Thank you. That's the best, most thoughtful, most honest, and most accurate description of the problem ever written.
My mom grew up in the Hartford Projects in the mid- to late-1950s. It was low-income housing and included many single-mothers (like my grandmother). Most of those folks were either young widows (of WW2) with kids, or what I'll call "vagaries of life" victims... decent people without the adequate family and community backup/support that used to be common (and is essential to help the young turn into functional, self-sustaining adults). Then came forced integration in the 60s...
After my parents' divorce in the late-70s, we wound up right back in that same neighborhood, attending the same schools, right down the street from the Projects. You won't be surprised to learn that things had (ahem) *gone downhill* significantly.
But the people I always felt worst for were the good black kids. Chappelle's joke about his own station growing up, that the difference between poor white people and poor black people is that whites don't think it's supposed to be happening to them! is trenchant on a lot of levels. I *knew* that I would not stay there, and that I would kill or die trying to get out. A combo of the military and education was enough.
I'll add this: a good number of "dark green" Marines I served with were acutely aware of what you've written here and were zealous persecutors of other black Marines who tried to bring that sh*t into the Unit. I always thought it was an interesting litmus test to see which officers (white or black) didn't understand the difference you've so well articulated. (And now I need to go read more Sowell - of all of his great writings, I've not yet read that one, though I'm aware of it).
I appreciate the kind words and the insight. I wish others could understand this issue more. My friend, the guy from the Bronx, used to get pretty irate about these guys who would act all hood and ghetto. He'd tell me, "These MFers don't know shit about the projects or the hood."
“Basic Economics” is a good starting place. I have it in book form and also from Audible. Solid work.
What is so sad is that so many blacks idolize complete bafoons. Here we have Thomas Sowell, quite possibly the most intelligent living man on the planet, but because he's not down with the victim mindset, he's ignored.
Your words exactly mirror my experience, both in the civilian world and the Marine Corps. One of my wake-up calls was a fellow NCO (black) who was called “my brother” by a POS Private (also black). His reply was enlightening. “I ain’t your damn brother, I know who my daddy was”.
Black flight from the cities is as common as white flight, and is based on both money and culture, just like with white folks. I spent 25 years moving household goods, which put me in houses and apartments, rich and poor, in every State. Every race, creed, and sexual orientation was a client. In the wiki list of 300 American cities by population I went down to number 272 before I found one I where haven’t been.
I have also been a firearms instructor for 23 years, and the concerns about personal and family safety are also exactly the same for those responsible black citizens as for those of any other ethnicity. Being a responsible adult, wanting a better life, and safe place to live were the common denominators. Before his fall from grace, Bill Cosby was a huge proponent of exactly what you describe. His personal failings make it no less true. There is also as noted, the voluminous work of Thomas Sowell and his colleague Walter Williams. For me Sowell’s most important and foundational work is “Basic Economics” and it is always the first book I recommend.
Thanks! When I was in the service, I'm not sure I completely "got it". It took some time. I remember a couple of weird things happening after I was out that made me think.
The first one was that I heard Whoopi Goldberg on her sitcom say something about "We wouldn't have Civil Rights if it weren't for the Democrats." It made me think about it and I looked it up because I was really a big reader. You know how it gets on CQ, better have a book. LOL
Lo and behold, the complete opposite was true, which struck me as odd. That coincided with a book I was reading titled Up From Slavery by Booker T Washington.
I remember thinking Whoopi said that crap, and it was false. Republicans overwhelmingly supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and all the preceding Civil Rights legislation. I'm reading this book about the son of a slave who has a better attitude and outlook than many of the black people I know.
I reread the piece, and I believe in almost every case where you say”ghetto culture” you could instead insert “third world culture”. The percentages of those who embrace it, cover for it, or reject it might change, but I believe the principles remain the same.
Often, but not always, this is Muslim culture (another thing you can’t say), but it could be any tribal culture, from Africa to South America to the’Stans. This “deculturalization” is based on a rejection of what we call civilization, in spite of the accomplishments of it. Our personal liberty, standard of living, scientific accomplishments, legal system, and codes of conduct are codependent. Like the Jenga tower or the house of cards only so much can be removed before collapse.
I find it difficult to be optimistic for the nation as a whole when we’ve already seen the virtual collapse of one major city after another. The maker and taker dichotomy still exists, but too many of the former now only make excuses.
Yep, and maybe even "Low IQ". I don't mean necessarily in the "intelligence" way as much as I do in the more "missing what's really going on" kind of way.
To be a functional well mannered citizen an 140 IQ isn’t necessary, but a willingness to do so and an understanding of why it’s needed is. I’ve known PhDs who were brilliant in their field, but obnoxious. And for at least one, a box from IKEA might as well be labeled “here there be dragons”.
You pretty much covered the waterfront there, I must say. And thank you for calling attention to a great book by Thomas Sowell [along with all his other ones]. Walter Williams is also the subject of an excellent documentary that you can watch here:
I agree with you that English/Scottish redneck culture contributed heavily to ghetto culture, as did LBJ's cynical Great Society programs, which both incentivized govt dependency and also rug pulled black homeowners in poor neighborhoods by bulldozing "substandard" housing to build projects--thus making a modest number of black people sharecroppers again, but also creating hives of misery and criminality that spread to the communities around them.
Unfortunately, that's not the end of the bad news, and here's the really inflammatory part: Why is the same sort of behavior common in Haiti, which was French, all across the West Indies, and also in Africa? Why did liberation from white Afrikaner apartheid fail to improve the miserable lives of most black South Africans? Why do so many African nations still operate under the strongman model exemplified by Idi Amin? Even if less violent, the prioritization of ego over achievement is still rampant, as are mafia-like make-work bureaucratic regimes and pointless regulations to skim money from entrepreneurs to connected politicians.
We see the very same problem in the Islamic world, which coincidentally dominates the northern half of the African continent. I assume there are many millions of Muslims who care more about their own economic future than violent conquest of their imagined enemies, but those people are forced to keep quiet or escape; they have zero chance of taking power from the psychopaths who control the cultural narrative. A grim prospect indeed, unless the successful Arab nations will start using military and economic leverage to eradicate the jihadis. I don't know how much will they have to do so, but there are faint signals here and there...
Now here's an interesting wrinkle: If you've read about the history of the American South before the civil rights campaign, or seen the film Black KKKlansman, you're aware that Southern whites, even as recently as a century ago, used to engage in behavior that was identical to what Hamas barbarians did on October 7. The discerning factor in my mind was not only the level of violence, which was animalistic, but more importantly the normalization of lynching and burning people to a degree that's hard for civilized people to imagine. The men perpetrated the violence, but their wives brought their children to watch, and have a picnic around the event. Exactly the behavior of "noncombatant" citizens in Gaza, or what black Africans regularly used to do to each other:
Why did that behavior develop among the rednecks who came from England & Scotland, which they were not doing back home since Braveheart days? And what was required to make it stop? I'm not being facetious; this is one of the hardest social questions in the world. In America, the behavior was able to be eradicated by the outsize national majority of people who condemned such violence; those conditions are absent in today's hot spots of conflict. And even here, as we all know, it has become fashionable to ONLY police white-on-black violence, never the reverse. Of course it is blacks who suffer from black ghetto culture far more than whites; same with the Western nations who tolerate violent Muslim culture in their midst.
I think such sociopathic cultures can only be stopped when the majority of productive people realize that they must take collective action while politicians, academics, and popular media are still drinking the anti-racist koolaid. Which reminds me; Jim Jones was quite popular with San Francisco's political and intellectual elite while he was building his cult. A key clue, in my mind, is that the term "populism" has become redefined to refer exclusively to nativist [another "toxic" word] sentiments among the electorate. But leftist populism exists as well, which is also called Marxism, or pandering to the rabble. It is no paranoid fantasy to look at LBJ's Great Society, or the constant excuses given by liberal politicians for dysfunctional minority behavior or why we should tolerate and even support immigrants who have nothing to offer [at the expense of our own citizens and all the truly productive immigrants who must compete with the bad ones]. The reason leftist populism is cloaked in lies, or denied to exist, is because it caters to people whose only utility to politicians is reliable votes. While right-wing populism can turn ugly if allowed to be captured by racist demagogues, the leftist version is far more insidious, as it undermines the entire zeitgeist and ethical foundation of high-trust societies. And what we comfortable heirs of the Enlightenment fail to recognize is that high-trust societies are vulnerable due to the priority on freedom of expression that we consider essential. Low-trust societies, on the other hand, are almost impossible to reform, because all the incentives align against social cooperation.
All across the Western world, freedom is being actively undermined by leftist populism, such as the British Fabian Society, which has been hard at work since the 19th century. Ghetto culture is celebrated in migrant communities in Europe, Australia, and Canada, just as it is with American native ghettos. I wish there was a better explanation for this organized campaign to undermine civilization, but I fear that we are governed by sociopaths. You alluded to this yourself, Arnell, in your prior posts on the '60s and '70s, when Marxist youth and academics colluded with Islamic terrorists in America and Europe.
It's deeply unpleasant to consider the magnitude of such a conspiracy, but it seems like some kind of deep spiritual malaise; why else would elites want to wreck their own children's future?
"The culture of Black America was not always defined by dysfunction. From the early 1900s through the 1950s, Black families had higher marriage rates than whites do today. Churches were packed. Schools, even under segregation, produced graduates who respected authority and valued achievement. Crime was relatively low. Manners were expected. Hard work was normal. And most Black Americans aspired to be part of the American mainstream, not to stand apart from it."
In other words, we did everything we were supposed to do to overcome prejudice, be successful, and become part of the mainstream--and it still wasn't enough. If anything, the more we achieved, the more we were opposed. Or as conservative civil rights activist Robert Woodson often says, "When we were at our best, [White society] was at its worse."
The culture shifted around the time landmark civil rights legislation was passed, but what did that mean to a generation who witnessed (via TV news coverage) churches bombed during Sunday School, fire hoses on children marching, nonviolent respectful citizens being bludgeoned by police, children being harassed and threatened by adults while entering school buildings, and the most strident advocates of nonviolence among them being gunned down--all in an effort to secure rights that a society constantly rejecting them at every turn was hellbent on denying them? These were the children of the Second Great Migration whose parents relocated to Northern and Western urban centers during the WWII era for economic opportunity--and they saw how their parents, particularly their fathers, were the first to lose their jobs when labor demand waned, they were packed and stacked in substandard housing, they were denied loans for housing and education, and police often harassed them and violated their civil rights. Thus you get a widespread oppositional cultural mood setting in that's a direct response to what they were seeing with their own eyes.
The culture shift didn't occur in a vacuum, and it wasn't inexplicable. Very rarely do these discussions attempt to explain the causes, which I can't help but think is deliberate as it leads readers to conclude that something must be inherently wrong with these people to irrationally engage in such behavior.
As far as the Black Americans who don't engage in this behavior at all yet refrain from offering public criticism, the rationale is similar. The most hated Black Americans by White society today are the Obamas without question. Not only do they eschew such behavior, but they were lecturing Black audiences about it so often that it spawned more than a few critical think pieces. Yet it has done nothing to stop lots of deplorable people from claiming the former first lady is a man. Nor does it stop White conservatives from calling any Black person in a skilled, professional role or who gets admitted to a non-HBCU university a DEI/AA pick, to include vice-presidents and SCOTUS justices. We know that for all of the talk that "it's culture, not race" that it's often race. The hierarchy of cultural tiers seems to affirm as much, as you appear to implicate educated, professional Black folks who code switch, listen to hip hop, and portray caricatures of certain "types" of Black folks (e.g., ghetto, hotep, hyper religious, etc) as humor as silently perpetuating bad behavior--which I find asinine. I'd say that this really does sound like a demand to "act White" in order to avoid blame if Whites didn't also engage in some of this.
Thank you. That's the best, most thoughtful, most honest, and most accurate description of the problem ever written.
My mom grew up in the Hartford Projects in the mid- to late-1950s. It was low-income housing and included many single-mothers (like my grandmother). Most of those folks were either young widows (of WW2) with kids, or what I'll call "vagaries of life" victims... decent people without the adequate family and community backup/support that used to be common (and is essential to help the young turn into functional, self-sustaining adults). Then came forced integration in the 60s...
After my parents' divorce in the late-70s, we wound up right back in that same neighborhood, attending the same schools, right down the street from the Projects. You won't be surprised to learn that things had (ahem) *gone downhill* significantly.
But the people I always felt worst for were the good black kids. Chappelle's joke about his own station growing up, that the difference between poor white people and poor black people is that whites don't think it's supposed to be happening to them! is trenchant on a lot of levels. I *knew* that I would not stay there, and that I would kill or die trying to get out. A combo of the military and education was enough.
I'll add this: a good number of "dark green" Marines I served with were acutely aware of what you've written here and were zealous persecutors of other black Marines who tried to bring that sh*t into the Unit. I always thought it was an interesting litmus test to see which officers (white or black) didn't understand the difference you've so well articulated. (And now I need to go read more Sowell - of all of his great writings, I've not yet read that one, though I'm aware of it).
I appreciate the kind words and the insight. I wish others could understand this issue more. My friend, the guy from the Bronx, used to get pretty irate about these guys who would act all hood and ghetto. He'd tell me, "These MFers don't know shit about the projects or the hood."
https://theabjectlesson.substack.com/p/systemic-racism
For me Sowell’s most important and foundational work is “Basic Economics” and it is always the first book I recommend.
“Basic Economics” is a good starting place. I have it in book form and also from Audible. Solid work.
What is so sad is that so many blacks idolize complete bafoons. Here we have Thomas Sowell, quite possibly the most intelligent living man on the planet, but because he's not down with the victim mindset, he's ignored.
Concur. That was my introduction as well, IIRC.
Excellent work!
Your words exactly mirror my experience, both in the civilian world and the Marine Corps. One of my wake-up calls was a fellow NCO (black) who was called “my brother” by a POS Private (also black). His reply was enlightening. “I ain’t your damn brother, I know who my daddy was”.
Black flight from the cities is as common as white flight, and is based on both money and culture, just like with white folks. I spent 25 years moving household goods, which put me in houses and apartments, rich and poor, in every State. Every race, creed, and sexual orientation was a client. In the wiki list of 300 American cities by population I went down to number 272 before I found one I where haven’t been.
I have also been a firearms instructor for 23 years, and the concerns about personal and family safety are also exactly the same for those responsible black citizens as for those of any other ethnicity. Being a responsible adult, wanting a better life, and safe place to live were the common denominators. Before his fall from grace, Bill Cosby was a huge proponent of exactly what you describe. His personal failings make it no less true. There is also as noted, the voluminous work of Thomas Sowell and his colleague Walter Williams. For me Sowell’s most important and foundational work is “Basic Economics” and it is always the first book I recommend.
Thanks! When I was in the service, I'm not sure I completely "got it". It took some time. I remember a couple of weird things happening after I was out that made me think.
The first one was that I heard Whoopi Goldberg on her sitcom say something about "We wouldn't have Civil Rights if it weren't for the Democrats." It made me think about it and I looked it up because I was really a big reader. You know how it gets on CQ, better have a book. LOL
Lo and behold, the complete opposite was true, which struck me as odd. That coincided with a book I was reading titled Up From Slavery by Booker T Washington.
I remember thinking Whoopi said that crap, and it was false. Republicans overwhelmingly supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and all the preceding Civil Rights legislation. I'm reading this book about the son of a slave who has a better attitude and outlook than many of the black people I know.
Stuff wasn't adding up.
I reread the piece, and I believe in almost every case where you say”ghetto culture” you could instead insert “third world culture”. The percentages of those who embrace it, cover for it, or reject it might change, but I believe the principles remain the same.
Often, but not always, this is Muslim culture (another thing you can’t say), but it could be any tribal culture, from Africa to South America to the’Stans. This “deculturalization” is based on a rejection of what we call civilization, in spite of the accomplishments of it. Our personal liberty, standard of living, scientific accomplishments, legal system, and codes of conduct are codependent. Like the Jenga tower or the house of cards only so much can be removed before collapse.
I find it difficult to be optimistic for the nation as a whole when we’ve already seen the virtual collapse of one major city after another. The maker and taker dichotomy still exists, but too many of the former now only make excuses.
Yep, and maybe even "Low IQ". I don't mean necessarily in the "intelligence" way as much as I do in the more "missing what's really going on" kind of way.
I know all kinds of dumb smart people. LOL
Indeed.
To be a functional well mannered citizen an 140 IQ isn’t necessary, but a willingness to do so and an understanding of why it’s needed is. I’ve known PhDs who were brilliant in their field, but obnoxious. And for at least one, a box from IKEA might as well be labeled “here there be dragons”.
You pretty much covered the waterfront there, I must say. And thank you for calling attention to a great book by Thomas Sowell [along with all his other ones]. Walter Williams is also the subject of an excellent documentary that you can watch here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXMxCEkRy5o
I agree with you that English/Scottish redneck culture contributed heavily to ghetto culture, as did LBJ's cynical Great Society programs, which both incentivized govt dependency and also rug pulled black homeowners in poor neighborhoods by bulldozing "substandard" housing to build projects--thus making a modest number of black people sharecroppers again, but also creating hives of misery and criminality that spread to the communities around them.
Unfortunately, that's not the end of the bad news, and here's the really inflammatory part: Why is the same sort of behavior common in Haiti, which was French, all across the West Indies, and also in Africa? Why did liberation from white Afrikaner apartheid fail to improve the miserable lives of most black South Africans? Why do so many African nations still operate under the strongman model exemplified by Idi Amin? Even if less violent, the prioritization of ego over achievement is still rampant, as are mafia-like make-work bureaucratic regimes and pointless regulations to skim money from entrepreneurs to connected politicians.
We see the very same problem in the Islamic world, which coincidentally dominates the northern half of the African continent. I assume there are many millions of Muslims who care more about their own economic future than violent conquest of their imagined enemies, but those people are forced to keep quiet or escape; they have zero chance of taking power from the psychopaths who control the cultural narrative. A grim prospect indeed, unless the successful Arab nations will start using military and economic leverage to eradicate the jihadis. I don't know how much will they have to do so, but there are faint signals here and there...
https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/article-862893
Now here's an interesting wrinkle: If you've read about the history of the American South before the civil rights campaign, or seen the film Black KKKlansman, you're aware that Southern whites, even as recently as a century ago, used to engage in behavior that was identical to what Hamas barbarians did on October 7. The discerning factor in my mind was not only the level of violence, which was animalistic, but more importantly the normalization of lynching and burning people to a degree that's hard for civilized people to imagine. The men perpetrated the violence, but their wives brought their children to watch, and have a picnic around the event. Exactly the behavior of "noncombatant" citizens in Gaza, or what black Africans regularly used to do to each other:
https://time.com/archive/6708166/south-africa-the-war-of-blacks-against-blacks/
Why did that behavior develop among the rednecks who came from England & Scotland, which they were not doing back home since Braveheart days? And what was required to make it stop? I'm not being facetious; this is one of the hardest social questions in the world. In America, the behavior was able to be eradicated by the outsize national majority of people who condemned such violence; those conditions are absent in today's hot spots of conflict. And even here, as we all know, it has become fashionable to ONLY police white-on-black violence, never the reverse. Of course it is blacks who suffer from black ghetto culture far more than whites; same with the Western nations who tolerate violent Muslim culture in their midst.
I think such sociopathic cultures can only be stopped when the majority of productive people realize that they must take collective action while politicians, academics, and popular media are still drinking the anti-racist koolaid. Which reminds me; Jim Jones was quite popular with San Francisco's political and intellectual elite while he was building his cult. A key clue, in my mind, is that the term "populism" has become redefined to refer exclusively to nativist [another "toxic" word] sentiments among the electorate. But leftist populism exists as well, which is also called Marxism, or pandering to the rabble. It is no paranoid fantasy to look at LBJ's Great Society, or the constant excuses given by liberal politicians for dysfunctional minority behavior or why we should tolerate and even support immigrants who have nothing to offer [at the expense of our own citizens and all the truly productive immigrants who must compete with the bad ones]. The reason leftist populism is cloaked in lies, or denied to exist, is because it caters to people whose only utility to politicians is reliable votes. While right-wing populism can turn ugly if allowed to be captured by racist demagogues, the leftist version is far more insidious, as it undermines the entire zeitgeist and ethical foundation of high-trust societies. And what we comfortable heirs of the Enlightenment fail to recognize is that high-trust societies are vulnerable due to the priority on freedom of expression that we consider essential. Low-trust societies, on the other hand, are almost impossible to reform, because all the incentives align against social cooperation.
All across the Western world, freedom is being actively undermined by leftist populism, such as the British Fabian Society, which has been hard at work since the 19th century. Ghetto culture is celebrated in migrant communities in Europe, Australia, and Canada, just as it is with American native ghettos. I wish there was a better explanation for this organized campaign to undermine civilization, but I fear that we are governed by sociopaths. You alluded to this yourself, Arnell, in your prior posts on the '60s and '70s, when Marxist youth and academics colluded with Islamic terrorists in America and Europe.
It's deeply unpleasant to consider the magnitude of such a conspiracy, but it seems like some kind of deep spiritual malaise; why else would elites want to wreck their own children's future?
"The culture of Black America was not always defined by dysfunction. From the early 1900s through the 1950s, Black families had higher marriage rates than whites do today. Churches were packed. Schools, even under segregation, produced graduates who respected authority and valued achievement. Crime was relatively low. Manners were expected. Hard work was normal. And most Black Americans aspired to be part of the American mainstream, not to stand apart from it."
In other words, we did everything we were supposed to do to overcome prejudice, be successful, and become part of the mainstream--and it still wasn't enough. If anything, the more we achieved, the more we were opposed. Or as conservative civil rights activist Robert Woodson often says, "When we were at our best, [White society] was at its worse."
The culture shifted around the time landmark civil rights legislation was passed, but what did that mean to a generation who witnessed (via TV news coverage) churches bombed during Sunday School, fire hoses on children marching, nonviolent respectful citizens being bludgeoned by police, children being harassed and threatened by adults while entering school buildings, and the most strident advocates of nonviolence among them being gunned down--all in an effort to secure rights that a society constantly rejecting them at every turn was hellbent on denying them? These were the children of the Second Great Migration whose parents relocated to Northern and Western urban centers during the WWII era for economic opportunity--and they saw how their parents, particularly their fathers, were the first to lose their jobs when labor demand waned, they were packed and stacked in substandard housing, they were denied loans for housing and education, and police often harassed them and violated their civil rights. Thus you get a widespread oppositional cultural mood setting in that's a direct response to what they were seeing with their own eyes.
The culture shift didn't occur in a vacuum, and it wasn't inexplicable. Very rarely do these discussions attempt to explain the causes, which I can't help but think is deliberate as it leads readers to conclude that something must be inherently wrong with these people to irrationally engage in such behavior.
As far as the Black Americans who don't engage in this behavior at all yet refrain from offering public criticism, the rationale is similar. The most hated Black Americans by White society today are the Obamas without question. Not only do they eschew such behavior, but they were lecturing Black audiences about it so often that it spawned more than a few critical think pieces. Yet it has done nothing to stop lots of deplorable people from claiming the former first lady is a man. Nor does it stop White conservatives from calling any Black person in a skilled, professional role or who gets admitted to a non-HBCU university a DEI/AA pick, to include vice-presidents and SCOTUS justices. We know that for all of the talk that "it's culture, not race" that it's often race. The hierarchy of cultural tiers seems to affirm as much, as you appear to implicate educated, professional Black folks who code switch, listen to hip hop, and portray caricatures of certain "types" of Black folks (e.g., ghetto, hotep, hyper religious, etc) as humor as silently perpetuating bad behavior--which I find asinine. I'd say that this really does sound like a demand to "act White" in order to avoid blame if Whites didn't also engage in some of this.