Chapter 4 of White Supremacy on Its Deathbed: Open Season

Let's workshop Chapter 4 of my book-length lyrical essay (White Supremacy on Its Deathbed), which aims to promote true black excellence by exposing the harmful implications of mainstream antiracism

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Chapter 4. Open Season

[The so-called “antiracist” worry about rejecting racial preferences in admission decisions is that] if you don't have racial preferences, and instead it's socioeconomic, you bring in poor black kids but not middle-class black kids. . . . Now “preferences” is a very euphemistic word. What [these antiracists are] saying is middle class black applicants should not be expected to have grades and test scores as high as other . . . applicants [because they experience the institutional scourge of white supremacy just like their poor counterparts do]. . . . I can understand saying that in 1966. . . . But for somebody to write that in 2023?! The idea that me, a young me, should not be assessed as stringently as Asian and white kids because of the kind of racism that, maybe, has nibbled at the very margins of my life now and then [and in trivial forms (like a security guard paying a bit more attention to me in a mall once or twice)]? . . . I did not suffer anything I would call “disadvantage”. . . . And if anybody doubts that—because the idea is supposed to be that just being black is this hideous burden—. . . would I rather have been me, middle class black me, in the 70s and 80s . . . or a person who weighs 400 pounds with acne who is white. . . . Which would you rather be: middle class and black, or white and simply having really bad skin. . . . You'd rather be the middle-class black kid. . . . [So no, the lowered expectations just for being black no longer make sense. And it threatens to foster among whites an ill-founded feeling of intellectual superiority. If it weren’t for these lowered expectations,] you would not have the white guy going to school with [Ketanji Brown Jackson] quietly thinking “She’s not here for the same reasons that I am”. . . . [Whites] would look at a Ketanji and they'd think “Well, she didn't have to have the kind of grades I did.” And fuck, the sad thing is they were right. It's enough. It's enough of that. . . .  And the only way [whites] won't be thinking that [and won’t be reluctant to work in groups with those they feel in their gut will be unable to pull their weight] is we if we no longer have this system of subjecting all black people to lower expectations.—John McWhorter[1]

Equity is one thing and equality is another. Equity is the lowering of standards in order to get the black numbers up. Equality is a mutual respect based upon . . . parity of performance. . . . And if you use lower standards to bring blacks in, you're going to get, on average, lower performance because the standards are correlated with the performance. So it will inevitably lead to the speculation, you know, “Did she get that seat next to me based on the same performances I [used to get] my seat?” and so on. Because, as a matter of fact, it'll be true that she didn't. And that's not equality. You can't just create equality. You can't just call it into being by fiat. It has to be rooted in the actual behavioral foundation. . . . And respect is also an ephemeral thing. I mean people will say they respect you, but real genuine honor and respect—these things have to be earned. They can't be created by legislation. “[T]he sky is falling. It's Jim Crow 2.0. They're trying to roll back the clock on us.” That [is] the tone [so-called antiracists] take [whenever it is suggested that standards stop being lowered for people merely on the basis of their being black]. “Here they come again for Black people's rights!” Come on man. . . . Affirmative action was a state of exception. We stepped away from the framework of colorblind non-racial treatment in order to deal with a historical contingency. We're 50 years on now. It's time to grow up.—Glenn Loury[2]

To legitimize the longstanding preconceptions regarding black inadequacy in comparison with other breeds of human; to seal blacks within a crypt of corroded self-worth perfect for remaining a permanent underclass where, through the obsession of how rigged the world is against them, blacks find it evermore difficult to see the greatness within themselves; to keep the black spirit—to the extent that it has been reified and shaped if only by the annals of shared persecution (and the guilt-tripping power such persecution affords in a victimhood culture)—crushed down (perhaps even to the point of extirpation); to bewitch black dreams away from veering beyond guilt trips and entitled demands for handouts and preferential treatment, from veering beyond strategizing how to stay a kempt person on the plantation; to ensure that blacks equate coming up with pulling others down; to ensnare the black psyche into a Gollum-like quagmire of bitterness, consumed by how victimized they are; to make it harder for blacks to transform from selfish little globs of grievances into thankful forces of nature; to encourage in blacks the self-destructive feeling that there is no real point in taking proactive steps to improve their situation; to steer blacks away from the life-enhancing emotion of gratitude and from a sense of excitement in personal growth and from pride in personal stewardship; to keep blacks stunted, in an arrested state of dependency (especially on pink nipples engorged with the patronizing milk of lowered expectations); to etch even deeper in stone the disheartening tableau of black underperformance in so many sectors (morality, reasoning, self-command); to condition blacks to settle for less than their true capabilities; to erode the motivation in blacks for personal ascent and evolution; to weave an insidious tapestry of black inferiority within blacks and nonblacks alike, perpetuating the notion that black individuals are incapable of competing without special assistance on so many playing fields; to burrow the slave mentality even deeper in the black zeitgeist and embroil blacks in a circus-elephant-sad pattern of seeking power merely through guilt-tripping whites for past injustice (and overblown, if not made up, present injustice); to absolve blacks of personal responsibility and divest them of the reins to their destiny—what might white supremacy do from its deathbed?

It could just sit back and revel in our world where so-called “antiracism” would have blacks do what any therapist would tell you is the most disempowering and pessimistic thing people can do to themselves: (1) regard someone else, or some outside force, as the source of all their problems and suffering (in this case, white supremacy in both its historical and modern articulations); (2) believe there is no realistic way to fix the issue, get rid of the cancer for good (in this case, because white supremacy is baked into the very DNA of the country)—two things that have them waiting around for some outside help, outside help they are told will only provide palliative care (instead of curing the disease); two things that reinforce one another, making their rut even deeper, since laying the problem at someone else’s feet means they do not focus on that parts of the garden they can tend, which has the garden grow wilder and wilder to the point where it makes good sense to think the problem is unfixable.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where blacks, incentivized by an antiracist industrial complex desperate to ensure that the activism money never stop pouring in, remain blind to the entitlements they have simply by having been born in the US at a time rich in resources and opportunity and medical technology and life expectancy, a time when black children can be anything they want—this way, focused on how constricted they are “under the boot of the white man,” they will neither take advantage of their leeway nor experience the tranquil confidence that comes from gratitude, but will instead marinate in life-expectancy-lowering resentment.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where blacks—already for centuries primed by a religion in which being a victim grants you superiority over others—see themselves according to the all-too-standard story, the ghoulish gospel so-called “antiracists” are paid to drive down their throats, of having been born the victims of a system so stifling it is pretty much pointless—despite the shining counterexample of Asian Americans or Nigerian Americans or Trinidadian Americans—to rise above persecution and into success with enterprising effort.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, despite—or is it, precisely because of?—the tangible dearth of antiblack racism in a western world as contemptuous of racism as it is enamored of black celebrity, people stand eager to do whatever it takes to convince the world that blacks continue to be brutalized by “whiteness” (thereby fueling black victimology):

seeing every disparity unfavorable to blacks through a bogus lens of white supremacy (while denying that any disparity favorable to blacks, such as what we see in the NBA, can be in any way a matter of black supremacy since “whites have all the power”) or, more specifically, explaining every black setback and underperformance as a function of relentless antiblackness baked into the American DNA (and thereby whose cessation would require America no longer being America);

interpreting each case where a black cop brutalizes a black person as a matter of that cop’s “internalized whiteness” or, as it is more colorfully put in Boyz N The Hood, as a matter of that cop’s being an Officer Coffey (lightened up with cream);

insisting that even if white supremacy were inactive that would be irrelevant since the traumas inflicted by whites pass down, generation by generation, epigenetically, which means that each black baby born feels all the pains of slavery and segregation (all the whipping, all the hosing, all the raping, all the lynching, all the mocking). 

It could just sit back and revel in our world where so many are eager to preserve this hobbling, belittling, responsibility-denying narrative—yes, even though it means reopening long-healing wounds and inventing new ones (with China’s help, of course), and even though it will make the US less and less competitive as more and more children groomed by this narrative grow up to be handed the reigns—for three understandable reasons (among the many others).

(1) Black people, to say nothing of whites hooked on the rewards of feeling like parent-saviors, will be reluctant to give up the helpless-victim outlook, the white-dependent mode of not having to take on the terrible burden of steering their own fate, into which they have been groomed over the last 400 years—groomed not only from oppression over enough centuries to feel like home, but also from recent years of enjoying the countless short-term perks and privileges of manipulating white guilt (no matter the long-term negatives to black independence and agency) that rely on it being accurate: the daily national reminders to support black businesses; the monthly diversity bonuses that lawyers and doctors get on top of their base pay; the rush of power seeing private and public and entertainment industries bend over backward to prove they “stand with antiracism”; the surge of satisfaction seeing the highest institutions (universities and churches and hospitals) accommodate, and in many cases celebrate, the norm violations of antiracism; the cheap thrill of watching whites tread lightly around them; the bullyish eroticism of watching whites too afraid to stand up even to their most whimsical demands; the relief of having a widely-accepted scapegoat of whiteness on which ultimately to funnel all their frustrations (a deep temptation made all-too-clear in Sartre’s Antisemite and Jew); the enjoyment of getting to be the pitied centers of attention and yet without having either to look to themselves when addressing their shortfalls or to take on the burden of carving their own fates.

(2) The fiery speeches and writings of black artists and leaders half a century ago—now in our monkey-mind-perplexing cyberage surreally available all at once, alongside images of the same lynched bodies that fueled their rhetoric (as if the threat was still present)—were so powerful in their argument and rhetoric, fueled as they were by a combination of truth and justice, that they convince many college-going blacks today— against their own intuition and empirical sensations outside of their cyber bubbles—that black people still grow up thinking they are white until they learn otherwise; that white beauty standards still are the only standards; that the US has not yet found a place for black bodies aside from as service chattel and sambos; that blacks still are in the US what the bad guy is in the crime novel or the Native American is in the black-and-white cowboy film.

(3) So many people, white and black, have built their livelihoods and sense of purpose around fighting antiblack racism—now a gravy-train industry in which film studios, universities, publishing houses (especially those sleezy weekly-webinar ones specializing in “Equity and Inclusion literature for companies who care about black folx”), big businesses, small businesses, and individuals are involved—that without it we face, like a fire department in a world where fire is on the verge of extinction, the scary unknown of what to do next—an unknown especially scary for blacks since it comes with being finally burdened (to the same degree, at least, as everyone else) with that agency from which they have long been alienated: that daunting freedom to make of their lives what they will.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where the victimology narrative is so important—and almost as if, so a conspiracy-oriented person might easily come to think, the desire to rob blacks is so strong (strong enough to result in white collateral damage)—that statues of heroes (even of abolitionists and philosophers whose writings were instrumental in dismantling all justification of white supremacy, and who argued that proper education would reveal blacks to be just as capable and moral as whites) are torn down—perhaps due to one small flaw, true or false (no matter in a post-truth era), or just one passing comment out of spirit with the rest of their work, or even just because they are white—and (in an anxious mix of pandering and fear) melted down and remade into a statue of a black man murdered by cops, “a statue testifying to the existential crisis of living while black,” even though it could have served also at least to spread awareness about a real crisis: the opioid crisis (saying on the bottom, next to the man’s name, perhaps something like: “Even this American saint struggled with an opioid addiction”).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where antiblack racism is regarded as so essentially American—indeed, the very explanation of America’s success in the global order—that America’s true birth date cannot be said to be the glorious 1776 (where brave people led us into liberty the likes of which the world had never seen), but rather the shameful 1619: the date of the beginning of the country’s protracted original sin; the date the first black slaves arrived from Africa.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where—at risk of painting blacks as a derivative and hollow souls ensnared in a self-defeatist chant of “Let my people go,” unable to let Pharaoh go even though he has long ago let them go—virtually all courses in Black Studies departments, and increasingly in other departments, center claustrophobically around antiblack oppression and black resistance, all other facets of black history and culture fleetingly mentioned only to be channeled back to the theme of domination by whites—facets too rich in breadth and depth to be reduced merely to the specter of white domination:

comedy (from Moms Mabley and Redd Foxx to Tiffany Haddish and Hannibal Buress);

jazz (from Satchmo to Sun Ra);

blues (from Muddy Waters to John Lee Hooker);

hip hop (from Kool Keith to Myka 9);

film (from the Blaxploitation Era to the Tyler Perry Era);

literary greats (from Ralph Ellison to Derek Walcott);

thinkers (from W. E. B. Du Bois to Neil deGrasse Tyson);

inventors (from Lewis Howard Latimer to Lonnie G. Johnson);

fashion and aesthetics (from African textiles to black American hairstyles);

languages and dialects (from the diversity of African languages to the evolution of African American Vernacular English);

mathematics (from Benjamin Banneker to Katherine Johnson);

art and sculpture (from the iconic artifacts of ancient African civilizations to contemporary artists like Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald);

sports (from Michael Jordan to Mike Tyson);

cuisine (from the soul food tradition to the black chefs shaping the global culinary scene today);

religious and spiritual practices (from Christianity and Islam and Rastafarianism to traditions like Yoruba and Vodun and Santería);

dance (from traditional African dances to contemporary forms like step dancing, krumping, and breakdancing);

key figures (from Coltrane and his all-too-human struggles with heroin to MLK Jr. and his all-too-human struggles with adultery).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where China, soon to rise to top-superpower status on the back of human-rights violations of its own, revels in and further stokes the narrative of omnirelevant black victimology at the hands of US white supremacy—this way, priming people to embrace it as the new beacon of Sino-goodness it hopes to spread around the world, representatives of the Chinese Communist Party (following old Soviet footsteps in fueling grievance and division in the US, but to greater effect given greater ignorance of history and contemporary affairs among US citizens coupled with greater tendency toward US condemnation among US citizens) can make the following declaration to intergovernmental organizations while holding up a tu-quoque photo of George Floyd.

“Don’t you dare tell us what to do. You have no moral high ground. You stole your land, you invaded other lands, you enslaved millions. And now, in the so-called progressive era of human history, you continue to torture and kill blacks. How could you live with yourselves? It’s one thing to brutalize any people. It’s a whole other matter to pummel them as if they have not been crippled earlier by your own hand! You need to take a good look at the white-supremacist wasteland in the mirror before you even dare cast judgment on other countries.”

It could just sit back and revel in our world where the market demand for the narrative of black victimology—a clean-cut narrative in which (1) black people are those to whom horrendous things are done, (2) white people are those who do horrendous things (particularly against black people), and (3) those two facts are omnirelevant—is great enough that peddlers of this narrative are given an easy pipeline to publication in the major presses, and make more than many Americans make in a year just for a one-hour speech (predominantly to white audiences desperate to feel “down”), and get honored with tenured posts and genius grants and peace prizes and comparisons to Gandhi and Holocaust heroes—while, on the other hand, putting their very livelihoods at risk (from their typically negligible and underground platforms) are those pariahs who aim to expose the narrative of black victimology as what it is: an aspiration-thwarting blight on blacks pushed by hucksters and the real handkerchief-head race traitors; a black poison that in being called “antiracist” is more ironic than a brand of black beauty products for hair-straightening and skin-bleaching being called “Nubian Pride.”

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, as if to burn an indelible imprint on all our minds as to how terrorized blacks are in the US, news of “antiblack brutality” is worth so much (and dishes out so many rewards and punishments to those even remotely connected to it) that “antiracists”—almost as if, hmm, they had some sort of stake in ensuring that blacks remain in the terrorized-victim frame of mind—will paint racial slurs on homes and business and cars and sidewalks in the secret of night and, if caught, will spin their duplicity as a desperate-times-call-for-desperate-measures matter of “drawing attention to a gruesome problem in this country,” thereby garnering respect—and, when the perpetrator happens to be white (as is so often the case), garnering the “We-fucks-with-Josh” support of blacks (the support for which any white person in this country who cares for their reputation prays every single night).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where (1) there is so much social capital in being a victim in general (which is why debates even inside of academia, perhaps even soon about STEM topics, amount to all sides racing to occupy the position of most victimized on the intersectionality matrix), and where (2) there is so much social capital in being a black victim in particular (a sort of ghoulish badge of honor), that it would not be too strange to discover that a black actor—perhaps uneasy about living a luxurious life at odds with the narrative of how bad blacks have it, or perhaps worried that his privilege disconnects him with authentic (that is, down-and-out) blacks, or perhaps just to negotiate a higher salary on the virtually all-black show that happens to be one of the top in the US—hired people to rough him up a bit, becoming (until caught in the lie) a hero celebrated for having survived, as the black US Vice President described it, “an attempt at modern-day lynching of just another three-fifths of a person.”

It could just sit back and revel in our world where such a narcotic of fatalistic-skepticism is shoved down black throats not only by 50k-an-hour public speakers—the more dreadlocks, the blacker (for eerie reasons laid out by Ellison in Invisible Man), the better—but also by their very own peers (who, by corroborating it, get to feel part of a spiritual-singing underdog team ranging over centuries of oppression while also getting to place all their hardships onto “white devils”).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, termination and even public ridicule being the price for noncompliance, the McCarthy-level enforcement of “right speech” and “right think” regarding how “terrible blacks have it under the continued reign of white supremacy” is present not just in the universities (from which the practice began) and not just in the entertainment industry and not just in pretty much all government agencies from federal to local (the big guns being the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security), but also throughout the private sector: from the big health insurance companies and law firms, to Nike and Pepsi and Walmart, and even all the way down to Sunoco and Cold Stone Creamery—only failing to appear in a few mom-and-pop stores and unincorporated pawn shops (who will fold soon enough, just like Grandma did in her resistance to Facebook).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, perhaps as cover for their own morally questionable histories and futures, the major places (the Nikes and the FBIs and the Disneys) even go so far as to host mandatory nonmandatory “reeducation retreats” where, after days of diversity workshops on “How to Be Less white” and “How to Prevent whiteness from Causing Harm in Private and Public Spheres,” the white-male employees are expected—another compulsory noncompulsory thing—in the final gathering to participate in multifarious nefarities:

showcasing teary and boogery shame for their whiteness in scenes, although for the time being at least not typically involving literal genuflection, eerily reminiscent of those self-berating ribbons-of-shame practices in Japanese zaibatsus;

swearing out loud that they do not believe they are superior to any other group (“I am not superior. I am not superior!”);

promising to read an exclusive roster of “nonproblematic” black authors (that is, the “approved” authors of antiracism);

affirming that they understand that the only remedy for past wrongs is counter—and thereby non-wrong—wrongs;

affirming that they understand that, in truth, the struggles of antiracism are never done once and for all (which is why antiracism must become, in turn, systemic and here to stay);

declaring that they will never engage in the gaslighting-process of questioning a black person’s lived experience, especially when it comes to how thoroughly this country is controlled by a white supremacy (a white supremacy indelible beneath “the mere surface progress” of banning slavery and virtually all forms of discrimination);

pledging that they will spread their “illegitimate privilege and affluence” to downtrodden communities (whether by demanding indefinite moratoria on hiring of whites, or by giving money to antiracist organizations, or by lobbying politicians to remove statues of people in any way traceable to white supremacy, or by patronizing all-black businesses, or by refusing to go to hairdressers that do not do black hair, or so on).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where the fully-onboard whites—at least those smart enough to connect the dots when it comes to the China-championed message, the message championed as well by the-miscegenation-fearing-racial-supremacist-North Korea, that “Whiteness is a virus seeking hosts like any other virus”—will write (in full sincerity, and not just because they are “asked to” by their employers during “diversity workshops” aiming to “call out and dismantle” white fragility or white rage or the like) letters of apology to black friends and black coworkers and black prisoners and random black strangers—letters that cover at least the bases:

(1) displaying empathetic (and yet not line-crossing) sorrow for the horrors of centuries back, especially since (a) those horrors pass down through the genes and since (b) “white people today, whatever they might like to believe, would have been slave masters back then”;

(2) displaying empathetic (and yet not line-crossing) sorrow for the fact that black people, on top of having to bear intergenerational PTSD, must face the more-insidious traumas each day in an “antiblack country like this”;

(3) pledging, on the one hand, to prioritize using their position of privilege “to undo the alluring logic that encourages people to aspire to whiteness” and yet pledging, on the other hand, to let black voices lead the way since “the very whiteness that secures their helpful platform remains hellbent (we must never forget) on harming black people in one way or other.”

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, under the trance of the victim mentality, countless blacks allow themselves in good conscience—and with no care for any suffering they cause along the way—to duck the burdens of trying hard and of playing fair, let alone of empathizing with other creatures concerning the nuanced injustices we all face: our reality being one in which we were all thrown to die, often after protracted suffering.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where any event that is unfavorable to blacks, or any measure against which blacks do not do as well as whites, testifies—immediately and conclusively—by that very fact alone to an insufferably antiblack agenda.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where we see antiblack racism implicated in all areas of life, such that even when a white toddler—uncoached, unprovoked—gives a black toddler a flower “there is oppression going on” (the least of which is that “Little whitey feels entitled to enter the space of a future Black king”).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, almost as if to keep blacks from seizing upon all the opportunities open to them (more or less as many as any other human in this hospice hour of white supremacy), blacks are swindled into thinking that the white system has blocked all but a lucky few—the “sellouts,” the “Oreos,” the “walking lies” among them—from meaningful opportunities (aside from sports and entertainment).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where—if only to prove how true the victim narrative is, and thereby increasing the likelihood of blacks accepting subminimal standards (and even regarding them as expressions of respect)—blacks are enticed to engage in obsessive rumination over past injustice, despite the moving-on-enabling fact that all our ancestors did terrible things—this way, blacks (black Americans, keep in mind) can go about their days with their hands out in entitlement, equipped with well-rehearsed huckster spiels about the horrors committed upon their ancestors, which will turn them into the most hated guests of black Airbnb owners outside the US.

“They're no longer welcome here. No more! My life will not be made miserable. They bring nothing but problems. Fighting late at night. Disrespectful. Entitled. Unappreciative. They are treated like saints by America. All the spoiling has made them used to getting everything free free free. They mash everything up. They want everything. They complain like children. No more!”

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, if only to prove that being a victim is to being black what being renate is to being chordate, blacks are enticed to engage in obsessive rumination over how helpless they remain under the “juggernaut of white supremacy”—this way, while even like-looking Nigerians down and out in the same underfunded public schools (and with the same “antiblack teachers”) build healthy homes and successful business and achievement throughout the ivy league (indeed, having a median household income higher than whites, which happens to be half of what Indian Americans make in this “white supremacist” country), blacks can feel righteous in crying “Woe is me” and in making various displays of petulance that neither require mastery and disciplined effort nor result in solutions to concrete problems (especially the crime and family problems) plaguing black people (yes, even though the difference in income between American blacks and whites goes away when we adjust for age, region, location, and educational level).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, if only to prove that being a victim is to being black what, in fact, being trilateral is to being triangular, blacks are enticed (partly by the insidious carrot of “Here is the authentically black style of honoring the angst of your enslaved ancestors”) to engage in self-destructive behaviors (resisting arrest, uttering anti-social F-yous to the white world and its “Ameriklan Dream,” even substance abuse), behaviors only adding to any cradle difficulties they do face—this way, they can point to more concrete examples of racist abuse instead of having to revert to saying things like the following (as they have had to do more and more with the waning of white supremacy).

“The abuse, although worse than ever, is too elusive in its nuance to communicate to nonblacks. I mean, will a white person really be able to understand how traumatic it is for a black person to hear Bach?”

It could just sit back and revel in our world where self-destructive behaviors (violence, procrastination, drug use, escapism), behaviors encouraged by the rewards of individual and institutional pity, become an understandable coping mechanism for living in a country that is—so they are hypnotized by the antiracist industrial complex to think—more deadly and hateful toward black bodies than ever before (whitey having gotten more clever).

It might just sit back watch our world where—and one cannot help but think of the devil in the Brothers Karamazov who tells Ivan that he has been too victimized and oppressed and demonized over the centuries to feel any gratitude—blacks are enticed to think, contrary to their very own health and longevity, that they are sadly lying to themselves (lying to themselves so as to cope with how badly they have been and continue to be wronged) whenever they feel—casting their eyes upon the mountains of gifts on which they stand—gratitude for their situation:

for being inheritors of great works of art and technology;

for being in a land of chock-full supermarkets, heated homes in winter and cooled homes in summer;

for being citizens of a prosperous country of blind justice and institutional commitment against virtually all discrimination, and at a time when black people enjoy the rights and opportunities for which so many around the world would die;

for being dwellers on a land of serene landscapes and grand metropolises where peace is not the exception but the norm).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where having an identity built around “having it hard,” an identity that excuses them from playing in the big leagues that their Harlem-Renaissance forebearers were eager to be—and were—some of the best in, is so integral to black people (and to universities and employers and mates and so on) that black people are enticed, if only subconsciously, to grope for ways to prove it: whether ignoring context and intent in order to feel slighted yet again (boycotting the museum, for example, because on a placard it uses the term of the day “Negro” to describe black spirituals) or even going so far as shooting themselves in the foot (baiting their employers, for example, to fire them by coming in high because “Life’s a bitch for a black man”).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where—despite coming at the expense of poisoning white people enough that even their accomplishments become delegitimized in their own eyes—children are brainwashed to think the agency-atrophying and effort-excusing thought that whites succeed not because of hard work put into mastering things, but because the system is hopelessly rigged in their favor.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, when faced with the overwhelming successes of African immigrants in this country, blacks will feel in their heart “Well, these immigrants already had to be the cream of the crop even to get here, in which case the comparison is unfair”—blacks will feel this in their heart and yet not draw the lesson implied by its being true: that cultivating initiative is a better path out of the muck than dwelling on the initiative-draining notion that racism is too baked into the system to warrant hope.

It could just sit back and revel in our world, one hard to imagine any more belittling, where as many blacks as possible root their aspirations and personas and movements and communities around nothing loftier, nothing broader, than a sense that “someone is going to have to pay” for their having been born with the skin of the most victimized people in the world—a straight up myth that, in tempting blacks to go the blackmail path of demanding special treatment, is detrimental for developing active power:

a power to lift oneself out of plantation dependency;

a power much more intrinsic than the power that comes from enjoying a victim status in a culture not guaranteed to stay a victim culture forever;

a power to get what one wants by one’s own direct initiative rather than by passively banking on the pity of others.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where blacks are painted as such helpless victims of omnipresent white supremacy, a racist order the proof for which now requires no more than my-truth reports of “lived experience” (quite convenient given how non-antiblack the US seems to be), that their dignity—warped through and through—can be realized only in performances of petulance and outbursts of indignation, in cries for special rights and dispensations (more junk food for blacks), that titans of black excellence like DuBois and Hughes and Hurston would have never stomached:

handouts and subminimal standards (even when it comes to social behavior) and kid-glove treatment;

shelter from anything unsettling, such as from the trauma of hearing the n-word (no, simply “negro”) from a white mouth;

freedom from criticism for their shortcomings (especially from “white mouths that can’t help but rape with their words”);

even the freedom to have their turn to participate in inhumanity as a means to balance the scales.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, seduced into preserving the vision of themselves as perpetual invalids (victims of a white supremacy that can always justify their throwing in the towel), blacks feel excused from the burden of honoring their individual agency, their inherent freedom to carve out their own fate in the face of real problems, their calling to take up the grinding and unromantic work necessary to make up for the various meaningful areas where they remain far behind—a burden colossal and intimidating for anyone; a burden colossal and intimidating especially for blacks, coming out of four centuries of home-making acclimation to subservience and to a mindset of such chronic dependence on the handouts and pity of white guilt that: 

(1) the question of “What do I got to do to be my best self?” becomes all-too-easy for blacks to interpret as nothing more than “What do I got to do to stay a kempt person on this damn plantation?”;

(2) emotional and physical alienation from black family and friends, and even a feeling of metaphysical alienation from blackness, is the likely price of being one of the early trailblazers who leave the plantation through the open door (instead of distracting themselves from the great burden of fate carving by searching for its key).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where—although no more part of a conspiracy to harm black people than the air pollution of oil companies is part of a conspiracy to harm humans (despite what might be believed by those naïve about the profound depths of human laziness and greediness and ignorance)—black people are groomed by the prevailing “antiracist” system into spoiled narcissists:

a people not to be blamed for their poor choices (since, oppressed for so long and in such a handicapped position, it would be unfair to hold them accountable);

a people whose poor choices, given the relentless oppression of whiteness, are considered understandable (if not glamorized as revolutionary payback or liberation);

a people who regards any internal voice of conscience that might say “Wait, don’t engage in these antisocial activities” as an “internalized whiteness” bent on holding them back further, an “internalized slave master” bent on getting them to forget how deeply they are owed);

a people who thinks that any spaces or persons failing to cater to them all the time or make them feel soothed, any spaces (even classrooms) or persons (even professors) that challenge them in any way, are racist.

It could just back and revel in our world where university students, mainly white ones full of teary outrage, chant the phrase “Nazi scum, Nazi Scum, Nazi Scum” to drown out the words of the invited speaker, a speaker described—at least by the rare, but growing, number of black students among them—as just another “Huxtable sellout to the other side.”[3]

[T]he real issue is that there is a black-American ideology, cherished especially by journalists and academics and artists, where for black people—and black people alone—there’s always a certain shoe that hasn't dropped, there's a beef. It's fundamental to the [black] identity that there's a beef and while that beef is going on we can't be expected to be subjected to truly serious competition. And everything that we do has to be seen through a different lens than you would see it with pretty much anybody else. . . .

[This ideology] is fraying. And you know there's a canary in the coalmine. . . . [S]eams are really beginning to show in terms of the portrait of Blackness as this tragedy—you know: just to be this color means that you're laboring under this burden and if you don't understand it, it means that you’re too dumb [or bigoted] to see it. But then again, look at these people who are pretending to be black! If it were really as bad as everybody says, there would be no such thing as this Rachel Dolezal—you know, who is this white woman who walks around truly having fashioned her sense of identity; she really identifies as black, including creating oppression, creating episodes of racism so that she can walk around complaining about things that happened to her.

And then my favorite example . . . Jessica Krug. . . . She's a white Jewish girl who grew up in Kansas City, upper middle class to affluent (“Krug”), who decided after she graduated from college to fashion herself first at some vaguely African black person . . . and then she decides she's an Afro-Latina. And you know she's wearing big earrings and loud clothes and pretending that she grew up in the Bronx to a drug-addicted prostitute mother. . . . And this person was . . . a tenure professor, wrote serious award-winning books (one in particular). And finally some of her colleagues began to sense that she was not this Afro-Latina person because the whole story doesn't make any sense. She actually claimed that at immigration in some way they misinterpreted “Cruz” as “Krug” . . . as if it's 125 years ago and it's some tough Jewish name or something. And so . . . she actually walks around calling herself “Jessica Cruz”. . . . She had, you know, blog posts where she was discriminated against at conference hotels, where they thought she was the help etc. None of that happened.

There would not be people like her—there's a little list at this point of Rachel Dolezals and Jessica Krugs. There wouldn't be people like that 50 years ago because being black really was a problem. Nowadays things have changed so much that . . . you have these people who are pretending to be black for the fake oppression [and the great rewards one can get from all of that]. That shows that something is really changing. . . . Because if it were really such a pain to walk around as a black person, nobody would choose that. Those people are new and that’s only over about the past 10 years. Canaries is what I think of them. We'll see more. . . .

[And whereas white people who, in pursuit of opportunity, try to pass themselves off as black are considered some of the most abominable people, blacks can get away with that level of phoniness. Why? Well, because] it’s different with black people. Remember, it's different with us because our whole identity is based on being the losers, being the ones who are owed something. . . . [W]hen it comes to a black person pretending to have grown up poor [or to having been abused by cops or whatever], the idea is not ideal—a little phony—but at least black people get to hear about black poverty [and racist hardship] and at least you signal to your people that you sympathize with people who grew up poor [and suffering under the boot of the white man].

I mean there's that whole routine with a lot of rappers frankly, to bring up something antique—where there's this competition. You know, “How real are you? Did you grow up in the hood? Did you do any gang banging? Did you sell any drugs?” And yeah, there was a lot of phoniness about that. But the idea was that you know you're sacrificing truth for something larger about giving a message [of black oppression] to the world through your art.

And so yeah, we're not held to as high as standard. I don't like it. That's exactly what's wrong with this sort of thing. You couldn't imagine it with any other group of people, with any other demographic. But for black people it's always different. And you know, to live under that is to feel condescended to if you pull the camera back a little bit.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, almost as if an orchestrated attempt to keep blacks cloven from one another, we swiftly brand as “self-deluded double-crosser” any black who buys into the “neoliberal-white-supremacist fantasy” of having a personal say in their destiny, who embraces practices to fortify their resilience to the injustices of the world (especially “white” practices like journaling, cultivating a growth mindset, prizing punctuality, tackling addictions, combating negative attitudes towards education, developing financial savvy, setting clear interpersonal boundaries, resisting the peer pressure to lead with violence, prioritizing prosocial circles, practicing mindfulness meditation)—yes, even if those injustices merely amount to seeing the word “nigger” while reading an American-History textbook for a college class they chose to be in, or hearing white people (and others contaminated with whiteness) speak on “black topics.”

It could just sit back and revel in our world where any black who fails to repeat and repeat the ghoulish gospel, the macabre mantra, as to how much blacks have been and continue to be victimized (and hence to how deserving blacks are of inferiority-ossifying sympathy perks, pity-driven privileges that excuse them from the responsibilities requisite for human flourishing) is to be excommunicated from blackness, ceremoniously stripped of the card so many are literally ready to lie and even slaughter to possess: the “Black Card.”

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, on the one hand, the most legitimizing thing about you when it comes to the weight of your opinion is that you are black and yet where, on the other hand, any disagreement with the antiracist religion of which this is a dogma—a dogma justified by the deeper dogma that blacks have been trounced upon hardest and longest by those with the most devastating power to trounce (Pharoah in the form of white people)—means you are not really black, but rather a “Satchmo Sambo” (a reference, of course, to Louis Armstrong and his “clownish grin for white audiences desperate for a dose of minstrelsy with their white showtunes”). 

It could just sit back and revel in our world where—calling too easily to mind the frightened fists of a tyrant strangling beliefs that fail to echo back his own tautology—any black who refuses to follow the cardinal shibboleth of the black community (namely, that victimhood remains forever the beating heart of black identity), and who strives to make the best of the cards they were dealt instead of pouring all their vigor into whining about cross-generational unfairness, earns the moniker “Uncle Tom”—or, as it is now put, “Uncle Clarence” (referring, of course, to one of the great boot-strap paragons of contemporary black excellence renown for rebuking the failure-excusing victimology narrative tearing through his brothers and sisters since the early seventies).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, in what calls to mind a person with rabies rejecting the merest sip of water, blacks are branded “deaf, dumb, and blind” for defying the temptation of the victimhood mentality—a temptation for all people given that it provides an aura of purpose and gravitas while also a golden ticket not only to sidestep hard work and accountability for past behavior and future fate-carving, but also to extort and abuse and manipulate one’s purported victimizers; a temptation especially for blacks given that it affords them Lord-of-the-Rings level grandeur as part of a longstanding communal struggle for justice against “the man,” an ancestral crusade for payback against the ever-shifting “powers that be.”

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, in what amounts to a punch right in the face of Frederick Douglass (who said “to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one”), any black is smeared as a “whitewashed jigaboo” if he happens to point out too loudly—as Dmitri Shufutinsky does below—the disturbing parallel between yesterday’s slave masters who (whether out of concern about their chattel getting any “dangerous ideas of liberation” or even out of warm-fuzzy desire not to burden the black mind with what it is not equipped to handle) said that “Readin ain’t right for black kind” and today’s woke pedagogues who say (with equally-troubling certitude and feel-good righteousness) that “expecting black kids to become as literate as white children is an antiblack affront, intrusive to their native disposition.”

It is time for us to ask ourselves: How different are “woke” teachers who believe that black children just shouldn’t be expected to become as literate as white children from the slave masters who wouldn’t allow us to read? . . . How is it “woke” or “equitable” to believe that misbehaving in classrooms or low academic achievement is inherently black and therefore acceptable? The answer is simple: It isn’t. It’s just racism. Equity’s imperialist colonization of the classroom and the black American population threatens to set back decades of progress our community has made. It has allowed, normalized, and encouraged bad behavior and academic failure among black youth. . . . Equity imperialism has re-labeled black excellence as white supremacy. . . . It is time for us, as young black Americans of the twenty-first century, to say the buck stops here. We cannot return to Reconstruction-era racism in the guise of wokeness. Allowing the equity/anti-racist movement to colonize the black mind will be the degradation of our people and tantamount to their re-enslavement. It will betray the memory of our ancestors. Now is the time to fight back. Embrace hard work, science, literacy, good behavior, kindness, and virtue.[4]

It could just sit back and revel in our world where any black is labeled a “step-n’-fetch-it-ass negro” should he remind fellow humans—if only for the wellbeing of his black children—that the story of black significance extends beyond the true tale of their historical subjugation and degradation by whites, and most definitely beyond the false tale too lucrative, too institutionally sacrosanct, too psychologically ingrained, too wise-and-moral sounding to resist reciting as catechism: namely, their skin-of-the-teeth survival in the face of an ongoing white oppression forever preserving them as the owed-innocents of mankind.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where any black is said to be “acting all brand new with all that flag-loving shit” if violates the taboos of mainstream antiracism:

if he buys into “white supremacist notions” like “colorblindness” and “meritocracy” and “punctuality” and “objectivity” and “antiwhite racism” and “common humanity”;

if he voices skepticism toward the doctrine of inherited trauma (which says that the full history of oppression passes down each generation of black people through the epigenome, leaving every black person—not just some, like sickle cell—more victimized than is imaginable even if white supremacy were not still inflicting its violence);

if he says that whites—despite their history of stealing and raping and maiming and killing the black body—enjoy the same amount of humanity or the same amount of moral authority as blacks;

if he denies that the only way to undo the injustice of the past is through injustice in the present.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where any black is disparaged as an “off-brand switch-up” if he dares to point out—as Shelby Steele does below—that black people, accustomed to the guilt-trip benefits that come from being deemed a victim in a culture that values victimhood, have an investment in keeping their victim status (as much as hospitals have an investment in people getting sick)—an investment that motivates them to be hypersensitive to racial slight and even to register false positives of racism; an investment that threatens to lull them into believing that black power, black somebodyness, amounts to getting whatever they can through the emotional manipulation of white people.  

The most obvious and unarguable source of black innocence is the victimization that blacks endured for centuries. . . . Like all victims, what blacks lost in power they gained in innocence. . . . This was the innocence that fueled the civil rights movement of the ’60s, and that gave blacks their first real power in American life—victimization metamorphosed into power via innocence. But this formula carries a drawback that I believe is virtually as devastating to blacks today as victimization once was. It is a formula that binds the victim to his victimization by linking his power to his status as a victim. And this, I’m convinced, is the tragedy of black power in America today. It is primarily a victim’s power, grounded too deeply in the entitlement derived from past injustice. . . .

Whatever gains this power brings in the short run through political action, it undermines in the long run. Social victims may be collectively entitled, but they are all too often individually demoralized. Since the social victim has been oppressed by society, he comes to feel that his individual life will be improved more by changes in society than by his own initiative. Without realizing it, he makes society rather than himself the agent of change. The power he finds in his victimization may lead him to collective action against society, but it also encourages passivity within the sphere of his personal life. . . .

By many measures, the majority of blacks—those not yet in the middle class—are further behind whites today than before the victories of the civil rights movement[: drug trafficking is far worse, crimes by blacks against blacks are more frequent, housing remains substandard, and the teenage pregnancy rate has skyrocketed]. But there is a reluctance among blacks to examine this paradox, I think, because it suggests that racial victimization is not our real problem. If conditions have worsened for most of us as racism has receded, then much of the problem must be of our own making. But to fully admit this would cause us to lose the innocence we derive from our victimization. And we would jeopardize the entitlement we’ve always had to challenge society. We are in the odd and self-defeating position where taking responsibility for bettering ourselves feels like a surrender to white power. So we have a hidden investment in victimization.[5]

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, in what seems a case of obvious excuse seeking and deflection from the guilt of not doing anything themselves to address the real causes for black failure, any black is tarred as a “cracker lover” for pointing out that all the talk, talk as grim and self-defeatist as it is tired and self-righteous, about blacks being the most dominated and degraded and devastated people the world has ever seen (such that there remains “little reason to strive in this racist abyss”) is merely self-serving—self-serving, however, in the most antiblack sense:

self-serving in the most antiblack sense since it allows them to wipe their hands of any complicity in their failures and instead fault the nebulous specter of “antiblackness,” which thereby promotes an agency-and-dignity-deprived circumstance that further fuels grievance about being so dominated and degraded and devastated by whites;

self-serving in the most antiblack sense since all the subminimal expectations (not just in education, but in conduct even), all the kid-glove leniencies, such repeated talk aims to wrest from whites only spoils blacks into an infantilized state of arrested development and dependency on whites, which further fuels grievance about being so dominated and degraded and devastated by whites (a vicious feedback loop).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where any black is pilloried as a “rented negro in denial” should he voice dismay over the prospect of sending his child into a school system fixated on keeping black people locked in rumination about their subjugation at the hands of whites, a school system where they learn that any desire to see themselves through any lens that fails to center their being the descendants of slaves is just a tragic symptom of Stockholm Syndrome.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, as if we really were in some white-supremacist twilight zone of mind fuckery, any black is mocked as a “Carlton” for saying something like the following.

“As long as we sit around here lying about how we are the perpetual victims of white supremacy, we will continue to look down upon ourselves. And especially as long as the majority population and the major institutions keep caving to our guilt trips, we will continue to put our hope in begging our victimizers for whatever we can. It is only natural. And what will this then do? It will inspire us to sit around here lying about how we are the perpetual victims of white supremacy!”

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, unless they knew these were words from Malcolm X (over 60 years ago), any black is labeled a “yessa-boss” who utters the following anti-victimology message about the overdue measures blacks need to take for self-reliance and personal responsibility and economic empowerment.

If white immigrants can come to this country 50 years ago with nickels and dimes and no education, and come here and pool their little nickels and dimes and no education and set up little stores, develop these stores into larger stores, develop this into an industry which creates job opportunities for whites, [then so can we]. . . . Today the black man according to the government economics has spending power of 20 billion dollars per year. We feel that with the black man spending 20 billion dollars per year—not setting up any businesses, not creating any industry, not creating any job opportunities for his own kind—he's not in a moral position to point the finger at the white man and tell the white man that he is discriminating against him for not giving him a job in the factories that he himself has set up. . . . We [need to] change the mind of the black man and make him accept himself. And as soon as he accepts himself, he’ll solve his own problem.[6]

It could just sit back and revel in our world where any black is labeled a “bootlicker” who—against the tide of the so-called “antiracist movement,” and especially against the liberal white elites at the root of it and leading it (and monopolizing it, just as they did the civil rights movement)—screams out “Please stop ‘helping’ us!”

Stop denying the rampant undereducation and unchecked violence gnawing at the roots of the black community: this cheap way to feel the virtue rush of thwarting  antiblack stereotypes only serves to fertilize these stereotypes!

Stop blaming these and other problems—in those moments when you do not deny them, in those spaces where it is safe to acknowledge them—on “the oppressive chokehold of white supremacy”: this blaming siphons away what little sense of agency we have; this blaming sends us charging like bulls at red capes in pursuit of cures—fruitless, too often toxic—for what is but a mirage of oppression!

Stop defunding police: as the spike in teary wails from so many black mothers have shown, this “cure”—this “cure” merely for a hystericized problem—as proven literally bloody to blacks!

Stop lying about there being some antiblack vendetta in uniform: statistics show, and as brother Fryer has put his life at risk for publishing (needing the protection of police even to walk around Harvard), there is no racial bias in police shooting!

Stop mocking the luminous ideals of the European enlightenment—objectivity and scientific inquiry, rationality and skepticism, diligence and hard work, foresight and planning, self-reliance and personal responsibility—as “whitewashed virtues,” as “hallmarks of whiteness (that contagious evil of all evils)”: these ideals are what pull people toward excellence!

Stop “dismantling” math courses and classical music programs (and so many other sturdy ladders to physical and intellectual flourishing), especially on such ridiculous grounds as that they are “inimical to black styles of knowing,” or that they are “designed—as just one of the many weapons of psychological warfare—to humiliate black youth while making whites”—so long as we ignore Asians, of course—“feel superior”!

Stop lowering standards for us: however much it might make you feel good, it so thoroughly grooms us into perpetual leaners as opposed to lifters that it almost seems as if the goal is to ensure that we have little choice but, for example, to pour our money (enough money to make us the 8^th richest independent nation on the globe) into nonblack communities who have carved out their own financial independence through enterprising efforts—enterprising efforts that a people taken care of on a plantation of dependency will rarely exert (not counting, of course, their strategizing ways to get more from the caregivers)!

Stop insisting that kindness and punctuality and hard work (especially in so-called “white domains”) are neither aspirational nor achievable for us: however much it might make you feel good, it grooms us into living jokes!

Stop patronizing us: the patronizing is so thick, so cloyingly sweet, that one cannot help but think that you have grown as dependent on us remaining in the nest of stagnation as we have grown dependent on that nest!

Stop placating us with soft words and softer expectations, as if such move of velvet-glove parenting would improve our lot (instead of spoiling us into a state of entitlement) and as if you genuinely care about us (instead of acting out of palpable terror—understandable terror, no doubt—that we will throw tantrums ruinous to your careers, that we will mar your reputations with accusations of bias, that we will sue for discrimination, that we will stop buying from your businesses)!

Stop repeating, however bad it makes you look or however much it negatively impacts your bottom line, the gaslighting lie that the door to our freedom is locked; the gaslighting lie that keeps us are searching for a key for a door wide open instead of developing the strength and skills to deal with the inevitable sufferings of any people faced with newfound freedom!

Stop keeping us so close to the bosom for so long: as we see when we consider the church in America (which is not propped up by the state), compared to the church in the UK (which is propped up by the state), our viability, our power to flourish, our resolve, our mettle, grows when we are given more space to live on our own merits!

Stop incentivizing us to sing about the horrors of our past and about the overblown—and often made up—horrors of our present: beyond these ghoulish songs hypnotizing us into perpetual victimhood, we have songs to sing about our achievements; we have songs to sing about our role-models who rose above adversity, shattering the narrative of black victimology!

Stop hiring—hiring and hiring, to Kafkaesque extremes—“right-think”-mandating bureaucrats, thought police eager (in their Orwellian “commitment to diversity and inclusion”) to sanitize discourse and silence dissent and purge any voice from spaces—yes, even college classrooms—that might “unsettle” black people (supposedly the most “at-risk” category in the intersectionality matrix)!

Stop hiring—hiring and hiring, to Kafkaesque extremes—university deans, administrative censors, who demand watered-down curricula of “trigger-free safety” so that no black person feels offended and so that the university—reduced to a funding-anxious cheerleader of political fads—does not seem to be targeting blacks with bad grades the way cops are said to be targeting blacks with their guns: such “proactive progressivism” is a disservice to all students, especially those students the echo-chamber diet of pablum is purported to protect)!

Stop acting as if the desecration and eradication of great-books courses is an effective way to fight white supremacy: these universally-uplifting pillars of literature are still universally-uplifting pillars of literature despite being penned predominantly by dead whites!

Stop condemning “western civ” for its “unbearable whiteness”: its Goethes and Shakespeares and Bachs and Einsteins and Lockes and Rousseaus lift us all; its science and medical technologies protect us all; its enlightenment ideals rocket humans toward Sagan stars; its emancipatory norms shelter the most vulnerable and suppress the might-makes-right laws of the jungle and enshrine core rights—civil rights, women’s rights, rights to free expression, right not to be raped by one’s husband, right to trial by jury, right not to be enslaved—for everyone, regardless of race color or creed!

Stop presupposing that our children are unable to behave in class: it is absolutely disgusting to excuse their disruptive behavior (behavior you would never excuse from your own children) as if you were doing them a favor, as if you were helping to fight the good fight; it is absolutely disgusting to excuse their disruptive behavior on such racist grounds as that, “because it’s in their nature to dance and clap and be a bit raucous, demanding black students control themselves like white students would be just as racially terrorizing—especially in light of the historical context of white people’s addiction to controlling black bodies—as holding up blue-eyed blondes as the pinnacle of beauty”!

Stop refusing to correct how our children pronounce words—especially on such bullshit “antiracist” grounds as that “The last thing we want is for students to look down on their own people or to go home and tell family members, who already face too much white supremacy outside the home as it is, that they are not saying words the right way (the white way)”: no, correction is crucial for learning how things are (in this case, the norms of English) and experience with being corrected is crucial for cultivating resilience (to say the least)!

Stop spreading that agency-crippling and handout-entitling gospel that blacks have as little chance for success as they have human standing in this “white supremacist nation hooked on the sadism of grinding black bodies into a compact obsidian upon which it can build its monstrous skyscrapers”!

Stop thinking that you are “fighting the man,” “dismantling the white hegemony,” through support of black music that—drowning out any divergent soundtrack—glamorizes destructive norms and behaviors (thuggery and whorishness and drug abuse)!

Stop judging us according to subminimal standards and expectations, as if we were eternal underlings: such spoiling treatment would keep any human, or any other change-fearing creature (let alone one with a maximize-calories-in and minimize-calories-out evolutionary history), plantation dependent and horizon stifled— plantation dependent and horizon stifled enough that the question “What must I do to love and care for myself?” becomes more and more difficult to see as different from the question “What must I do to keep getting these kempt-person benefits?”

Stop stoking a moral hysteria about white supremacy on the hunt—now with greater strength and invisibility than ever before—for blacks, as if it were open season on blacks: this moral hysteria, despite being as bogus as the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and as distracting to black excellence, has now spread beyond the graduate seminars of some insular college department no one takes seriously—yes, even into corporate boardrooms and elementary-school classrooms!

Stop apologizing for being white: (1) it is a bad look for humankind, especially when it goes to such groveling extremes; (2) it keeps you and all of use from moving on to addressing the root issues behind some of the more upsetting disparities (which perhaps is precisely the point since (a) we are always looking for cheap ways to feel virtuous and since (b) addressing root causes would undercut the longstanding racial grievance industry of which the constant apologizing plays an integral part); (3) it baits fellow whites, many of whom are understandably sickened by all the whites kissing black boots in sorrow “for causing so much trauma each day and for harboring so much privilege” (sickened especially when set against the stark reminders each day as to how unfavorable it is, in terms of career and mate and travel prospects, to be white)—baits them into an emotional backlash that, although in truth is born of frustration at the punking program against whites and the collective gaslighting about how no punking program is actually occurring, can all-too-easily (given the anti-intellectual streak in this country) find racist channels.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where any self-loving black who champions individual agency and resilience, and who pushes fellow blacks to recognize that an addiction to bellyaching interferes with seizing upon the over-ample opportunities available, and who tries to wake his bothers and sisters up to the black-growth-impeding industrial complex of black victimology, and who thereby utters that riddle striking at the jugular of the whole belittling enterprise “the best evidence of white supremacy being alive and well is the lie that it is,” is smeared as a “self-loathing Kanye,” an “American-flag hatted Chad Jackson.”

It could just sit back and revel in our world where any black who refuses to recite the anti-agency story of how terrible it is for blacks in this land, of how “impossible it is for blacks—too often enough literally—to breathe in this inferno (let alone to walk or even crawl),” is an “Aunt Jemima” (or as it is now put, to refer to one the most notable “bed wenches” of the bukkake-happy white man, a “Candace Owens”).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where any black who embraces the path of forgiveness (which leads to gratitude, and to focus on the parts of the garden we can tend to, and to regeneration, and to excellence, and ultimately to heaven on Earth) instead of down the path of bitterness (which leads to vengeance, and to harm to others, and to harm to self, and ultimately to hell on earth) is “a house nigger.”

It could just sit back and revel in our world where any black who expresses gratitude, that chief emotion for halting the human march toward oblivion from crumbling along the way into a bleak bazaar of bitterness and blaming, is a “backstabbing Stacey Dash”—for, on top of lying to herself (since again, as with Dostoyevsky’s devil, the victimized station of blacks could never warrant such a feeling of non-misery), she drains the reservoir of resentment aimed at “the whiteness behind all black setbacks” and thereby undercuts the vengeful drive to remind humanity how deserving of boosts and restitution blacks remain.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where any black bold enough to tweet the career-ruinous thought that the police shooting of the black man “might not have been an act of white supremacy (especially when we consider he was flaunting a weapon and was living a thug’s life too often glorified in pop culture)” is a “handkerchief-headed negro” guilty of a black-on-black crime more poisonous—more poisonous because metaphysical—than any gang bangers in Little Rock could ever be.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where any black bold enough even to question the dominant shibboleths of “antiracism”—that there is a mega racial disparity in the likelihood of civilians being shot by police, or that economic inequalities between black and white has much of anything to do with individual choices and behaviors, or that racial disparities in incarceration reflect anything really but systemic antiblackness—is a “flag-loving fuck.”

It could just sit back and revel in our world where any black saintly enough to speak up against the repeated falsehood, the foundational untruth, upon which her inflated diversity bonuses rest—the lie of white supremacy having revved up to such redline rpm that, like blurred propellers, it is as shredding as it is invisible—is denounced as a “white man’s whore,” a “slave-quarter concubine.”

It could just sit back and revel in our world where any black who sins against the Holy Ghost (that is, who ever speaks “invalidating” words like “The push for us to identify as victims in the sanctimonious guise of ‘antiracism’ makes us hallucinate racism in every shadow and distracts us from black excellence”) is a “race traitor” more deserving of rebuke than even night-raiding Klansmen—more deserving of rebuke, yes, since he draws a different conclusion from apparently the same information base of experience and so (just as the apostate imperils faith more severely than could any infidel who never belonged) is someone who threatens the religion of antiracism more severely than any white ever could.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where any black is a “cooning self-hater” who writes the following passages in his “hurtful” novel about a young African American man who returns home from a BLM march in a traumatized state after an edible had opened him up to the “funhouse-horror element, the nightmarish cruelty and injustice, he might have otherwise overlooked in scenes otherwise familiar”: whites groveling at black feet for forgiveness; whites chanting various promises (like that they will never deny a black person’s truth or speak over black people); whites rallied by black looters to help “liberate black reparations”; blacks, and their “groveling allies,” passing out blacks-cannot-cut-it pamphlets like “SATs Are Still Racist!”

If it had been any other group, he would not have hesitated to say that perhaps they at least played a part in their own shortcomings—their own shortcomings in education, overrepresentation in crime, higher rate of STD infection and homicide. But something inside him made him hesitate when it came to black people. He had an insane need to shout their innocence to the skies. Why did he so strongly resist accusing black people as playing a part in their own failings—but not whites or Asians or Hispanics?

The panic was ramping up, although it had been hours since the gummy. He turned on the Disney channel, looking for the soothing surprise of a childhood show. A black cartoon character was telling the white character that he could “never understand the terror that black people go through in this country. We built it. We built it but, even when we’re not shot by cops or locked up, we have to expect bad healthcare and lower salaries. We are still treated as slaves even though we are the kings.”

He turned off the TV. He needed a break right from it all. He thought back to what this white friend had told him: “You bought the ticket, now take the ride.” Closing his eyes, he tried to lean into that maxim.

He knew, deep down, he had learned the lie by heart—the lie lucrative enough even for Disney to spread: that black people are victims through and through; that all their failures were due to the ever-growing reign of white supremacy. It was a terrible lie. It was a disempowering lie. As long as everyone believed the lie, black people would be unable to address where they were going wrong and lift themselves up beyond victims to be the masters of their fate. As long as everyone believed the lie, black people would never be able to take ownership for the harms they perpetrate against black people, for what they do to get arrested so much.

Had he and his friends been spreading exactly the message of deflection that a white supremacist movement would want them to spread? The face of his former principal, Mr. Baker, rose in his mind. He had been instrumental in getting Mr. Baker fired. But he could no longer evade the light. All the black boys that principal suspended—they needed to be suspended. Shit—they needed to be in jail! They were terrors. Mr. Baker wasn’t a white supremacist.

He thought of Mr. Baker and his black wife. He knew having a black wife didn’t matter, but still. Mr. Baker was no tool of white supremacy. Trayvon, Darrel—those guys were terrors!

It could just sit back and revel in our world where any black who writes something like the following prose poem is some “white man’s sambo” set on “cock blocking blacks from the amends long overdue.”

Fellowship of the Ring

A child abused in a home so dysfunctional it can barely be called “a home” (the parents, the abusers, lacking any sense of disapproval for what they have done) is lucky in one way—at least under the assumption that outside institutions (primarily, schools) do not prioritize cultivating lifters as opposed to leaners. For in a more functional home (one, even if merely jerry-rigged to stand, in which the guardians want to do better), a hobbling temptation would ring too loud for most children to resist: the temptation, tremendous for any calorie-out-minimizing chimp, for them to build an identity around being a victim and for them to locate their primary power in emotional blackmail of the parents behind the abuse.

And so we have the precarious situation of the black person in America today. Dignity spat upon for so long (released from the chattel barn only to be sprayed with firehoses), yet he finds himself not only in one of the better functioning societies (full of resources and opportunities), but one with a hellbent commitment to self-criticism and to justice and to doing better. “Hellbent” would be a word better than “proven.” For this society dug deep enough into its reserves of courage to do what most others could not: outlaw the universal temptation of slavery, which it did despite its very own addiction to slavery. It dug deep enough to guarantee the protection of all—no small feat given our chimp-deep instinct to crush heterodoxy like the skulls of deformed births.

What would you do, then? Can you at least understand why, especially when things have improved so much on the healing path, those addicted to guilt-tripping—who only know guilt-tripping, who have built everything around guilt-tripping, who have found great success for so long with guilt-tripping—would even go so far as to hypnotize the world (especially themselves) that the pain is still there, worse perhaps than ever (lynch days included)? Can you at least understand why, even though both the casting of the spell and the success of the spell amount to additional blows to dignity? Many men, even the sweetest boys who really do love their mother most of all, have stolen her rings and laptop to score the next fix. Hooked on someone else taking the wheel (and, indeed, on the victimology logic that aims to prove why it is only fair for someone else to take the wheel), a kempt people will go to tremendous lengths to avoid the terrible burden of taking the wheel. Never underestimate the lengths!

Many of us can still feel how our stomach sank when, as a young teen, our father or uncle suddenly dropped that bombshell of a question upon us, carefree in the passenger seat: “You wanna drive?” With a society that prods us to grow into responsible agents, we fight the urge to flee the responsibility. But imagine that the society, coddling us, does not prod us to push through our fear and indolence. Imagine, even more terribly, a society under the spell of the idea that it would be unjust—one of the worst injustices, in fact—to expect us to take the driver’s seat.

And so we have the precarious situation of the black person in America today. Now is the time for tough love intervention. Yesterday was the time.

What hope is there to reach the addict, however, without first excising the wormtongue whispering into all of our enabling ears? If only it were called by its antiblack name it would be easier to rally against the wormtongue. But no, it goes by the name of “antiracism,” a movement that emphasizes how victimized blacks were and continue to be (even going so far as to say that the trauma is passed through the genes and that white-supremacist reign, although more invisible, is as strong if not stronger than ever); a movement that insists, as the only humane and just option (considering the bleak state of affairs, the so-called “terror dome,” blacks find themselves born into), that blacks continue to be given special dispensations (from As for C work, to impunity when it comes to retributive discrimination); a movement that goes down so easily for all of us given (a) that we do not like change and (b) that we are all addicted, the overwhelming majority of us well-meaning, to blacks being on the plantation of dependency. We bank on it. Too much money has been, and continues to be, made upon it.

That is why we are called, once again, to dig deep into our reserves of courage. We did it before. We can do it again. Let Thomas Sowell be the Gandalf of our fellowship, a union of black-power warriors who can dig deep enough to resist all the social and economic capital, all the cheap hits of virtuous feelings, that come with spreading the deleterious victimology narrative.

The warriors include white people. Their challenge too is great. They must have enough integrity and love and strength to resist their inner Cain. Even despite all the super-citizen advantages black people have been given (lowered standards, special leeway, choice cuts, first dibs, pampered protections), and even despite a whiteness-demonizing world in which whites are expected to shut up and kowtow and apologize for their very skin, and even despite all the gaslighting (being deemed a racist, for example, for calling the racist violence against whites “racist”), and even despite all the videos of pathetic whites kissing black feet (so many videos, given that social-media algorithms prioritize the sensational), and even despite how fashionable it is to punk white people, and even despite how easy it is for whites to lose their jobs just for saying words that merely sound close to words super-citizens should never hear—despite all this, our white warriors must follow the better angels of human nature. They must resist being baited into a misguided lashing out against black people themselves (however enticing it is to lose oneself in righteous-feeling and purpose-giving bitterness, which can at least temporarily distract us from existential despair in the post-Nietzschean era of an Earth unchained from its sun).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where any black who says anything like what Glenn Loury does in the following is just a “Proud and Loyal Toby Wallace.”

Is it really such a bad thing to say that there’s something wrong with black people? . . . What I mean is: what did Malcolm X [imply] when he said “You've been hoodwinked, you've been bamboozled?”. . . . [He was implying that something is wrong with the] middle-of-the-road negro aspiration (civil rights conservatism, Church based, don't get too much up in their faces). . . . [He was saying] “black people, free yourselves from the mental encumbrances of the servant mentality. . . . There was something wrong with you when you were bent in a crouch. When you stood up with your shoulders back and you took responsibility for your own security, you were fixing what had been made wrong with you. . . .” [T]he real issue is agency. . . . The real issue is: are we, or are we not, the masters of our fate and the captains of our souls? . . . Am I the only one who is ashamed of the fact that every time I turn on the television and I hear about a party gone awry and somebody pulling out a gun and shooting somebody that 9 times out of 10 or 95 times out of 100 it seems the perpetrators are black?[7]

It could just sit back and revel in our world where any black is a “Django Stephen” if he lends any credibility to the so-called civil war between niggas and black people, let alone voices worry about the nigga-side growing unchecked (especially given the help of mainstream media’s centering of black artists who reflect and more and more seem to glorify anti-education druggery and pro-crime thuggery)—as Chris Rock in his 1996 standup Bring the Pain.

There's a civil war going on with Black people, and there's two sides: there's Black people and there's niggas. The niggas have got to go. Every time Black people wanna have a good time, ignorant-ass niggas fuck it up. . . . Can't do shit without some ignorant-ass nigga fucking it up. Can't do nothing. Can't keep a disco open more than 3 weeks! Grand opening, grand closing! Can't go to a movie the first week it comes out! Why? Cuz niggas are shooting at the screen. . . .

I hate niggas. Boy, I wish they'd let me join the Klu Klux Klan! Shit, I'd do a drive-by from here to Brooklyn. . . . You can't have shit when you around niggas. You can't have shit! You can't have no big screen TV! You can have it, but you better move it in at 3 in the morning, paint it white, hope niggas think it's a bassinet. Can't have shit in your house! Why?! Because niggas will break into your house. Niggas that live next door to you break into your house, come over the next day and go, ‘I heard you got robbed.’ Nigga, you know you robbed me. . . .

You know the worst thing about niggas? Niggas always want some credit for some shit they supposed to do. A nigga will brag about some shit a normal man just does. A nigga will say some shit like, “I take care of my kids." You're supposed to, you dumb motherfucker! What are you talking about? What kind of ignorant shit is that? “I ain't never been to jail!" What do you want, a cookie?! You're not supposed to go to jail, you low-expectation-having motherfucker. . . .

You know what the worst thing about niggas? Niggas love to NOT know. Nothing make a nigga happier than not knowin the answer to your question. Just ask a nigga a question. Any nigga! “Hey, nigga, what's the capitol of Zaire?" "I don't know that shit! Keepin it real!" Niggas love to keep it real—real dumb! Niggas hate knowledge. Shit. Niggas break into your house; you want to save your money? Put it in your books. Cuz niggas don't read. Just put the money in the books. Shit, books are like Kryptonite to a nigga. “Here's a book!" “AAHHH! NO! NOT A BOOK! NO! NOOOO!"

Tired of this shit, man! Your kids can't fuckin play nowhere. Every year the space gets smaller! Okay, you can go from that corner to that corner. Oh, you can go from that gate to that gate. By the time that fucker's 10 he's just hoppin in a circle like: <hops in circle>. . . .

Tired of this shit, man! TIRED, man! Niggas just ignant . . . singing 'bout ignorance. I heard some song the other day, ‘It's the first of the month." Niggas are singing welfare carols! “On the first day of welfare my true love gave to me.” “I wish you a Merry Welfare and a Happy Food Stamp!"

The fuck is going on?! What the fuck is going on? Now they got some shit. They tryna get rid of welfare. Every time you see welfare in the news, they always show Black people. Black people don't give a fuck about welfare. Niggas [on the other hand] are shakin in they boots. “Boy, they gonna take our shit!"

Shit, a Black man that got two jobs, going to work everyday, hates a nigga on welfare. Like, “Nigga, get a job! I got two! You can't get one?! I would give your lazy ass one of mine, but you'd get fucked up and get laid off. . . .”

Shit, a black woman that got two kids, going to work everyday, bustin her ass, hates a bitch with nine kids gettin a welfare check. Like, bitch stop fuckin! Stop fucking! Stop it! Put the dick down! Put it down! Get a job! Yes, you can get a job! Get a job holdin dicks! Whatever you do, get paid to do it. . . .

And I see some black people lookin at me. “Man, why you gotta say that? It ain't us. It's the media. The media has distorted our image to make us look bad! Why must you come down on us like that, brother? It ain't us. It's the media." Please cut the fuckin shit, okay?! Okay?! Okay?! When I go to the money machine tonight, alright, I ain't lookin over my back for the media! I'm lookin for niggas! Shit! Ted Koppel ain't never took shit from me! Niggas have! So, you think I got three guns in my house cuz the media outside?

It could just sit back and revel in our world where any black is an “Officer Coffey,” a “Seargent Calhoun,” if he speaks like Delroy Lindo’s character (Seargent Calhoun) in the following nigga-versus-black segment from the 1997 film First Time Felon.

You know you're the enemy, Yance. . . . I bet your black ass doesn't even know there's a war going on. I'm not talking about the war on crime and drugs, I'm talking about the war between black people and niggers. And that's what you are, Yance. You a motherfucking nigger. Let me tell you something. God—I hate niggers, but I love black people: honest, hard-working, law-abiding black people. Niggers like you, you make me sick. It's no problem for a nigger to get his own people hooked on drugs, have the young girls on the corner turning five-dollar tricks—no problem for a nigger to shoot another nigger; no problem for a nigger to rob and steal from good, honest, hardworking black people. . . . You look at me and you call me an Uncle Tom? You are the Uncle Tom! You're a fucking joke. You are the real enemy of black people.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where even the sweetest blacks—yes, even those who shudder at the notion of ever dehumanizing another black person as the mere “brainwashed puppets of the white man”—are still likely to wonder in their hearts exactly what the siren song of victimology would have them wonder:

what, other than “self-hatred or a Stockholm need for white validation,” could motivate a black person “zip-cooning around” with all these “white-supremacist statistics” about how things are not as bad as they seem for blacks (the irony being, of course, that those blacks “zip-cooning around” in this way are spreading a higher black love, a more uplifting and positive vision for black empowerment);

what, other than “self-hatred or a Stockholm need for white validation,” could motivate a black person “zip-cooning around” with all these “traumatizing arguments” suggesting that antiblack racism is not behind every black failing (the irony being, of course, that those blacks “zip-cooning around” in this way are pushing a brave and wise love concerned with seeing the best for black folks, much like a mother who—loving not just in idea but in action—exposes her child to challenges of uplifting degrees instead of sheltering it from all challenge).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where responding to the Uncle-Tom charge in the following way, as Shelby Steele does, only serves to make a black person “a real Uncle-Tom-ass nigga”).

[So here is how] I respond to the Uncle-Tom charge. . . . After the 60s black America turned around and began to put [its] fate in the hands of white America. We became dependent on white America. We said we have to have this and we have to have that. We have to have affirmative action. We have to have this kind of a program and so forth and so on all these demands that we made and which then, of course, come out of a psychology of dependence where “I can't get ahead unless white America gives me all these things and white America bends over backwards and uses affirmative action to get me in here and get me in there” and so forth. “I can't do it on my own. I can't be self-sufficient. I can't take care of myself.” So {these so-called] black militants are all dependent, obsessed. They are people who are obsessed with dependence. And the mask that they wear of black anger and they wear the fist. Who's the fist pointed at? The fist is pointed at whites. The fist is that “I demand something from white people.” That to me is the very essence of Uncle Tomism. The fist is the Uncle Tom. All it is a militant begging, militant dependence. I'm the one who's saying we can do it on our own and must do it on our own and we won't ever get anywhere until we do do it on our own! I'm the one who says we have the ability to do it on our own, we have the capacity to do it on our own, and that dependence is a loser's game. . . . We're free. We're free as we're ever going to be. And now is our opportunity. We have to stand up like men and women and take it—regardless of what the world says, regardless of whether or not there's still racism here. I'm the [true] militant. They're the Uncle Toms.[8]

It could just sit back and revel in our world where whites, punished for opposition and rewarded for allyship, lack the backbone or even the awareness to call out these pity-seeking exaggerations as what they are—let alone to scream against the entire antiracist industry, like some modern-day Johann Mayfurth:

Listen, you money-hungry executives and bloodthirsty administrators, the apparitions of white supremacy are all lies!

It could just sit back and revel in our world where the antisocial violence and criminality all-too-cliché among inner-city black enclaves marred by pitiable life expectancy and pitiable education are hastily chalked up to “a thriving disdain—present both in individual hearts and the very fabric of which all our institutions are made—for blackness” (as if black people would phoenix up from the blunt ashes of their predicament of high susceptibility to robbery and rape and murder and incarceration and disease and so on if only the suffocating shroud of white supremacy were suddenly lifted off their heads), when the reality-check truth is that—despite our egalitarian society at present showing as much love for black people as it does for anyone else (if not more)—blacks find themselves in a situation of physical and mental and familial and cultural debilitation resulting not only from the ravages of intentional antiblack oppression (slavery followed by multifarious forms of discrimination), but also from the ravages of several efforts largely meant to help black people.

We might cite the welfare reform and the war on drugs and the counterculture movement of yesterday, all of these jointly encouraged today’s bloom of black single babies having babies more often to ain’t-workin-for-the-man alleyway hooligans highly vulnerable to jail cells and early caskets given their black market occupation and rebellious attitude—an occupation and attitude lionized as aspirational and authentically black in the thug anthems of popular culture.

We might cite the handouts and the diluted standards of conduct and achievement that, however important as a transitional lifeline during emergency times, continue even now (in the ironic name of mercy and justice and racial equality)—a continuance that, like opiates taken too heavily and for too long, has engendered dependency as well as feelings of black shame in the face of all the black underperformance and all the white (and Asian and African and Caribbean) condescension invited by such “helping practices.”

We might cite the pattern of condemning as “antiblack” (again, in the name of mercy and justice and racial equality) any educational benchmark unmet by blacks—a condemnation that (1) helps to hide what their getting lower math and reading scores really means (namely, that they are, at the time of the test, less capable than their peers) and thereby that (2) enables blacks and society as a whole to circumvent the goliath task of addressing the developmental reasons for black deficits across class lines (namely, the ideals and attitudes and norms of black culture, which are potent enough to present roadblocks in the face of which even affluence struggles).

We might cite also the pattern of demonizing as “foot-shuffling mammie” or vilifying as a “race-traitor Oreo” any black who calls upon fellow blacks to remember that to blame all underachievement on past and present white supremacy would not only be false but self-defeatist (sabotaging, in effect, the very drive toward self-improvement that has gotten so many other groups with a history of persecution out of the morass); or any black who calls upon fellow blacks to root their significance beyond just being “descendants of slaves still doomed to remain lowest on the hierarchy of oppression” (♫“Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen”♫); or any black who calls upon fellow blacks to reject the agency-and-dignity maiming lie that their unfortunate behaviors in the present are the result of an omnipresent structure of antiblackness centuries old; or any black who calls upon fellow blacks to stop waiting for some external messiah to deliver them from the quagmire; or any black who calls upon fellow blacks to take responsibility for rectifying their debased situation (even if foisted upon them at birth, even if due to racial biases) instead of wallowing on past tragedies or buying into race-monger lies that divest them of any present-day fault or (God forbid) even glamorizing their debased situation as what makes them cool like their favorite rapper (Sexyy Red or Finesse2tymes); or any black who calls upon fellow blacks to start looking more granularly at how their own issues hold them back (power-sapping issues, in some cases akin to teen-girl cutting, much less apparent even through the eras of slavery and reconstruction and Jim Crow): their shattered family structures; their glorification of criminality and violence and promiscuity and drugs; their antisocial role models; their thuggish peer groups; their anti-curiosity and anti-reading norms of parenting; their laziness-propped fear to leave the ancestral nest of victimhood; their grape-drank dietary choices; their proud isolation from others who could uplift them just by osmosis; their negative attitudes toward academic pursuits (attitudes, blooming from the 60s, severe enough for it to be not uncommon for black people to bully fellow blacks who embrace school as “acting white”).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where black people, their predecessors having been toolified in the mid-twentieth century to carry out a Marxist agenda aimed at tanking the government by ensnaring as many bodies as possible in a web of dependency on welfare, now regard reliance on government assistance, assistance factoring over the decades heavily into the decrease in marriage and the increase in babies having babies (two black blights only since the 1970s), as an inalienable birthright—indeed, a badge of underdog valor connecting them with their forefathers, a point of twisted pride strategic to invoke in college applications as proof of how hard they had it growing up.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where blacks, their predecessors having found tempting opportunity in a perilous black market opened up by a well-intentioned war on drugs, now regard drug dealing as an easier calling than being a doctor or lawyer—indeed, a badge of underdog valor connecting them with their forefathers, a point of twisted pride strategic to invoke in rap lyrics as proof of how black they really are.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where blacks, their predecessors having welcomed in the white-initiated counterculture movement that fetishized fighting the powers that be (a dropout orientation of “fuck respectability,” a fuck-the-man orientation less accommodatable by blacks of the resource-scarce civil-rights era), now still feel the economic and child-modeling impacts of all the blacks who suddenly at the turn of the 1970s refused to take the many nonmenial jobs available while also refusing to stay nonviolent in the face of discrimination—these impacts, synergizing with the illegal-activities-impact of the war on drugs and the single-babies-having-babies-impact of welfare reform, leading to the entrenched problem we all know today: the problem of black inner-city thugs, thugs too often romanticized in black culture (and more and more in mainstream culture) and too often blamed on the lie of a structural racism ever-growing in the present (a structural racism said to block most job opportunities, most ladders out of poverty, from inner-city blacks despite the shining counterexamples of many other inner-city nonwhites including Africans who, untouched by the how-to-be-black ravages of this American history, use busses to get to their jobs if need be).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, leaving the black home and black family and black culture uncriticized (as if it were by white-supremacist design masked by political correctness), the Department of Education threatens to pull federal funds from thousands of school districts (on civil-rights grounds) if it keeps seeing such high rates of black suspension—the disparity of black suspension wildly assumed without second thought to be a reflection of “the antiblack constrictions of unchecked whiteness endemic to the American school system” instead of a reflection of the disruptive behavior of black boys, the same sort of disruptive behavior that leads to a disparity of black young men getting incarcerated (a disparity, however, that is itself wildly assumed without second thought to be a reflection of “the antiblack constrictions of unchecked whiteness endemic to the American criminal-justice system”).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where incidents of police brutality against blacks, although swiftly dealt with by officials afraid of being branded as “racist,” get magnified in choking-tazzing-clubbing-shooting detail by a conniving media that pays little to no attention to the similar acts of brutality (similar knee-on-neck holds for similar protracted durations for similar excruciating deaths by asphyxiation) faced by an almost equal number of whites (albeit without the urgency for swift justice); our world where incidents of police brutality against blacks become sensationalized as such a regular occurrence in America that “antiracists” presume their prevalence to be in the tens of thousands (far surpassing the mere dozens in reality), thus rendering unbelievable the truth that more cops are killed by blacks than vice versa or that a black person is more likely to be struck by lightning than harmed by cops—all this distortion, of course, putting blacks in submission (as if by meticulous design) in two pivotal ways: instilling an element of fear when it comes to going out into the public sphere (the very arena where careers are built, money is made, connections are formed, and nature is experienced) while at the same time reinforcing within black culture a victimhood mindset where petulant demands for special privileges seem much more attractive and black-appropriate, black-authentic, than pursuit of excellence. 

It could just sit back and revel in our world where there is a racial double standard on how crime is reported: were a mob of whites to attack a black man and rob him (as is so often the case the other way around) it would be major news gaining major political attention (unlike the other way around), and the news anchor would be sure to stress the race of everyone involved (since it feeds into the big-money narrative of the voracious appetite of whiteness).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, against a constant bass-bumping backdrop of niggative lyrics drowning out all the rest (“Nigga named Ruger, he a shooter, though / Never had a V, always pulled up in an Uber, though / Left him on seen, nigga blew up my text / But I called him last week to come shoot at my ex”), incidents of police brutality against blacks, statistically rare compared to the countless high-intensity interactions each year with a heavily-armed populace, will be chalked up—in what amounts to a slander of sociology—solely to the bogeyman of white supremacy (invisible, of course, only for racists), rather than to a more nuanced mosaic of factors:

the alarming overrepresentation of blacks in violent crime (blacks being less than 14 percent of the population and yet explaining, for example, over 60 percent of the firearm homicides);

officers recognizing, for that reason, (a) the importance of focusing on black communities—communities disproportionately requesting police assistance—so as to serve and protect a larger number of people, and (b) the ease of meeting interaction quotas (and sotto-voce arrest quotas) by concentrating on those communities;

a streak in black urban male culture—as present today as once was, in that same culture, the refusal to “eat pussy” or the disdain for “fags”—to be noncompliant with cop commands as an expression of being “authentically black” (being a Jim Kelly in Enter the Dragon or in Three the Hard Way “sticking it to the man”);

a persistent thug-life cop-killing theme romanticized in popular black art, art that happens to be the most popular art in America;

a police profession self-selecting perhaps a bit more for machismo (even authoritarian-bully) types who, especially once adorned with a badge, struggle to deal with challenges (backtalk or noncompliance) to the authority around which they locate their identity;

a sense that poor people, who appear in an overwhelming majority of cases involving excessive force (including against blacks), have less to lose and are more susceptible to substance abuse and mental-heath challenges, and so are more willing to go to escalating extremes during police interactions;

police officers who, despite the manly-man self-identification, are too often insecure and out-of-shape and undertrained in de-escalation techniques and unskilled in nonlethal restraint (such as would be developed from only a few months of jujitsu training)—to such an extent, in fact, that there are times when they shoot even legless people wielding no more than knives.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where—despite widespread proclamations of a “total war against blacks led by an institutionally racist police force” (a police force that close to 15 percent of US liberals and close to 10 percent of US conservatives believe killed about 10,000 unarmed blacks in 2019, and that likely over 50 percent of either liberals or conservatives would say was at least 100)—in reality, only around 25 unarmed blacks were killed by cops in 2019 whereas the number of unarmed whites killed (notably unlisted on Wikipedia, unlike in the case of blacks) hovered around 35—a figure that does indicate that blacks are more likely to be killed by cops (given the population ratio of about four whites for every one black in the country), but still a disparity at least partially attributable to the fact that blacks commit a disproportionate amount of violent crime (being around seven times more likely than whites).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where violent crimes between blacks and whites amount to about 5 violent crimes out of hundred, with blacks being the victims in less than 20 percent of those cases—this fact in stark contrast to the so-called “total war against blacks, the likes of which has not been seen since the lynching era”: a message our pocket screens (dulling attention spans, rewriting memories, shaping public opinion, stoking division) constantly repeat with the help of images stirring enough to make even otherwise sane deans, overcome with the inner sense of protecting God’s most precious and vulnerable, terminate professors without due process merely for saying a word that sounds close to “nigger.”

It could just sit back and revel in our world where every college and university president posts an open letter—all smelling alike (of wool)—that declares their dismay whenever a black person is killed by the police and how, “even though it can never understand the terror they live with everyday, the white community will stand by every black student—offering not just empty words, but real action: making antiracist training required for all members of our community; prioritizing equity over equality not just in admissions and hiring, but in classroom decisions; and much more.”

We are devastated by the recent tragedies of police brutality towards Black persons. We stand strongly against not just the act of police brutality but underlying afflictions also known as systemic racism. We know that these are not just isolated incidents and recognize that racism radiates well beyond the criminal justice system: housing, healthcare, and even our own system of higher education. We also recognize that racism has a significant mental and physical impact on Black individuals when these tragedies happen.

So to our Black students and colleagues: we see you, we support you, we value you and we love you!

Some of us have the privilege of not having to worry about our children when they leave the house or interact with police. Some of us have the privilege to go for a jog or to sleep in the comfort of our own homes. Some of us have the privilege of being given the benefit of the doubt in our daily lives. Such privileges blind us. That is why it is so important to acknowledge, and educate ourselves about, the struggles of living while black.

We are not writing this as an empty statement. We are committing, right now, to employing antiracist practices throughout our college: from hiring and employee retention, to student success, to policy and curriculum revisions that will include a more race-conscious and equity-minded approach. Creating sustainable change for our college will take some crucial and courageous conversations. It will take action! We are prepared. A new strategic plan for Inclusive Excellence is in the works, and it will align with a college-wide strategic plan to be presented in fall 2020.

Both plans, we are proud to say, will be “living documents.” This means that every division at the college will have the ability to chime in and develop them. Most importantly, we will be allowing any black-identifying individuals—faculty or staff—full jurisdiction over any of these documents. We want to make sure that black voices always get a say when it comes to keeping these documents relevant and accurate as circumstances change, or as new information becomes available.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where victim-narrative falsities are promulgated enough to seem axiomatic:

(1) that the majority of US blacks are destitute urbanites (instead of middle-class suburbanites);

(2) that black households earn less than white households for the same work (instead of earning roughly the same as whites, more in many cities across the nation, when we factor in the disproportionate number of black single-parent households surviving on welfare and the disproportionate number of blacks living in areas—the southern US, in particular—where wages are lower for everyone and especially when we adjust for age, region, location, and educational level);

(3) that performance gaps between blacks and whites indicate systemic racism (instead of those performance gaps, many of which narrow significantly simply when we account for age and study time, being a function of cultural values and educational practices in the black communities with higher rates of single-parent homes, homes inadvertently incentivized to become overburdened since more fertility means more milk from the nanny system);

(4) that blacks are less likely to receive callbacks and job offers due to rampant racism (instead of due to worries about overrepresentation in crime and underperformance in education in those rare cases—say, entry-level private-sector jobs twenty-five years ago in Podunk places—where blacks fail to enjoy the substantial hiring advantage they enjoy in most sectors over equally-qualified white candidates, especially given the longstanding and widespread affirmative-action initiative in a country where countless employers and colleges need diversity-forward positions to be deemed serious and competitive);

(5) that largescale antiblack racism is baked into the criminal justice system (instead of longer and more punitive sentences explained predominantly by prior criminal record, the nature of the offense, and the quality of the legal representation);

(6) that racial profiling by police officers in many cities is because of antiblack bias (instead of because blacks commit a disproportionate amount of crime, which results in a higher demand for police intervention in black communities);

(7) that excessive police brutality against blacks, as if it were “open season” on them, represents a commonplace trend of American racism (instead of being a comparative anomaly over-spotlighted in a country where differences in rates of police shootings and police encounters between whites and blacks virtually go away when we adjust for the higher rate of black violent crime reported by victims).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, due to these ingrained “axioms” (and all the doors to virtue signaling that open up thereby), governments and business alike are excessive with freebies and leniencies—offering cloying praise that would seem backhanded if directed toward whites.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where black children are indoctrinated into thinking that in order to have a wholehearted desire to reach a goal, or to believe in their potential to reach it, they need to see someone doing it who looks like them, thereby allowing us to accept in better conscience the fifth-string black candidate over the first-string white counterpart.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where blind interviews and blind auditions, once hailed as a means to combat prejudice in selection processes, are now (like blind criminal justice and blind healthcare and other insidious forms of “blindness”) deemed “problematic” because—in letting decisions be made on a case-by-case determination of merit or talent or character (“insidious concepts of white supremacy”) rather than on the basis of color, and thereby in blocking a great deal of black entry while favoring whites (who “gained their talents on the back of black oppression anyway”)—they are anti-equity disruptors of “the only solution to racist discrimination: antiracist discrimination."

It could just sit back and revel in our world where—just as we do not increase the educational resources in black communities as a response to subminimal scoring in math and reading, but rather simply declare the standards used to measure them (and in some cases even math and reading themselves) white supremacist—we do not increase classical music education in black communities as a response to black underrepresentation in orchestras, but rather simply declare blind auditions (and musical notation and all the rest) white supremacist—a declaration that viciously fuels the demand, lest we be charged with merely offering lip service to diversity, that the priority be selecting black people (even if it means selecting those unable to meet the usual standards, and even if it means getting rid of white musicians and perhaps also musicians of other minorities).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, in order “to dismantle the legacy of white supremacy in western music,” two main strategies are on the table:

second best is to privilege systems of music notation other than the European one, even though the European one—superior to the Chinese and the Indian and even the African—captures pitch and rhythm precisely enough to do what others cannot (namely, capture even the strangest and most sophisticated music of all traditions);

first best, since the demand to read music disproportionately impacts blacks (who are about “hip feeling rather than square thinking”), is to do away with music notation altogether—starting, of course, with the “colonialist representational system of Western notation” precisely because its superior ability to capture (or, perhaps better, “enslave”) all other forms of music makes it “such a useful tool for the white evil of appropriation” that even black bodies who learn or utilize it are in some sense “complicit in white supremacy.”

It could just sit back and revel in our world where—despite it being highly addictive and debilitating and merely an anesthetic for the pain of deeper issues, which is why it is only to be used like fentanyl in emergency situations (lest, of course, we want to ensure black inferiority in standing and achievement and dignity and drive to achieve, and a whole lot of correlated white contempt)—affirmative action is seen not as a temporary measure to start the syphon flow of blacks into all the areas of historical exclusion (a transitional solution from which blacks are to be quickly tapered off, as greater attention is given to the attitudes and home structure and family situation and values that weigh blacks down), but rather as something needing to be permanently instituted as a matter of justice for long as this country is still around (since antiblack bias, the very fabric of this country, will always stop any syphon flow if left unchecked).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where black people accept and even celebrate (for being pro-diversity) the lowered bars for admission and hiring, for reading and writing and speaking, that nicely screw blacks into a state of eroded motivation for personal growth and development:

watering down the accomplishments of high-achieving black intellectuals (so much that geniuses of rigor and originality are put on a par with sloganeering lightweights hooked on the continued boosterism of the white world);

taking away developmental pressure for blacks to rise to what they otherwise would be able to rise to;

hooking blacks on “extra help,” such that they become wards of white pity;

making blacks—even the ones who really are topnotch and who put in topnotch effort—feel lesser than (in their very souls) and making others look at them as lesser than.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, by lowering the bars for blacks, institutions get to feel and seem virtuous even as their bar-lowering only further cloaks, and thereby further hides from cure, deeper causes of black underachievement:

causes such as the cultural emphasis placed on being “authentically black,” which means being able to hang in project-housing territories with swagger (in general, just not being nerdy like white people, with all their present fathers and noninvolvement in the criminal-justice system and Encyclopedia Britannica collections and temperance when it comes to sex and drugs);

causes such as the failure of elementary school curricula, or of family structure, or of a “niggative” attitude toward achievement in the “white world” (Nigga, why you reading like you white and shit?”) or of a “niggative” attitude toward wonder in the black child (“Child, get from that bug!”), or of a “niggative” attitude toward the child’s human desire to keep communicating with the delivery man at the door (“Child, get from that door!”).

It could just sit back and revel in our world—our “progressive” world—where, as if to demoralize and humiliate blacks (at least subconsciously, in feelings only to resurface perhaps in the last third of the night), blacks are dozens of times more likely to get picked for universities over equally-qualified Asian kids.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where all the sermonizing about the necessity of exempting blacks from various challenges (like doing away with the requirement to learn Greek even if the black student majors in Greek, or doing away with the requirement to read music even if the black student majors in Music) will be effective enough to entrench it into practice—and yet not effective enough to make blacks forget (again, at least in the recesses of pre-dawn hours) the humiliating fact that they are being patted on the head with condescending kid gloves because they are lesser than.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, as if to render the option of trying harder a nonstarter and to perpetuate the cycle of underachievement, the blame for blacks not doing as well as their white counterparts on tests and on licensure requirements, the blame for the imbalance between the number of blacks and number of whites in elite science high schools or with careers in aerospace engineering, is (conveniently) shifted onto the selection measures themselves—“standards distressful, particularly to black bodies, because of the white supremacy baked into them.”

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, almost as if some secret hand were intending to breed blacks into perpetual children unable to be moved by rationality, the responsibility for black shortcomings in abstract reasoning is (conveniently) placed upon “white-bread assessment standards with an intrinsic telos of black-body rape”—yes, even despite their blind administration, and despite the thorough efforts to ensure their fairness, and despite various factors beyond (not the least of which are black environments of low intellectual stimulation harboring “niggative” cultural attitudes toward abstract thinking as being “something for white people”).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, by casting the blame elsewhere than upon these stultifying environments, these environments stand a greater chance of survival, thereby locking in the historical privilege of whites outperforming blacks when it comes to abstract thinking, locking it in even more securely than does the main other complementary strategy of hypnotizing blacks to embrace a lie tempting for them believe after centuries of addiction to having their agency tied to their victimizers by a short chain—a lie tempting for them to believe since it justifies tossing off the big burdens (the burden of carving their own paths to the degree that other humans can; the burden of the freedom of choosing for oneself what to be responsible for, as opposed to the freedom of having no responsibilities; the burden of stepping up to do something with the opportunities afforded them; the burden of responsible parenting, which includes safeguarding innocence until the skills and knowledge and maturity solidifies enough to handle to traumas of adult life; the burden of self-improvement; the burden of independence from government assistance): the lie, namely, that these environments are the inevitable and inescapable byproduct of centuries of slavery plus the immiserations and humiliations of Jim Crow laws and redlining (and various other impediments to blacks getting to enjoy the fruits of being born in America).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, because of this lie (and the associated lie that things have only gotten worse for blacks in America and thus that the efforts of brave and inspirational black leaders over the last century were in vain, if not themselves orchestrated by white supremacy), blacks in this country—despite it decades of redress dispensations and despite its having reached a point where racial tolerance is (at least ten years ago) better than any other time in world history—see themselves, in what amounts to a slap in the face to those around the globe suffering from real institutional racism (think India’s caste system and other cases of concrete racism around the world, which are best kept hidden to America in order to ensure that exaggerations of black mistreatment go unchecked), as outsiders forever barred from even entering the candy store with the other kids they get to watch through bulletproof windows.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, if ever their practice of direct preferential admission were banned, universities carrying out the coddling agenda would be prepared to abolish SAT and GRE and LSAT requirements altogether (on grounds that “it is unjust and uncivil, not to mention mortifying, to ask black people to compete in a colorblind meritocracy against people who don’t face their historical and ongoing traumas”)—doing away with these requirements, these “white supremacist weapons to humiliate blacks and exclude their representation in various sectors,” even at the price, yes, of leading humanity as a whole down a road of mediocrity (which would perhaps be the best road anyway, as far as some Palpatine-like white supremacy on its deathbed would be concerned, given the risk otherwise of non-mediocrity leaking out to blacks).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where hiring standards are diluted, even if at the internecine expense of tanking the possibility of groundbreaking advances coming out of universities or of more fatalities on the surgery table because of incompetence—yes, whites included (as if the collateral damage of some real antiblack agenda, rather than of the fake one on which the black-damaging indignation-industry of so-called “antiracism” depends).

It could just sit back and revel in our world, a creepy world, where even Huxtable blacks (treated too as borderline disableds) are denied the chance to show how they can reach greatness without the help of a white savior with quotas to fill—an eerie scenario in itself, but especially considered in light of the Skinnerian experiment showing how fleas are easily conditioned: after just few days of the lid being on the mason jar, fleas that could easily jump out no longer jump high enough to do so (such conditioning spreading down multiple generations). 

It could just sit back and revel in our world, a cynical world, where even Huxtable blacks (in the shadow of constant pandering) are denied a dignified sense of respect and appreciation even for anything they do accomplish on their own, which with the help of poor blacks will nicely help preserve the intelligence gap between blacks and every other group.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, to be seen as and to see themselves as deserving of spoiling special treatment, blacks find their highest dignity in getting whites to admit blacks have been the most heinously victimized people—Jews included—the world has ever seen.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where black power is defined primarily in terms of (a) stewing over injustices inflicted upon their ancestors and, instead of devoting internal energy to lift themselves up, (b) demanding (in the name of “justice” and “accountability”) payouts and favors from the dubiously-supposed brethren of black victimizers—payouts and favors that, so as never to divest themselves of the ability to say in the pathos spirit of Ralphie in A Christmas Story “Look how your actions have crippled me,” at best amount to new rims for their wheelchairs and someone there to push them up any hills.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where blacks are to devote their days begging for special favors from a US system they think is hopelessly corrupted by white supremacy—so corrupted it would seem only logical for them to conclude (but remember, logic is itself antiblack) that any such helping hand would actually be toxic to blacks.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where—“whitenotized” as needing whites to unruin them (a gospel eerily similar to what heartened the Trans-Atlantic slave trade: “A white Savior is your only hope out of the dung”)—blacks are lured away from Harlem-Renaissance-style efforts to enter the pantheon of human greats (like Shakespeare) and, instead, into a ruinous game where they locate their core power in guilt-tripping whites (as a son might a mother for past abuse).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, in turn, at least those whites not in denial of their white supremacy get easy no-change-required absolution for being white—that is, get their guilt lashed away, in the safe way of BDSM, for being descendants of sea-bottom-senders, rapers, slavers, lynchers, hosers, humiliators, redliners—by excusing blacks shortcomings (even acts of barbarism) as understandable given the horrors of the past.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, instead of directing resources toward uplifting programs that empower them to compete on equal footing, black students—groomed by overuse of emergency medicines like affirmative action to expect admission into the same positions and venues and conversations with lower qualifications than other groups—are judged by different standards:

by outspoken passion rather than by critical-ethical thinking;

by kinesthetic prowess rather than by research methods;

by Wakanda street smarts rather than by white-bread book learning;

by spoken-word expression testifying to intergenerational trauma rather than by written exams testifying to analytical proficiency;

by urban slang rather than by the labyrinthine lexicon of SAT prep books;

by spontaneous improv rather than by planned execution;

by social justice rather than by understanding the truths of the cosmos (inner and outer, micro and macro).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, instead of directing resources toward uplifting programs that build resilience, black students—groomed by the implementation of safe spaces and bias response teams to expect an environment free from challenge or discomfort—are exempted from ennobling challenges:

from rushing when late;

from doing well on math tests;

from excelling in the written word;

from looking beyond color to individual merit and character and need;

from striving to be objective;

from raising skepticism toward received orthodoxy and one’s sense of “inner truth”;

from planning things out instead of flying by the seat of one’s loincloth;

from aiming to control emotion with reason;

from trying to understand Shakespeare;

from all the various “aspirational hurdles set by white supremacists to make blacks feel pathetic as they inevitably tumble.”

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, given the different standards of judgment and the exemptions from ennobling challenges (and all the other hobbling-humiliating treatments packaged, in our white-supremacy hysteria, as “a matter of Black justice”), it is hard not to think some nefarious plot against black kind really were underway: a plot to render yet another generation of children (black and nonblack) powerless to resist—however much they try (in fear of finding the r-word pulsing in neon over their faces in the bathroom mirror)—the conviction, mushrooming in the deepest recesses of their hearts, that black people are intellectually stunted (or at least that “black” and “nerd” repose in mutual exclusivity), which enables a culture where (a) blacks—and whites too—feel that any book-smart and articulate black person must not be authentically black and where (b) blacks—and whites too—feel righteous in dishing out mental and social and physical penalties to any black successful in school (or in various other “whites-only areas and styles of being”).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, given the different standards of judgment and the exemptions from ennobling challenges (and all the other hobbling-humiliating treatments packaged, in our white-supremacy hysteria, as “antiracist”), it is hard not to think some nefarious plot against black kind really were underway: a plot to render yet another generation of children (black and nonblack) powerless to resist—fearing that scarlet “r”—judging black people not by the robustness of their intellect or the depth of their character, but through a kaleidoscope of diminishing caricatures serving to keep them (a) outside the gates of informed and ethical citizenship, (b) less able to compete on equal footing (on their own merits and efforts) without special considerations, (c) stuck in an aid-expectation cycle of underachievement.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, given the different standards of judgment and the exemptions from ennobling challenges (and all the other hobbling-humiliating treatments packaged, in our white-supremacy hysteria, as “pro-black”), it is hard not to think some nefarious plot against black kind really were underway: a plot to make it more likely that blacks never marry their dollars with sense, and so stay some of the biggest unnecessary spenders on things they themselves do not make (clothes, furniture, phones, drugs, hairstyles, name brand stuff) instead of investing in businesses and real estate that might curb the unfathomable speed at which the black dollar leaves the black community.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, given the different standards of judgment and the exemptions from ennobling challenges (and all the other hobbling-humiliating treatments packaged, in our white-supremacy hysteria, as “malicious to withhold when black people are so terrorized each day”), it is hard not to think some nefarious plot against black kind really were underway: a plot to keep off the table of possibility actionable plans for self-sufficiency, such as the following concrete plan specifically for those black families who own a business:

(1) provide your children with valuable work experience by employing them in your business as early as you can (early teens);

(2) compensate them just enough to avoid federal income taxes (according to the standard deduction for that year);

(3) claim a tax deduction for their wages as a business expense;

(4) invest a portion of their earnings into a Roth IRA to yield a retirement fund at the level of the millions from just a few thousand dollars starting out).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, given the different standards of judgment and the exemptions from ennobling challenges, it is hard not to think some nefarious plot against black kind really were underway: a plot to elbow out, in the same way that refined sugar elbows out fruit sugar, solutions for improving black educational performance even by the supposedly too-high “white standards”—so many solutions:

(a) incentivizing the intellectual growth of students (paying first graders for every book they read and successfully complete an exam on, showering praise upon students who solve logic puzzles and critical thinking games, cultivating a sense of admiration around past and present figures who have committed themselves to a life of the mind, exposing the harmfulness of anti-intellectual attitudes in the black communities while also laying out the historical and psychological reasons behind their flourishing);

(b) celebrating students who “burn the midnight oil” in determined pursuit of noble goals, or who demonstrate thought-out skepticism toward received orthodoxies (especially toward the “antiracist” orthodoxy of black victimology);

(c) going harder on black students (strict disciplinary policies, extended school hours, extra scrutiny, less protections from so-called “malinformation,” more responsibilities);

(d) encouraging enrollment in HeadStart and Upward Bound (providing families with comprehensive information sessions, offering transportation services, creating a mentorship system where older students guide and motivate the younger ones);

(e) teaching blacks kids physics through sports they love (the gravity and aerodynamic drag involved in three-point shots, the thermodynamics involved in dribbling, the conservation of angular momentum involved in a ball-spinning layup);

(f) improving status and pay of teachers (perhaps based on their pursuit of professional development, or on the performance of their students on blind tests);

(g) ensuring like Marva Collins that black kindergarteners are surpassing intellectual milestones (reading at the level of Aesop’s fables, doing math up to simple multiplication and division);

(h) ensuring like Marva Collins that black kindergarteners ingest a hearty dose of pro-autonomy propaganda (such as through folktales like “The Little Red Hen,” whose chief moral is “If you don’t work you don’t eat”).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, given the different standards of judgment and the exemptions from ennobling challenges (and all the other hobbling-humiliating treatments packaged, in our white-supremacy hysteria, as “the very least we can do”), it is hard not to think some nefarious plot against black kind really were underway: a plot to elbow out, in the same way that TV elbows out books, literacy and family-bonding and confidence-boosting programs—so many programs:

(a) parent-child-school programs (where in the morning session parent fill educational gaps while preschoolers learn math and reading, and where in the afternoon both groups come together to learn how to learn together);

(b) financial-literacy programs (where participants learn the ins and outs of budgeting and saving and investing through real-life scenarios and interactive workshops equipping them with the tools to break the cycle of poverty);

(c) health-awareness programs (where community members come together to learn about the importance of nutrition and exercise, along with practical cooking demonstrations for healthy meals on a budget, and free health screenings that aim to prevent hypertension, diabetes, and other black scourges);

(d) technology programs (where participants, especially the youth, are introduced to the digital world's opportunities, including coding, digital marketing, and social media literacy);

(e) entrepreneurship programs (where local entrepreneurs and business leaders provide mentorship and support through the process of turning an idea into a sustainable business);

(f) vocational-training programs (where hands-on training in high-demand trades such as electrical work, plumbing, coding, and health care provides not only certifications but a direct pathway to employment);

(g) cultural heritage and history programs (where participants explore the rich history and contributions of Black individuals and cultures beyond the dated context of oppression);

(h) pro-social programs (where workshops focus on building strong interpersonal and conflict resolution skills, and on increasing awareness of black role models who do not reinforce the thug and whore monolith, and on combating the false and harmful depictions of black people as perpetual victims, and on dismantling the notion that the police and the legal system are the enemies of black people, and on destigmatizing the sharing of emotions and the pursuit of intellectual interests and the talking to therapists, and on centering black voices like Sowell and Shelby and Lowery who would have black people aim higher than grievance when cultivating their sense of purpose and self-worth and somebodyness).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where America, in addition to warping the perspective of Americans as to the severity of antiblack racism, seems hellbent on exporting its distorted views to other countries—this way, as people in Stockholm and Paris and Brazil protest the underrepresentation of blacks in STEM fields in America or protest the killing of black men by cops in America, there will be less of a chance for blacks to become truly woke: woke from their victimhood stupor.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where whites are pressured to spend their lives groveling in atonement for the sins of like-looking dead, doing all they can—even to unjust and spoiling lengths—to help, thereby becoming (as the helpers of the down and out) the most dignified little halflings on Earth.

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[1] youtube.com/watch?v=Vrsv3wrzrLQ&t=10s

[2] youtube.com/watch?v=Vrsv3wrzrLQ&t=10s

[3] These are the words of John McWhorter. They were taken from a podcast he does with Glenn Loury. youtube.com/watch?v=pwZMzFQXb48

[4] freeblackthought.substack.com/p/black-excellence-is-not-white-supremacy

[5] harpers.org/archive/1988/06/im-black-youre-white-whos-innocent-race-and-power-in-an-era-of-blame/

[6] youtube.com/watch?v=tXE-TpGLFac

[7] youtube.com/watch?v=0eY1Ggb6eE4

[8] youtube.com/watch?v=9mbKRvED41g

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