This week’s major viral hit is the video below documenting how an average-looking, not-especially-sexily-dressed woman receives 100 instances of street harassment in the course of a ten-hour stroll through New York City.
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My millennial Facebook friends from Yale circles were righteously a-buzz over this one yesterday. One girl after another testifying that she, too, was constantly harassed by men. It is all about power, they agreed. I offered the consolatory reflection that none of them will have this problem any longer after just a couple of decades. But the girls did not particularly appreciate hearing that one.
It was not very long, however, before the thoroughly-conditioned youngsters, just like Hannah Rosin at Slate, identified a highly problematic subtext in the Hollaback! video: “the video also unintentionally makes another point, that harassers are mostly black and Latino, and hanging out on the streets in midday in clothes that suggest they are not on their lunch break. As Roxane Gay tweeted, ‘The racial politics of the video are f*cked up. Like, she didn’t walk through any white neighborhoods?’ â€
Today’s young people simply cannot tolerate viewing, hearing, or reading anything uncomplimentary to the groups they have been trained all their lives to regard as sacred. Their noses twitch, their hairs stand on end, their heads go up, and they reflexively cry: Racism!
Once the material is identified as racist, that is it. It is not only bad, it is ipso facto false, and must be dismissed out of hand. It doesn’t matter if the questionable content is perfectly true. It is still false because it is wrong, cosmically, absolutely, utterly WRONG. In the minds of today’s young, nothing is, nothing can possibly be so unutterably wrong as Racism. And Racism is not necessarily some kind of concrete theory of the characteristics and relative inherited inferiority of certain groups. Racism is merely saying anything whatsoever negative about certain groups.
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The mandatory racial witch hunt having concluded, the Internet Community then turned its attention to poking fun at the Hollaback! Sexual Harassment video.
Funny or Die! gave us this (non-embeddable) 1:56 video of 10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Man.
Ta-Nehisi Coates sports one of those preposterous made-up African personal names, which is, I suppose, a vital fashion accessory for a fellow who makes his living as a professional angry black man.
TNC (as other writers often refer to him) is a college drop-out who (for some completely mysterious reason, what could it possibly be?) has managed consistently to fail upward. Starting in 2000, over a period of seven years, TNC was hired and then quickly fired by the Philadelphia Weekly, The Village Voice, and Time magazine in succession. Naturally, with a resume like that, the Atlantic was quick to hire him as national correspondent and senior editor.
At the Atlantic, TNC has a comfortable gig. When he doesn’t feel like turning in any copy, he simply posts a sign reading: “The Lost Batallion,” and that’s cool with his employers. They keep TNC on, despite his tendency to punt, because when he does write an article, he produces 200-proof, double-distilled racialist venom. Back in May, TNC argued for reparations to be paid to gentlemen of color like himself to compensate for “395 years of preferential treatment for white people” and an “early American economy built on slave labor.”
More recently, TNC has been off at Middlebury in Vermont studying French. His French lessons, you might suppose would be racially irrelevant, but you’d be wrong.
TNC, you see, finds learning French hard, and that is your fault, whitey!
There were years when I failed the majority of my classes. This was not a matter of my being better suited for the liberal arts than sciences. I was an English minor in college. I failed American Literature, British Literature, Humanities, and (voilà ) French. The record of failure did not end until I quit college to become a writer. My explanation for this record is unsatisfactory: I simply never saw the point of school. I loved the long process of understanding. In school, I often felt like I was doing something else.
Like many black children in this country, I did not have a culture of scholastic high achievement around me. There were very few adults around me who’d been great students and were subsequently rewarded for their studiousness. The phrase “Ivy League†was an empty abstraction to me. I mostly thought of school as a place one goes so as not to be eventually killed, drugged, or jailed. These observations cannot be disconnected from the country I call home, nor from the government to which I swear fealty.
For most of American history, it has been national policy to plunder the capital accumulated by black people—social or otherwise. It began with the prohibition against reading, proceeded to separate and wholly unequal schools, and continues to this very day in our tacit acceptance of segregation. When building capital, it helps to know the right people. One aim of American policy, historically, has been to insure that the “right people†are rarely black. Segregation then ensures that these rare exceptions are spread thin, and that the rest of us have no access to other “right people.â€
And so a white family born into the lower middle class can expect to live around a critical mass of people who are more affluent or worldly and thus see other things, be exposed to other practices and other cultures. A black family with a middle class salary can expect to live around a critical mass of poor people, and mostly see the same things they (and the poor people around them) are working hard to escape. This too compounds.
Rod Dreher read the same TNC article, and he, too, was a bit ticked off by TNC’s revolutionary racialist BS.
TNC goes on to draw some sort of black nationalist lesson from his summer at French camp, culminating in this line: “Sometimes you do need the master’s tools to dismantle his house.†OK. Whatever. Reparations scholarships to Middlebury for all!
I snark, but honestly, the idea that the enormous privilege of spending a summer studying a foreign language at a verdant Vermont college should conclude with a resolution to become even more of a militant race man is depressing. Exactly whose house will TNC be burning down as a result of the tools he acquired this summer at Middlebury? François Hollande’s? I don’t get it. I seriously don’t. Seems to me that learning French as a middle-aged American can only do one worthwhile thing: make you more of a humanist. TNC thinks it has done that for him, I guess. Recalling his past self, he writes:
I saw no reason to learn French because it was the language of the plunderers of Haiti.
I had to be a nationalist before I could be a humanist.
What does that mean? That he had to learn to love his people before he could love all the world? I guess I understand that, but if a rural white Southerner had the same thought, what would TNC think of him? I know good and well what the overclass that TNC spent his summer with would think of that Southern kid.
Anyway, it seems that TNC is, in fact, learning French because it was the language of the plunderers of Haiti. I don’t know how else to read his conclusion, referencing Audre Lorde’s line, that the meaning of his summer spent immersed in the language of Baudelaire, Racine, and Rimbaud is to be found in how it empowers him to resist white supremacy. That does not sound like power to me. That sounds like impoverishment.
He is part of the Establishment now. He writes for a well-respected national magazine, about things he enjoys. He takes summers to go to language camp to learn French. That’s great! Why is he such a sore winner?
TNC is a sore winner, of course, because that is actually his profession. TNC is a professional angry black man, employed by the elite editorial board of the Atlantic, sitting atop the heights of establishment American culture, to be a kind of in-house Caliban, to rant, to rage, to emote and accuse America generally in order to solidify and confirm that Atlantic editorial board’s claim to top-people-ship. If TNC were reasonable and rational, he might actually have to find a real job and meet editorial deadlines.
Let a man be told incessantly that everything he and his forefathers had achieved was largely a matter of chance; that the poverty and backward condition of other individuals and races was also largely a question of luck—in fact perhaps even the fault of himself and his forefathers; that his standards of morals, fiscal responsibility and personal integrity were no better than anyone else’s; that his civilization was mostly happenstance and really nothing much to be proud of; that since all humanity were innately equal, all actual differences must be due to the other man’s misfortune and his own four-leaf clovers—let a man hear these things often enough and his values were bound to change.
Poor innocent 18-year-old Michael Brown, shortly before he was shot by an obviously racially-biased police officer.
Helpfully, in the New Republic, Julia Ioffe warns that African Americans in Ferguson, Missouri have been excessively self critical.
This self-criticism—or self-flagellation—is nothing new. It’s the return of a phenomenon that is referred to by African-American historians as the “politics of respectability.” “During times of unrest, black writers going back to the early 20th century have argued that the reason blacks are facing discrimination or police brutality is because they have not been acting properly in public—particularly young, poor people,†says Michael Dawson, a political scientist and director of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture at the University of Chicago. “In the last 20 years, it’s been a criticism of baggy pants, rap music, hair styles. Back in my generation, it was Afros. I remember my grandparents telling me, ‘you should cut your hair.’â€
Respectability, in essence, is about policing the behavior in your community to make sure people are behaving “properly,†so as to not attract unwelcome attention from whites—“with ‘properly’ being a normatively white middle class presentation,†says Dawson. In feminist discourse, a similar phenomenon among women is described as internalizing the patriarchal gaze.
Concerned citizens in Ferguson, Missouri protesting police violence and militarization of the police.
Poor Michael Brown was videotaped by a surveillance camera robbing a convenience store, shortly before he was shot by police.
Armed & Dangerous agrees with the general narrative contending that events in Ferguson, Missouri show that American police use too much military equipment and are ill-advisedly trained to employ military tactics, but –beyond all that– he feels obliged to defend police against knee-jerk accusations of racism.
[The] 2% [of the US population composed of black males aged 15 to 25] is responsible for almost all of 52% of U.S. homicides. Or, to put it differently, by these figures a young black or “mixed†male is roughly 26 times more likely to be a homicidal threat than a random person outside that category – older or younger blacks, whites, hispanics, females, whatever. If the young male is unambiguously black that figure goes up, about doubling.
26 times more likely. That’s a lot. It means that even given very forgiving assumptions about differential rates of conviction and other factors we probably still have a difference in propensity to homicide (and other violent crimes for which its rates are an index, including rape, armed robbery, and hot burglary) of around 20:1. That’s being very generous, assuming that cumulative errors have thrown my calculations are off by up to a factor of 6 in the direction unfavorable to my argument.
Now suppose you’re a cop. Your job rubs your nose in the reality behind crime statistics. What you’re going to see on the streets every day is that random black male youths are roughly 20 times more likely to be dangerous to you – and to other civilians – than anyone who isn’t a random black male youth.
Any cop who treated members of a group with a factor 20 greater threat level than population baseline “equally†would be crazy. He wouldn’t be doing his job; he’d be jeopardizing the civil peace by inaction.
Yeah, my all means let’s demilitarize the police. But let’s also stop screaming “racism†when, by the numbers, the bad shit that goes down with black male youths reflects a cop’s rational fear of that particular demographic – and not racism against blacks in general.
Like myself, John Derbyshire zoned out before managing to make it all the way through Ta-Nehisi Coates’ endless whiny anecdotes of alleged past injustices intended to make a case for yet more racial navel-gazing leading to black reparations.
Coates’ piece is very long: 15,768 words. That’s longer than the Book of Proverbs. I read at about 300 words a minute, so I’d have to commit almost an hour of my life to reading the wretched thing.
For another, it’s about a topic I have no interest in: American blackness.
I bear no ill will towards American blacks and would not deprive them of a jot nor tittle of their constitutional protections. I treat the blacks I encounter with proper courtesy and respect, and have publicly urged the nonblack youth of America to do the same.
It’s just that I’m not interested in blacks in the generality, and find their endless complaining tiresome. I don’t have to listen to it—you can’t make me—so I prefer not to. …
So far as I can tell from scanning his columns, all he writes about is blackness. Does even he find it that interesting? Obviously, yes.
There’s a narrowness, a poverty of imagination there. I count myself fairly limited in my interests—I know nothing about sport, or art, or TV, or celebrities—but in the past three months I’ve found something to say about consciousness, biohistory, literature, General Relativity, opera, science, Ireland, China, humanitarianism, eugenics, child-raising, Liverpool, Asian-Americans, psychology, poetry, Puerto Rico, global warming, genomics, robotics, and Intelligent Design. Meanwhile Coates has been droning on about blackety-blackety-blackness.
So my deduction is that Ta-Nehisi Coates is just another Affirmative-Action mediocrity grumbling ceaselessly about Whitey.
(I always assume that any black person in a well-paid position is an Affirmative Action hire. I shall cease assuming this, at least so far as new hires are concerned, when Griggs v. Duke Power is overturned and the stupid and odious doctrine of “disparate impact†is declared by the Supreme Court to be impermissible in legal arguments.)
Way I look at it, if God had meant me to squander my precious hours reading 15,000-word articles written by Affirmative Action mediocrities on topics of zero interest to me, He wouldn’t have given me the Ctrl-F key.
So no, I haven’t read all through the thing. Okay?
Derbyshire correctly identifies what Mr. Coates is really after.
What they really want is for everyone else to find blackness as infinitely fascinating as they themselves find it. This is clearer in the interview Coates gave to Bill Moyers, which comes with a full transcript. From which:
I think, one of the things is that we talk about race a lot, we do. So I think it’s wrong to say we don’t have conversations. No, we actually talk about it quite a bit. I don’t think we talk about it in depth as much as we should. And I think part of the problem is when you start talking about it in depth, when you start getting to a level where you say, listen, everything we are, everything we have is built on past sins.
The dream of the Eric Holders and Ta-Nehisi Coateses is for us all to talk about race 24-7—although of course only in a vocabulary approved by them: acknowledging collective white guilt and sympathizing with the sufferings of blacks.
Personally, I’d rather pay the reparations, if I thought it would shut them up. It wouldn’t, of course.
Now that Gay Marriage, on the basis of a series of fabricated popular opinion polls and even-more-shamelessly-fabricated judicial opinions, seems to be firmly established as a feature of American life, the Establishment media is competing to pick the next great liberal cause. Time Magazine plumped for Transgender Rights. The Atlantic, more conservatively, just allowed its house affirmative action senior editor to publish an interminable screed demanding reparations.
That editor, a fellow named Coates who affects the silly and pretentious Afro praenomen Ta-Nehisi, makes an essentially preposterous claim. His contention is that we all owe him money because the entire American economy and Capitalist System as we know is built upon the unremunerated contributions of black slaves prior to 1865.
There are a number of obvious problems with this theory. According to historian Eugene Genovese, the most authoritative student of the subject, during the Antebellum period, black slaves typically received a significantly larger share of the product of their production than did free laborers in the North.
Additionally, the economic contribution of black slaves was regional, overwhelmingly restricted to the agricultural and non-industrial South. Industrial America and modern American capitalism developed in the far more urban and populous North. The wealth of the South was ultimately sunk in the struggle for Southern Independence, and its economic assets, its modest industries, and its large agricultural economy was destroyed in the war. After the Civil War, the Southern states sank into provincial poverty and economic backwardness for most of a century.
If the South owed Black America anything, in 1865 it was bankrupt and in no position to pay. Congress, moreover, specifically repudiated all the debts of the late Confederacy.
The Northern States extinguished Slavery at the cost of more than 700,000 American lives, the equivalent of two and half percent of the entire population of the country, four years of war, and the expenditure of what would undoubtedly be trillions of today’s dollars in wealth. The entire record of history fails to disclose any equivalent example of so enormous an effort and so enormous a sacrifice of blood and treasure by any society for the benefit of another people. The absolutely incredible cost of the Civil War would be taken by any fair-minded person to wipe the slate clean for the entire nation, North and South.
Finally, of course, there is to be considered the obvious enormous distance of time, and the tremendous changes in American society and its population which have occurred in that century and a half since 1865. Few people living today actually even know the names of their ancestors who were living in 1865, let alone their circumstances.
For Mr. Coates to claim that America owes him, and others of his kind, for potential underpayments of wages to some great great grandfather is just ridiculous. Nor does his endless series of sob stories about bad real estate deals and segregation impress me very much.
I don’t think I owe Mr. Coates, or the rest of Black America, a damn thing. No members of my family ever set foot in this country before the mid-1890s, a full generation after slavery was extinguished. My Lithuanian ancestors settled in the Anthracite mining region of Northeastern Pennsylvania, where they enjoyed the distinctly white European privileges of digging coal, getting killed in cave-ins or gas explosions, and dying unusually young of Anthrosilicosis.
They probably would have discriminated against Mr. Coates’ ancestors, given the chance, but happily they were spared the moral burden of Black Segregation because there simply weren’t any blacks at all living in their part of the country.
Segregation would have seemed the natural order of things to my relatives, who self-segregated themselves by settling in Lithuanian communities, living in Lithuanian neighborhoods, building and attending Lithuanian churches and schools, shopping at Lithuanian butcher shops, and drinking in Lithuanian saloons.
We owned no slaves, oppressed no Negroes, denied them no public accommodations, and had nothing to do with them whatsoever. My family additionally, in generations gone by, enjoyed no particular white privileges denied to Mr. Coates’ family. I was the first member of my family to attend an elite college. My father had to leave school after the 8th grade and go to work. His father was dying of miner’s asthma and the family needed the money. My grandparents bought a house in Mahanoy City early in the 1920s. They paid it off in three years, having no more access to federal mortgage financing than Mr. Coates’ family and their peers.
But, I’m willing to be generous. I don’t believe I, or any other Americans, owe Mr. Coates anything, but let us bend over backwards to quiet his complaints and make him whole.
I agree with the philosophy expressed by Rupert Birkin, speaking for D.H. Lawrence in Women in Love:
The minute you begin to compare, one man is seen to be far better than another, all the inequality you can imagine is there by nature. I want every man to have his share in the world’s goods, so I can be rid of his importunity, so that I can tell him: “Now you’ve got what you want — you’ve got your fair share of the world’s gear. Now, you foul-mouthed fool, mind yourself and don’t obstruct me.
And what would appropriate reparation for Mr. Coates consist of?
Clearly, we need to remove all the burdens and oppressions heaped upon his shoulders by evil America and wicked European Civilization. We ought to restore to him everything he has lost. We should give Mr. Coates a spear, and grass skirt, and along with them a one-way ticket back to Africa. As part of the deal, of course, we’ll have to take away his shoes, his trousers, his personal computer, and his position as senior editor at The Atlantic. Good luck in Africa, Mr. Coates! Say hello to that panther there for me.
Christophe Fratin, Panther and Cubs Attacking an African Native, 1834, The Peabody Art Collection, Baltimore.
Gavin MacInnes says Racism, Sexism, and Homophobia are myths, and contends that “If you killed every racist in the country right now, America would be all white again.”
Who knew that NBA Commissioners enjoyed such plenary and sweeping powers?
Say something privately in your own home which NBA commissioner Adam Silver does not like, and he evidently thinks he can, without due process or any further ado, slap you with a $2.5 million dollar fine (I’m still trying to calculate how many dollars that is per word), ban you for life from attending any games or practices or setting foot in any facility or participating in any business or player personnel decisions involving the team you own, and then force you to sell your team.
(How I wonder do you sell a billion-dollar sports franchise while not participating in business decisions regarding that franchise? Are you supposed to be prohibited by the commissioner’s edict from declining any offer as too low? I hereby bid $1.)
Kings, popes, and presidents can’t, these days, simply wave a scepter and fine people they don’t like millions of dollars, or ban them from having any contact with or exercising any power over business entities (worth as much as a billion dollars) which they own. Those sports league commissioners are hot stuff.
It seems to me that, legally speaking, Mr. Sterling should have pretty good prospects of contesting all of this, if he chooses to do so.
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Despite the enthusiasm of the media lynch mob, I’m not clear myself as to what Mr. Sterling’s actual racial views are or precisely what he is guilty of. The current scandal revolves around a leaked recording, made illegally and presumably released by Sterling’s former mistress “V.Stiviano” aka Maria Vanessa Perez, who is presumably disgruntled about being sued by Mrs. Sterling.
The conversation in the recording is less than completely clear. Ms. Stiviano refers repeatedly to racism and animosity toward blacks and seems to be deliberately attempting to elicit potentially inflammatory statements from Sterling. The context of the conversation seems to be a previous demand by Sterling (not heard in the recording) that Stiviano remove pictures of herself with black sports figures from her Instagram account and his request that she should not accompany them to Clippers games. Who precisely has a problem with the photos and the association at games is unclear. At one point, Sterling seems to be referring to the practical necessity of bowing to society’s prejudice, which he feels unable to change. It seemed to me, listening to the conversation, that it would hardly be surprising that a rich 80-year-old man would object to his youthful girlfriend flaunting public evidence of her association with much younger athletic men.
In any event, Sterling actually expressed no personal racial opinions at all. He also seemed to be noticing Stiviano’s efforts to put words in his mouth, and complained of her hostility.
The public record of Sterling’s career offers very mixed evidence. It seems on the face of it unlikely that anyone who invested in ownership of a sports franchise of a game dominated by black players is personally hostile to African Americans. The record indicates that Sterling, who is a major real estate investor, was obliged to settle a government lawsuit contending that he had practiced rental discrimination against blacks and Hispanics, but those kinds of lawsuits commonly confuse perfectly legal social class discrimination with protected class discrimination. If Sterling is obsessed with racial prejudice, why did he select a Hispanic girlfriend who was partially of African-American descent? Why was he a prominent donor to the NAACP scheduled to receive a lifetime humanitarian award this year? Why did Sterling hand out basketball game tickets in large numbers to needy inner city kids, and support charities and sports camps for their benefit?
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The real question, though, is: So what if Donald Sterling was actually Grand Exalted Kleagle of Greater Los Angeles and, in his heart of hearts, hated all blacks like poison? The First Amendment guarantees Freedom of Religion, which surely must include freedom to adopt whatever social and moral opinions in a private context one likes.
When exactly did America become a leftist theocratic state, in which a strange alliance of capitalism and revolutionary bolshevism is able to impose tests of politically correct opinion? Apparently, today, if you donate money to political efforts to oppose Gay Marriage you are not allowed to become CEO of a major software company. Get caught on a secret recording telling your mistress not to post pictures of herself with black guys, and you get banned from basketball.
Dave Blount rightly wonders: The way we are going, how long exactly will it be before the community of fashion starts burning heretics at the stake?
For all the lockstep sanctimonious sputtering from everyone on TV and radio, this story is not about race. It is about freedom and its opposite, coerced ideological homogeneity.
At this point the stampeded cattle comprising the American public will probably agree that anyone who does not want his mistress hanging out with blacks is so awful that he should be burned at the stake. But if the thought police are successful at immolating Sterling, next time it might not be about race. Next time the thought criminal will be someone who said something not currently politically fashionable about homosexuals — and/or about the Bible. Soon it could be a remark expressing doubts about the dangers of global warming that turns someone into Emmanuel Goldstein. If we continue down this road, within a few years, criticism of government figures could bring out the lynch mob.
