March 25-26: At least seven white people were attacked by mobs of black people in Grand Rapids, Michigan. / "The detective also told Jacob that he believed the Trayvon Martin media frenzy is what prompted the attacks."
April 5: A 78-year-old Ohio man said that he was the victim of a hate crime after a group of young black men attacked him while shouting, "This is for Trayvon."
April 10: Police in Gainesville, FL investigated a "racially motivated" incident after several black men attacked a white man. The victim was punched in the face and was then struck several more times while he was on the ground. The attackers allegedly chanted, "Trayvon" before the attack.
April 25: An Alabama man was attacked by a mob of 20 black people in his home. The attackers used brass knuckles, pipes, paint cans, and other makeshift weapons to beat the victim. / "one of the assailants referenced Trayvon Martin during the attack."
April 26: A 15-year-old black male was charged with a hate crime for attacking and robbing white victims. Police say that the suspect pinned the victim, threatened him with a large tree branch, and then said, "Empty your pockets, white boy." / "he was angry about the Trayvon Martin case."
July 14: Riots in Oakland, California turned violent when protestors threw rocks at reporters and policemen, causing an estimated $50,000 in property damage.
July 15: An eyewitness claims that a group of young black men assaulted a Hispanic man while shouting, "This is for Trayvon!" The eyewitness stated, "They were just yelling and calling him names as they ran after him, but once they were hitting him and after that they started yelling, 'This is for Trayvon, [expletive].'"
While I think that these issues have more to do with gun control than racism or justice, I think the problem of race relations, specifically those concerning the blacks and whites, is a major divider and mechanism which can be instantly activated by an allegorical switch and the outcome is used by the powers that be to further their agendas. I think that mechanism must be 'objectively' studied in order to be better understood.
In order to understand 'what we don't understand' before attempting to cure, I would like to share the following excerpts from Thomas Sowell's 'Black Rednecks & White Liberals' [[Link] for perspective and some critical thought. (I decided not to remove the footnotes, so when you see a number out of place in the text, that's what it is).
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Excerpts:
These people are creating a terrible problem in our cities. They can’t or won’t hold a job, they flout the law constantly and neglect their children, they drink too much and their moral standards would shame an alley cat. For some reason or other, they absolutely refuse to accommodate themselves to any kind of decent, civilized life.
THIS WAS SAID IN 1956 IN INDIANAPOLIS, not about blacks or other minorities, but about poor whites from the South. Nor was Indianapolis unique in this respect.A 1951 survey in Detroit found that white Southerners living there were considered “undesirable” by 21 percent of those surveyed, compared to 13 percent who ranked blacks the same way. In the late 1940s, a Chicago employer said frankly,“I told the guard at the plant gate to tell the hillbillies that there were no openings.”When poor whites from the South moved into Northern cities to work in war plants during the Second World War,“occasionally a white southerner would find that a flat or furnished room had ‘just been rented’ when the landlord heard his southern accent.”1
More is involved here than a mere parallel between blacks and Southern whites. What is involved is a common subculture that goes back for centuries, which has encompassed everything from ways of talking to attitudes toward education, violence, and sex—and which originated not in the South, but in those parts of the British Isles from which white Southerners came.That culture long ago died out where it originated in Britain, while surviving in the American South. Then it largely died out among both white and black Southerners, while still surviving today in the poorest and worst of the urban black ghettos.
[. . .]
Back in the British Isles, the life of the Scottish people was transformed dramatically, from the masses to the elites, as they advanced from being one of the least educated to one of the most educated peoples in Europe. However, what is significant here is that much of the migration to the American South occurred before these sweeping social transformations. This timing was crucial, as Professor Grady McWhiney has pointed out in his book Cracker Culture:
…had the South been peopled by nineteenth-century Scots, Welshmen, and Ulstermen, the course of Southern history would doubtless have been radically different. Nineteenth-century Scottish and Scotch-Irish immigrants did in fact fit quite comfortably into northern American society. (Significantly the Irish, who retained their Celtic ways, did not.) But only a trickle of the flood of nineteenth-century immigrants came into the South; the ancestors of the vast majority of Southerners arrived in America before the Anglicization of Scotland, Wales, and Ulster had advanced very far.14
[. . .]
What the rednecks or crackers brought with them across the ocean was a whole constellation of attitudes, values, and behavior patterns that might have made sense in the world in which they had lived for centuries, but which would prove to be counterproductive in the world to which they were going—and counterproductive to the blacks who would live in their midst for centuries before emerging into freedom and migrating to the great urban centers of the United States, taking with them similar values.
The cultural values and social patterns prevalent among Southern whites included an aversion to work,16 proneness to violence,17 neglect of education,18 sexual promiscuity,19, improvidence, 20 drunkenness,21 lack of entrepreneurship,22 reckless searches for excitement,23 lively music and dance,24 and a style of religious oratory marked by strident rhetoric, unbridled emotions, and flamboyant imagery.25 This oratorical style carried over into the political oratory of the region in both the Jim Crow era and the civil rights era, and has continued on into our own times among black politicians, preachers, and activists.Touchy pride, vanity, and boastful self-dramatization were also part of this redneck culture26 among people from regions of Britain “where the civilization was the least developed.”27 “They boast and lack self-restraint,” Olmsted said, after observing their descendants in the American antebellum South.28
[. . .]
Centuries before “black pride” became a fashionable phrase, there was cracker pride—and it was very much the same kind of pride. It was not pride in any particular achievement or set of behavioral standards or moral principles adhered to. It was instead a touchiness about anything that might be even remotely construed as a personal slight, much less an insult, combined with a willingness to erupt into violence over it. New Englanders were baffled about this kind of pride among crackers. Observing such people, the Yankees “could not understand what they had to feel proud about.”29 However, this kind of pride is perhaps best illustrated by an episode reported in Professor McWhiney’s Cracker Culture:
When an Englishman, tired of waiting for a Southerner to start working on a house he had contracted to build, hired another man to do the job, the enraged Southerner, who considered himself dishonored, vowed:“to-morrow morn, I will come with men, and twenty rifles, and I will have your life, or you shall have mine.”30
In the vernacular of our later times, he had been “dissed”—and he was not going to stand for it, regardless of the consequences for himself or others.The history of the antebellum South is full of episodes showing the same pattern, whether expressed in the highly formalized duels of the aristocracy or in the no-holds-barred style of fighting called “rough and tumble” among the common folk, a style that included biting off ears and gouging out eyes. It was not simply that particular isolated individuals did such things; social approval was given to these practices, as illustrated by this episode in the antebellum South:
A crowd gathered and arranged itself in an impromptu ring.The contestants were asked if they wished to “fight fair” or “rough and tumble.” When they chose “rough and tumble,” a roar of approval rose from the multitude.
This particular fight ended with the loser’s nose bitten off, his ears torn off, and both his eyes gouged out, after which the “victor, himself maimed and bleeding, was ‘chaired round the grounds,’ to the cheers of the crowd.”This “rough and tumble” style of fighting was also popular in the southern highlands of Scotland, where grabbing an opponent’s testicles and attempting to castrate him by hand was also an accepted practice.31 Scottish highlanders were, in centuries past, part of the “Celtic fringe” or “north Britons,” outside the orbit of English culture, not only as it existed in England but also in the Scottish lowlands.
[. . .]
In colonial America, the people of the English borderlands and of the “Celtic fringe” were seen by contemporaries as culturally quite distinct, and were socially unwelcome. Mob action prevented a shipload of Ulster Scots from landing in Boston in 171942 and the Quaker leaders of eastern Pennsylvania encouraged Ulster Scots to settle out in western Pennsylvania,43 where they acted as a buffer to the Indians, as well as being a constant source of friction and conflict with the Indians. It was not just in the North that crackers and rednecks were considered to be undesirables. Southern plantation owners with poor whites living on adjoining land would often offer to buy their land for more than it was worth, in order to be rid of such neighbors.44
Because there were no racial differences to form separate statistical categories for these north Britons and for other whites who settled in the South or in particular enclaves elsewhere, indirect indicators must serve as proxies for these cultural differences. Names are among these indicators. Edward, for example, was a popular name in Virginia and in Wessex, England, from which many Virginians had emigrated, but the first forty classes of undergraduates at Harvard College contained only one man named Edward. It would be nearly two centuries before Harvard enrolled anyone named Patrick, even though that was a common name in western Pennsylvania, where the Ulster Scots settled.45 This says something not only about the social and geographic differences of the times, but also about how regionalized the naming patterns were then, in contrast to the fact that no one today finds it particularly strange when an Asian American has such non-Asian first names as Kevin or Michelle.
[. . .]
Pride had yet another side to it. Among the definitions of a “cracker” in the Oxford dictionary is a “braggart”52—one who “talks trash” in today’s vernacular—a wisecracker. More than mere wisecracks were involved, however. The pattern is one said by Professor McWhiney to go back to descriptions of ancient Celts as “boasters and threateners, and given to bombastic self-dramatisation.” 53 Examples today come readily to mind, not only from ghetto life and gangsta rap, but also from militant black “leaders,” spokesmen or activists.What is painfully ironic is that such attitudes and behavior are projected today as aspects of a distinctive “black identity,” when in fact they are part of a centuries-old pattern among the whites in whose midst generations of blacks lived in the South.
Any broad-brush discussion of cultural patterns must, of course, not claim that all people—whether white or black—had the same culture, much less to the same degree.There are not only changes over time, there are cross-currents at a given time. Nevertheless, it is useful to see the outlines of a general pattern, even when that pattern erodes over time and at varying rates among different subgroups.
The violence for which white Southerners became most lastingly notorious was lynching. Like other aspects of the redneck and cracker culture, it has often been attributed to race or slavery. In fact, however, most lynching victims in the antebellum South were white.54 Economic considerations alone would prevent a slaveowner from lynching his own slave or tolerating anyone else’s doing so. It was only after the Civil War that the emancipated blacks became the principal targets of lynching. But, by then, Southern vigilante violence had been a tradition for more than a century in North America55 and even longer back in the regions of Britain from which crackers and rednecks came, where “retributive justice” was often left in private hands.56 Even the burning cross of the Ku Klux Klan has been traced back to “the fiery cross of old Scotland” used by feuding clans.57
[. . .]
Much of the cultural pattern of Southern rednecks became the cultural heritage of Southern blacks, more so than survivals of African cultures, with which they had not been in contact for centuries. (Even in colonial times, most blacks on American soil had been born on American soil.) Moreover, such cultural traits followed blacks out of the Southern countrysides and into the urban ghettos—North and South—where many settled.The very way of talking, later to be christened “black English,” closely followed dialects brought over from those parts of Britain from which many white Southerners came, though these speech patterns died out in Britain while surviving in the American South,143 as such speech patterns would later die out among most Southern whites and among middle-class blacks, while surviving in the poorer black ghettos around the country. For example:
Where a northerner said,“I am,”“You are,”“She isn’t,”“It doesn’t,” and “I haven’t,” a Virginian even of high rank preferred to say “I be,”“You be,”“She ain’t,”“It don’t,” and “I hain’t.” …These Virginia speechways were not invented in America. They derived from a family or regional dialects that had been spoken throughout the south and west of England during the seventeenth century.144
[. . .]
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 dealt major blows to racial restrictions, especially in the South, and had dramatic effects on the number of black elected officials. Economically, however, the upward trends in black income and occupations that had begun decades earlier simply continued, but at no accelerated rate. The rise of blacks into professional and other high-level occupations was in fact greater in the years preceding the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than in the years afterward,262 and was greater in the 1940s than in the 1950s.263 Behind such developments was the fact that blacks were closing the gap between themselves and whites in years of schooling during this era.264
In short, major social transformations within the black community were having an impact in their economic condition. It would hardly be surprising if it also had an impact on how whites viewed blacks, as had happened in the nineteenth century. The civil rights legislation of the 1960s may well have been an effect of the rise of blacks, rather than the sole or predominant cause of that rise, as it has been represented as being, by those leaders—black and white—with incentives to magnify their own role in racial progress.
The difference between cultural explanations of changing race relations and explanations based on political acts or swings of the pendulum in white public opinion is not just a matter of intellectual preference. There are wholly different implications, not only about the past, but especially about the future.The question is whether the advancement of blacks is helped or hindered by promoting a black “identity” built around a redneck culture whose track record has been largely negative for both blacks and whites.
[. . .]
White liberals in many roles—as intellectuals, politicians, celebrities, judges, teachers—have aided and abetted the perpetuation of a counterproductive and self-destructive lifestyle among black rednecks. The welfare state has made it economically possible to avoid many of the painful consequences of this lifestyle that forced previous generations of blacks and whites to move away from the redneck culture and its values. Lax law enforcement has enabled the violent and criminal aspects of this culture to persist, and non-judgmental intellectual trends have enabled it to escape moral condemnation.As far back as 1901, W. E. B. Du Bois, while complaining of racial discrimination against blacks, also condemned “indiscriminate charity” for its bad effects within the black community.265 In a later era, the burgeoning welfare state, especially since the 1960s, has spread an indiscriminate charity—in both money and attitudes—that has given the black redneck culture a new lease on life.
Intellectuals have been particularly prominent among those who have turned the black redneck culture into a sacrosanct symbol of racial identity. This includes both black and white intellectuals, though the latter predominate numerically and in terms of influence through the media and academia. Intellectuals have promoted misconceptions of history, misreadings of contemporary life, and counterproductive notions of how to prepare for the future.
By projecting a vision of a world in which the problems of blacks are consequences of the actions of whites, either immediately or in times past, white liberals have provided a blanket excuse for shortcomings and even crimes by blacks.The very possibility of any internal cultural sources of the problems of blacks have been banished from consideration by the fashionable phrase “blaming the victim.” But no one can be blamed for being born into a culture that evolved in centuries past, even though moving beyond such a culture may do more for future advancement than blaming others or seeking special dispensations.
[. . .]
Blaming others for anything in which blacks lag has become standard operating procedure among white liberals. If blacks do not pass bar exams or medical board tests as often as whites or Asians, then that shows that something is wrong with those tests, as far as many white liberals are concerned. Best-selling author Andrew Hacker, for example, says that academic problems in general are created for black students in white colleges because such colleges use curricula that “are white in logic and learning, in their conceptions of scholarly knowledge and demeanor.”266 Why this does not seem to be a problem for Asian students remains unexplained, even though blacks have lived in this white society for centuries longer than either Asian Americans or contemporary immigrants from Asia.Why it is not a problem for blacks from the Caribbean is another unexplained contradiction of such white liberal excuses for American-born blacks.
If black attorneys are not elevated to partnerships in law firms in proportion to their numbers, then to the New York Times this shows, in the words of their front page headline:“Law Firms are Slow in Promoting Minority Lawyers to Partner Role.”267 Apparently there can only be external reasons for anything negative that happens to blacks. According to Andrew Hacker, the fact that white taxi drivers often pass up black males seeking a ride, especially at night, shows these drivers to be “patently racist”268—even though black taxi drivers do the same, in order to avoid becoming victims of crime.269
White liberals long denied that there were higher crime rates among blacks by pointing to the imperfections of crime statistics in general or, more specifically, claiming that blacks are simply arrested more often for things that whites would not be arrested for. But if the imperfections of crime statistics were the real problem, then discussions could be limited to murder statistics, since dead bodies are not ignored, whether they are black or white, and neither are murderers, whatever their race. But murder statistics show the same disproportionate number of crimes by blacks as other statistics do. While murder statistics might provide more accuracy, they would not provide white liberals with a means of evading the obvious.
Riots by blacks are almost automatically blamed on whites, whether in the Kerner Report on the riots of the 1960s or in the reactions among white liberals to the Los Angeles riots of 1992. In some white liberal circles—the New York Times, for example—the police are almost automatically at fault in confrontations with black criminals, hoodlums, or rioters. When the police arrive on a scene of crime or violence in black communities, whatever they do is likely to be categorized later as either having let the situation get out of hand or as having used excessive force.Any force sufficient to prevent the situation from getting out of hand is almost certain to be called excessive force by white liberals in the media, so that—by definition—the police will have acted badly, no matter what they did or failed to do. Should the police arrive in such overwhelming numbers as to bring the disorder to a quick halt without any need to use force at all, then they will often be said to have “over-reacted” by sending so many cops to deal with unresisting people.
One of the reactions of the police to such predictable scapegoating in the media has been to “de-police” some of the most violent black neighborhoods, looking the other way rather than risk seeing a whole career ruined by media charges of racism.This gives criminals, hoodlums and rioters a freer hand—at the expense of law-abiding blacks, who may be the great majority, even in a high-crime neighborhood. There is evidence that this is in fact what happens after a barrage of adverse media coverage against the police.270
The incorrigibility of white society—and the corresponding futility of black efforts to improve their situation by improving their own education and other qualifications—is another leitmotif of much white liberal writing. After the U.S. Supreme Court struck down some racially gerrymandered congressional districts, forcing some black members of Congress to run in districts where most voters were white, New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis said,“the reality in the South is that black men and women, however well qualified, have little chance of winning in white districts.”271 But these Southern black candidates were in fact re-elected.
The fact that black rednecks exhibit the same hostility and violence toward other minorities long associated with bigoted white rednecks in the South presents white liberals with another challenge to find a way to evade the obvious. Black anti-Semitism, for example, is not recognized by Andrew Hacker, who claims that “no one really knows if blacks and whites differ markedly in their feelings about Jews”—despite survey after survey showing greater hostility to Jews among blacks.272 Black hostility to other minorities, such as the Koreans, has likewise often been ignored by such liberal publications as the New York Times273 or even defined out of existence by a variety of white liberal writers on grounds that racism requires power, which blacks do not have.
Following that logic, Nazis were not anti-Semites until they gained control of the German government and the Ku Klux Klan today would not be called racist any more because it has lost the power it once had. But the arbitrary proviso of “power” was never part of the definition of racism until racism among blacks became widespread enough to require a convenient evasion.
The thuggish gutter words and brutal hoodlum lifestyle of “gangsta rap” musicians are not merely condoned but glorified by many white intellectuals—and “understood” by others lacking the courage to take responsibility for siding with savagery. The National Council of Teachers urged the use of hip hop in urban classrooms.274 The cultural editor of the San Francisco Chronicle characterized rapper Tupac Shakur as “a lightning rod of insurrection in the name of social justice.”275 USA Today said,“gangsta rap is rooted in part in underfunded school systems which fail to equip students with the skills to speak out effectively and intersect with larger communities.”276 An article in the New Republic said that rap music “has become the nearest thing to a political voice of the poor.”277 Mikal Gilmore of Rolling Stone wrote of “all the terrible forces” responsible for “such a wasteful, unjustifiable end”278 to the life of rapper Tupac Shakur by the very lawless violence he had sung of and lived, not by some mysterious “forces.”
The blaming of gangsta rap barbarism on social conditions takes many forms, such as that of a Boston Globe columnist who depicted it as deriving from “the institutional indifference that thrives wherever poor people assemble in America: struggling schools, dangerous streets, long-gone factories, hospital emergency rooms or EMTs substituting for family doctors, futures measured by sunsets and sunrises and the dull feeling that nearly everything is against you.”279 A New York Times essay dismissing critics of gangsta rap referred to “the poverty and hopelessness that foster vicious behavior.”280
The general orientation of white liberals has been one of “What can we do for them?”What blacks can do for themselves has not only been of lesser interest, much of what blacks have in fact already done for themselves has been overshadowed by liberal attempts to get them special dispensations—whether affirmative action, reparations for slavery, or other race-based benefits—even when the net effect of these dispensations has been much less than the effects of blacks’ own self-advancement. For example, although the greatest reduction in poverty among blacks occurred before the civil rights revolution of the 1960s, the liberal vision in which black lags are explained by white oppression requires black advances to be explained by the fight against such oppression, symbolized by the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. This scenario has been repeated so often, through so many channels, that it has become a “well-known fact” by sheer repetition. Moreover, this protest-and-government-action model has become the liberals’ preferred, if not universal, model for future black advancement.
Sowell, Thomas (2009-05-01). Black Rednecks & White Liberals (pp. 55-56). Perseus Books Group. Kindle Edition.