[BretLudwig]

Black Dependence

"When offered the opportunity of return to Africa as a solution to the
issue of racial incompatibility, Frederick Douglas was keen to make it
known that blacks had an investment in the culture then current in the
U.S., and that the milieu present domestically was to be preferred to that
of Africa. The implications are obvious. Even the conditions wrought by the
experience of slavery (which it is claimed were wholly detrimental to the
prosperity of blacks) were superior to the conditions of native Africans.
Offered the opportunity to create, ab initio, a nation after their own
image, post slavery conditions of the U.S. were to be preferred.

Black post-slavery culture in the U.S. cannot be described as a black
culture ab ovo, as existed in Africa, but rather it was wholly hybridized,
bringing with it all the (apparent) benefits of the slavery experience. It
is an open question, though, whether the experience of slavery in and of
itself engendered this improvement. Slavery was ubiquitous among native
Africans. Indeed, through much of Africa, the most recognized form of
currency was the slave, male and female. African native tribesmen had been
taking prisoners in war and enslaving them for many centuries before the
slave trade ever cast its shadow on African soil. This being the case, the
subsequent question naturally arises why the benefits to culture of the
slavery experience did not occur in African slavery, but rather only in
the agricultural slavery of the U.S.

The control in this thought experiment is the presence of White culture in
the one case, and the absence of it in the other. Douglas was tacitly
admitting what few today will acknowledge. Namely, the conditions of
slavery and post-slavery culture were to be preferred over any and all
conditions in Africa, even an African territory to do with as they saw
fit, and this merely due to the presence of White culture. There is no
more candid admission of the essentially dependent and parasitic nature of
North American black culture than this statement of Dougas. One thing is
clear, the abject nature of African slavery is incommensurable with the
status of the African slave as a chattel of the white plantation owner.
Even today, in post-colonial, post-aparthied, post-white Africa, as
Zimbabwe,South Africa, and Sudan descend into chaos, hunger, crime, and
internecine bloodshed, the end of contact with white culture, or active
opposition to it, has left an undistinguished record. Meanwhile, blacks in
the U.S. have reached heights unknown to the black race through the
paternalistic impulses of whites.

Throughout the civil rights era, when blacks were given the opportunity to
choose between the separatism and supremacism of Malcolm X and The Nation
of Islam, or the Black Panther Party, time and again the large majority
chose the integrationist, accommodationist Michael (Martin Luther)
Kings approach. Kings movement had as its objective the seizure of
political and social power from white society, but not as a prelude to
exodus from it into a €œmillennium€� of black freedom, but,
paradoxically, to live cheek by jowl with the very race that had been
responsible for their captivity in America. Is this not a tacit admission
of the utter rejection of real black independence by blacks themselves.
Had King joined with Malcolm X and pressed for black independence, the
social and political climate of the time would have ensured a hearing of
such a proposal. Having chosen the path of accommodation, we yet see
that, far from adopting the €œcolor blind€� integrationism of the
slogan-wielding €œcivil rights€� movement, the preference for black
representation by blacks is itself a form of separatism and racism that
belies the rhetoric of the equality mandate.

Nor can it be persuasively argued that the black independence movement has
no history or legitimacy in the black community. Prominent blacks Martin
Delaney in the 19th century, and Marcus Garvey in the early 20th, publicly
called for African Americans to undertake a return to Africa and establish
themselves in Liberia. This was also the goal of Abraham Lincoln, patron
saint of American blacks, who in freeing the slaves also readily admitted
their incompatibility with White culture. A century-and-a-half later,
blacks largely remain incompatible with white culture, and in self-imposed
segregation. Yet another notable black public figure, Benjamin €œPap€�
Singleton, looked to form separatist colonies in the American West. The
Nation of Islam, much more subtly, continually makes public overtures of
support for an independent black state on American soil. Even within the
mainstream black community, gradually rising black separatism holds that
blacks would be better served by exclusively black schools and businesses,
as well as by black local politicians and police.

This mainstream black separatism is sharply opposed by
anti-segregationists and integrationists within the African American
community, who generally insist that blacks can and should advance within
the larger American society and call on them to achieve such goals largely
through the use of political activism and capitulations from the majority
white community (if it can be called such) in the form of affirmative
action, with some increasingly marginalized figures (typically referred to
by militant black racists as €œUncle Toms") suggesting that personal
responsibility, personal improvement, educational achievement, and
business involvement, are the best means. The unfortunate truth is that
the latter course of developing personal responsibility among blacks is
being rejected in the main by the average black who looks on his highly
successful and articulate black brethren who refuse to espouse the race
demagoguery so prominent among them as compromised figures, lacking
€œstreet cred€�, or credibility within the mainstream black community.
The fact remains that beneath the rhetoric of equality, blacks want two
things: dependence on what Steve Sailer called the soft bigotry of lowered
expectations for their prosperity, and a culture of grievance that opposes
and alienates both those who call for black independence and those who
call for the reinvigoration of the sense of personal responsibility among
blacks.

The overwhelming dominance of such resentment toward €œsold out€� blacks
betrays a lingering, intractable, almost instinctive separatism that enjoys
an uneasy truce with the integrationist approaches of the more €œeffete€�
forms of black activism. But it is an incomplete separatism that still
envisions economic reliance on whites, while black culture is maintained
as something distinct from white. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, who
maintained his separatist sympathies until May of 1964, may be said to
personify the opposition between the two views, although it has recently
come to light that even the sainted Dr. King entertained separatist
thoughts toward the end of his foreshortened life. We can only conjecture
in what direction he might have led the black community had he lived. One
suspects that despite his increasing sympathies for the separatist path,
the exigencies of the realpolitik with the black community would have
prevailed. After all, it is a fool who does not know where his bread is
buttered. As for the Nation of Islam to which Malcolm X belonged until his
turn from separatism, despite the anti-white venom spewed by its leader
Louis Farrakhan, even today it calls for a return to self-reliance among
blacks. The cynic in me is tempted to believe that this is why the NOI is
not more popular than it is.

Returning to King, why would the leader of black integrationist activism
in the 1960s take such a radical turn of thought? For the same reason that
€œpolite€� black separatists do today. Blacks are not achieving parity
with whites, despite monumental efforts to close the €œachievement
gap,€� a fact which is an embarrassment to those who claim broad-based
biological equality of the races, a notion which science is rapidly
undermining. Recently, Liam Julian at National Review online called
studies that categorize results by race €œoffensive and useless.€� It
seems that the formerly conservative National Review has joined the camp
that desires desperately to hide the achievement gap until the presence of
minorities in white schools erases it through the pressure for lowered
academic standard, one supposes for the sake of racial reconciliation that
blacks dont want, since their interests are not vested in racial peace,
but only in white submission. As the persistent performance gap seen among
blacks (and Hispanics, we hasten to add) continues to underscore biological
racial inequality in a way that black dominance in sports has never been
able to do, the calls for black separatism will grow louder. We can only
hope that our €œleaders€� are listening, a highly unlikely prospect."


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