Jared writes (and his experiences mirror mine):
Like some other writers for this website, I have a reputation for writing rude things about blacks. I have written rude things about whites, Hispanics, Asians, and Muslims, but being rude about blacks is one of our era’s unforgivable sins. Of course, what I write about blacks is true, but as Mark Twain pointed out, nothing astonishes people more than to tell them the truth. Deep down, everyone knows the truth about blacks, but a vital requirement for respectability is to pretend you don’t.
The fact is, there are things to like about blacks—and I like them. They mostly have to do with lack of inhibition, a kind of cheerful spontaneity you don’t often find in whites. I have a half-Asian friend—a connoisseur of stereotypes—who thinks blacks and whites differ in that respect even more than they do in average IQ. As he puts it, whites act like Asians who have had a few drinks and blacks act like whites who have had a few drinks.
You see this in the easy way blacks talk to strangers. Sometimes I wear a hat—a black fedora in the winter or a panama in the summer—and I can count on compliments from blacks: “Love yo’ hat.” “Cool lid, man.” Mostly it’s from men but sometimes from women, too.
Blacks also have a knack for turning a moment with a stranger into a friendly exchange. If you are waiting for a bus in the summer, someone will turn to you and say “Sho is hot,” or “When izzat damn bus gonna come?” Educated blacks learn to be aloof, like whites, but lower-class blacks like to talk to whoever will listen, and there is charm in the way they share bits of their lives with you.
For a few weeks not long ago I walked to a job in the Tenderloin, which is San Francisco’s worst ghetto. Most whites never go there. The bum shelters empty early, so even at 8:30 in the morning the sidewalks were full of layabouts and panhandlers, most of them black. Some were clearly crazy—they looked straight through me and talked to themselves—but they never seemed dangerous. There was always banter among the regulars; some called each other by name, but there was a lot of “Hey, nigga,” too.
I wore a suit every day, and the federal courthouse was down the street, so after a few days, I was greeted with “Heah come de judge.” The panhandlers quickly learned I was a dry hole, but one tall, skinny black man refused to give up. “Any spare change today?” he would say, with a smile. And, of course, everyone liked my hat.
I had one awkward moment. A middle-aged woman with shocking blonde hair walked up and opened her jacket, revealing great, pendulous breasts. She then wrapped her arms tightly around me, as a happy cackle went up and down the sidewalk. I was stuck. I didn’t want to force her arms apart, and she wouldn’t let go. I was saved by another black woman who came up and said, “Stop yo’ playin,’ nigga, or I’ll beat yo’ ass.” I don’t think it would have worked if I had said that.
I realize that not everyone would have enjoyed that commute through the Tenderloin, but I did. Those “niggas” were poor and would always be poor. They were about as down and out as Americans get. But I admired the way they got every possible drop of amusement out of their lives. I was a bit of fun walking through their neighborhood, and they made the most of it—and in a way that made it fun for me, too.
It’s hard to imagine a bunch of whites in quite the same predicament, but I think they would have an angry sense of failure that those blacks did not. They would be surly; these people were cheerful. A long-forbidden stereotype is the happy-go-lucky Negro. Sorry, but that’s what I found in the Tenderloin.
Part of the spontaneity of blacks is the uninhibited way they pay compliments. Once I was walking back to my hotel room after a workout in the gym. My shirt was off and I was glistening. Two black chambermaids coming down the hall eyed me with interest. “Nice!” one of them said softly. I smiled, and the other said, much louder, “Very nice.” No white chambermaid would have said that.
I know women don’t like too much of that sort of thing when it goes the other way, especially when it doesn’t stop with “Baby, you look so fiiiiiiiiiiine.” I’ve heard black men proposition complete strangers in broad daylight on the streets of Washington, and I suppose girls get tired of that. Even so, to an onlooker, there’s something compelling about such guileless spontaneity.
The way blacks speak English is entertaining. A black man once explained to me the difference between “He sick” and “He be sick.” “He sick” is chronic—someone who is bedridden or in a wheelchair—while “He be sick” is a temporary condition like the flu.
I got a dose of creative black rhetoric one day when I fell off my bicycle in Manhattan. I had been going fast, and though I wasn’t injured, I was in a mild state of shock. I sat on the curb to pull myself together, and a black bicycle messenger who had seen me go down stopped to see if I was alright. I told him I was fine, but that I was feeling queer, shaky. “Dass right,” he said. “You go off yo’ wheels; it fucks wi’ yo’ mind. It fucks wi’ yo’mind.” I wouldn’t have put it that way, but he got it exactly right.
Jesse Jackson ran for president in 1984 and 1988 on a campaign of doggerel: “From the outhouse to the white house.” “They got dope in their veins, not hope in their brains.” “From disgrace to amazing grace.” A white candidate with idiotic lines like that would be laughed out of politics; Mr. Jackson carried it off.
COMMENTS:
* ROBERT WEISSBERG: Jared speaks the truth. I, too, wear nice hats (including a real Panama during the summer) and blacks regularly give me compliments. Moreover, in my many years of teaching I always got along splendidly with individual blacks despite my well-known “controversial” views on race. We shared lots of jokes and laughs much to the chagrin of my uptight liberal colleagues. I was also a regular at a local black owned rib joint where much of the black clientele looked like the people whose pictures decorate the post office. My liberal colleagues where terrified to go there despite my assurances that it was totally safe. These were the same “experts” who would insist that black crime resulted from white racism.
* Jared Taylor’s views on commenting are pretty reasonable and middle-of-the-road: He stands for freedom of expression but he would also like things to be civil and not hateful. A quote from an interview with him in American Spectator: “I wish our commenters were better behaved. I agree that they are sometimes mean-spirited, and I wish nothing ever appeared on the site that was mean-spirited. On the other hand, I don’t like censorship, and deleting comments is a kind of censorship. This is a dilemma faced by all sites that permit commenting.”
As for Taylor’s take on Jews, his views are a matter of both public record and evident from his actions. Again in his own words from two interviews:
“AR‘s position on Jews is well-known: Jews have always been full participants in the work of race realism and have taken prominent roles in almost all of our events.”
“Racially conscious whites tend to be suspicious of Jews for two reasons. First, Jews have been prominent in the effort to demonize any sense of white identity. Second, Zionist Jews support an ethnostate for Jews — Israel — while they generally promote diversity for America and Europe. This is annoying, but understandable for historical reasons.” (From the same American Spectator interview quoted above.)
I would not facilely accuse AmRen (i.e. Taylor) of anti-Semitism, as few people in the movement have been more thoughtful and circumspect on the issue than Taylor. Why would he continue to publish Jews and feature them at AmRen conferences only to play games on the issue in the comments? Taylor most likely is simply following the policy articulated above: trying to allow freedom of expression but moderating in order to avoid tangential, unhelpful and inflammatory commenting. Sometimes this may result in deleting “anti-Semitic” and sometimes philo-Semitic comments.
* There’s so much more more at work than IQ among racial groups. Blacks are very accomplished musically, both creating and performing, and in particular singing. I recently argued to some friends that, at this point, Asians, IQ notwithstanding, are so far behind blacks musically at this point that blacks could stop creating music now, we could wait a million years, and Asians still wouldn’t be anywhere close. Asians excel at understanding, appreciating, and performing European music, but they have no creative bone. Not even the Japanese are musically creative, although, unlike Asians generally, they are creative in many other ways.
