At The Atlantic, the day after the second inaugural of a black President, Ta-Nehisi Coates explains how The Man keeps down the Black Middle Class:
The American Case Against a Black Middle Class
... Black people have been repeatedly been victimized by the half-assed social contract. It goes back, at least, to Reconstruction.
5) The half-assed social contract continues to this very day with policies under the present administration, like the bail-out of banks that left the homeowners whom the banks conned underwater. The results of the housing crisis for black people have been devastating. The response is to hector these people about playing video games and watching too much television. Or to tell them they've have "an achievement gap." It is sickening, dishonest, and morally repugnant.
6) America does not really want a black middle class.
My impression is that what America really wants is a black upper class, full of decorative and symbolic figures to worship from afar: Barack and Michelle, Jay-Z and Beyonce, Chris Brown and Rihanna, etc.
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84 comments:
America does not CARE about a black middle class, in the same way that American does not care about a white middle class, an Asian middle class, or anything else.
I always find leftists hilarious because they think that they can't accomplish something without there being a top-down plan. Unless there's a PROGRAM to get someone through high school, unless there's a program to get someone through college, unless there's a program to teach entrepreneurship or musicianship or software engineering, or whatever, then how can one possibly expect that individual X, Y, or Z will ever accomplish anything?
If you think you can't, you're right.
LOL; Ta-Neshi sounds like your readers talking about the Ivy league.
Coates is the Atlantic's funniest writer.
What, free Chrysler 300's isn't enough for him?
Wait, there's no longer an achievement gap? Great news!
"I always find leftists hilarious because they think that they can't accomplish something without there being a top-down plan."
Ta-Nehisi has made a different point, in other posts: not that the government hasn't done enough of X to help blacks, but government at some level did Y at some point (e.g., early 20th century), which actively hurt blacks.
Coates spends a lot of time thinking about and writing about injustices done to American blacks before the Civil Rights Act was passed, and much less time using Occam's Razor to determine the reasons why blacks are poorer or otherwise worse off today than other groups.
In another recent post, he called the wealth gap between blacks and whites "shameful", and pointed to some obscure Y policy from the past as a cause of it. As if that pre-Civil Rights policy explains, for example, why so many black pro ball players who get paid millions of dollars per year routinely go broke after their careers end.
Seriously though, the thing he's doing with achievement gap here is so obnoxious: on one hand it's the most important crisis in the country and we're racistly not doing enough about it, but at the same time if we refer to the problem in any way than we are racistly disparaging the victims.
Ta-Nehisi is a good guy and one of the smartest, most interesting and idiosyncratic voices in black America. I wish you'd seriously engaged with his argument instead of doing a drive by snarking at it.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
was that name originally the more familiar "Tennessee"?
Anon @ 313
Hi Coates. Nice of you to stop by.
.. the half-assed social contract
It's not The Man keeping blacks down, it's their inability to express themselves intelligently.
Coates is supposedly a member of the black intelligentsia, yet he writes things like "the half-assed social contract"!
"Ta-Nehisi is a good guy and one of the smartest, most interesting and idiosyncratic voices in black America. I wish you'd seriously engaged with his argument instead of doing a drive by snarking at it."
Coates is a bright guy and a talented writer, but I think he may be too thin-skinned to engage with Sailer. I once suggested to Coates on his blog that he read Sailer's take on something, and Coates quoted a line from Sailer's post about Katrina and New Orleans that he found objectionable and said he wouldn't listen to someone who thought that.
Coates also got touchy when his former colleague Andrew Sullivan wrote about race and IQ. This is a fundamental problem with engaging with most black public intellectuals. The Occam's Razor explanation for black problems is too painful for them to consider, so they keep circling back to explanations based on pervasive racism against blacks.
I hope I'm wrong about Coates though. If he agreed to have a dialog with Sailer, I'd buy popcorn for that one.
most idiosyncratic voices
You're illiterate. He's a garden-variety reflexive whiner with the exact set of opinions he's required to spout to be considered a "leader" by blacks who demand subsidized livings. Idiosyncratic would be Star Parker or Janice Rogers Brown. Go work on your dunks, mofo.
C. Van Carter said... Coates is the Atlantic's funniest writer.
You're right, I did chuckle at Coates's statement in the article you linked: "I think I've been pretty straight with you guys about the pitfalls of my eduction."
"Coates also got touchy when his former colleague Andrew Sullivan wrote about race and IQ. This is a fundamental problem with engaging with most black public intellectuals. The Occam's Razor explanation for black problems is too painful for them to consider, so they keep circling back to explanations based on pervasive racism against blacks."
Why would an intelligent person want to listen to people tell him that he's the member of an inferior race?
Coates essay describes black people in the pre-Civil rights era who did work to overcome their station in life. As the article states, many blacks had stable nuclear families that went to church, had steady jobs, worked hard, etc.
They succeeded in spite of racism. The problem was the activity of the gov't to keep blacks in low income, poor neighborhoods, with poor schools kept many people who might have been more successful out of the middle class. The GOP claims that the gov't hinders job growth with regulations and high taxes on the wealthy and that they producers will quit if they continue to tax and spend and regulate the economy. When it comes to, "the black middle class" however, discrimination in work, discrimination in housing, health care, etc. Then it's just lazy black people looking for a hand out.
like the bail-out of banks that left the homeowners whom the banks conned underwater. The results of the housing crisis for black people have been devastating. The response is to hector these people about playing video games and watching too much television. Or to tell them they've have "an achievement gap." It is sickening, dishonest, and morally repugnant.
This is half-true. The Banksters/Big Finance got away with it. In real life, when you screw up (ie break the law, commit fraud, take excessive risk), you get screwed. Unless you work for a Wall Street firm or bank/lender, in which case nothing happens. Heads they win and get fat bonuses, tails the taxpayer bails them out (and the banker walks away without any punishment).
There's plenty of blame to go around to diversitycrats and irresponsible borrowers (who are disproportionately black), but conservatives are disingenuous when they defend the banks. "It's the free market at work!" "These guys create value."
What happened in 2008 represents the confluence of crony capitalism, monopolistic business practices, lack of regulation, perverse incentives, and irresponsibility among lots of Americans. We can point the finger at NAMs who took on mortgages they couldn't afford, but why the heck do our political elites and bankers get off free?
If anything, bankers are worse. NAMs have 2-digit IQs and can't understand what adjustable rate mortgages are. Ivy League educated execs are smart enough to know what they're doing..... and clever enough to rig the system in their favor.
One final point: Fleecing low-IQ NAMs, and then letting the government pay the bill, is not "free market capitalism."
Blacks would make more economic progress, and stay out of trouble more, if immigration were cut down. If Microsoft and Amazon couldn't import endless amounts of foreign coolie labor, they'd probably just train locals (some of whom would be black). Our software would be inferior (to what it snow) and MS would be less profitable, but there'd be more of black middle class and less of an incentive for young blacks to be gangbangers.... and that would be a definite plus for America.
Nobody thinks that way in Washington DC, unfortunately. Supposedly we need an amnesty...... and a low-skilled "guestworker" program.......... and a high skilled "guestworker program". You know, because there's such a shortage of workers in our country....
What the hell are up with the comments on that thread, everyone is taking it seriously.
What about the argument that SBPDL makes? Namely, that the black middle class is artificial. That it only exists by and large because of disproportionate government hiring of blacks, and the forcing of the private sector to comply with AA policies. Without government, the black middle class would be drastically smaller.
Ta-Nehisi is a good guy and one of the smartest, most interesting and idiosyncratic voices in black America. I wish you'd seriously engaged with his argument instead of doing a drive by snarking at it.
There's no evidence that he's intelligent. Let's be frank. He sounds like one of those people who are so dumb that they don't realize how dumb they are.
"Why would an intelligent person want to listen to people tell him that he's the member of an inferior race?"
Okay, now I know your Coates, because he said that same thing.
@anon 4:59
"They succeeded in spite of racism."
Perhaps they succeeded because of it, or Coates' perception of what was racist, which in fact a soft paternalism/benign neglect that created an environment of success for all lower IQ people to succeed, black or white? Does he discuss the government assuming the role of provider which directly led to a black illegitimacy rate of > 70%?
I wonder if Coates would ever accede to *that*.
Your comment about a black upper class makes me think of the South Park episode "Here Comes the Neighborhood" where Token Black tries to get more people like him to move to South Park. You know, rich people like Will Smith, Snoop Dogg, Magic Johnson, and Oprah. It's tough being the only wealthy family in town.
Ta-Nehisi is a good guy and one of the smartest, most interesting and idiosyncratic voices in black America. I wish you'd seriously engaged with his argument instead of doing a drive by snarking at it.
Okey doke.
1) ... In fact, in some cases, black migrants were better educated than their Northern white neighbors.
There is a subset of the black population better educated than the median of the northern white population. Who said otherwise, and when?
3) The black migrants were not immigrants. They were citizens of this country who did not enjoy its full protection. Unlike other immigrant classes, blacks were never able to cash in on their hard work and middle-class values. For all of their work-ethic, education-valuing, and long-term marriages, they received the worst wages in the worst jobs, were limited to the worst housing, and stuffed in the worst schools.
Ummmm, you are saying you had a corps of workers of satisfactory productivity and willing to work for lower wages whose human capital was systematically left untapped by employers; that housing stock is static in quality and that landlords and developers are in their activities unresponsive to the purchasing power of potential renters and buyers; and that school quality is unaffected by characteristics of the clientele of said schools.
5) The half-assed social contract continues to this very day with policies under the present administration, like the bail-out of banks that left the homeowners whom the banks conned underwater.
Do you mean the banks Jedi mind tricked black applicants into taking out loans which incorporated mortgage payments which exceeded what they could afford on their take home pay, or do you mean that prices in what appears to be a highly decentralized real-estate market are orchestrated by snidely-whiplash bankers?
The results of the housing crisis for black people have been devastating. The response is to hector these people about playing video games and watching too much television.
???
6) America does not really want a black middle class.
You mean 'America' is some sort of hive mind with a will and preferences?
Some of the most bracing portions of Wilkerson's book involve the vicious attacks on black ambition. When a black family in Chicago saves up enough to move out of the crowded slums into Cicero, the neighborhood riots. The father had saved for years for a piano for his kids. The people of Cicero tossed the piano out the window, looted his home, torched his apartment and then torched his building.
1. Irving Kristol once recounted that he had been inducted into the military in Cicero, Illinois in 1942; that the place had once been Al Capone's old stomping ground; that quite a few of the men he had been inducted with were 'thugs and near-thugs'. Not exactly a representative locale.
2. You think you might hear stories like this (and like that of that unfortunate physician in Detroit in 1924) because they did not happen that often and have had a novelty value?
3. You think an ugly instance of small scale riot and vandalism occurring 59 years ago is not exactly topical?
In the South, when black people attempted to leave to earn better wages, they were often forcibly detained, and thus kept in slavery as late as the 1950s.
In slavery? 'Often' forcibly detained where? You had 5 million blacks living up north in 1950 and 10 million down South. How much jail space could have been devoted to aspirant migrants (at a time when the total prison population of the entire country was under 200,000)?
On a policy level, there is a persistent strain wherein efforts to aid The People are engineered in such a way wherein they help black people a lot less. It is utterly painful to read about the New Deal being left in the hands of Southern governments which were hostile to black people, and then to today see a significant chunk of health care, again, left in the hands of Southern governments which are hostile to black people.
Rednecks in North Carolina are short-changing blacks applying for Medicaid?
At this point, such efforts no longer require open bigotry. They are simply built into the system.
Care to specify how they are 'built-in'?
"Hmm, lets think about that for a moment. Well, you see, white folks get to hear that all the time"
I though we were evil geniuses keeping the brothers down. I wish the DWL elites would pick a line and stick with it...
A major contention I have with black intellectuals is their seeming refusal to acknowledge the numerous positive steps that U.S. whites have taken to uplift the black race and remedy past acts of mistreatment. White Americans have fought a bloody civil war that costs the lives of 600,000 fellow citizens largely over the issue of black slavery, established educational programs and institutions to teach the new freedmen, enforced integration via court decisions even when the masses vehemently opposed them, ensured the protection of their voting and civil rights by federal fiat, designated the race an official preferred class through affirmative action and disparate impact, lionized their top entertainers and most palatable politicians, de-emphasized the undeniably high rate of black crime to save the community’s image, ad infinitum.
Yet, elite blacks like Ta-Nehisi Coates rarely express a shred of gratitude for or recognition of these mammoth endeavors (however perfect or imperfect) by whites. Always more is demanded. Always never enough has been done. Always more could have been done if those hesitant, indifferent whites had apparently not refused to do it. Always only said elite blacks know exactly just what needs to be done and whites merely need to listen and act.
It is odd and frustrating. Have Arabs ever attempted to rectify their historical mistreatment of blacks? Do blacks ever demand anything from them?
Ta-Nehisi Coates and Garrance Franke-Ruta should get together and write a baby name book.
In the South, when black people attempted to leave to earn better wages, they were often forcibly detained, and thus kept in slavery as late as the 1950s.
In slavery? 'Often' forcibly detained where? You had 5 million blacks living up north in 1950 and 10 million down South. How much jail space could have been devoted to aspirant migrants (at a time when the total prison population of the entire country was under 200,000)?
There's volumes about so-called "vagrancy" laws and blacks being forced to work all the way through the 1960s.
One book called, "Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America" Is a good place to start. It talks about Black people held in forced work camps, assigned to backbreaking toil of filling sandbags and were driven by white overseers wielding guns and whips.
Black people were not allowed to evacuate because the cotton planters were afraid they wouldn't come back.
"Why would an intelligent person want to listen to people tell him that he's the member of an inferior race?"
Coates made a similar argument on his blog at the time, saying that 19th century racists/colonialists used their belief that blacks were less intelligent to justify enslaving them, IIRC. You could make the points that Steve has made in the past, that 1) average group differences in intelligence don't define individuals, and 2) that one group is less intelligent, on average, doesn't make it inferior, because it may be superior in other attributes.
Both points are true, but our society places so much weight on intelligence that I can see how they wouldn't be much of a salve for Coates. Maybe a more compelling reason to acknowledge the importance of IQ would be because once you acknowledge it, you can think about constructive ways to help those on the left half of the Bell Curve -- such as the ways Steve has blogged about in the past.
"Ivy League educated execs are smart enough to know what they're doing..... and clever enough to rig the system in their favor."
Not most of them, as it turned out.
"One final point: Fleecing low-IQ NAMs, and then letting the government pay the bill, is not "free market capitalism.""
It's usually lefties who warn about the risks of "unfettered capitalism" in the wake of the mortgage bust, but it's hard to think of a sector of the economy with greater government participation and distortions. But let's set the record straight on one thing: Wall Street didn't fleece NAMs, or any other mortgage borrowers during the housing bubble; this was a case, for the most part, of Wall Street getting fleeced by Main Street (mortgage brokers, many of them NAMs selling to NAMs).
The biggest Wall Street banks got bailed out, because the government was worried about a huge economic collapse if they went under (in reality, the steps taken by the Fed and Treasury in the fall of '08, such as guaranteeing money market deposits, probably would have been enough of a firewall against that). But Lehman and Bear Stearns went bust, hundreds of thousands of Wall Streeters lost their jobs, and as many had substantial portions of their savings wiped out when share values of their companies collapsed.
Shorter Tennesse Coates:
"It's all whitey's fault"
Lets be honest, if Ta-neshi coates were white/asian, he wouldn't be paid to write for "THE ATLANTIC" and we wouldn't be reading him. He's not very bright.
Of course Coates omits to mention reversion toward the mean, which explains why the descendants of those high-achiever blacks who moved North average nearly as feckless as their cousins who never went anywhere.
The worst thing that happened to black America was the 1965 immigration act. But nobody wants to hear this.
Romney scared away large portions of the (otherwise potentially receptive) white working class with his plutocratic policies, and lost. Therefore we must pander to the Hispanics, who will give Obama most of the credit anyway.
The results of the housing crisis for black people have been devastating.
The results of integration for white people have been devastating. Can anyone seriously disagree? If that's both true and unmentionable then how is it not prima facie evidence that American society is fundamentally anti-white? Sheesh, talk about half-assed social contracts.
If white people complain about the Chinese and Muslims keeping them down why can't black people complain?
DAJ said: A major contention I have with black intellectuals is their seeming refusal to acknowledge the numerous positive steps that U.S. whites have taken to uplift the black race and remedy past acts of mistreatment.
Hunsdon edits: A major contention I have with Jewish intellectuals is their seeming refusal to acknowledge the numerous positive steps that U.S. whites have taken to uplift the Jewish race and remedy past acts of mistreatment.
And!
A major contention I have with Nick Diaz is his seeming refusal to acknowledge the numerous positive steps that U.S. whites have taken to uplift the Hispanic ethnicity and remedy past acts of mistreatment.
We could call this the "no good deed goes unpunished" theory.
Why would an intelligent person want to listen to people tell him that he's the member of an inferior race?
Why would an intelligent person want to continue to believe in fairy tales about race?
There's volumes about so-called "vagrancy" laws and blacks being forced to work all the way through the 1960s.
One book called, "Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America" Is a good place to start. It talks about Black people held in forced work camps, assigned to backbreaking toil of filling sandbags and were driven by white overseers wielding guns and whips.
Those would be 'convicts,' and would include white hobos and drifters as well. Vagrancy laws have been on the books forever, as property owners have historically always had a problem with anonymous, sociopathic individuals in the public space.
Blacks stayed on as sharecroppers because it was their home and their skill-set. Of course, cotton prices had cratered at that point and the actual profit-incentive would have been to give them a dollar and say goodbye and good luck, and many of them would have starved.
These days we're far more enlightened. It's way, way cheaper just to hire one itinerant Mexican to drive the harvester.
Why would an intelligent person want to listen to people tell him that he's the member of an inferior race?
Uh, because he's an intelligent person?
Dave in Hackensack wrote, "It's usually lefties who warn about the risks of "unfettered capitalism" in the wake of the mortgage bust, but it's hard to think of a sector of the economy with greater government participation and distortions."
How about health care, buddy?
There's volumes about so-called "vagrancy" laws and blacks being forced to work all the way through the 1960s. One book called, "Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America" Is a good place to start. It talks about Black people held in forced work camps, assigned to backbreaking toil of filling sandbags and were driven by white overseers wielding guns and whips.
Somehow, I doubt what is done during natural disasters describes well the ordinary course of life.
See The Social History of Crime and Punishment in America: An Encyclopedia, p. 1481. The practice of 'convict leasing' had evaporated by 1930, not 1955 or 1965. Even so, it would have required some sort of criminal conviction, even if trumped up.
See At Freedom's Edge: Black Mobility and the Southern White Quest..., pp. 229 et seq. "Contract enforcement laws" were applied to laborers who took advances; "enticement laws" were applied to employers; "emigrant-agent laws" imposed licensing fees on labor recruiters. All of these are bad acts and economically injurious to the whole as well as to black labor. It is rather de trop to compare them to 'slavery'.
As for vagrancy laws, their heydey was from about 1900 to 1930. Two percent of the population might pass through the court system of a state for any reason in a given year. That is plenty of opportunity for many injustices to occur. 'Many injustices' does not constitute binding to the land as a regular social practice, as Coates implies. The share of the black population living outside the South went from 10% in 1900 to 33% in 1950. That's the main story.
Black people were not allowed to evacuate because the cotton planters were afraid they wouldn't come back.
Again, I think you are confounding the aspirations of the planter class in the immediate post-bellum period (1865-67, when the black codes were passed) with the regular social practice throughout the century after the war.
Again, Cohen, p. 248:
"It was one thing to design and erect a structure of laws to prevent people from moving. It was another to make the laws work. A central paradox of the era from the end of Reconstruction to World War I is that, even as the laws of racial proscription constricted black freedom, southern planters continued to find the labor control they sought beyond their grasp."
Please note, Cohen's survey concludes in 1915, whereas Coates refers to the 1950s.
" Truth said...
LOL; Ta-Neshi sounds like your readers talking about the Ivy league."
LOL, like when your sister gripes about all those Messkin' hos stealin' all the good Johns...
Just to make explicit the problems with Coates' line:
1. The middle class - salaried employees and proprietors with out much in the way of accumulated assets - is a minority in any locale more variegated than a suburban township. As of now, just north of a quarter of the population fit the description. Most people are wage-earners. Some wage-earners have skilled trades, are out of debt, or own their own homes. Some think of themselves as occupying a place in a stratum with people above and below them, rather than thinking of themselves as subaltern. All of which is to say there are working people with a good deal in common with the bourgeosie.
2. There was in 1948 and is today a bourgeois stratum in the black population. It is proportionally smaller than in the general population, but has for generations been large enough to be obtrusive. In the former period, it was made up of a class of professionals, merchants, and artisans who served a black clientele. Those people are still there, but you have people employed in the larger world of the commerce. Both subsets are now outnumbered by public employees and those in philanthropic apparati.
3. Nonsensical social and economic history aside, Coates cannot reliably attribute responsibility to save his life. Markets have price bubbles due to imperfect information; banks and securities firms do business in a defective regulatory architecture with perverse incentives; human organizations (including banks) harbor a large mass of the negligent and a smaller mass of the predatory; people given the freedom to make their own decisions sometimes make bad ones. That's just life, and people of all description are injured at times; working class blacks were not major customers for collateralized debt obligations. In Coates-world, all that translates into Honky conspiring to keep the black man down. It's puerile.
4. There is much good public policy that can be enacted that would be disproportionately beneficial to blacks. The thing is, any public square suffers from its mindsets and most proposed reforms run up against vested interests. Black pols one might wager do not want to go there; neither does Coates (presuming he knows where 'there' is.)
Lets be honest, if Ta-neshi coates were white/asian, he wouldn't be paid to write for "THE ATLANTIC" and we wouldn't be reading him. He's not very bright.
Exactly! He´d be flipping burgers were it not for Affirmative Action and the Democratic vote plantation he works in.
But he´s got to be a good boy and put on the angry black man act to suit his masters.
"The worst thing that happened to black America was the 1965 immigration act."
Not really, as long as Blacks have quotas and set-asides they don't care. For example, the massive asian domination of the California Universities has hurt white/hispanics not the blacks - who have a unwritten quota. Same with the Ivy League.
@ 3:13 anon
Come on Ta-Hehehisi, comment under your own name.
The nerve of YT, thinking that blacks should have to work to be in the middle class! Doesn't stupid YT know blacks should be able to watch TV and play video games all day, and the gov't should just send them enough money to put them in the middle class?
America does not CARE about a black middle class, in the same way that American does not care about a white middle class, an Asian middle class, or anything else.
The gov't sure seems to care about a black middle class. Seems like all you have to do is be black and not assault people, and they'll give you a job.
LOL; Ta-Neshi sounds like your readers talking about the Ivy league.
True. And most blacks sound like Ta-Nehisi on the middle class, and iSteve readers on the Ivy League. While the white middle class just provides the danegeld to fund the entire operation.
The Occam's Razor explanation for black problems is too painful for them to consider, so they keep circling back to explanations based on pervasive racism against blacks.
Right. Because the way to counter the inherently racist IQ gap explanation is to deploy the inherently racist "evil white folks" explanation.
Why would an intelligent person want to listen to people tell him that he's the member of an inferior race?
Why would an intelligent person want to give credence to the idea that he's from a less intelligent race by sticking his fingers in his ears and shouting "la la la la la! Can't hear the crimethink!"? What would a smart, intellectually-confident person have to fear from wading into the fray?
The problem was the activity of the gov't to keep blacks in low income, poor neighborhoods, with poor schools kept many people who might have been more successful out of the middle class. The GOP claims that the gov't hinders job growth with regulations and high taxes on the wealthy and that they producers will quit if they continue to tax and spend and regulate the economy. When it comes to, "the black middle class" however, discrimination in work, discrimination in housing, health care, etc. Then it's just lazy black people looking for a hand out.
English is spoken here. Anyone know what that's supposed to mean?
What happened in 2008 represents the confluence of crony capitalism, monopolistic business practices, lack of regulation, perverse incentives, irresponsibility among lots of Americans, and lots and lots of race-hustling BS from the usual suspects. We can point the finger at NAMs who took on mortgages they couldn't afford, but why the heck do our political elites and bankers get off free?
FTFY. That said, in which parallel universe are you living? Who's this "we" to whom you refer? It certainly isn't American society, which has been pointing the finger at the banksters far more than it has been pointing it at NAMs vis-a-vis the mortgage meltdown.
Lying doesn't bother you lot at all, does it?
One final point: Fleecing low-IQ NAMs, and then letting the government pay the bill, is not "free market capitalism."
Oh, I see, the "government" pays the bill. And where does their money come from?
Perhaps they succeeded because of it
Precisely. To the extent that blacks have ever "succeeded," it's been under "white supremacy," or whatever you want to call it. Blacks do not handle freedom well.
Why would an intelligent person want to listen to people tell him that he's the member of an inferior race?
Right. The proper response is to call whites an inferior race.
A major contention I have with black intellectuals is their seeming refusal to acknowledge the numerous positive steps that U.S. whites have taken to uplift the black race and remedy past acts of mistreatment. White Americans have fought a bloody civil war that costs the lives of 600,000 fellow citizens largely over the issue of black slavery, established educational programs and institutions to teach the new freedmen, enforced integration via court decisions even when the masses vehemently opposed them, ensured the protection of their voting and civil rights by federal fiat, designated the race an official preferred class through affirmative action and disparate impact, lionized their top entertainers and most palatable politicians, de-emphasized the undeniably high rate of black crime to save the community’s image, ad infinitum.
Yet, elite blacks like Ta-Nehisi Coates rarely express a shred of gratitude for or recognition of these mammoth endeavors (however perfect or imperfect) by whites. Always more is demanded. Always never enough has been done. Always more could have been done if those hesitant, indifferent whites had apparently not refused to do it. Always only said elite blacks know exactly just what needs to be done and whites merely need to listen and act.
It is odd and frustrating. Have Arabs ever attempted to rectify their historical mistreatment of blacks? Do blacks ever demand anything from them?
Or Jews. The first synagogue in the US was built with slave-money, if memory serves.
What you're describing is sociopathy. Leftism always sounds a lot like sociopathy.
America loves Blacks and cannot get enough of them. Look at Jay Z, he's worth half a billion, and that did not come from Black consumers. Oprah is a billionaire plus by being every White woman's imaginary Black best friend. Whites LOVE Blacks, and want as many as they can get. On TV, in political leadership, and so on.
Living next to them, not so much.
As for the Black middle class, it is artificial and created solely by discrimination against Whites. Blacks are just superior to Whites on average in athletics. They just are. But as superior as they are, they can't compete on average (absent a few exceptions) against Whites let alone Asians in cognitive fields.
Hence the genius of Elites: "landed estates" consisting of government sinecures (think Hillary and Bill Clinton, and Chelsea) plus media jobs, and allied to that a vastly expanding central government to fund a Black middle class. Tapping into the White fascination and love for Blacks.
White people LOVE LOVE LOVE Blacks. Just look at the NFL, "hero" Ray Lewis (how Black is he?) and the NBA. Compare/contrast the NHL ratings and visibility with say, the NBA.
Do you mean the banks Jedi mind tricked black applicants into taking out loans which incorporated mortgage payments which exceeded what they could afford on their take home pay,
It cannot be this as Obama was the lawyer who took banks to court under the CRA to make this happen and the Hawaiian Harvard hero is incapable of doing wrong.
Dave, the Ivy League execs (and politicians) cashed out big time. Their "failiure" didn't result in them doing jail time or paying back the money. It just resulted in the masses (ie people like us) getting screwed.
It's usually lefties who warn about the risks of "unfettered capitalism" in the wake of the mortgage bust, but it's hard to think of a sector of the economy with greater government participation and distortions. But let's set the record straight on one thing: Wall Street didn't fleece NAMs, or any other mortgage borrowers during the housing bubble; this was a case, for the most part, of Wall Street getting fleeced by Main Street (mortgage brokers, many of them NAMs selling to NAMs).
The biggest Wall Street banks got bailed out, because the government was worried about a huge economic collapse if they went under (in reality, the steps taken by the Fed and Treasury in the fall of '08, such as guaranteeing money market deposits, probably would have been enough of a firewall against that). But Lehman and Bear Stearns went bust, hundreds of thousands of Wall Streeters lost their jobs, and as many had substantial portions of their savings wiped out when share values of their companies collapsed.
I tend to agree with the government distortions argument. I even made the same point earlier in the thread. That doesn't mean we can absolve the mortgage and financial services industry of their guilt. They knew what was happening and they made a lot of money out of it. The execs, the brokers, the Wall Street gamblers.....
There are some who argue that the banks could've raised capital through diluting ownership by offering more shares up. An even better option, in my view, would've been nationalization.
Yes, Lehman and Bear Stearns went under.... and who let them go under? Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson (ie former Goldman Sachs CEO). Then when Hank Paulson finally decides which banks to bailout, who did he consult? Lloyd Blankenfein (current CEO of Goldman Sachs).... and after that he bailed out AIG (which turned around and gave billions in credit fault swap agreements to Goldman). I'm telling you, it's crony capitalism at its worse.
You make a valid point that lots of Wall Street workers lost their jobs, but really Wall Street is a pyramid designed to benefit those at the top. Analysts are expendable - what matters is that people from the VP level and up cash out, which they did.... and even if you get fired, so what? If you made a few million, go do something else and live well. It's not like former Goldman employees are living lifes of penury. Trust me, don't cry for these guys.
Low-IQ NAMs and the cult of diversity represent problems, which is why immigration is generally bad.... but under a more responsible system (ie pre-Bush), there damage inflicted wouldn't have been so severe. As Steve Sailer has said, our era is one where high and low gang up to fleece the middle (ie most of us).
We important Mexican labor, then we sell them houses they can't afford, then we bailout the banks. In the process, the average man sees his taxes go up and his wages go down, all the while ignorant because he fixates so much on celebrity gossip, college football, and other frivolity. Meanwhile the schemers at the top ("public servants" like Bush, Clinton, Hank Paulson, Clinton's son-in-law VP at Goldman Sachs - yes Clinton has a son-in-law at Goldman) get rich. It's robbery of us by them, with NAMs as a "stage army of the elites" (as Steve Sailer said).
"It is odd and frustrating. Have Arabs ever attempted to rectify their historical mistreatment of blacks? Do blacks ever demand anything from them?"
I suggest you go to Saudi Arabia and find some blacks who live there, and ask them.
"LOL, like when your sister gripes about all those Messkin' hos stealin' all the good Johns..."
My sister is married, to a white man who can trace his heritage to the Mayflower.
"Lets be honest, if Ta-neshi coates were white/asian, he wouldn't be paid to write for "THE ATLANTIC" and we wouldn't be reading him. He's not very bright."
If he were white, he would have certainly discovered that FOX network paid more.
"If white people complain about the Chinese and Muslims keeping them down why can't black people complain?"
Don't forget the bane of white people's existence; the "Scots-Irish."
"
The results of integration for white people have been devastating."
Not nearly as much as it was for the Natives.
Anon,
"How about health care, buddy?"
Sure, there's lots of government participation in health care -- about 50% of health care costs are covered by government, mainly via Medicare and Medicaid. But there is more government participation in the mortgage market. The government created the secondary market for 30 year mortgages in the first place, and government agencies own or guarantee about 95% of all mortgages today.
Why would an intelligent person want to listen to people tell him that he's the member of an inferior race?
What intelligent person is happy that their sex comprises the overwhelming majority of violent criminals? And yet most men acknowledge this.
True, few intelligent men want to listen to people who rant on about "patriarchal" violence as mono-causal explanation for everything bad in the world, but that's largely because such people are morons.
There are also ranting morons for whom HBD-derived ideas serve as mono-causal explanations for various ills. Pretty much everyone finds them offensive, but the ones who should oppose most are the non-ranting-moron HBD-ers. Anti_HBD-ers are secretly delighted by them.
Cennbeorc
What happened in 2008 represents the confluence of crony capitalism, monopolistic business practices, lack of regulation, perverse incentives, and irresponsibility among lots of Americans. We can point the finger at NAMs who took on mortgages they couldn't afford, but why the heck do our political elites and bankers get off free?
Much as I hate the finance-industry elite, I think they faced the impossible task of conjuring acceptable returns for the boomers' retirement savings out the slow-growth post-1970s economy, and they did it the only way they knew how: through fraud, i.e., bubbles.
Something needed to be done to keep the property bubble inflating, and a deal with political elite to make shaky loans to their clientele groups seemed like something they might once again get away with. Their luck finally ran out... well, actually, our luck ran out, their luck is doing fine.
IMO, if it hadn't been NAMs it would have been some other group. If America had been 100% white European, the political elite might have promoted double-digit-IQ whites (of whom there are plenty) employing quasi-marxist or quasi-communitarian rhetoric.
Cennbeorc
On a policy level, there is a persistent strain wherein efforts to aid The People are engineered in such a way wherein they help black people a lot less. It is utterly painful to read about the New Deal being left in the hands of Southern governments which were hostile to black people, and then to today see a significant chunk of health care, again, left in the hands of Southern governments which are hostile to black people.
That may have been the situation a generation or two, or three, ago, but today it seems that race relations are better in much of the South (the Carolinas are often mentioned) than elsewhere in the U.S. A black coworker of mine was saying that just this week.
Not nearly as much as it was for the Natives.
Whites don't deny that, sport. I don't know of any blacks that acknowledge what a disaster integration has been for whites.
"America does not really want a black middle class."
The current ruling elite don't want a middle-class at all - they want rich (them) and poor (everyone else).
The (unprotected by AA) black middle-class is just the first to go in the same way as the black bluecollar population was first to be sacrificed to immigration and offshoring.
This guy whines about discrimination against blacks keeping them out of the middle class but the reality is that it is discrimination for blacks that put most of the ones in the middle class there.
Why else hire these black writers who, apparently the brightest of their kind, can at best only regurgitate the same tired nonsense that we've been getting for decades?
"Truth said...
"Lets be honest, if Ta-neshi coates were white/asian, he wouldn't be paid to write for "THE ATLANTIC" and we wouldn't be reading him. He's not very bright."
If he were white, he would have certainly discovered that FOX network paid more."
But if he were white, even working for FOX he couldn't speak the truth that blacks are actually getting privileged treatment and are responsible for their own failures.
""LOL, like when your sister gripes about all those Messkin' hos stealin' all the good Johns..."
My sister is married, to a white man who can trace his heritage to the Mayflower."
It would be interesting to see if their kids state they are of this lineage which brought America to greatness from its beginnings when it comes to college applications, jobs, etc. Put Coates griping to the test and list white on their applications instead of black and see what happens.
Coates starts off by talking about how migrating blacks were more educated and enjoyed better rates of employment than native northern blacks and then immediately plops out a hypothesis that makes this stated disparity inexplicable. If the man has set it up so that blacks are unable to capitalise on things like education and worth ethic then why did the more highly educated migrating blacks do better in the job market than northern blacks?
In truth America would obviously love it if black america had a much larger middle class. A larger black middle class would greatly increase your chances of living next door to a Bill Huxtable over a character from the wire. Unfortunately many blacks are simply not interested in pursuing the things that produce a middle class lifestyle and a big part of the reason is that those things have been de-legitimised by people like Coates. If you think about any of the personal qualities or policies that might increase the likelihood of black ascension to the middle class then you can be sure to find Coates bashing and belittling them in print. He argues that single parenthood is irrelevant, that familiarity with the the work of Ghostface killah is just as important as a familiarity with the western canon, that it is ignoble to expect blacks to be responsible for themselves, that police strategies which lower crime in black neighbourhoods are a racist plot. It's obscene for someone like him to blame America because so few blacks do the things he is continually disparaging.
Coates is an affirmative action hire, no doubt ... the type of black intellectual who uses lots and lots of words but never really says anything.
His commenters are even worse.
Not to mention that he bans anyone who even hints at disagreeing with him
This Ta-pretentious-african-name Coates couldn't be more wrong. White middle-class people would wish for nothing more dearly than that blacks could just be respectable middle-class people, rather than AA parasites, welfare spongers, and criminals. It would make life easier for all of us.
NAMS as the stage army of the elites - thats brilliant.
"But if he were white, even working for FOX he couldn't speak the truth that blacks are actually getting privileged treatment and are responsible for their own failures."
Whites get privileged treatment vis-a-vis Asians in college applications, do you speak up against it?
NAMS as the stage army of the elites - thats brilliant.
Steve Sailer came up with it, not me..... but yes, I agree, it is brilliant.
Wasn't that what the housing bubble was about? Politicians/lobbyists/execs (all three groups are interchangeable, as politicians often end up becoming lobbyists and then execs) make money by selling mortgages to NAMs..... They further inflate this by allowing in huge numbers of illegals, who also get mortagages......... They push "anti-discrimination" CRA-type laws, deregulation, lax oversight, Fannie/Freddie, and financial speculation.......... They pat themselves on the back for being so enlightened........ Average working man's wages and community decline........ Then when the whole damn thing falls apart, we (the taxpayer) bails them out....... A few months later, Goldman Sachs pays out huge bonuses.
Our elites are parasites.
Now "conservatives" like Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan want an amnesty and a new "guestworker" program, which will deal with our country's massive worker "shortage." It wouldn't surprise me if, in a few years, the housing market rebounds and we're talking about how that whole mortgage meltdown was some type of anomaly...... and how racist Americans (ie you) won't give mortgages to hardworking family-oriented Mexican immigrants, so we gotta do something. Now.
Rinse, repeat.
Some of the blame, I think, goes to the American masses. All sorts of frivolity (college football, reality tv, celebrity gossip) take up the bulk of the average American's attention.
Remember when Joe Paterno was fired? The students rioted. When was the last time that anyone got that excited about outsourcing? About the fall in wages? About the corrupt DC-Wall Street axis?
Yes, we have Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Parties, but those represent our fringes. Mainstream Americans (ie the people who care more about Joe Pa's firing than their pa's firing) don't really care. The amount of public indifference is astounding.
White middle-class people would wish for nothing more dearly than that blacks could just be respectable middle-class people
True. In fact, they want it to be true so badly that they mostly believe it is true, and manage to turn a blind eye to any evidence that contradicts it.
" NAMS as the stage army of the elites - thats brilliant.
1/27/13, 12:37 PM
Blogger Truth said...
"But if he were white, even working for FOX he couldn't speak the truth that blacks are actually getting privileged treatment and are responsible for their own failures."
Whites get privileged treatment vis-a-vis Asians in college applications, do you speak up against it?"
Yes, as do many of the commenters here. We are for MERITOCRACY. Of course, if Ted Kennedy and his ilk hadn't been so foolish as to open the country up to every Tom, Dick and Geraldo that stepped off a boat or walked in, its doubtful we'd ever have to wonder about this issue, now would we?
Sure, there's lots of government participation in health care -- about 50% of health care costs are covered by government, mainly via Medicare and Medicaid.
You have vastly understated the amount of government distortion by ignoring the wage controls imposed by the Feds during WWII. Employers started giving workers health insurance as a perk that didn't count as wages, thus disconnecting the patient from payment.
Whites get privileged treatment vis-a-vis Asians in college applications, do you speak up against it?
The falsity of this assertion has been addressed ad nauseam RECENTLY at THIS BLOG!
Yes, as do many of the commenters here. We are for MERITOCRACY.
And why would you consider meritocracy to be blind to race or citizenship?
Why shouldn't "merit" be defined to include membership in the group that created the things that are being distributed on the basis of "merit"?
"A whole lot of people here want an end to all forms of AA and racial quotas, which would eliminate the bias in favor of whites over Asians as well as the bias in favor of hispanics and blacks over whites."
No I would say that a lot of PEOPLE do, certainly not a lot of people here. If admissions were strictly intellect/achievement based, Ivy league schools would have mostly black football and basketball teams, a smattering of, I would say 10% whites, and the rest, Asians, East Indians, and Jews, I've never read anyone here advocating this.
" but it ought to be equally clear that most Americans seriously want a black middle class to prosper. That line about America not wanting a black middle class would not have survived a f minutes of critical thought."
I am not sure about this. I know that a high number of white Americans would welcome a black middle class, but I would say a fairly equitable number of white Americans judge they're personal value primarily upon the fact they they are "better than the blacks." You can read it here EVERY SINGLE DAY without fail. A large black middle class would absolutely destroy white people lacking in confidence, a good deal of whom comprise Steve's readership.
"I'd say a lot of the white support for Obama is based on saying "yeah, this is what we always hoped for from integration and civil rights--smart, competent blacks who get good college degrees and get married before they have kids and are overwhelmingly successful."
I would say that an OVERWHELMING degree of white support for Obama can be boiled down to 8 words; Allan Keys, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and Mitt Romney. The man has run against four complete morons for office, and this is the only way any black man would be elected president; alternatives so unbelievably bad that there was no true alternative...and the powers that be set it up this way.
As for evidence of black people being "screwed" that's a long, complicated issue that I will probably cover on my blog when I have time.
Black people, at large, are no longer raped by the system, instead "we" are systematically conditioned, from birth to enjoy pedophilia, and handed a bottle of KY.
Truth said . . .
If admissions were strictly intellect/achievement based, Ivy league schools would have mostly black football and basketball teams, a smattering of, I would say 10% whites, and the rest, Asians, East Indians, and Jews, I've never read anyone here advocating this.
If you are going to try to actually contribute to the discussion, this would be a good jumping off point for you. You are making a wildly implausible claim above (this is a compliment---we learn by finding out that implausible claims are true). Why don't you try to argue for it?
As Ron Unz recently pointed out, Cal Tech's student body does not look the way you predict. Fewer Jews and more whites than you say above and fewer Jews and more whites than the Ivies. Cal Tech is pretty darn meritocratic and would be even more so if the SAT did not suck so much.
I would say that an OVERWHELMING degree of white support for Obama can be boiled down to 8 words; Allan Keys, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and Mitt Romney. The man has run against four complete morons for office, and this is the only way any black man would be elected president;
The four just named include:
1. A lapsed foreign service officer with a PhD from Harvard University.
2. A commercial and corporate lawyer with a degrees from Wellesley and Yale with a 20 year history of staying one step ahead of the law.
3. A career Navy pilot who has twice run vigorous campaigns for President.
4. A graduate of Brigham Young and Harvard who made himself a centimillionaire in 25 years in the private equity business and then got himself elected governor of Massachusetts and ran to vigorous campaigns for President.
--
You might apply a number of descriptors to the four individuals above, but 'complete moron' would never be one. Unless, that is, you are a hopelessly conceited individual who fancies you could have had elite academic degrees and the world's millions with a flick of the wrist.
"Why would an intelligent person want to listen to people tell him that he's the member of an inferior race?"
Depends if it's fixable or not.
.
"Whites get privileged treatment vis-a-vis Asians in college applications, do you speak up against it?"
The most discriminated against group are white applicants from the red states with military or rural connections so if people are to be judged on the basis you imply then anyone making moral claims should be speaking up against that.
Secondly if the most discriminated against are a White sub-group yet in terms of the average over whole ethnic groups Asians have the biggest SATgap then there must be an over-subscribed White sub-group to balance the discriminated against rednecks.
Logically that must be the case.
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