I have been provided with several rations’ worth of bitter amusement over the last few years , when reading various news stories, especially those concerning incidents of murder, rape, mayhem and property crime – most of which can be laid at the door of a certain violently dysfunctional urban demographic – and then comparing the sympathetic manner in which that specific demographic is presented in pop entertainment.
Yes, just as the sun rises in the east, one can absolutely count on black urban youth being cast as hapless, misunderstood yet endearing rascals, automatically the prime suspect in a murder actually committed by the prep-school son of a white Wall Street magnate, or a deranged Christian minister, or some middle-class white schlub with a dirty secret – as is usually wrapped up in the final ten minutes of an hour-long episode.
Just as certainly, one may also count upon reading the headline about a mass brawl at an entertainment venue, fast-food place, business or concert, a random violent street shooting/stabbing or a particularly nasty street beat-down … nine out of ten, one scrolls down to the story, or the pictures accompanying the story showing or describing the participants in brief detail, and says to oneself, “Self … yeah, just what I thought.”
Everybody knows that so-called urban black youths are the ones responsible for committing a staggering percentage of reported and unreported violent crime: murder, rape, robbery-assault or just plain assault. Everybody knows, except perhaps foreign viewers doing an epic binge of American crime drama. And almost everyone would prefer to deny this knowledge publicly. Generally, whites – especially the more prosperous whites in government, academia or media – don’t want to be tarred with the brush of accusations of racism by others in pointing this out or even admitting to acting preemptively on that knowledge or on the advice of John Derbyshire.
Prosperous and middle-class blacks are, I think, simultaneously embarrassed by the murderous antics of the black underclass and confounded by their own success in rising above it, and in doing so they have somehow lost authenticity. Getting an education, making a good living, and creating a functional, affectionate family is somehow “acting white” and to be scorned by “real” black folk – the urban black underclass. Somehow, they have become the element setting the tone of the black minority culture. Which is purely ironic, as the black urban underclass has become everything that 19th Century slaveholding racists insisted that blacks were: ignorant, illiterate, dissolute, violent at the slightest provocation and crudely lascivious. (Frederick Douglass must be spinning in his grave like a Black & Decker drill these days.) Thomas Sowell wrote an essay positing that the black underclass picked up these unsavory traits wholesale from the white southern rednecks; a valid point, but the white redneck underclass hardly can be said to be steering white culture generally. Instead, we repeat stories of Florida Man’s antics and snicker heartlessly.
But the urban black underclass has a powerful death-grip on black American culture, demonstrated by the new, shiny AOC-like star in the Democrat Party, Jasmine Crockett. Rep. Crockett, elected by a largely black district in Dallas, Texas to the US House of Representatives was the recipient of a privileged upbringing, including private-school education and college. But she seems to find it necessary to present in public as a semi-literate, semi-articulate, potty-mouthed ‘hood ratlette with a resentful chip on her shoulder the size of the battleship Missouri. Nothing like the educated, articulate person that she really ought to be, given that background. That’s the other sad irony – that successful, prosperous leaders find it somehow necessary to take social cues from the worst and dysfunctional. Again – Frederick Douglass … et cetera. Too late for her parents to get a refund of the tuition to that nice Catholic girls’ school, I guess.
If there is any chance of positive change in the black community, it will have to come from inside the demographic. There’s nothing that outsiders can do, or want to do, or would even be welcome. All that is possible for us –white, Hispanic, Asian, whatever – to do is to quietly avoid the dangerous demographic to the best degree that we can. Comment as you wish, and dare.
“All that is possible for us –white, Hispanic, Asian, whatever – to do is to quietly avoid the dangerous demographic to the best degree that we can.”
I have lived in Kansas City MO ever since I retired from the USAF in 2014. From Day One I decided to live on the north side of the Missouri River. I live in Clay County, the second most populous county in KC after Jackson County (KC is in three counties, but Platte County is the least populous , with ~106k people…). From wiki:
Percentage of Jackson County that’s black: 22% (out of ~717k people)
Percentage of Clay County that’s black: 7% (out of ~253k people)
‘Nuff said. Crime isn’t nonexistent in Clay County, but damn near every time the news reports a shooting, I look up the location and way more often than not it’s in Jackson County. My friend’s son coined a term several years ago when they were driving through a sketchy part of town: “Dad, are we in Hooliganville?” That’s stuck with us ever since…the bulk of Hooliganville is south of the river.
I would not assume that Crockett is ignoring the good Sisters in pursuing her ghetto pretensions. I’m sure that they are just as woke with probably even less accountability as their public school counterparts. Wouldn’t want to cramp her authentic style.
I admire Thomas Sowell, but he is full of beans on this one. If dere be all dey sheeeit motherbleeper po white folk talkin like dat then — where the hell are they? Did they evaporate? We KNOW how black slaves sounded, for Christ’s loving sake. They were recorded in the 1930’s as they were getting old and dying, and that vital portion of our nation’s history was slipping out of living memory, so a concerted attempt was made to preserve their testimony:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9kPg1nQ8KU
Yes, they sound a little like characters written by Uncle Remus. But they are perfectly intelligible. Hell, they speak better than a lot of modern Americans. Ebonics and the gun-wielding trash-talking no-impulse-control culture that goes with it is a modern urban thing, if we define ‘modern’ as the end of WW2 forward. Look at the national crime rates ion the 1930’s, when black people genuinely were persecuted in some places and lynched and so forth. Did they commit half the farking murders in the country? No. Their postmodern spawn do. And ethnocentric middle class blacks excuse it, and even endorse it. And no one dares contradict them.
If Fredric Douglass could see what had become of his people and his nation he would put a rifle in his mouth and blow his brains out.
Didn’t Scott Adams get nuked for saying exactly this?
Phil, Sowell wasn’t commenting on black speech, he very specifically was talking about actions and cultures. He wrote an entire book on this and has given several interviews about it too.
You’re responding to a point entirely made within your head. Don’t be like Twitter.
Two words — “Vibrant Diversity”. I can live out the rest of my life without seeing it EVER AGAIN.
I’ll probably get flamed for this.
We’re not allowed to acknowledge that Charles Murray raised a very valid argument in his book The Bell Curve. He points out the differences in IQ among different demographics. Smarts are not distributed equally among the population, but to acknowledge this is racist. Not everyone has the chops to be a rocket scientist, no matter how fancy the schools.
Murray posits that the average black IQ is 84. Now do a YouTube search on “Jordan Peterson most terrifying IQ statistic.” Peterson notes that the military invested a lot into IQ research as a means of identifying potential leaders, and as a screen for fitness in military service in general. He notes that the military determined that an IQ of 84 is the lower threshold; below that point, there is nothing a person below that cutoff can be trained to do. And as Peterson notes, that sub-84 cohort comprises 10% of the population.
I admit there are issues with IQ determination, but it’s a useful data point for discussion. But we can’t have that discussion.
(Also, do a search on “IQ by country,” and consider where a lot of our illegals are coming from. Are they a good fit for a First World, high-tech nation?)
I read a stat a decade or more ago that said for that year, using FBI stats, a black was 12 times more likely to murder a white than a white was to murder a black. Given a ratio that extreme, it likely changes with small differences in the numbers, so I figured 10X was probably a usable figure.
Imagine what would happen to any public official or figure who mentioned that stat. Career devastation. Some truths can never be told.
In 2007, two young people from our community in Knoxville were randomly kidnapped, tortured, raped, and murdered over a period of several days. Five thugs just having fun. If the races of the victims and the vicious perps had been reversed, the crimes against Christian and Newsome would be among the most famous crimes in American history. Instead, readers here likely never heard of them.
I once got death threats for advocating civil rights. I think the pendulum has swung too far. If we all care about truth and justice, we need to start being honest and stop the self-censorship.
Pennsylvania has 67 counties. Roughly 90% of homicides occur in iust two counties that contain about 20% of the state’s population. They are Philadelphia County and Allegheny County (Pittsburgh). Homicides in the other 65 counties average out to about one homocide per year per county, with some having small clusters of two or three per year in small Democratic cities and others having zero. Still, it works out to about one per county year after year. We are demographically deprived in my own Appalachian county. 99% percent of us are white. There hasn’t been a homocide in a decade. Most people around here expect to never experience or even witness a crime. Go figure.
The issue with Jasmine Crockett is not that she is uneducated.
The issue with Jasmine Crockett is that she is educated.
She is forty four, and the education that the white forty or so cohort got was often intended to produce cripples, and intended to produce paranoid fruitcakes.
The ‘mainstream’ theory in a lot of the modern behaviorist tertiary schools is that ‘you’ were witched by some people of the ancient past.
Manner of speech can simply be a tactic.
More important is the ‘strategy’ of how one really sees the world.
There are also plenty of cargo cultists who are vicious lunatics, and also present themselves in public with decorum and polished tertiary school speech.
Educated sometimes means someone of the older culture, who willfully and knowingly takes part in the basic deal of American society, but, sadly, it is also often used for the academic henwit magical thinkers who have made themselves outside of the bounds of a civil society.
The education sold to the forty or so cohort was intended to suck in everyone, and make them insane. There are straight white males in that cohort who are very unwell, thanks to how they were trained, and what they took in with it.
I’m not sure whether Crockett is especially bad or not.
And if I had gone through my teen years with a complete license to bully, I would possibly be dead of something stupid by now. The crime rate stuff can simply be explained as ‘anti-racist’ criminal justice reform being entirely white supremacist in effects.
Phil Ossiferz Stone
April 11, 2025 at 1:48 am
I admire Thomas Sowell, but he is full of beans on this one. If dere be all dey sheeeit motherbleeper po white folk talkin like dat then — where the hell are they?
You really should read his book about it. It’s a lot broader critique of things like “honor culture” than it is of ebonics and such. However, even if it’s not the same language, there are distinct speech patterns preserved in Appalachia in very similar manner to the insular culture of black urbania.
Also, btw, Sowell is speaking of the actual ethnographic “rednecks”, not just bubbas in rural America.
To GBW: I read the book and I agree with you in general. However, I hasten to point out that here in the Appalachian hill country of central Pennsylvania we sound nothing like the referenced stereotype. Hey, I would just prefer not to be tarred by that brush.
I read somewhere long ago that one of the features of the immediate Post-Civil War years in the US was freed slaves making enormous efforts and very long journeys seeking to reunite with their wives and children who had been sold to other plantations in the years before the war. There were many admirable people among the slaves.
Then there was the Great Depression, which was very hard on many people — and probably hardest on People of Color. And yet there was no massive explosion in crime.
What this suggests is that the current problem with the UnderClass is a problem that Lefties (well-meaning or not) got started by subsidizing Out of Wedlock births. That destroyed the former family culture for people of many different backgrounds, and left too many young males with no father figures. If we want to fix the problem, we could start by bringing back orphanages and stopping subsidizing single mothers.
“What this suggests is that the current problem with the UnderClass is a problem that Lefties (well-meaning or not) got started by subsidizing Out of Wedlock births. That destroyed the former family culture for people of many different backgrounds, and left too many young males with no father figures. If we want to fix the problem, we could start by bringing back orphanages and stopping subsidizing single mothers.”
To correct a problem, one must first admit that a problem exists, then perform analysis to determine the best potential path(s) to correction and resolution.
Without that first step failure is guaranteed; indications are that it may also be the desired outcome.
I chose my nom de cursor based on this quote:
“It is the rare fortune of these days that one may think what one likes and say what one thinks.”
? Tacitus, The Histories
It’s good to live in times when you can speak your mind. It’s been a few years…..