Plinking Cops

Guest Post by Fred Reed

The Symptoms Worsen

Partial index, Knockout Game a Lie? To cure a disease, begin by admitting that you have it.

Ah, the joys of escalation. In Ferguson blacks are shooting policemen as others cheer .It does a curmudgeon’s soul good: Everything gets worse, the collapse continues, and unreasoning stupidity goes thundering into the future.

We will hear I suppose that it wasn’t racial, that teens did it, that discrimination  caused it, white privilege, racism, institutional racism, slavery, colonialism, bigots, Southerners, rednecks—everything but the hatred of blacks for whites.

And thus we will avoid the unavoidable, that racial relations are a disaster, will remain a disaster, will get worse, are getting worse, and will lead to some awful denouement no matter how much we lie, preen, vituperate, chatter like Barbary apes, or admire ourselves.

It isn’t working. There is no sign that it ever will. What now?

The only solution, if there is a solution, would seem to be an amicable separation. This methinks would be greatly better than the slow-motion, intensifying racial war we now see, and pretend not to see. When the races mix, there is trouble. So, don’t mix them.

A one-sided race war of low intensity is exactly what we have, and will have. This has been multiply documented, and the documentation ignored, yet it is readily available. Most recently, there is Colin Flaherty’s  Knockout Game a Lie?: Awww, Hell No!  dealing with gang attacks of whites by blacks. It is a clever book since, being available in Kindle format only, it can (and does) contain hundreds of clickable links to original sources. It all checks out. So does Ann Coulter’s Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama: . So does Flaherty’s earlier book, ‘White Girl Bleed A Lot’: The Return of Racial Violence to America and How the Media Ignore It.

The racial hostility of blacks for whites can be seen elsewhere, for example in targeting of crime, most starkly in interracial rates of rape. One of the less appealing tendencies of uncivilized masculinity, a staple of military history, is the desire to humiliate the enemy by having his women. The numbers on rape, almost entirely black on white, also check out as cold fact, being derived from the federal UCR and NCVS. This has been analyzed to death, and ignored to death, but perhaps the most readable account is Jim Goad’s For Whom the Cat Calls (the numbers of note come below the ads).

Even without the (inevitable) racial hostility, togetherheid would not work well. The races have little or nothing in common. They do not want the same things. Whites come from a literate European tradition dating at least from the Iliad in 800 BC, a tradition characterized by literature, mathematics, architecture, philosophy, and the sciences. Africa, having a very different social traditions, was barely touched by this, and today blacks still show little interest. Even in the degenerate America of today, whites put far more emphasis on education than do blacks.

The media paint the problems of blacks as consequent to discrimination, but they clearly are not. If blacks in white schools wanted to do the work, or could, whites would applaud. If in black schools they demanded thicker textbooks with bigger words and smaller pictures, no white would refuse. The illiteracy, the very high rates of illegitimacy, the crime in general, the constant killing of young black men by young black men in particular—whites do not do these. They are either genetic, and irremediable, or cultural, and remediable, if at all, only in the very long run. We live in the short run.

Would it then not be reasonable to encourage a voluntary segregation? Having only black policemen in black regions would slow the burning of cities. If we let people live among their own, let them study what they chose to study, let them police themselves and order their schools as they chose, considerable calm would fall over the country.

If the races had the choice of running their own lives apart, they would. If this is not true, why do we have to spend such effort trying to force them together?

IIt is a great fallacy to think that because we ought to love one another, we will; or that because bloodshed among groups makes no sense, it won’t happen. The disparate seldom get along, whether Tamils and Sinhalese or Hindus and Moslems or Protestants and Catholics or Jews and Palestinians. The greater the cultural and genetic difference, the greater the likelihood and intensity of conflict. Blacks and whites are very, very different.

Separation does not imply disadvantage. The assertion that “separate is inherently unequal” is a catchiphrastic embodiment of the Supreme Court’s characteristic blowing in the political wind. A college for girls is not inherently inferior to a college for boys, nor a yeshiva for Jews inherently inferior to a parish school for Catholics. And maybe it is the business of girls and boys, Catholics and Jews, to decide what and where they want to study—not the government’s business.

And so with segregation. While a comfortable distance would make for peace, black policemen should get the same pay and equipment as white, black teachers the same pay as white, and black schools equal facilities and any books and curricula they want.

Autonomy in setting policy for police would further reduce anger. For example, blacks are unhappy because so many of them are in prison, frequently on drug charges. Why not make arrests a local option? If the residents of black neighborhoods wanted their police to arrest drug dealers, they could do so. If they wanted to ignore dealers, or dealers in some drugs, they could do that too. We might call this “choice,” or “freedom.”

Washington, with its hothouse isolation from America, ruled by the exotic orchids flowering in the Senate and by billionaire hustlers, may believe that America is what the talking heads tell us it should be. If you savagely punish anyone who points out that you have cancer, they stop pointing—but you don’t stop having cancer. Maybe we should think about this.

Anger hangs over the country. Not everyone white is a professor or collegiate sophomore or network anchor. Not every white—not by a long shot—in Congress or the federal bureaucracy is a Mother Jones liberal, not in private conversation. They say aloud what they have to say. But in the Great Plains and small-town South, in corner bars in Chicago and Denver, in the black enclave of the cities, a lot of people are ready to rumble. Read the comments section of the St. Louis papers after the riots. We can call the commenters whatever names we choose but when we finish, they will still be there. The shooting of policemen for racial reason–at least four to date–is not a good sign. We will do nothing about it but chatter.