Economists Tom Sowell and Walter Williams come to my mind.
* Who, among black intellectuals, would still qualify as an intellectual if he were white? McWhorter is the only one I can think of, although I’m not the most well-informed so there may be others.
It seems like there used to be many more pre-1960s. Do highly intelligent blacks get roped into non-”intellectual” fields like engineering, or is it simply that they lack the opportunity to hone their reasoning skills because it’s racist to argue with them?
* The right is finding that parody is the ultimate antidote.
Logic is pointless. It’s better to say how you moved your family from the violent Whitebread suburbs to the obviously safe vibrancy of the inner city.
* I’m going to predict a theme about blacks needing to soar, about proud, vast spirits, constantly being wounded by petty and often meaningless ‘norms’ of white society, leading to frustration, anger and noncompliance (what everyone one else in our society calls ‘criminality’). The answer, of course, is for the rest of society to tolerate even more black social pathology. I can also see educated and successful black people reading Coates’, reflecting on some of their own neighbors and relatives and saying to themselves, ‘Oh, hell no.’
* At this point I’m pretty bored with HBD hatestats, but Five Thirty Eight managed to startle me all over again with this graphic.
As my annoying Millennial brethren like to say, “This One Chart Proves…”
One way to broach the uncomfortable subject of black criminality is to start by talking about how, even if you control for demographics, America is more violent than Europe. (Wilson would do this all the time.) And if you present the statistics in a certain way American whites do look remarkably violent. But it’s easy to convey that impression because the violent crime rate (especially the homicide rate) is so low in so many European countries. “The homicide rate of American whites is more than 3x greater than the Swiss rate!” Well, yes, but the Swiss rate is a virtually nonexistent 0.7 per 100k… In reality, white America might as well be Finland in regards to violent crime.
Steve, do you consider it a feature or a bug that your posts, articles, and insights are evergreen, because they axiomatically cannot get absorbed by the MSM? You get to recycle a lot of material, but it must get exasperatingly tedious.
* We may be past the peak of post-Civil Rights black achievement. Think of corporate America, for example, which used to include prominent black CEOs such as Don Thompson (McDonald’s), Stan O’Neal (Merrill Lynch), Dick Parsons (Citigroup, Time Warner), and Ken Chenault (American Express). Of those, only Ken Chenault is still CEO of a major company (American Express). Dick Parsons is the interim chief exec of the LA Clippers, and who knows what the others are up to now.
Thinking of politics, who’s left to follow in Obama’s footsteps? Corey Booker? There doesn’t seem to be a deep bench of black pols with crossover appeal.
* Whether or not one thinks of Coates as especially intelligent, the fact remains is that he has found his professional niche and as long as he gets paid and has slobbering adulation from the elites, its not in his interest to explore new ground or to consider other points of view. He’s found a good pasture (or hustle) and is going to keep grazing there as long as he can.
* A genuine black ‘intellectual’ would know that its all over. The Civil Rights Era has come and gone. That the past 50 years was the ‘Golden Age’ of the American negro and demographic change and economic decline will return the negro to his rightful place in American society and there is nothing to be done about it. This country is no longer rich enough to subsidize 40 million blacks with middle class lifestyles and a shrinking percentage of the population has any historical connection to black historical grievances.
The engine of black prosperity has been government spending and that engine is broken. At the local, state and federal level pension obligations and healthcare costs are going to eat away at a thousand line items in agency budgets that were the bread and butter of the negro middle class. LA is laying the ground work for a city where people walk, bicycle or take a bus to get where they are going. Its being sold as ‘people friendly’ but what it really means is LA is sliding back into the Third World. Daddy didn’t take the T-Bird away, daddy can’t afford a T-Bird for himself much less his kids! Chicago’s school district is on the verge of collapse. It has a budget hole of $500 million and there is no more money to be had anywhere. When the economy is growing ( if you believe) at two percent and state and local governments have to pay more than that to borrow money… its over! The United States is growing poorer and, what is worse, the Latino population is going to be demanding their fair share of the remaining black sinecures and the rules blacks made to carve these niches out for themselves will be ruthlessly applied to cull them from them.
* My experience of black people is in comparison with the lower end of the white demographic so in terms of being impulsively violent, criminally-minded meatheads (between mid-teens to mid-twenties) the gap wasn’t as big as other people have experienced.
The two big differences were
1) much lower monogamy – and this matters as a lot of random violence revolves around that
2) low but much higher frequency of “killers” i.e. people who are inclined to settle disputes with a lethal weapon i.e. white maybe 1-2%, black 4-8% – something like that – still a small percentage of the total population but critical in terms of how things play out on the ground.
I expect this is genetic (MAOA?) and could be figured out but unfortunately no-one will try.
* There’s a definite link between testosterone and criminality. The other factor is IQ. A third factor would be what I’d call impulse control. Most criminals are low-IQ, high-testosterone, and impulsive.
* On any given year the number of homicide victims in the U.S regardless of race who are murdered by a Black male perpetrator is significantly higher than the number of people who died on 9/11.
Americans regardless of race statistically have a higher chance of being murdered by a Black man on any given year than they do of being a victim of a terrorist attack.
* Albanians are Muslims and the BBC does not want to portray Muslim men as being ruthless pimps who treat prostitutes like second class citizens. Armenians are Christians so it okay to portray them in a negative light.
I bet Hollywood would feel extremely uncomfortable disproportionately portraying my people the Italians as being criminals at a much higher rate than we actually are in real life, if we were a Muslim ethnic group and not a Catholic ethnic group, there would probably be no mafia films about Italians.
