of the ground) don’t even have the excuse of being on the brink of starvation, bereft of land and resources, with many mouths to feed. The American settlers - as a group - had that excuse. As I said, it is foolish and arrogant for a modern physicist or teacher or lecturer to try to reach back and judge the behaviors and decisions of the past.
So the inter-civilizational contest between Native Americans and European descendants was natural and predictable and could not have gone much differently. Most people involved were decent and rational and pro-social individuals, exhibiting ideas and norms which were legitimate and adaptive and had a kind of ethical logic. Slavery was different. While practiced globally as far back as we can discern, the trans-Atlantic slave trade was understood by all involved to be a frightful and evil enterprise… although not, in our current terms, a racist one. There were primitive peoples happy to sell each other into valuable captivity to traders. The fact that the traders were mostly white (or Arab, or Berber, etc.) and the captives were black was simply seen as a kind of natural hierarchy of development. It required no theory of white supremacy to draw this conclusion, which was almost universally believed. It was simply a fact that sub-Saharan African cultures appeared profoundly primitive to the navigators that visited their shores. They were. We know that any modern person who grew up in these conditions, with these naturalistic and sensible ideas, would probably feel the same way because everyone at that time (decent and enlightened or not) felt that way. Later, certainly, the disparities in civilizational outcomes between races would be blended with scientific and pseudo-scientific concepts, but for centuries that was unnecessary. Black Africans appeared more primitive by nature because they were more primitive in fact, and this judgement rests firmly upon the rational-materialist consensus that still supports our civilization, for better and for worse. Primitivism, according to their meanings and ours, was denoted by a lack of literacy and navigational techniques and sophisticated buildings and metallurgy. It is one of the many oddities of the modern world that a memetic complex which blanches at words like ‘primitive’ or ‘barbarian’ or ‘uncivilized’ tries so urgently to foster ‘international development.’ These are identical concepts, in different words. What is the effort to develop the healthcare capacity and infrastructure of Afghanistan or the Congo other than a battle against primitive (‘barbarian’) conditions? Of course, we don’t call it that.
Slavery was the origin of black-white racial dynamics in the United States, but it never assumed the monumental dimensions asserted by some modern ideological historians. Slaves did not, in fact, “[build] this country,” although they built some of it.
[In the 1850 census] [t]he confederacy’s 11 states had 316,632 slave owners out of a free population of 5,582,222. This equals 5.67 percent of the free population of the confederacy were slave owners.
Slaves certainly made certain Southerners a tremendous amount of money by growing and harvesting cash crops with cheap labor inputs. Slavery therefore contributed to the cultural and economic development of Richmond and Savannah and Charleston and New Orleans. Outside of the great Southern cities, however, and away from the huge latifundia of concentrated slaves (on the eve of the Civil War, something like 4,000 slaveowners owned about half of all black slaves in the South, according to historian Paul Johnson) slaves were individuals or couples or families working for small and mid-size corn or tobacco farmers or the like. In the North (where fewer than 50,000 people owned slaves), slaves often worked in stables or shops or as blacksmiths. The phenomenon of free black Americans (now mostly ignored) complicates the picture further.
What we can say is that black people in the South (and in the North, especially after the Great Northern Migration, when Northern cities had to contend with chaotic masses of uneducated and desperate black migrants) were, in many ways, second-class citizens. This status is presumed to be a kind of blanket, civil bigotry (which it was) and also purely an artifact of ‘white supremacy’ (which it was not). This is a complex idea for modern minds - which have regressed in terms of sense and instinct for human nature in many ways - but the reality seems to be something like this: the media and education and popular culture didn’t then exist as they do now. People formed their impression of their own groups and of others based upon natural human chauvinism (which is universal), tradition, norms, and observations. Two separate propositions can be true at once. For instance, the Roma were and still are discriminated against in Central Europe. The Roma are also uniquely prone to anti-social behaviors (due to a different self-conception and different values regarding socialization and achievement). Which emerged first? No one knows, and it doesn’t matter. These two developments manifested in tandem, playing off of one another. If you live in a mid-size Romanian agricultural hub or a Polish factory town, and the Roma you’ve known during your entire life seem to have a special propensity for drunkenness and robbery and prostitution it is likely that your views of the group will reflect this, especially if they are taught to you from a young age. The modern tendency is to find groups of ‘victims’ (even in history) and then blame every attitude and event on a different, stronger, group. Social science has no place for culpability though. Stereotypes and prejudices (even unfair to the individual or no longer applicable) rarely come out of nowhere, and so we should take the fact that dominant American society regarded black people as - on average - inferior in certain respects seriously. That is extremely difficult for modern people to even attempt, but the reasons for that lie more in prurience and indoctrination than in careful analysis, I think. It seems almost indubitable that black Americans were uneducated, simple, uncultured, and not very ambitious. These perceived traits affected the general white opinion of black people, and so prejudice and reality intersected and reinforced one another.
What do we know about American slaves, before they were nationally emancipated? Famously, they first arrived in 1619. The Emancipation Proclamation was issued in 1863. That’s a span of 244 years. Importing slaves into the United States became illegal in 1808 (although it sometimes still happened after that date). The historical span from 1863 (which seems truly ancient to us now) until today is only 162 years. Many slaves came from 6, 7, 8 generations of captivity. During that time the most curious, obstinate, brilliant, and cerebral among them were selectively eliminated. Those traits were cumulatively weeded out from the population, and the traits of hardiness, docility, and conformity were selected for. Slaves were unable to form their own regional cultures (although the reality was, as always, more complex on the ground) or read books or attend classes. They often required travel passes to journey to the next town. Of course the persistent and cumulative effect of these practices was to further dull and oppress black people in the slave states. It would be very curious if brutal and widely-practiced policies in place for 240 years which meant to erase creativity and rebelliousness and brilliance had no effect.
The American system of chattel slavery had two especially brutal inflection points: the captivity and transport of the original slaves (‘black bodies’ in the contemporary styling) and the forced separation of families via sale and transfer. The slave ships were unbelievably brutal, but then so was much of society during that time. It would be a mistake to identify this brutality as unique or ideological, for it was neither. Travelling across the ocean in a galleon or a caravel was a filthy, miserable business, and being forced to do so by amoral and predatory men incentivized to pack as much viable human flesh onto a single vessel was usually hellish. Nevertheless, the voyage of Ferdinand Magellan embarked with 270 people and, after 32,000 miles of nautical travel, 18 arrived back in Spanish port. My point is not to minimize the racism and inhumanity of the trans-Atlantic slave trade (or the Indian wars), but to note that racism - which looms huge and overpowering in the modern imagination - had very little to do with the day to day brutality of the business. Greek slaves had terrible lives chained to the oars of Mediterranean triremes. Soviet zeks had terrible lives brought by their thousands to trackless Siberian wildernesses and made to build camps and cut timber. European slaves had terrible lives after being captured by pirates on the Algerian coast. Whenever people are dehumanized, en masse, they are treated badly. Whenever this mistreatment intersects with profit and occurs in a place and time unprotected by institutions and legal structures the mistreatment to swell as much as is necessary to maximize profit.
The sale and transfer (which necessitated the forcible tearing apart) of families was the other persistent degradation. Slaves lived in various states of health and security, but while their lives were neither free nor luxurious they tended to be young and healthy and so coupling was inevitable. After some time in the New World most slaves had been Christianized and so young men and women would get married and establish families. The looming profit prerogative always put these family units at risk, however. The sale of wives away from husbands and husbands away from wives and children away from parents scandalized goodhearted white people (in the North and South) and proved exceedingly difficult for the pro-slavery apologists to justify. Two points should be made about this tragic practice:
The fact that this pricked the consciences and aroused rage across the West should indicate that racial hierarchy was not simply about power or profit or subjugation. Cultures are very complicated, and the Western world during the past few centuries has been in many ways the most complicated cultural setting in human history. Culture incorporates norms, assumptions, institutions, and memes, and while a practice like American chattel slavery might rest upon a partial foundation of racist assumptions and economic incentives and power hierarchies, those underlying factors still largely existed in the early 19th century… when slavery was outlawed across the British empire. They still existed in the late 19th-century… when slavery was outlawed in the United States. Clearly, then, these factors aren’t sufficient to explain the persistence of slavery as an institution.
It’s a common reflex to point to the doleful practice of forcible family fragmentation during the era of slavery as a factor which has rippled down through time, affecting even contemporary American black family structures and contributing, in some shadowy way, towards dysfunction in some way. This is a credible supposition. It makes a kind of intuitive sense, but the statistics don’t bear it out. Until the early 1950’s, the rates of marriage were higher and divorce and lower in black families (during many years) than white families. This began to change, as we will see, when the federal government introduced new programs and entitlements which incentivized poor women to remain unmarried while having children. These social pressures affected lower class black women (and, by extension, men and children) far more than any other demographic. They may be the worst and most harmful public policies ever implemented in the United States, possibly even worse than Jim Crow laws.
Reaching for Freedom
The narrative we learn today in school is that slavery ended in 1863, towards the end of the American Civil War. Reconstruction was imposed on the South for a brief period, after which political exigencies and Southern resistance made the federal government relent, after which blacks in the South languished in a kind of civil purgatory - technically not enslaved but unable to vote or meaningfully advance their station. So far, so good (although, again, the facts on the ground were much more complicated and millions of black Americans were able to get educations, buy properties, own businesses, and accumulate money and status to an extent which is shocking to modern readers).
Blacks suffered under white supremacy, according to the narrative, until the Civil Rights movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s, when concerted political action won their freedom from a racist, intransigent society, and allowed the first glimpses of real civil equality for black Americans. This narrative might be at least incomplete, if not wrong. Here are some possible counterpoints and implications for a different view:
Racism is understood to be unfair and irrational and harmful. It’s a mindset that produces words and actions that, when turned towards black people, are assumed to be illegitimate (and have never been less acceptable than they are today - any hint of racist thought or speech is nearly certain to result in a person’s professional termination and social ostracism… even when it’s clearly specious and sometimes even when it’s obviously incorrect). There’s a different (related) construct to racism, however: natural stereotyping. Racism begins with a blanket assumption about a race; natural stereotyping is rather a kind of pattern recognition, that is rooted in the tendency of humans to observe the behavior of others and to sort people into groups. The widespread persistent of incomplete information in social situations means that people are liable to make assumptions about new individuals, based upon past experience and group characteristics. If you own a store, and 10/10 of the people who have robbed your store are black, will you be especially watchful when a young black man enters near closing time? If you’re a law professor, and the bottom half of performers in your class consistently is a class that consistently contains virtually every black student, will you be likely to imagine that the incoming group of black students are likely to be above average, or even excellent? These judgements are ethical lapses, of course. The black man entering the store and the freshman L1 students have no relationship to those past examples and so you should harbor no preconceptions towards them. That is not, however, how humans process social information. Natural stereotyping can actually be useful and generally accurate, when the groups to which it’s being applied have certain collective factors or characteristics in common. It’s not bigoted to imagine that recent immigrants from Nigeria will speak with an accent. It’s not bigoted to assume that women will be less physically aggressive than men, or that someone from a poor family will have different perspectives toward wealth than one from a rich one. These kinds of group-based and culturally reinforced patterns interact uneasily with racist attitudes. They contribute towards them but they also muddy any discussion that one can have about them. Many features of the American conception of ‘racial stereotype’ are actually cultural stereotypes, overlaid upon racial groups (who do tend to vary culturally). We cannot accept public judgement or discrimination about and toward people simply based upon their race, but the idea that discussing group differences between racial groups is somehow invalid (or that all such differences are attributable to racism) is asinine. We can break the category of ‘black Americans’ up into myriad subcategories: Nigerian-Americans, Caribbean immigrants, African-Americans, educated, imprisoned, business owners, athletes. Just as all of these groups will have their own collective traits and tendencies (which in many cases will be precise nearly to the individual) so too do the meta-categories of white and black. This is a fuzzy, imperfect, and often complicated picture, and it should never be sufficient to deny an individual an opportunity or kindness or a fair hearing, but different groups have different characteristics.
That is the central paradox of the white supremacy narrative: we are expected to believe that black Americans have survived under a system of pervasive disadvantage for centuries… and yet that these disadvantages have had no meaningful impact on the average level of ambition or prudence or intelligence or capability of the victims. If there has been some appreciable effect on the black population, we are commanded to ignore it, and pretend as if it does not exist. Racism is evil and terrible, and centuries of racism has had no impact on the collective socialization or ambition or intelligence of the affected population.
Racism is now seen as an evil and violent and destructive mindset, but in most cases it was rather humiliating or distorting or just mildly unfair. Even the Autobiography of Malcolm X contains very little explicit and malignant racism, past the author’s childhood.
writes that:Modern audiences will no doubt be horrified by the casual racism young Malcolm endures. But even he admits that the racism was usually thoughtless rather than malevolent. His worst memories are of snubbing, not cruelty.
Racism was rarely hateful and violent, but was rather a constraining and retarding force for most black people. Would it be less constraining than being an outspoken conservative in the NYU sociology department these days? The reason that one mode of bigotry is now so much more proscribed is that it is connected to a national structure of social attitude and policy which oppressed an entire race of people, and which sometimes erupted into violence or injustice. But bigotry is bigotry, and unfairness is unfairness, and being cruel or prejudicial or unfair to others is wrong in itself, aside from its larger social context. Ideally, people should be treated with a basic (and fairly equal) default level of respect and consideration, and should thereafter be treated in the way that their behavior and character deserves. That is not the vision of modern progressives, however.
It seems likely that black Americans were making their own fortunes, and gaining purchasing power and status and access. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 integrated the remaining workplaces and businesses and facilities (which were fairly limited at that point) but it didn’t change the culture. The culture was already changing, and it continued to change such that the 1970’s were better until the 1960’s, and the 1980’s were better than the 1970’s, etc. By the 1980’s and 1990’s the reputational risk of public anti-black racism was such that it was exceedingly rare. Civil equality had been won decades earlier. It’s possible to see the Civil Rights movement as a culmination of a long-growing national trend, rather than a catalyst in itself. The images from Selma and Little Rock were only effective because the national white conscience was capable of a great deal of sympathy for and anger on behalf of black Americans. This reservoir of goodwill coexisted with the racism and discrimination. As I’ve said multiple times now, the picture was very complex - but the Civil Rights Act wouldn’t have passed if white America was implacably against it.
Two things can be possible at once:
(1) Black Americans during the first half of the 20th century were held down by a host of degrading and limiting norms and laws, the legacies of which might still be with us (or at least traces of them might be).
(2) The urban culture of the Northern cities, from the 1920’s onward was dynamic and hustling and cutthroat, but it also created socially pathological forms and practices that had little to do with racism. It is perfectly conceivable that, even given all the racism and discrimination in the North and the Jim Crow laws and threat of secret violence that Black Americans in the 20th century could have developed a culture which prized sobriety, industry, monogamy, and the life of the mind. Indeed, cultures have developed a powerful ambition for success and a thirst for intellectual attainment under worse and harsher circumstances. Lest you think that this criticism is unfair (or racist) keep in mind that most black reformers before 1950 spent their lives arguing for similar changes.
Here’s Malcom X:
The black man in the ghettoes, for instance, has to start self-correcting his own material, moral, and spiritual defects and evils. The black man needs to start his own program to get rid of drunkenness, drug addiction, prostitution.
Of course, Malcolm blamed the vice and dissolution of the Northern cities solely on white people.
I fired at this point, at the reason for our code. “The white man wants black men to stay immoral, unclean, and ignorant. As long as we stay in these conditions we will keep begging him and he will control us. We can never win freedom and justice and equality until we are doing something for ourselves.”
But Malcom doth protest too much. What good would what it do to exhort black people to refrain from drugs and sex and theft and dietary sin… if they didn’t have any agency or power over these matters?
This is a point that is rarely made these days, but it’s of paramount importance: systemic discrimination and oppression has nothing to do with the character and ethics of individuals. A person can be stymied again and again… and persist. A person can suffer every indignity… and still be kind. A person can look out at the larger society and see reflected back at him only contempt and degradation… and that person can still keep his dignity. Making things easier and fairer and more opportune doesn’t make people better. Making them less fair and harder doesn’t make people worse. Every person’s soul is in his or her own keeping.
It’s possible that the benefits of the Civil Rights Act were more than offset by the harms done to black America by other contemporary federal legislation. President Johnson’s ‘Great Society’ erected a welfare state (or more precisely - added to the ne which already existed) coincided with a devastating fall in black marriage and in-wedlock birth rates, a trend which is still continuing. Progressives would have you believe that fighting white supremacy entails entitlements and government programs and set asides, but for the intended recipients (working class black folks, single mothers, Native American reservations) such programs have only ever made things worse in the long run. They’ve never, in the past half-century, made things better.
The Great Northern Migration involved the mass flight of black Southerners to Northern cities. The aftermath of that migration is known to all at this point. Again, we have a narrative: poor black folks moved to Chicago and Boston and Detroit and Washington D. C., where they encountered racism and were herded into ghettoes and then public housing (another example of progressive programs having a toxic and deleterious effect on the recipients). This account isn’t wrong, but, like all similar narratives, it erases any agency on the part of the affected groups. Black Americans from the rural South moved to Northern cities. Largely uneducated, used to strong communal networks, and desperate to make money, many black people (men, especially) turned to drugs and crime and predation. Ethnic neighborhoods of Irish and Jewish and Polish citizens fled from the disorder, perceiving a coming wave of crime and falling property values - not due to racism (or at least not only due to it) but due to natural human desires for cleanliness and safety and prosperity.
It’s ironic to me that some of the same themes can be found in The Slaughter of Cities and the writings of Thomas Sowell and The Autobiography of Malcom X.
‘Separate but equal’ is now almost universally regarded as a regressive policy which existed only to keep black people in a state of subjugation and inferiority, but any examination of the historical record will show that this account is incomplete. While the policy certainly resulted in drastic limitations in public and institutional access for black citizens and kept them confined in facilities and spaces that were inferior, it was perceived in the South as a policy to reinforce a norm that stretched back for generations. It was often supported by black people and in some cases it worked to their advantage. Due to the effective ceiling created by racial employment discrimination, for example, black schoolteachers were often excellent. More to the point, school racial segregation is now worse in many places than it was in the 1950’s. There’s evidence that racial educational disparities today, 80 years after integration, are actually worse than they were then.
The great loss of racial discrimination for society was the wastage of talents of the brilliant and energetic and original. Group disparities shouldn’t necessarily trouble anyone. They are, as Thomas Sowell points out, virtually a human universal. But racism kept the most outstanding black people working as field hands and butlers, and then later schoolteachers and typists. Not only is that the great loss and harm of racial discrimination, but it can be understood as an indicator of it, too. When you see a cluster of brilliant and ambitious artificially held down in terms of status and achievement, discrimination is a definite possibility. If group metrics aren’t necessarily a reliable marker of malignant discrimination, then what is? Actual evidence of active discrimination - that is, employer statements or hiring practices or secret policies. Of course, these will disappear and become invisible when discrimination is outlawed. We should ask ourselves: is there a significant population of responsible, capable, striving black people who are being artificially limited by society? Not only is that no longer the case for black people in the United States (and probably hasn’t been since the 1980’s) but it’s nearly the reverse: a black student of even modest capabilities and initiative these days will often be artificially promoted and rewarded, through a hundred different mechanisms: preferential admissions (declared illegal by the Supreme Court, but still occurring and still counting for mean differentials of hundreds of SAT score points at elite schools), hiring quotas (and limitations on East Asian, white, South Asian, etc. applicants), scholarships, status rewards (‘victim’ status being especially valuable) and enhanced credibility, etc. While it might not be connected to a dark and centuries-long history, discriminating against non-black applicants creates the same waste and injustice as discriminating against black ones did in the century before 1950.
The ‘Back to Africa’ movement and the associated BlackStar company (eventually revealed to be a swindle), the Black Panthers, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Harlem Renaissance, the Nation of Islam, Tulsa’s Black Wall Street - all of these institutions/organizations and many more were an indication of a certain irrepressible dynamism and freedom among African Americans. A truly repressive society (like Soviet Russia) would have forbade any of these organizations and a less repressive one (like Apartheid South Africa) would have pushed organizers toward radicalism and violence. It’s a curious fact concerning American radicals that they are (and have been for many years) mostly all talk. Aside from oddities and splinter factions, political and cultural movements (even distinctly hostile ones, like the American Communist Party) have mostly been left in peace, and have pursued peaceful tactics. Sure, there have been notable instances of anti-black surveillance and counterintelligence and even murder (I suspect that federal agents may have killed Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., for example) but these efforts are remarkable for their secrecy and their inconsistency. No one is gathering up black reformers and putting them in camps, or bringing their leaders out and shooting them against a wall. We imagine ‘racism’ to be the most mortal of human sins, but it is really unaccountable state power that every person, from the 20th century onwards, should be most concerned about. It is possible to imagine a regime which explicitly abhors anti-black racism, which is still murderous (Zimbabwe) or mildly repressive (modern Germany or Canada or Great Britain). Conversely, it is possible to imagine a society with strong racist elements that is still fairly free and allows people the rights of freedom, association, expression. Such was the United States in the late 1960’s, as unfashionable as it might be to point this out now. Even the dark days of the Jim Crow South permitted more joy and freedom and opportunity than many societies without any real dominant racism whatsoever. It isn’t racism we should most fear. It is bad policies, and oppression.
Character and collective characteristics and attitudes (i.e., culture) are extraordinarily important for the life courses of individuals. When Ibram X. Kendi asserts that there are only two possible explanations for persistent racial disparities (racist discrimination, or innate variation) he is incorrect. People often behave in the ways that they’ve been taught to behave, and certain teachings (punctuality, courtesy, persistence, ambition) are extremely important for modern success. These are all possible to acquire today. We cannot necessarily fault the individual who fails to learn the value of these things (people are, in some sense, hostage to their cultural context) but we can absolutely blame the culture. A dysfunctional culture produces dysfunctional people. A resilient culture produces functional (even admirable people), even in the face of terrible oppression and hostility. No culture is either completely functional or dysfunctional - all have elements of both. Does modern black culture (in all its variety) appear to be a superfunctional cultural form to you? Even if historical racism is part of the explanation for cultural problems there’s a sense in which this is irrelevant. Cultural problems are cultural problems, and they can’t be fixed or redirected by changing policies or laws or external factors. Cultures can only be changed by their participants and leaders.
The behaviors and attitudes of individuals are incredibly important and they can be more limiting than any system or racist oppression ever assembled. Writing about Malcom X and his observations of the black ghettoes of Boston and New York,
writes:Malcolm is well-aware of the importance of self-destructive behavior among the poor. Indeed, he’s a perfect example of the syndrome:
[A]ll the thousands of dollars I’d handled and I had nothing. Just satisfying my cocaine habit alone cost me about twenty dollars a day. I guess another five dollars a day could have been added for reefers and plain tobacco cigarettes…
Once he starts experimenting with Islam, Malcolm becomes puritanical – and predictably turns his life around. But he somehow manages to avoid the lesson that he was a major – if not the main – source of his own problems.
Imagine if Malcolm had stayed sober, stuck to victimless crime, and conservatively invested his money. He would quickly have surpassed the typical standard of living for contemporary whites. Yet the devil’s to blame for everything wrong in his life – and the devil is the white man:
The white people I had known marched before my mind’s eye. From the start of my life. The state white people always in our house after the other whites I didn’t know had killed my father… the white people who kept calling my mother “crazy” to her face and before me and my brothers and sisters, until she finally was taken off by white people to the Kalamazoo asylum… the white judge and others who had split up the children… the Swerlins, the other whites around Mason… white youngsters I was in school there with, and the teachers – the one who told me in the eighth grade to “be a carpenter” because thinking of being a lawyer was foolish for a Negro…
My head swam with the parading faces of white people. The ones in Boston, in the white-only dances at the Roseland Ballroom where I shined their shoes… at the Parker House where I took their dirty plates back to the kitchen… the railroad crewmen and passengers… Sophia…
The whites in New York City – the cops, the white criminals I’d dealt with… the whites who piled into the Negro speakeasies for a taste of Negro soul… the white women who wanted Negro men… the men I’d steered to the black “specialty sex” they wanted….
The fence back in Boston, and his ex-con representative… Boston cops… Sophia’s husband’s friend, and her husband, whom I’d never seen, but knew so much about… Sophia’s sister… the Jew jeweler who’d helped trap me… the social workers… the Middlesex County Court people… the judge who gave me ten years… the prisoners I’d known, the guards and the officials… [ellipses in the original]
Notice how Malcolm conflates a bizarrely disparate range of behavior. Whites interested in black music are on the same list as his father’s murderers. Women who like black men are on the same list as the man Malcolm cuckolded. The jeweler who helps the police catch Malcolm is on the same list as “white criminals.”
What about his own years as a thief and violent criminal? In Malcolm’s mind, it’s all the white man’s fault. But why? He can hardly claim that poverty drove him to savagery. By his own admission, he made lots of money in his legal jobs – not to mention in victimless crime. His well-off sister Ella was eager to help him succeed in any legitimate line of work. So what’s his excuse for being a violent parasite?
The theme of this counternarrative is that society is very complex, and rarely fits into neat moral narratives. The idea that all American citizens, regardless of race, should have civil equality is a moral claim and a sensibly consistent development of the themes of American history. No evidentiary basis is necessary to support this idea. The opinion (reflexive on the left and nowhere more popular than among rich, educated, white progressives) that black dysfunction is due to racism (past and present) is different. It is instead a claim about human nature and about society. It’s a claim about external reality, past and present, and so we should be open-minded and skeptical before pronouncing certainty about it. In nearly every case I’ve investigated at length, I’ve concluded that this explanation (‘racism is the problem’) is woefully inadequate. Often it’s anti-true, which is to say that black Americans are actually getting inordinate levels of assistance and benefit. Yet disparities persist.
It is possible that cultural and economic development are not processes that are amenable to redistributive fixes. It’s possible that the arc of black evolution in the post-Civil War United States was actually a long and cumulative story of education and family ambition and middle class development, which culminated in the Civil Rights era (rather than being created by it). It’s possible that this building dynamic of progress and admirable achievement, made over generations in the face of considerable social and legal obstacles, was rather interrupted and derailed by the glut of federal money awarded to poor black folks, notably single mothers. I can’t say whether these things are true. But neither, with certainty, can you. No one can, because no one knows, for sure. Perhaps our public discussions should reflect this reality.
Where We Now Stand
Further, it’s possible that the shadowy presence of ‘racism,’ which now encompasses in the public imagination everything from violent (anti-black) hate crimes to awkward comments about a person’s hair, has mostly outlived its usefulness and applicability. It’s possible that white Americans are among the least racist people who exist now on Earth and are among the least racist people that have ever existed in a multiracial society. It’s possible that set-asides and race-based assistance and bonuses to black citizens are actually destructive (as well as being patronizing). To understand how this might be the case, one only has to interrogate human nature: if we automatically gave A’s to 100 underperforming students, would their academic development accelerate, or languish? If we gave monthly stipends to the poor and miserable, would they become happy and productive or would they, in many cases, become lazier and less functional? (Actually, we’ve run that experiment for over a century in this country with the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ federal entitlements, concentrated on Indian reservations. Are they flourishing, after hundreds of billions of dollars of reliable assistance?)
The analytical error is (or might be) thus: a misunderstanding of the nature of marginalization. People who are struggling aren’t always struggling because they don’t have money or high-status jobs. Perhaps they’re struggling and that creates the conditions for poverty and low status. If that’s the case then handing them money will address the poverty aspect (marginally) but it could contribute to the other struggles. If lack of ambition or impulsiveness or anti-social behavior or low intellect is the problem then transfer payments won’t suffice to fix it. Is that the case among most poor Americans? It’s certainly the case for some.
It’s a perverse (and little observed) fact of human nature that if you make things easier for people they might use that ease to drive improvement and development in other areas… or they might become lazier. If you remove consequences for risky and antisocial behaviors (like having children out of wedlock) some people might continue to make good decisions, but the number of people engaging in those behaviors will increase. If you reduce criminal penalties for certain acts then most people will carry on as before, uninterested in the change. But there will be an increase in the behavior. If you increase the social benefit of identifying oneself (internally and publicly) as a victim then more people will begin to identify as victims, even if this involves exaggeration or deception. This increase will occur despite the negative psychological effect that it might have on healing or personal development for groups and individuals.
It’s possible that the widespread establishment of federal entitlements and academic shortcuts and status bonuses and criminal leniencies has been the most catastrophic factor for the development of back America. Most black people are employed and about 1/3rd are middle class, but even for those productive citizens it’s possible that the relentless focus on racism as a force throughout history and until today has negative social and psychological effects, changing their relationship to achievement and to white people and to themselves. Low expectations never helped anyone (although for many strivers they make no difference).
It’s possible that the biggest bonus that white people (especially white men) have in this society (aside from a better-than-average chance of being born into stable family with two parents) is that they are able to see themselves as products of their own efforts, and that they expect no special dispensations or accommodations as they live their life. When I contemplate the lives of my unborn offspring, I ask myself: would I want them to receive exorbitant advantages which set them apart from others, despite them having to do nothing to earn them? Would I want them to be financially rewarded for bearing children with unreliable people? Would I want them to think of themselves as put-upon and victimized, and to approach the social hierarchy with an attitude of resentment and entitlement? I would not. I wouldn’t want that for anyone.
Are any of these musings and historical assertions totally correct? Probably not… but I think that they’re partially correct, and they are essentially unsayable in most professional contexts in this country today. That’s the power of narrative. An equally pressing question, aside from whether our contemporary racial narrative is true, is: is it helping? Will more of the same somehow close these persistent achievement gaps and foster interracial solidarity and help build people into the capable and resilient individuals that everyone should strive to become? Or will it do the opposite?
When people groups come into contact, the two biggest factors are cultural confidence and agricultural technology. Even without losing direct access to land, it’s impossible for a hunter-gatherer culture to outgrow or even complete with an agricultural culture. This considers only people-per-unit-area, notwithstanding the other advantages an agricultural culture usually enjoys
Given favourable circumstances, a more primitive herding or agricultural culture with a strong cultural identity can make gains against a more advanced but socially weaker society - usually by raiding. However, history suggests that such gains are usually temporary
“Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present, controls the past.” —George Orwell,
1984