This essay was written as a response to a Quillette article entitled “James Baldwin and the Trouble with Protest Literature”.
A great, well-written essay. I love: “Put differently, the overemphasis on race in American life, culture, and politics is actually a continuation of and a complement to America’s legacy of racism rather than a departure from it.” And this: “But protest for protest’s sake without a definable purpose—the pursuit of conditions under which such protest would cease to be necessary—is nothing but a symbolic gesture, albeit one that can produce deleterious real world consequences. It feels good to its participants, but, in a stroke of tragic irony, does the most harm to the very people it’s intended to help by permanently plastering them to their suffering without instilling the internal and external resources necessary to overcome it.”
But quite apart from the observation that advocating for social change through creative writing can undermine the bond between writer and reader, negating the inherent reciprocity of allowing a window into ones most intimate thoughts and experiences, it can cause deeper problems. It may well displace an invitation to empathy with the attitude of the scold- like lecturing the reader on their weight, their appearance or their lifestyle but there is ample evidence to suggest that every, or at least most, attempts by White Liberals to help African Americans in the decades since the Civil Rights era have actually caused more harm than good.
I think there must be something poisonous in the need to make amends motivated by White Guilt and White Atonement. It seems to invite an attitude of White Paternalism which, despite noble intentions, only leads to Liberals acting as though Black people cannot achieve anything without their help. History would beg to differ, because despite the most awful and omnipresent racism that we in the modern era can scarcely imagine, African Americans managed to achieve amazing material advancement in the decades following reconstruction- building Black businesses, Churches, communities and colleges- educating their way out of poverty and towards proud self-sufficiency.
Unfortunately, African American self-emancipation through struggle seemed to flatline somewhere in the 50s and 60s, and one has to wonder why. It is easy for conservatives to blame welfare dependence and the dissolution of the Black family. With the former it is difficult to argue that the world would be a much better place for African Americans materially, if The War on Poverty has instead been construed as a negative income tax which didn’t penalise both employment and fatherhood through the threatened withdrawal of welfare for either. And whilst it is difficult to dispute that fathers in the home improve outcomes across a range of metrics as varied as emotional health and wellbeing, cognitive development and motor skills and even longevity enhancing and long-term health improving telomere length, it would appear that fathers in the home are not a primary driver of upward social mobility.
According to research performed by Dr Raj Chetty and his team at Stanford, a high proportion of fathers in the community in which a child grows up is the single biggest driver for upward social mobility, more important even than quality of education. There are plenty of reasons why this is probably the case. Fathers in the community likely have a moderating influence on teenage male peer groups- other studies show that as fathers reduce, male juvenile violence goes up. Fathers also probably represent an iterative model of potential life paths with which a teenage boy might see himself in a happy, productive life as an electrician, a roofer, a chef or a firefighter.
Differential rates of crime involvement and unemployment by ethnicity might point to the fact that fathers act as a social safety net for the 50% or more of Whites, Latinos and African Americans who don’t do well at school, giving those with a community of productive fathers an IRL network of potential job referrals, references and social outreach into employment, whilst their less fortunate counterparts wallow without help or opportunity, and often turn to a life of crime. And beneath it all is the uncomfortable observation that when teenage boys don’t have admirable male role models to seek out for the purposes of status validation and competition, they tend to seek out far less savoury sorts who in turn treat them as candidates for gang grooming.
It’s interesting that several years ago, when I researched the controversial proactive policing, or Broken Windows, with which the Left seems to have such a problem, I found that whilst most countries which managed to keep their violent crime figures low utilised proactive policing, there was one outlier- Germany. In my most recent thread I posit that the reason why Germany is able to operate with low crime and only reactive, problem-orientated policing is because they have instituted what amounts to a universal male surrogacy program for every teenage boy who doesn’t do well in school. Nearly 60% of German schoolchildren ultimately undertake some form of vocational training, and given the types of vocations boys tend to select, it is highly likely that most of them find themselves under the supervision and tutelage of ideal male role models.
Watching the excellent documentary recently produced by Shelby Steele and his son, What Killed Michael Brown?, I was struck by how universal many of the systems deployed by the post-war liberal consensus planners, with many of the worst policies implemented in America, also mirrored in the UK. We too instituted welfare programs which disincentivised fatherhood. We too built huge indiscriminate housing estates and complexes which acted as amplifiers for social ills- although in our case German bombing during the war created much of space needed, and we didn’t need to demolish neighbourhoods with high rates of Black home ownership. Admittedly we didn’t recruit agents to go out to African American mothers and offer them a steady source of cheques provided they didn’t have a man in the house, but the incentives were there, nonetheless.
The only difference between the American and British experience was that the British form of liberal paternalism extended to the white working class, which could now more aptly be described as an underclass. Because this demographic was largely submerged in the larger demographic of White British, the types of remedial programs meant to alleviate the worst effect of truly awful government policies were slow to come into being. Government had no incentive to act swiftly to cover its mistakes, because the problem was largely invisible. Today the rate of university attendance for white working class boys is 9%. For girls the percentage is a still terrible 14%.
One can still see the legacy effects of poorly conceived social policies, because when the British compile their data on achievement for their national exams which every child takes at 16, it is still possible to view success rates by ethnicity and with the added distinction that one see the breakdown within groups between whether the children were eligible for free school meals. Interestingly there is almost no difference between results amongst Chinese British schoolchildren from the bottom 20% and the top 20%, with almost no difference also found amongst Indian British schoolchildren from Hindu backgrounds. Needless to say, both groups also possess very high rates of fatherhood within their communities.
Part of the problem with the modern Social Justice formulation is that it relies too heavily on the assumption that al disparities must be down to systemic or structural racism, and a large portion of this is caused by implicit or unconscious bias. This blinds us diagnostically to the real root causes of particular problems. Don’t get me wrong, implicit bias is real- it shows most readily in affinity bias in hiring, but to assert that it is all of the problem or even most of it, can prevent real progress. Worse still, it offer the children of privileged upper middle class Whites an easy option for assuaging their class guilt. All they need do is protest, become allies and vote Left- when sixty years of politics hasn’t helped at all. Coleman Hughes has written eloquently on the subject of The Case for Black Optimism, but it has to be said that the story of Black Progress since the early 2000s is one of hardworking African Americans joining the middle class through their own effort, rather than White Paternalism lifting them up through government help.
When was the last time you heard good news about the state of black America? Given the way the topic is reported in the media, you could be forgiven for not remembering. Most will be familiar with …
The second problem with a Critical Race Theory which divides the world into oppressors and oppressed is that whilst it seeks to give us an opportunity to atone for our sins, it also teaches us to find fault in others. This is a natural invitation to invoke group social dynamics to use force or coercion. If the problem is other people why not force our employers to use standard diversity training? Well for one thing, it doesn’t work- and is actually proven to impair efforts at African American inclusion and promotion. Many have suggested that resentment might be the root cause of this problem, but I think there is another answer. Simply put, people thrive at completing tasks when they pursue goals voluntarily and where there are incentives in terms of social status enhancement and promotion. But when the tool used is obligatory compulsion, lip-service is the more usual response, with what should be a high priority is relegated to one of any number of maintainer tasks, where the right noises are more important than achievement.
This article from Harvard Review shows why standard diversity programs fail. There is a clear delineation between the voluntary and compulsory. Status enhancing mentoring and recruitment participation pushes managers to become invested in the people they recruit and mentor, because they have skin in the game, whilst compulsory systems cause disengagement and only peripheral participation. By finding fault in others, we naturally tilt work environments towards compulsion and away from far more productive and beneficial voluntary participation in change. Perhaps the saddest thing of all which the article points to, is the fact that many White managers are willing, even eager ,to become mentors, but the lack of an option for formalised relationships, probably causes fear of the social censure which might result from constructive criticism meant as feedback, but perceived as a slight.
It is interesting that most of the types of help which been forthcoming have focused on assuaging White Guilt and the need for White Atonement. White people made it all about us, when it really wasn’t. We could have become detectives tracking down the root causes of social problems with a view to fixing them, or been motivated by the spirit of agapē which Martin Luthor King so passionately believed in. Agapē is the highest form of love or charity in which finding the love of God for man and of man for God. Using this underlying ethos we might have invoked the essence of brotherly love and instituted an approach which looked at the betterment of others through the lens of class, treating race as the increasingly irrelevancy which it doubtless would have become.
But instead we swept our problems under the rug, like an embarrassing secret which we were too intellectually lazy to fix. The liberal with his inherent dislike of criticising those less fortunate than himself studiously ignored problems within communities as much as he was able, and with his implicit dislike of authority and discipline, failed to institute well-ordered public schools which might have empowered greater social mobility. The conservative with his inherent distrust of government solutions, and believing that the only true road to empowerment is through personal autonomy and responsibility was rendered impotent to help, other than offering vague exhortations about the value of family and faith.
It turns out he was right, but this ignores the fact that people need basic ingredients in their lives to aid family formation, with marriage fast becoming a luxury good in America- and solutions as varied as youth reform, vocational training, mentoring both in the workplace and the community and any number of other approaches might have worked. Apart from anything else, conservatives are naturals at eliminating government waste, and their participation could have been vital in making sure that money was spent efficiently and effectively, on solutions that worked.
America needs a reset on this issue because whilst activism is great for bringing an issue to the fore and mobilising support it is unlikely to produce the fine-tuned solutions which could actually help, especially when it is predisposed to see racism and implicit bias as the primary driver of racial inequality, which it is clearly not- at least not in the way we conventionally think about racism. Because we cannot ignore that America’s troubled history of trying to help, to assuage guilt over one of its two Original Sins might have been well-intentioned in cause, but it has certainly created a legacy which is racist in effect. By unintentionally (and intentionally) removing fathers from Black communities and creating housing policies which were the equivalent of ‘kettling’, the desire to help has caused what to some may seem irreparable harm.
Perhaps it is better to look back to our promises of old for solutions. Because by any modern sense of equivalency 40 acres and a mule was meant as a means not of imbuing wealth but proving vocation. For too long the West has myopically focused on who has the wealth and power at the top of society without realising that wealth is built from the bottom- just ask China with an economic miracle largely powered by labour and capital which only derived a measly profit of 6% at best. The doctor, the accountant, the lawyer and the entrepreneur cannot enjoy lifestyles at the top of society unless they have customers who can pay their bills on time and afford to eat out and indulge.
In this sense 40 acres and a mule really is to be found by vocation, and in 2019 before the pandemic there were over 7 million well-paying jobs in vocational fields sitting vacant. This is not to say that vocational training should be used as an alternative to university, although Peter Turchin might well have a point about the overproduction of elites, but more a plea that the West finally begins to pay attention to those kids who don’t well at school. Because this focus, above all else, could be the silver bullet which finally addresses the ‘wicked’ problem of racial inequality. It might also require a plan B alternative to welfare which converts unemployment insurance into a negative income tax payment, but I will leave that for another time.
Most kind!
Geary, more people must see this. For the good of society.