{"id":117137,"date":"2017-09-04T11:29:57","date_gmt":"2017-09-04T19:29:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=117137"},"modified":"2017-09-04T11:29:57","modified_gmt":"2017-09-04T19:29:57","slug":"the-summer-of-monumental-madness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=117137","title":{"rendered":"The Summer Of Monumental Madness"},"content":{"rendered":"

Robert Weissberg writes<\/a>: <\/p>\n

I\u2019m sure, but let me add a less obvious but ultimately more important hypothesis: the sudden hysteria is a result of decades of pent up exasperation over failure at achieving racial equality. In a nutshell, for at least a half-century, perhaps longer, America has struggled with its \u201crace problem\u201d and while proposed solutions exceed dozens, and expenditures in the trillions, progress has been scant. In fact, on at least some indicators, for example, illegitimacy and crime, race-related matters where better off in the 1950s. Not even electing a black President has cured America\u2019s race strife despite all the assurances that Obama would be a \u201cpost-racial\u201d President that would, once and for all, bring everybody together. What we have gotten for all our efforts is Black Lives Matter and yet even more black condemnation of whites.<\/p>\n

This accumulated frustration can be likened to a situation where a patient with a grim prognosis grows ever more desperate as one standard treatment after the next fails to reverse the illness. These frantic patients often gravitate to quacks despite the low odds of a cure. Nevertheless, the very act of visiting a faith healer or drinking a magical herbal concoction outshines passivity. And who knows, the world abounds with testimonials to quack cures and \u201cdoing something\u201d calms the despair.<\/p>\n

Think of the Monumental Madness as social engineering quackery\u2014it probably will accomplish little if anything but it feels better than doing nothing. What encourages this desperate quest for today\u2019s \u201cmiracle\u201d is that so many past solutions, at least according to all the learned experts, were \u201cguaranteed\u201d to perform as advertised and all failed. Recall when the surefire cure was improved education\u2014ending segregation, equalizing school expenditures, hiring more black teachers and administrators, altering textbooks to make it more relevant to black youngsters, intensive pre-school (Head Start, Sesame Street) and, more recently, eradicating unconscious teacher bias and no longer disproportionately disciplining blacks. We\u2019ve had Bush\u2019s No Child Left Behind and Obama\u2019s Race to the Top and countless other expensive remedies.<\/p>\n

A similar guaranteed cure was political empowerment, that is, the Department of Justice would ensure that blacks would live in cities run by black elected officials and self-government would cure everything from crime to joblessness. The upshot, of course, have been urban disasters like Detroit and Selma, AL. And let\u2019s not forget tough anti-discrimination laws that would ban employers from using racist job descriptions, and affirmative action programs that would temporarily give a leg up to those who began the race a few steps behind.<\/p>\n

All and all, genuine successes are rare, typically only cosmetic, and if there were a Museum of Failed Cures for America\u2019s Racial Problems, it would be the size of Washington\u2019s Smithsonian.<\/p>\n

In other words, by the summer of 2017, the frustration over repeated failures plus the lack of any more \u201cguaranteed\u201d solutions on the agenda had created a perfect setting for quackery. Now, as with all serious but likely intractable problems, the marketplace supplies something to meet these needs, and to continue our parallel with those suffering from incurable cancer, taking down statutes of Confederate soldiers or re-naming buildings is the equivalent of using Laetrile among countless other bogus cures. Yes, there is no scientific evidence that past crusade against \u201chate\u201d has even helped African Americans, but given the sorry record of past efforts, why not give it a try? Hard to resist anything that feels so good.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Robert Weissberg writes: I\u2019m sure, but let me add a less obvious but ultimately more important hypothesis: the sudden hysteria is a result of decades of pent up exasperation over failure at achieving racial equality. In a nutshell, for at … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-117137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blacks"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=117137"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117137\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":117138,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117137\/revisions\/117138"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=117137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=117137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=117137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}