In the wake of all the Pantifa / Black Lives Suck Matter riots and protests and such, the airwaves and presses are full of earnest pleas to “start a national conversation” or “address the racial strife” or “deliver justice” for those whose lives have been so horribly afflicted by the daily misery of living in modern-day America.
But what if we — that is, the people who are the targets of such tropes — don’t want to have a conversation with these people anymore? What if we look around us and see things like minority set-asides, preferential hiring- or admissions practices, creation of the various bureaucracies that purport to address all these supposed iniquities (e.g. Offices Of Race Relations, Equality Commissions, etc.), and realize that despite all these efforts, many Black people are still mired in slums, are still enslaved by criminal lifestyle, are still hobbled by sub-standard education establishments and continue to behave in ways that, in the immortal words of Chris Rock, still end up with their asses getting beaten by the cops?
What if we — we, the suffering middle classes who form the backbone of this nation — just say, “Fuck you, and your conversation.”
And before anyone gets all bent out of shape about the above, let me remind you all that when the Chink Wuhan virus hit our shores, the people who kept this country together were not academics, or politicians, or journalists, or community organizers; and for damn sure they were not the people now rioting and looting, nor the shadowy organizations who are organizing the unrest. The country was kept going by people like truck drivers, doctors/nurses, supermarket workers, maintenance technicians, farmers and trash collectors, to name but a few. Not glamorous people, not members of the “elite” set, just people who are not a part of “systemic racism”, nor of “class privilege” and especially — considering that many of them are Blacks and Hispanics themselves — are not benefactors of the so-called “White privilege”.
What if these people, these ordinary hardworking people just said to all these demands, “No. We’re not going to pander to you anymore.”
What then?
Just think–if Mr. Floyd hadn’t tried to pass counterfeit bills he’d be alive right now. If the looter dragged (smeared) to death under the wheels of a Fed Ex truck hadn’t been looting the truck at the time, he’d be alive right now. Et cetera, et cetera ad nauseam.
Let’s be honest here. Except for white males, (European white males) the entire rest of the world would be/is living in mud huts picking bugs out of their hair living hand to mouth. The entire “thing” that everyone, the world over thinks of as “civilization” is created, invented and run by white males.
Honestly, at this point, the rest of them can all go back.
To be fair, East Asia has outperformed the mud hut level. But you’re right…for civilizations, Final Cull took place at 0700 EDT 12 October 1492. Western Christian civilization passed.
And the only enemy we have to fear is our own home-brewed idiocy.
Living here in the Soviet of Washington, I’m pretty sure I’m going to run into the “you need to listen” crowd. I may have difficulty remaining polite. So very many idiots think that someone’s freedom of speech means that they must be listened to. Nope. You can speak; I don’t have to pay attention.
And don’t get me started on the “you have to speak up and show support” crowd. I’ll speak up when I damn well please and not before.
My standard answer to “You must listen” is to show the tattoo on the inside of my left arm. BFYTW.
BECAUSE FUCK YOU THAT’S WHY
Even the whole “we need to have a national conversation” or “we need to have a dialogue” statement is pure bullshit.
They don’t want a “conversation” or a “dialogue” because conversations are dialogues are TWO WAY. What they want is for us to sit mute while they wag their fingers and harangue us with their ideology.
Thing is, they’ve been doing that for years. There’s nothing they have to say that is new or enlightening, just a list of greivances, most of which we, the white middle class, have no ability to address anyway.
I actually think the BLM activists are making a big mistake by focusing on the “black” part. Seems to me that what this really needs to be about is police misconduct – and that misconduct affects not just black but also white, Hispanic and all other Americans. By failing to focus on incidents where police behaved atrociously but the victims of that abuse were not black, they are depriving themselves of a lot of allies that would help them in their cause.
Of course, that’s assuming that their “cause” is curbing abusive police tactics, and not just another race-based “shakedown” of whitey, which will benefit a few crafty agitators and not help “their” people one bit.
Whenever anyone spouts the “We need to have a conversation about guns” By first thought is “We’ve had that conversation. Your side lost. Get over it.”
I have similar thoughts about any other time someone else tell me “we need to have a conversation…”
They don’t want a conversation, they want to lecture and virtue signal. They don’t want acceptance, they want agreement and submission.
We spent 50 years trying the “conversation” thing. The problem is, a conversation is two-way. They don’t do conversation. They tell us that we are supposed to shut up and listen. That’s not a conversation.
That’s a lecture.
We’ve heard the lecture. We disagree.
Now what?
This is a putsch plain and simple. I find myself in some sympathy with the Black communities on this. They have been complaining about this kind of thing for a while, and its been ignored by a self-protective bureaucracy and complicit court system (and I am aware of the gray areas with regard to criminal activity). Without going into too many details I have seen the same thing with a different branch of .gov agencies and courts, I understand the “Backed into a corner” mentality. But this is being used by neo-marxists and their ilk to create a putsch. If the governing body gets hardcore on them, they are going to whine about how they were “peaceful” and the authorities overreact. If the governing body does nothing, it makes it look weak and incapable.
Such things/tactics are not new.
We, unfortunately, have a overwhelming surplus of feelings in this matter, and an incredible deficit of critical thinking. People screaming for “change” have some vague, utopian, fever-dream, about what it will look like, but no specific articulation thereof. “SOMETHING must be done”, “THIS is SOMETHING” ergo THIS must be done. I hear this too much “We’ve done X and nothing has changed”, no one seems to realize that sometimes NO change is better than making something worse.
I have to liken it to my own university experience. My degree is in history. Basically after my first 2 years of core classes I wasn’t taught history or analysis anymore, I was hammered on academic tribalism “I’m a FEMINIST historian” and “feelings” et al. That was 35 years ago, I can only imagine its increased exponentially.
I have not heard or seen one person in my circle who has sat back and said, “You know, just because it came up on my Twitter feed, from my group, there IS the possibility that someone is trying to manipulate me”
At least I have ammo, for now.
FFS
/rant
P.S. None of the above commentators are wrong in their assessments either.
The more interesting (and long-lasting) question is: What happens now? After the rioters finally go home (and they will) and the damage is cleaned up, what then?
The root of the problems – impoverished and crime-ridden inner cities, lack of employment opportunities, a culture that denigrates education and glorifies crime – aren’t being addressed and all the “white concern” in the world isn’t going to change it.
Right now the small minority of “woke whites” (I’d guess less than 10% of the white population) will gnash their teeth, rend their clothes and rail at the “injusticeness” of it all, but what’s more interesting is what those “woke whites” WON’T do.
They won’t be moving from their nice, safe urban and suburban neighbors to the crime-ridden inner cities to live cheek-by-jowl with the black folks they love so much; They won’t be deliberately seeking black men/women to date so as to be able to marry themselves into black culture; They won’t be making a deliberate choice to send their children to predominately black schools so they can be immersed in black America; They won’t be investing their retirement funds into businesses in the black parts of town, etc.
IOW for all their talk of loving black America, the actions of the “woke whites” tells a very different story. Yeah, they’ll clutch their tissues, update their Facebook statuses and say they “stand in solidarity”, but put their money where their mouth is? Not a chance.
And that’s the “woke” and politically active whites. What of non-political or conservative whites? The constant bombardment of images of looters and rioters in mostly black neighborhoods certainly isn’t going to make THEM more likely to want to stay in these “racially diverse” cities. If anything, it makes taking that job in Whiteyville, Nebraska a lot more attractive, even if it does come with a pay cut.
So the racial polarization continues. White people and white money will continue to flee the inner cities and the overwhelmingly black residents will sink further into poverty and chaos. The core city’s tax base will crater as white residents move away, and nobody with a lick of sense will start a new business (especially a retail business that might employ local youths) if they know that there’s a good chance it will be torched the next time there is a highly publicized police shooting. Any cop with good qualifications and a survival instinct will apply for a lateral transfer to Whiteyville where drunk drivers and teenage racers are the biggest challenge, which means in turn that the inner city PD’s will have a shrinking pool of less-qualified recruits in the police department.
I wish I could be more hopeful but I don’t think I can.
It is just me, or is the Overton Window on race starting to shift?
In which direction?
Other than the appointment of “police oversight committees” and maybe a rolling back of the doctrine of Qualified Immunity, I don’t see very many concrete proposals. “Stop killing us” makes a great sound bite but it’s not really a workable policy. “Racial Equality” and “end white privilege” are similarly vague and unworkable.
Seems to me at the end of all this there’s going to be someone with his hand out saying “pay me!” and that will be the end of it.
“Concerned People” will continue to furrow their brows and tut-tut about “white privilege” and “inequality” but at the end of the day, the white elites will go back to their predominately white neighborhoods and predominately white schools and predominately white jobs.
Unless you believe that police are deliberately seeking out black people to kill (apparently for sport?) I can’t imagine a proposed law or policy change that will have any effect on relations between the black community and the police.
I suspect there is a very quiet conclusion being reached that there IS no way to placate, no sense in “discussion” or “conversation”. Only the generous application of deadly force to maintain order.
As long as about 4-6% of the population (black males 15-40) commit 60-70% of violent crime, black males will be the majority of arrests, will be represented in the prison population far beyond their proportion of the US demographic, and given their propensity for violence, will be featured in the majority of accounts/complaints of police violence toward perps.
Either black culture must change, or they’ll forever have something complain about.
We’ve thrown trillions at them to no avail for more than fifty years, and our reward is mass criminality and destruction.
Want to cure police violence by defunding police? Go ahead. Fine.
I hate to say it, because I used to love the big city where I grew up, but now? –
Let the inner city blacks drown in their own sewage, and just like in their African ancestral home, let them sink. At least fifty percent of them bring nothing to our civilization.
Without police to keep some order, maybe the punks can approach self-extinction in time.
My modest proposal is to simply withdraw the police from the intercity. Lots of decent people will be hurt until they get their act together and clean up their own community but clearly having the cops there is not working.
I call it my modest proposal because my real desire is to withdraw the cities from America.
Richard. I like where your mind is on this. A very solid recommendation in both respects
I sometimes wonder how much vilification the police in many of these cities will put up with before they just turn in their badges en masse.
It would be interesting (read: horrifying) to see what would happen if one day, say 25% of the white police officers in [insert name of medium-to-large size city here] just walked into their precincts, turned in their badges and guns, and went home (to the suburbs, where most of them live.)
Would never happen. They’re slaves to the salaries and the bennies, like most people in government.
Conservatives tried the “Let’s have a conversation” route, too—it was called the Tea Party. The other side didn’t seem very interested in that conversation, though, so…fuck ’em.