He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies; and what's his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villany you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.
The Merchant of Venice, Act 3, Scene 1
(emphasis mine)
To avert accusations that I was simply making stuff up in my last post about the us-versus-them mentality prevalent in the black community, rapper Cam'ron came to my defense in an interview with Anderson Cooper (link probably won't last long enough for anyone to read it).
Rap star Cam'ron says there's no situation -- including a serial killer living next door -- that would cause him to help police in any way, because to do so would hurt his music sales and violate his "code of ethics." Cam'ron, whose real name is Cameron Giles, talks to Anderson Cooper for a report on how the hip-hop culture's message to shun the police has undermined efforts to solve murders across the country. Cooper's report will be broadcast on 60 MINUTES Sunday, April 22 (7:00-8:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network.
(emphasis mine)
I understand that I previously linked this behavior to slavery and Jim Crow, and I stand by my statement. However, it's a little more nuanced than that.
For a very long time in this country, if a cop came looking for a black guy because of a rape accusation, there was every reason to believe that the cop was actually looking for some white guy's scapegoat. There was little way to ascertain the truth of the matter, for frequently before making it to his unfair trial, the black guy could very well find himself hanging from a tree. On the other hand, if a white raped a black, the odds he would get lynched, or even face rude stares in the street, were minimal at best.
It therefore makes perfect sense that blacks would develop a "code of ethics" favoring hunkering down and keeping as much information as possible from the white man. Police, lawyers, judges, and most of the institutions in the Old South thrived on an us-versus-them mentality, only the "us" was white people. "They" learned it from "us." Hence, the root causes.
Yet there's more. Anti-violence advocate from Harlem Geoffrey Canada says:
in the poor New York City neighborhood he grew up in, only the criminals didn't talk to the police, but within today's hip-hop culture, that's changed. "It is now a cultural norm that is being preached in poor communities....It's like you can't be a black person if you have a set of values that say 'I will not watch a crime happen in my community without getting involved to stop it,'" Canada tells Cooper.
(emphasis mine)
I have no idea how old Mr. Canada is, but whatever his age, during his youth not as much time had progressed between then and slavery as has passed today. However, according to Canada, Cam-ron's anti-authority ethos is stronger now. Were slavery indeed the root cause, shouldn't it be waning instead of increasing with the passage of time and Civil Rights legislation?
We see the same phenomenon with illegitimate births and crime rates, all of which peaked several years after the Civil Rights movemment alleviated much (but admittedly not all) of the institutional unfairness prevalent in our country. (Thomas Sowell discusses this in great detail.)
We therefore have the following sequence of events:
1. Unjust historical circumstances create understandable thought and behavioral patterns, some defensive (us-versus-them), some destructive (crime).
2. As the unfair circumstances gradually alleviate, the patterns remain but lessen.
3. A movement drastically reduces the number of injustices.
4. The initial thought and behavioral patterns increase in scope.
Huh? Acoording to Dr. Sowell, for a period earlier this century, blacks who knew actual former slaves had lower illegitimacy rates than whites, but now we're supposed to blame the effects of racist institutions for the number of blacks without a father at home. Our society is far from perfect, but it no longer sanctions auctioning off somebody's kids, and the days when it did sanction such awfulness are fading farther into the past every second. Time is linear, after all.
(I know that Vyan, among others, blames black incarceration rates. Although I wholeheartedly agree with him that our drug policies are patently unfair, I also know that when I was fifteen I had a job with about twenty Detroit high schoolers, none of whom were in jail or married but nearly all of whom already had kids.)
Pardon my knee-jerk reactionary impulses, but I suspect that something other than the meanness of white society is at work here, for white meanness has decreased substantially since 1957, but in 1957 more black kids interacted with their fathers on a daily basis.
So what is at work here, and what can conservatives do about it?
In my next post, I will expand on the problem (the leftist manipulation of understandable defense mechanisms through the overprioritization of motivation--it's a mouthful but very effective), and hopefully get to the solution--heroism.
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