Will book clubs keep black felons from repeating their crimes? Count me as skeptical.
They were all teenagers then, charged as adults for their violent crimes. At the D.C. jail, they found solace in a book club, reading memoirs and reciting poems they had written.
Over the past year, they finally came home. They see themselves as reformed men who did dumb things as kids but who know that others may have trouble forgiving.
So they stick together. The support system that strengthened them then is the one they are counting on to help them now that they’re out. The unlikely community has become an unlikely lifeline, as they try to defy the patterns that send ex-offenders back to jail.
They fall into a high-risk category: Juveniles tried as adults are 34 percent more likely than youth tried as juveniles to return to prison, according to a 2007 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The alumni of the book club have no interest in becoming part of this statistic. So they work together to create goals. They applaud when someone meets his goal, such as when Barksdale got a job working full time as a city maintenance worker. They share job leads and work out together and meet up for pancakes.
Steve Sailer writes June 27, 2010:
It`s widely argued that the reason that blacks tend to perform poorly in schools and jobs is their fear of being accused by other blacks of "acting white." Thus in the current issue ofThe New Republic, linguist John McWhorter, the celebrated black intellectual associated with New York`s Manhattan Institute, lauds the new book Acting White: The Ironic Legacy of Desegregation
by Stuart Buck (who is white—see picture.) McWhorter argues, "Much of the reason for the gap between the grades and test scores of black students and white students was that black teens often equated doing well in school with `acting white.`"[Guilt Trip, June 24, 2010]
In an interview with Buck about his book, Rod Dreher defines "acting white" as when "academically accomplished black students are often accused of being traitors to their race (`acting white`) because of their good grades and study habits."
Buck`s main argument: blame black underperformance on the paradoxical consequences of integration. He explains:
"An integrated school can often appear to black students to be controlled by whites, or to be run in a way that benefits white students. Thus, the black student who tries to curry favor from the white authorities is seen as saying, `I`m better than you.`"
Buck declares:
"… I think there`s a strong case that `acting white` began with desegregation. First, as far as I could tell, black people who went to school before desegregation have testified unanimously (whether in autobiographies, newspaper articles, or personal interviews) that `acting white` was a completely foreign concept in their school days. After all, why would a child whose most-admired peers and mentors within the school were black think of any type of school behavior as `acting white`?"
In Race and Education, 1954-2007 U. of Delaware historian Raymond Wolters also pointed out the disruptions imposed upon black schools by desegregation in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education.
But Wolters made clear, however, that one major cause of the decline of black communities was blackflight—middle class African-Americans fleeing contact with poor blacks.
Are blacks held back by fear of "acting white"?
No doubt this is often true. Yet the benefits that whites bestow upon blacks for acting reassuringly white (for example, the White House itself) are so lavish that it`s hardly certain what the net effect is. As Buck admits, when unsuccessful blacks denounce successful blacks for "acting white," there`s an obvious whiff of sour grapes about the proceedings:
"Indeed, in one of the earliest scholarly accounts of `acting white,` one of the poorer black students was remarkably frank about how he viewed the more accomplished black students in his class: `There`re just a few of these Uncle Toms at school, these are the goody-goody guys. Maybe I say this, though, because they`re doing a little bit better than I am. And maybe I`m a little bit ashamed of myself because I`m not doing as good as they are in school, and I`m jealous. Maybe that`s why I think of them as Uncle Toms.`"
One peculiarity of this popular "acting white"theory: there is significantly stronger evidence that a lack of intellectual ambition holds back otherwise capable Hispanics (especially Mexican-Americans) than that it debilitates African-Americans. But that never seems to come up in public discussion—probably because, as I`ve argued before, Anglos just find blacks much more interesting than Latinos.
Google finds 14 times as many pages featuring the phrases "African American" and "acting white" as it does "Mexican American" and "acting white." An expensive Harvard study by celebrity black economist Roland Fryer intended to
confirm the "acting white" hypothesis by showing that black students lost friends as they earned higher grades actually wound up demonstrating that this problem is much worse among Latinos.
Contrary to the claims of John McWhorter, African-American culture isn`t particularly anti-intellectual or anti-education … at least relative to the average black IQ of 85, some 15 points below the white average. [VDARE.com Note:Via Amazon.com`s search inside feature, we find that no mention of this IQ gap—indeed, the lettersIQ appear only twice in the book. Test gap?Check. Stereotype Threat? Check.
Parenting? Check. IQ? No.]For example, think of how many black intellectuals you can name?Probably quite a few. (You can start with McWhorter.)
In contrast, how many Mexican-American intellectuals can you recall? (Sure, there are Mexican intellectuals—but they don`t move to America.)
Even if you cast your mind back a century, in 1910 there were two nationally prominent African-American intellectuals: W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington.
Each advocated impressive albeit contrasting ideologies. Du Bois endorsed legal equality for the black elite—the "Talented Tenth",
as he called them. In contrast, Washington contended that building human capital among the black masses was key to their moving up from sharecroppers to factory workers.
The federal government could help blacks, Washington noted, by limiting immigration. (See Washington`s once-famous 1895 speech to white industrialists, "Cast Down Your Bucket Where You Are," asking them to hire black Americans rather than immigrants for their factories.)
An example of black ambition relative to Mexicans: taking the Law School Admissions Test might seem like a pretty white thing to do. Yet blacks do it vastly more than Mexican-Americans: in 2006, 11,288 blacks took the LSAT compared to only 1,789 Mexican-Americans. On a per capita basis, young blacks were four times as likely to take the LSAT as young Mexican-Americans.
The problem is that so many blacks took the LSAT that their average score fell at only the 12th percentile of the white distribution. In contrast, so few Mexican-Americans attempted the LSAT that those who did would have averaged at the moderately mediocre 29th percentile among whites.
White Americans constantly fret over whether black self-esteem is endangered by the mere mention of IQ gaps, but worry far less about the danger of overestimating how smart they are. Yet, that can lead even genuinely if modestly talented individuals into a disastrous career cul-de-sacs. For
example, 53 percent of blacks who begin law school never pass the bar exam, compared to only 24 percent of whites. In contrast, Hispanics are less likely to waste time pursuing degrees they aren`t cut out for.
In fact, the anti-educational bias in Hispanic culture certainly does keep down a fair number of Hispanics who really do have the brains to make use of education.
For example, Latinos who grow up in the U.S. have at least as bad a high school dropout rate as blacks, according to Nobel Laureate James Heckman`s 2007 study. Yet their IQ scores average about five points higher. P.L. Roth`s 2001
meta-analysis of 39 studies covering a total 5,696,519 individuals in America found that the white-Hispanic gap appears to be only about 65% as large as the notoriously unmentionable white-black gap.
In other words, while the Hispanic IQ glass is almost
two-thirds empty, it`s also over one-third full. So, why isn`t the Latino high school graduation rate better?
The likelihood that Latinos have the brainpower to accomplish more than they are currently is actually pretty good news, because they
already outnumber blacks in the U.S. If this country is going to stay solvent over the next generation, especially if immigration policy remains jammed on full throttle, Latinos are going to have to earn a lot more income, so they can pay a lot more taxes.
But will they? Unfortunately, nobody knows how to motivate Latinos to stick with education.
Mexican-Americans tend to see pursuing education as being disloyal to la familia and La Raza. Mexican ethnic pride correlates with Mexican lack of education. PBS commentator Richard Rodriguez, who has been perhaps the most distinguished Mexican-American public intellectual ever since he published his gracefully written memoir Hunger of Memory way back in 1981 (i.e., there`s not much competition), argues:
“Americans like to talk about the importance of family values. But America isn`t a country of family values; Mexico is a country of family values. This [America] is a country of people who leave home.”
My theory: I suspect that class matters. Before McWhorter`s turning point year of 1966, African-Americans had been in America long enough for a class structure to emerge, with people of mixed-race descent largely on top. And the “one drop” rule for defining who was black typically kept them black.
In contrast, the Mexican-American population is constantly being replenished by immigrants from the lower reaches of the Mexican class pyramid.
Moreover, the racial barriers in America have always been low enough that the more successful and ambitious Mexican-Americans tend to marry Anglos. For example, a recurrent theme in Joseph Wambaugh`s long string of novels about the Los Angeles Police Department, from 1971`s The New Centurions through 2009`s Hollywood Moon,
is the ambiguously Latino character, somebody whose ethnicity could arguably be either Mexican or Anglo.
Thus, particularly in California, there hasn`t been much of a Spanish-speaking upper class to refine manners since the 1840s. And those role models who have existed have been unfortunately influenced by the fatalism and indolence of Spain.
McWhorter writes:
“I even sense from the testimonials I have received that if one particular year could be pegged as the time in which `You think you`re white making those grades?` `tipped` as a community commonplace, it would be 1966—perhaps because this was the year that `black power` ideology went mainstream in the black community.”
The birth of the Black Pride movement around 1966 meant that the African-American Talented Tenth switched from emphasizing their cultural whiteness to emphasizing their cultural blackness: there was now good money to be made in acting black.
But this meant that the manners of the black masses were no longer upbraided by starchy black upper class role models, like Carlton Banks on Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
For example, one of the main characters in Tom Wolfe`s novel A Man in Full,is mild-mannered Roger White II, a black lawyer and Stravinsky devotee. He is known to his Morehouse college fraternity brothers, including the mayor of Atlanta, as Roger Too White. By the end of the book, even Roger Too White has figured out that the real money and power in modern Atlanta is in representin`.
White people will pay well to employ blacks who can act white—but as long as whites and blacks insist on assurances that the blacks are “authentic”, racial tensions will continue.
And the black-white educational performance gap is likely to continue even longer.
* I think you underestimate the time value of sex, and the ability to gain superior sex by eschewing education for more macho endeavors such as gang membership.
Students in the barrio who do good have to conceal it, otherwise they are beaten by gang members (if they are boys, no one cares about girls). Why? Because it is a signal of dominance. Football players who do well grade-wise of course are left alone. I personally have seen this in action as a barrio teacher.
Meanwhile, being a top HS football player OR gang member will get you a very hot girlfriend. Lets not be shy, for a 13 year old kid, the prospect of a really, really hot girlfriend three years out as an up and coming gang member, versus a ten year slog of almost total celibacy, and another ten years of near monk-like study, to finally get a girlfriend at age 30, is not an easy sale.
A boy that age is looking at twenty years of hard work. Without much reward, as he can see. Versus the guys he sees in the neighborhood, with girls and even kids. Yes the risk is greater (being shot) but he can run that risk just being a studios nose-to-the-grindstone kid. For a slightly enhanced (as he sees it) risk he gets much greater rewards.
Just as a dollar today is worth more than one ten years out, so too is a beautiful teenager to a teenage boy himself worth more than a prospective 30 year old twenty years from now. Particularly since he won’t be a provider, instead “spread your seed” type of guy.
Its not as if the White/Anglo culture values guys as providers (no fantasies about hunky beta guys that some lucky woman lands) and Mexican culture is even worse.
* How do we know that the mestizos and indios are smart? Something like 1/2 of Mexican teenagers are illiterate. It does not take much money to learn to read, nor does Spanish phonics take incredible brain power to master.
Now that isn’t to say that indios and mestizos are also a particularly undynamic, boring group. Just that they’re even less likely to have the minimal brain power required to benefit from acting white.
The rare as hens teeth slightly above average hispanic student has no hispanic friends because frienship is pretty much impossible across a 30 point (say ~110 for the bright aborigine and ~80 for his co-ethnics) IQ gap.
“Acting white” points towards the real personality differences between human groups that also matter. Whites aren’t just smarter than blacks, the behavioral differences are tremendous. Sailer himself has noted that more whites have IQ below 85 than blacks, but less intelligent whites don’t act like blacks. Why? because they’re acting white.
* Living on the Arabian Peninsula I have concluded that the imposition of strict shariah law is the only practical solution. Nothing like knowing you will receive a hundred lashes for talking to a girl or boy not related to you to change a gangbanger’s attitude.
* So that’s why there’s such a large and intractable Dancing Gap between blacks and whites — the pales who could actually cut a little rug fear being ostracized by fair-skinned fuddy-duddies for “acting black.”
* People from less study obsessed groups quite understandably don’t like others raising the stakes with the amount of time they have to invest in education, generally because they’d rather enjoy life.
And if they’re already insulated from competition, their quality of life is good and they have no prospect of being placed in a situation where it’s bad if they use their political leverage successfully (to prevent immigration, for’ex), who can really blame them for wanting to have more time to relax and goof off?
Certainly, I think most iSteve readers would not be that sympathetic to the behaviour of White people who adopt the “work ethic” (put euphemistically) of an Asian peasant and who would advocate this for all Whites rather than simply excluding the Asian peasant competition.
* I’ve watched this phenomenon my entire career. The treatment of good students by their peers ranges from ostracism to out and out persecution, sometimes violent.
I’ve mostly taught in rural schools that were almost entirely black, and pretty much everyone was on Free and reduced lunch.
Since gangs essentially run these schools (everything in Chicago migrates back to Mississippi), I sense an added incentive on top of the oft-discussed reasons for the “acting white” phenomenon, at least in rural areas. The academic students represent competition with the gang way of life. In some of these small villages, gangs have become the only real social institution. The studious kid represents a disruption of the transgressive, initiatory behavior that gangs continuously reinforce that is known as “the game”.
Another deep psychological factor that can be at play is that studiousness usually implies a somewhat stable home life, and the presence of a male role model (even though he’s often a grandfather, rather than a father). This is an affront to the tormentor, who constantly has to reinforce his chaotic existence through disrupting class, mindlessly reciting rap lyrics, and displaying gang affiliations, no matter how absurd it is (I’ve had students who literally spent all day rerolling a shirt sleeve and pants leg on the left or right side, depending on their Chicago-based gang affiliation).
* When high IQ white children go to school with asian children the whites and the asians intermarry.
When low IQ white children and latino children go to school together, the groups intermarry.
This doesn’t happen all at once, but it certainly becomes pervasive when the groups attend the same schools for two generations.
A good example here in California – massive numbers of people moved from Japan to California a long time ago – perhaps 100 or more years ago. The older generation worked very hard to preserve a separate cultural identity, teaching the children and grandchildren Japanese, trying to keep them interested in eating Japanese foods, some even at great expense arranged for the young ones to spend summers in Japan.
Despite the best efforts of the older generation, the Japanese in California married in to the larger white community. In fact, if you look at Japanese families that have been living in California for more than 100 years, more than 80% have intermarried with the white population to some extent.
Japanese and Whites in California have just melted in to one high IQ successful lump. “Japanese survivalists” that tell the young to preserve their culture by not intermarrying are laughed at the same way that “white survivalists” telling whites not to intermarry are laughed at.
You can’t tell what culture someone has just by looking at their skin. I am surprised that the rapper Drake hasn’t gotten more press in the HBD blog-o-sphere. Drake is culturally very jewish, he grew up in a majority jewish neighborhood, went to a jewish religious school, goes to shul for Yom Kipur and wears talit – the whole nine yards. Drake’s mom is 100% ashkenazi and his dad is 100% black and if you were to just look at his photos you would see a big muscular scowling black guy.
In many parts of california things are changing – the old rigid racial lines are sort of an artifact of the past – not relevant to the young.
High IQ whites and asians that attend the UC schools together find they have so much in common that there is no way to keep them from getting together.
Low IQ whites and latinos in the inland Empire find they have so much in common that there is no way to keep them from getting together.
I believe that California is the future of the USA and that race will melt away.
However, I don’t know how things work in the rest of the USA – can other people give me examples that prove me wrong? Is there a place in the USA where low IQ whites have been going to public school with latinos for 100 years where the two groups have NOT merged in to one?
Is there ia place in the USA where high IQ whites have been going to school with asians for 100 years and the groups have not melted in to one?
* Steve, I’m disappointed that you wrote “Before McWhorter’s turning point year of 1966, African-Americans had been in America long enough for a class structure to emerge, with people of mixed-race descent largely on top” without a parenthetical note about McWhorter’s melanin deficiency.
* Why do liberal Jews go on and on about black-white gap? Could it be to divert our attention from the Jewish-gentile gap, which is the most astounding in our society. And it never seems to be going away.
Jewish-black gap, Jewish-white gap, and even Jewish-Asian gap are quite dramatic.
Since Jews don’t want to call attention to their own power and privilege, they bitch and whine about white-black gap and dump all the blame on ‘white society’, though no group among whites are as successful and far ahead of others as Jews are.
If whites are guilty for leaving blacks behind, aren’t Jews especially guilty for leaving blacks WAY BEHIND?
* 30 minutes after reading your comment, I observe the following in Marin County, California. I’m in McDonald’s getting coffee. Enter two teenaged, obviously lower class whites with tatoos. So far no problem. As I leave store, wiggers get into 25 year old, paint-peeling Chrysler, parked in zone reserved for handicapped. At wheel of car is young black guy. I believe that in the U.S., the attraction for wiggers is the opportunity to piggyback on blacks’ immunity to the rules.
* Culture does matter in social achievement. Cultures that look down upon education for women will have ignorant women.
Italian-American parents have been less academically supportive of their kids than Jewish parents. Jewish parents took pride in their kids doing better. Italian-American parents–at least long ago–took offense when their kids did better; they took it personally, as if their kids were putting them down. The movie PADRE PADRONE shows what Italian youth were up against.
Also, we know from ultra-orthodox Jews that culture can narrowly define intellectual endeavor. Orthodox rabbis and scholars may be smart and knowledgable about the Talmud and Torah but they aint gonna become great scientists.
And in the American South, being smart or intellectual can get you called ‘liberal’ or ‘gay’. Even within the White Right community, you get called a ‘neocon’, a ‘zog’, ‘negrophile homo’, ‘lesbian’, etc, etc if you go against white nationalist orthodoxy. Try to have an open debate with morons at Stormfront, and it is impossible. If you say the Holocaust happened, you’re a ‘zog homo negrophile’.
And the equivalent of ‘acting white’ in white schools is called being ‘geeky’ or ‘nerdy’–like Anthony Michael in Breakfast Club. Geeks are not popular but they are tolerated in most white schools.
And try to argue for evolution among white Christian Southerners, and they look at you like you’re a ‘communist’. So, cultural stupidity holds a lot of white conservatives from achieving more in cultural and intellectual endeavors. Anti-intellectual bible thumping, flag waving, gun-hugging, and beer guzzling have made lots of conservatives stay stoooooopid.
So, culture does matter.
But culture is shaped to an extent by biology. Dumb people tend to have dumber cultures. If you got a people with IQ of 150 and a people with IQ of 85 and told each to edit and publish a journal of ideas, the 150 IQ group is gonna come up with more interesting ideas and views than 85 IQ group.
Much of black culture is dumb because too many blacks aren’t too smart. And even the smart ones tend to lack wisdom cuz blacks are by nature more uppity, self-centered, arrogant, and aggressive. Mike Dyson, Cornel West, and Henry Louis Gates may be smart guys but they are soooo full of themselves–always posing, preaching, and self-promoting–that they sound like bratty children then real scholars. They lack dignity and depth. They are slickity and slackity, like jazz musicians. All style, no substance.
The fact is many blacks don’t like ‘acting white’ because it feels alien to what their natural soul rhythm tells them–to git down and funky!! Basketball and football are games created by white men–as is the Olympics–,but blacks have no problem with doing that. Guns and beer were created by whites, but blacks love that too. Whites created the boombox and other musical stuff, but blacks love that too. So, it doesn’t matter if it was created by whites as long it’s fun and thrilling to the bouncy wouncy black butt. It feels natural to the black butt. But sitting still, being patient, and thinking quietly just aint natural to the black man. He starts asking, ‘what is this shit, man?’
* People revert to their natures under freedom.
Prior to the 60s, blacks were less free and still fearful of whites, so they ‘behaved’ better. Also, there were more social/moral/spiritual taboos within the black community. It could be scandalous even in the 1950s if a black entertainer used gospel music to sing about ‘my woman got a nice big butt’. So, the black community was under control due to external(white) and internal(black spiritual/moral)pressure.
But the 1960s not only liberated blacks but also women and youths. Black women got welfare and didn’t need their men no more. Indeed, single mother black women gained an advantage over black males since all they had to do was have kids to receive welfare.
And black men were sexually liberated too, and they got to screwing everyone instead of sticking around. Especially since their ho’s could get welfare, why bother to take care of ‘my woman and children’. Since fatherhood was dead and youth culture was all the rage, black kids began to act crazy and shit–using drugs, guns, and etc.
What took place was a kind of return-to-nature social dynamic. Well, not all races have the same natures, just as different dog breeds have different personalities or caninalities. For middle class whites, return to nature meant being like a hippie flower child. For blacks, it meant acting wild and funky, which was more damaging to society. To be sure, some whites became like pagan barbarians like old. Just look at trashy white Britons on welfare. They are like Vandals of old.
Well, we have returned to nature, but ironically paid for by super artificial big government which doles out welfare to those who act like animals.
(The rise of black male/white female sex is also the product of return-to-nature, as females in nature put out to toughest studs. This has been secured in pop culture through hiphop and Hollywood, and in higher culture via the promotion of Obama. Obama’s mother was a white woman of privilege, education, and intellect who went with a black guy. So, if rap culture tells white trash girls to have sex with blacks, Obama’s mother serves as an example to elite white women to go with blacks. It’s no wonder liberal Jews love Obama mucho.)
UK used to be more repressive and rigid, but the lower classes once looked to emulate respectable upperclassmen, and that had been the basis for some social harmony and stability.
But once the working class whites turned into the shirking class on welfare and turned to class rage via punk music and such trash, they turned into a bunch of drunken shiites and soccer hooligans.
* Before the real reason is known and understood there are a plethora of silly hypotheses. Such is the case now with black school achievement or Mexican school achievement. We have “the legacy of slavery explanation” and we have the “acting white” explanation.
Not so very long ago the cause of tuberculosis was unknown but that didn’t keep people from speculating. My favorite theory before Pasteur and Koch was that TB was caused by vampires.
Black people have about 70cc less gray matter in their frontal lobes. That accounts for their poor school performance. Period full stop.
People do indeed tend to impugn the mental acuity of slaves. But that prejudice evaporates like dew in the desert if the former slaves are normally intelligent. The Germans were Roman slaves for a millennium.
Similarly if almost all your friends are stupid and do poorly in school you may come up with a fanciful explanation. This is to confuse effect with cause. Better to blame the vampires.
* If a young man from a backwoods, trailer park West Virginia background happens to be born with very high IQ and happens to go to a prestige university and major in something useful like engineering, how likely is he to marry a high IQ female?
My understanding is that white prole culture tells young men to marry the best looking virtuous female they can get, and not to select on the basis of IQ.
On the other hand, Brahmin culture, Northeast Asian culture, Ashekenazi culture all stress over and over again to young men the truth that their sons’ IQ depends on the IQ of their wife’s family.
I have noticed that white Americans of European ancestry that grow up in neighborhoods with Brahmins, Northeast Asians, and Ashkenazi know that their sons will only succeed in life if their sons are born with high IQ, and that the only way to get high IQ for their sons is to marry a female from a very high IQ family.
On the other hand, white Americans who grow up isolated from Asians, Brahmins, Ashkenazi don’t seem to care how high the IQ is of the females they marry. Is the problem that no one has ever taught these young men that their sons need high IQ in order to succeed, or is the problem that these young men don’t understand the correlation between IQ of his wife and IQ of his sons?
In Wolfe’s recent Jefferson Lecture, he wrote:
“Each individual adopts a set of values which, if truly absolute in the world–so ordained by some almighty force–would make not that individual but his group . . . the best of all possible groups, the best of all inner circles.”
I only wish Wolfe had come up with a catchy name, which he, the coiner of “radical chic,” “the Me Decade,” and “the Right Stuff,” is certainly capable of. A reader writes:
“Tom Wolfe’s “fiction-absolute” structure of the mind has tremendous explanatory power.
Regarding (racial) groups with significantly different innate abilities, it would suggest that the 2 groups cannot ever live together in harmony. No group would ever agree to take part in a society that valued traits that would ensure that their group was valued less. Even though their group overall well being might be materially better, and any individual might gain status and prestige within this system, if it decreased the status potential of the group they will rebel and create their own values.
I have been waiting my whole life for someone to systematically explain this to me. It seemed intuitive but I wasn’t smart enough to systematically understand it.
It would also explain the phenomenon of political correctness. It never made sense to why telling the truth was such a big deal. Maybe the liberals understand the human mind better than I do. Maybe each particular group must feel that they have a theoretical chance to dominate or else there will be a psychological schism too large to bridge without overt domination of one group over another.
A diverse society therefore has two options: living a lie that every group is equal in ability (eventually backed by force as it fails) or a caste system backed by force.
This would seem to argue against neoconservative color blind society that ignores group differences. It would also argue against your citizenism where we are all aware of our differences but get along fine and only think about the nation as a whole.”
What happens is that people are perfectly capable of living happily in a society where their group is below average … until they think about it. The problem is that as time goes on, people general get more time on their hands to think about things like this, and more “ethnic leaders” to encourage them to dwell on the insult of it all.
The funny thing is that your group doesn’t even have to be below average for you to be outraged. Indeed, it appears to be a general pattern that the closer your group gets to being the top dog today, the angrier you get over slights to your group in your great-grandfather’s day, as JPod’s tantrum over immigration last Friday on NRO’s “The Corner” showed.
Let me add, thought, that the point of citizenism is not that its natural or easy but that it’s necessary to head off trouble caused by natural divisiveness.
A reader suggests the following potential replacements for [Tom] Wolfe’s important concept that “Each individual adopts a set of values which, if truly absolute in the world–so ordained by some almighty force–would make not that individual but his group . . . the best of all possible groups, the best of all inner circles.”
Hopefully one of these buzzwords for “fiction absolute” might pull it off:
Vanity paradigm
Group-hype
egocosmos
hypeomology
This little insight would explain much about why Black-American media culture so adamantly condemns assimilated, by-the-book blacks as “acting white”. If a critical mass of blacks decides to abide by the White egocosmos, it will damage the credibility of its black counterpart, and thus compell (eventually) blacks to accept being in second place in the dominant paradigm. Thus where going by the book might be the better individual strategy, the preservation of group vanity requires the instillment of an alternative paradigm reflecting the endowments of African-Americans, where they come in first and whites in second.
Any other suggestions?
Reader comments:
I think that ‘egocosmos’ takes it. A nice, smooth neologism that emphasizes the rootedness of the social myth in the inner urges, anxieties, and will-to-power of the subjects.
Thinking about Wolfe’s idea, I like the terms “group primacy,” “club primacy,” or to come at it differently “The Perfect Circle.” It could be given a more scientific note if we Latinzed it “Orbis Superbia.”
What the heck is “hypeomology?”
“Ideal type” I know, Max Weber used it in another sense, but since it has zero recognition in the general culture I say it is open.
How about three-word phrases? This isn’t an easy concept to get across, so maybe we should try being a little more expansive.
Tribal narcissism
“Tribal” is very good. “Narcissism” is close, but it sounds too self-contained, too aloof, whereas this phenomenon is more competitive, more relative, more needing to put other groups down to promote your own.
Vanity Paradigm
“Vanity” pays tribute to Wolfe’s “Bonfire of the Vanities,” although there Wolfe was using “vanity,” I would assume, in the sense of Ecclesiastes and/or Savonarola, “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” rather than in the more contemporary sense of egotistical.
I think Wolfe is drawing an analogy to Kant’s philosophically sophisticated version of the Golden Rule, the Categorical Imperative, which says “Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it would become a universal law.” (Another version: “Act so that the maxim … may be capable of becoming a universal law for all rational beings.”)
Wolfe’s “fiction-absolute” is the evil twin of the categorical imperative: “Each individual adopts a set of values which, if truly absolute in the world–so ordained by some almighty force–would make not that individual but his group . . . the best of all possible groups, the best of all inner circles.” In other words, “Act so that if the maxim became a universal law for all rational beings, your group must be seen as best.”
So, maybe some term calling attention to the contrast with Kant’s categorical imperative might help, such as “competitive imperative.” I kind of like “tribal competitive imperative.”
