by
Fred Reed
Recently
by Fred Reed:
YouSSR, MeSSR
Watching the
Zimmerman trial, I wonder whether we may not be in for big trouble.
Racial hostility is much higher in the United States than it is
allowed to appear. In the Twittersphere there is much traffic from
blacks, saying that if Zimmerman walks, they will kill him themselves,
riot, or kill random whites. On many sites around the web, whites
of a sort not found on NPR are saying, “Bring it on.”
This is not your granny’s recipe for domestic tranquility.
Let’s
not kid ourselves. Race underlies almost everything in this country
that spends half its time denouncing racism. This is true of trials,
and particularly true of show trials. When the police who beat Rodney
King, were acquitted by a white jury, the cops being clearly guilty,
blacks burned Los Angeles. When OJ Simpson, clearly guilty, was
acquitted by a black jury, whites didn’t burn anything, but
were angry and perfectly aware that the verdict was political.
The prosecution’s
case against Zimmerman is so weak that unless the fix is in, he
will walk. Katie, bar the door.
How did we
get here? It’s a long story.
An important
part of the world view of blacks is the belief that whites enslaved
them. This makes sense if you believe a race is a coherent being
with a life stretching over the centuries, as a man’s life
stretches over decades. (Compare The Jews Killed Christ. “Gosh,
Rachel. You don’t look old enough. You sure you did it?”)
It makes no
sense to whites who reflect that no white in America has ever owned
a slave, and no black has ever been one. Blacks know this, but it
is hard to focus anger on things done by dead whites long before
you were born.
Blacks know,
correctly if in most cases vaguely, that Negroes, as they were then
known, were indeed brought in chains to America. Whites today weary
of hearing about slavery since they had nothing to do with it, but
it happened and it was ugly. The ensuing slavery was no better.
Slaves were in fact whipped, raped, tortured, and kept illiterate,
as anyone knows who has actually investigated. (If you want an introduction
to slavery as it actually was, read Journal
of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation – 1838-1839.
) Lynchings
occurred, many, many of them, and they were hideous. Blacks know
this. Further, Jim Crow abides held in living memory. So blacks
have a case.
So do whites
(which will make no difference if Zimmerman walks). After all, they
ended slavery, passed the Civil War amendments, abolished segregation,
passed and enforced the civil rights laws, and instituted lifelong
charity for blacks in the form of welfare and affirmative action.
They didn’t have to do any of these things.
But onward.
It is an automatic belief among blacks that any black shot by a
white was innocent, and shot because he was black. This is seldom
true today, if ever it is, not because white policemen like blacks – they
do not – but because every cop knows that he would be crucified
in the press and probably in the courts, lose his job and pension,
and become unemployable. However, white cops (and black ones, but
that is another story) do abuse ghetto blacks, sometimes in front
of a police reporter (me). Blacks know, and remember.
Memories are
selective. People readily remember evil inflicted on them by others
while forgetting their own sins. Blacks do not tolerate mention
of their high rates of crime and the common – increasingly
common – racial gang attacks on whites in which the victims
frequently, and intentionally, end up with brain damage. These are
hidden by the media, but a primer is White
Girl Bleed a Lot.
All of this
makes for an angry black population, and they are watching the Zimmerman
affair intently.
If riots come,
they will come in the sprawling, entirely black ghettoes of cities
like Trenton, Cameron, Detroit, Atlanta, Birmingham, Gary, Chicago,
and so on. Few whites see these dismal wastes. I have, extensively,
through the windows of police cruisers. Outside of a squad car,
I wouldn’t have lasted an hour without being beaten crippled.
It is that bad.
In eight hours
in these places you never see a white face. People are not poor,
not in the sense that anyone in India would recognize. Rather they
are isolated, hopeless, their only contact with the outside world
being television. The schools are terrible. Fully half of Detroit
is illiterate, meaning that many of the rest of the city almost
is. They blame all of this, they blame everything, on whites. While
in the past they were right, their problem is no longer whitey,
and neither is the cure, if there is one. This is why the endless
racial programs do not work.
In a technological
society, those who can’t read have no chance. Whites no longer
prevent blacks from learning to read, or have any desire to do so.
If blacks in Detroit took to the streets demanding thicker books
with bigger words and smaller pictures, if they fired incompetent
teachers to hire better ones, if black parents taught their kids
to read even if they had to learn alongside them, most whites would
cheer. I would. Whites can’t do these things for blacks. Yet
even to suggest that blacks need to solve their own problems brings
cries of racism.
And so things
are explosive. On the one hand, whites have given up on blacks.
Ritualistic talk continues about poverty and closing the academic
gap, and affirmative action is accepted as another entitlement,
but no one does anything or knows what to do or has much interest.
Many whites are quietly angry about the Knockout Game and mob attacks.
Others revel in flagellating themselves over White Privilege, but
chiefly for the joy of narcissistic self-abasement. It has little
to do with blacks.
On the other
hand, in the black sections hatred of whites is strong. It is not
resentment or mere anger. It is hatred. Things are lousy, and it
is Whitey who did it. Life is going nowhere in the ‘hood, people
live meaninglessly and don’t know what to do about it. There
are no jobs. On various occasions I have gone into a home in the
ghetto in response to a police call, and found five grown men watching
television all day.
They are doing
nothing because there is nothing for them to do. The economy doesn’t
need them. They do not know why they are in the mess they are in,
as, really, neither do I. But they blame whitey. They, especially
the young, are ready to do something about it.
Many whites
of my acquaintance in Washington do not grasp any of this. They
are lawyers, journalists, academics, people who live in a bubble
of political correctness and see only the well-dressed blacks who
work in offices on Connecticut Avenue. To them racial tension is
what rednecks and Southerners do.
They don’t
really grasp that the human animal is savage, cruel, vindictive,
and murderous. This diagnosis may seem excessive if you are well-fed,
content, and more or less in control of your life. It is not excessive.
History and for that matter the present are full of groups butchering
each other for reasons of race, ethnicity, and nationality. Irish
Prots and Catholics killing each other, the IRA planting bombs in
London, white Southerners lynching blacks in the South, the slow
genocide of whites by blacks in South Africa, Sunnis and Shi’ites
killing each other, Turks butchering Armenians, black tribes in
Burundi hacking each other into pieces by thousands, white Americans
exterminating the Indians.
It can happen.
Maybe it won’t.
July
3, 2013
Fred Reed
is author of Nekkid
in Austin: Drop Your Inner Child Down a Well, A
Brass Pole in Bangkok: A Thing I Aspire to Be, Curmudgeing
Through Paradise: Reports from a Fractal Dung Beetle, Au
Phuc Dup and Nowhere to Go: The Only Really True Book About Viet
Nam, and A
Grand Adventure: Wisdom’s Price-Along with Bits and Pieces about
Mexico. Visit his
blog.
Copyright
© 2013 Fred Reed
Republished with permission from: Lew Rockwell