Continued from part 1.
4. Reverse Racism and the "Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations".
Many on the right have made the claim that "the liberals are the real racists because they don't believe black people can get ahead and life" while claiming that they aren't racist because "capitalism doesn't care what race you are". Some even go so far as to claim that this "defeatist" attitude propagated by the left is a big part of the reason we see the racial disparity in crime rates that we do.
First of all, this is a complete strawman. No one is saying black people can't get ahead in life, they're saying it's more difficult too. I mean former slaves had become successful businessmen in the late 19th and early 20th century but no one would argue that black people had a harder time being successful when there were explicitly racist laws at play. Similarly now, there are problems like underfunded public schools, the impact of red lining, lead infested neighborhoods and a biased criminal justice system. So while despite this, it's possible for black people to succeed but to claim it's racist to say that when faced with these problems, people have a harder time getting ahead in life is blatant projection.
As for capitalism, well capitalism doesn't care what race you are BUT it does care that racism exists to divide the lower classes and prevent "class consciousness" from forming because then there is less union activity to cut into your profit margin. At Blair Mountain the coal mine owners used racism to prevent the workers from organizing but you could only go so far with that when all the miners' faces are covered in soot. So while those who use this claim might not be racist, using racism for financial gain is being just as bad as one.
Another claim of the soft bigotry of low expectations is the use of voter ID laws. A claim by proponents is that we need those to prevent voter fraud (we don't) and people who want to get rid of them are the real racists for thinking black people can't get the voter IDs. But this is breaking everything down to individual choice and you can make voting more difficult for black people by making the IDs that they are less likely to have as a pre-requisite to vote. And this isn't a hypothetical either, in 2016, the Supreme court struck down NCs' voter ID laws claiming it targeted African Americans with "surgical precision". So claiming that people who want to take down the voter ID laws are the real racists is about as ridiculous as saying people who wanted to get rid of the literacy tests at the voting booths during the Jim Crow era were the "real racists" for thinking the black people couldn't read (there was a lot more covert racism in the past than most people seem to realize).
Some have argued that extensive welfare laws have created a culture of dependency among African Americans which is part of the overall narrative that's being pushed that the socioeconomic situation African Americans are in is because of the Democratic policies enacted by the governors. First of all, there are a huge number of factors that lead to high levels of crime and poverty in the cities and with these problems, people are going to support politicians who support policies like sentencing reform and welfare to fight these problems. Saying that Democrats are responsible for this is like saying that because the places where the most pesticides are used have the most pests, the pesticides must be causing the infestation; it completely flips the cause and effect And this isn't just speculation; if we compare states (where all other factors are better controlled for) we can see greater poverty and violent crime rates in red than blue states.
But what of the "culture of dependency" that the welfare system creates such as the notion that it encourages single motherhood in the black community? Well first of all there is no evidence that a culture of dependency outweighs the positives of welfare systems
. Now there are conflicting assessments of whether or not welfare encourages single motherhood but whenever you consider implementing a policy, you have to weigh the benefits and the risks. The risks in this case are that if it turns out that repealing welfare doesn't prevent single motherhood, now you have a whole other parenting issue with absentee mothers because they have to work all the time instead of raising their children. Another argument put fourth against the welfare system is that the tax burden makes it harder for entrepreneurs in black neighborhoods to get businesses going. This is again contradicted by data that shows that countries and states within the US with a stronger social safety net have greater economic mobility. In order to be an entrepreneur you have to take risks but with a strong social safety net, you can afford to be wrong.
Finally, many have leveled claims of reverse racism against BLM citing things like affirmative action and claiming the news jumps all over it when a black man is killed by a white man but not the reverse". Well first of all, the latter isn't true and crime perpetrated by black and Hispanic perpetrators is over represented by the media all the while a crime is less likely to be solved if the victim is black (yes, black communities are simultaneously over and under policed; the worst of both worlds if you still think increasing police presence in black neighborhoods will solve the problem of high crime). You might be asking "wait, are you saying that increased police doesn't mean less crime"? Well there is certainly a correlation but most of these correlations aren't linear but follow a pattern of diminished marginal returns so when you invest more and more in policing, eventually you'll reach a point where investing more will only cause a minute decrease in violent crime rates ON ITS' OWN. But these policies don't exist in a vacuum and investing more in police means you have less to devote to social programs to prevent people from becoming criminals in the first place (good minds can be corrupted by their surroundings; I know that's a hard suppository to insert for people who boil everything to individual choice). But enough of this tangent (I forgot to put it in the last section) back to the issue of reverse racism.
Many have claimed that now we have a system of reverse racism because of policies like affirmative action which disadvantages white and Asian people. Now let me clarify one thing: I'm no fan of affirmative action and I think we should instead have every public school in the country receive the same funding per student along with universal higher education. But if reverse racism really outweighed all other past explicit racist policies with lingering impacts to this day and the implicit ones still active, then we would see African Americans over achieving but this is not the case. Another claim of reverse racism is the proposal to give reparations to African Americans. The claim goes that "you are giving people money because people with the same skin color as them went through slavery and that's racist". But this ignores the fact that slavery wasn't the only discriminatory law passed. There was also 100 yeas of Jim Crow which ended in 1965 (well within living memory). So compensating the people who lived under Jim crow wouldn't be compensating someone because of their race but because they lived under racial discrimination. Also, reparations don't have to be paid to individuals but to governing bodies such as administrative bodies of neighborhoods subjected to red lining whom are still feeling the effects of it. If you think that this is some kind of radical proposal, we compensated the Japanese Americans who were interned in WWII and Native American tribal councils for broken treaties.
5. Would Black People Rather Live In Africa?
A common tactic used to "whitewash" (subtly justify) slavery is to ask what would life be like for African Americans if they were left in Africa. But I think this is omitting another HUGE elephant in the room:
So many people have this idea that Africa was just a wilderness inhabited by hunter-gatherers prior to 1500 AD but if you look at the Archaeological record, we can see developments like pottery, agriculture and metallurgy appear around the same time in West Africa as we do in Western Europe and in the NE part of Sub-Saharan Africa around the time we see it develop in the Balkans. There were also similar population densities up until around 1500 AD. Now it is true that there weren't as many major cities in Sub-Saharan Africa as there were in Europe but that's probably because in the hot, humid climate of Sub-Saharan Africa, there diseases are way more prevalent so it would be best to avoid high population densities.
And if you're going to ask how Africa was able to be "so easily dominated":
In short, after the Songhai empire collapsed, different factions fighting each other were desperate to obtain weapons so they traded them for slaves captured in war. And (for those of you who say that the African diaspora should blame the continental Africans for selling them into slavery) if they didn't trade slaves for weapons, they wouldn't have arms to fight against other factions who would then sell them into slavery and use the weapons to fight the next faction. Kill or be killed, eat or be eaten, enslave or be enslaved. The documentary series is called "Lost Kingdoms of Africa" but a more accurate term would be the forgotten kingdoms because the existence and extent of these civilizations isn't a recent revelation. They've been known about since antiquity but the history has just been ignored.
But what I think is overlooked but is far more relevant than the notion that nothing changed in Africa from 100,000BC-1500AD is that nothing's changed in Africa from decolonization (or at least since the early 2000s) to the present which is equally untrue. To deflect issue away from systemic racism directed at the African diaspora, reactionaries often talk about how much violence and poverty is prevalent in Africa to push the narrative that "black criminality" is due to geneti- ahem* culture. I've had people claim that "if you go to the Congo, they'll cut your hands off and eat you for being white" (oh the irony
) from what it was in 1985-2005. I mean there was an uptick in recent years BUT that includes North Africa which has become embroiled in the "Arab Winter" so take that with a pinch of salt. Also, life expectancy has gone up,). Not sure how that adds up because the slaves had their culture torn away from them but anyway, if you look at the trends in global violence, violence in Africa has gone down
Hunger has almost halved from what it was in the 1990s,
and HIV and extreme poverty have reached a plateau (in fact poverty per capita is going down).
So while Africa may be lagging behind the rest of the world, the average economic growth rate of Sub-Saharan Africa is 6.2% (versus the global average of 3.6%) and it's no where near the brutish cesspit all of these racist imbeciles would have you believe.
And not addressing systemic racism in the US will hurt economic opportunities to be gained by forming relationships with this rapidly developing part of the world.
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