The Rawness

CNN is doing a series called Black in America. Online they had a piece related to this series titled “Black and Single: Is Marriage Really for White People?” This article I especially found interesting because it touched on many of the things I discussed in my last two blog posts explaining why so many modern women have trouble getting married. The TV specials and the linked article were the typical PC excuses and canards that we hear when it comes to this topic: noble black women are working hard and being super-successful in the classroom and the workplace, but the irresponsible black man is just fucking up left and right and as a result we’re stuck with the statistics of 45% of black women having never been married and a 70% illegitimacy rate in the black community.

I read this piece and almost responded on this blog, because I really get tired of how only black men are thrown under the bus in these reports, but black women are lionized to look so consistently noble, self-sacrificing. I’m not claiming black men are blameless here, just that we shouldn’t let black women totally off the hook here either, and we need start challenging some of these accepted premises if we really want to come up with solutions. Part of the problem is that despite all the talk about how black women have it harder than anyone else but in actuality that’s not entirely true. Oftentimes people will be deathly afraid of criticizing a black woman because with a black woman there is the fear of coming off both sexist and racist, which often shields them from criticism from white men, white women and even black men. You can call Paris Hilton a bleached blonde whore all you want in the media or even have two black male comedians make a mainstream movie mocking white women called White Chicks, but you can’t joke that black women are “nappy headed hoes” without a media firestorm. Seriously, picture a movie of two white comics dressed in blackface called “Black Chicks” where they send up all the stereotypical loud sassiness, eyerolling, and side-to-side neck thing people often associate with black women. Could you see that being made?

I started coming up with a lengthy response, but then I found a much better response in this audio podcast by Tariq Nasheed so I decided to just link to that instead. It has some salty language that you probably don’t want to listen to at work, but it is brutal in its lack of sugarcoating, but I think it’s a much more honest discussion of the topic than you’ll find when you look to the politically correct liberal mainstream media and the usual suspects of the popular black intelligentsia for answers. Nasheed really tells it like it is, and I must warn that many will find it offensive.

Another reason I didn’t write a lengthy response to the CNN series was because I think a lot of the writing I’ve done on the blog answers the questions well enough. Especially these four posts:

• Myth of the Ghetto Alpha Male
• Why Black American Chicks Like Thugs
• Why You Can’t Find a Husband Pt. 1
• Why You Can’t Find a Husband Pt. 2

Any response I’d make would end up repeating a lot of the same points I made in those posts anyway, so I figure it would be easier to just link to them.

As for the point about black illegitimacy, I really hate when the mainstream media covers things like this because as progressive liberals they’ll never attack the real culprit: the welfare state. Do you know that in 1940, the black illegitimacy rate was 19 percent, less than what it is now? After the 60s, when Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society welfare programs were introduced, illegitimacy rates in the black community immediately skyrocketed. By the early 1990s black illegitimacy was at 70%, where before the Great Society it was only 22%. Why? Because these welfare programs rewarded single-parent households!

If a woman had children out of wedlock, she got government assistance with housing, food, education and spending money. If a man was living in the house or she got married, she lost these benefits. And case workers would visit to make sure that no man was living in the household. This created an incentive to have children out of wedlock and to stay out of wedlock. And it also created a culture of phantom fathers, men who float in and out to check up on things but never actually live in the household or marry the mothers.

After getting used to this low level of required parental investment, it wasn’t much of a step for them to just stop coming around altogether after a while. The boys who grow up in this environment receive the message from their own households and those of their friends that noninvolvement is socially acceptable for a father. The girls receive the message that they don’t need a man for anything except a sperm donation and that the the government can be their husband and the father to their child. And many times this social pathology stays with black people even as later generations move up the socioeconomic ladder.

As for the incredible gap in accomplishment between black men and black women? Once again, look at entitlement programs. Between black men and black women, who has received a lion’s share of benefits from federal entitlement programs since the 60s? Programs that shielded them from the full consequences of their choices and allowed them to go to get food, schooling, education, housing and childcare? Among men and women of all races in America an accomplishment gap has arisen, but the welfare state, by giving a vast majority of benefits to black women over black men, has made this accomplishment gap even more extreme in the black community.

You won’t find any mention of these factors on CNN though, even if they extended their Black in America series to a full year.

Recommended Reading:

Continuing from this post.

The 3 steps to building compliance, as mentioned before, are:

1. Cred
2. Earn-Reward Method
3. Intermittent Rewards

To get compliance, you first need to establish cred, which is short for credibility, or more specifically, credible authority.  There are many ways to do this, but the easiest way is to just have an authoritative title and position. Owner. President. CEO. Of course that’s not always enough. If you have an authoritative position and title but are known as a pushover, for example, you still lack credible authority because no one believes you will follow through on your threats. It’s the equivalent of pulling out a gun on the streets when everyone knows you’re too much of a pussy to actually use it. People end up testing and challenging you even worse than if you didn’t have the gun at all.

You see this all the time in toxic organizations that have weak management. The subordinates will test and challenge the weak management constantly and you’ll end up with the inmates running the asylum. On the flip side, if you lack any official status or authoritative title yet exude a ton of confidence and charisma, you can still convey credible authority just by the way you carry yourself. Even a violent criminal can exude credible authority just by showing a reckless disregard for rules and societal norms and displaying a willingness to fight or kill you. (This type of credibility is called street cred).  Credible authority boils down to displaying confidence, having the ability to punish and demonstrating a willingness to follow through on said punishment. Punishment can range from anything from simple social snubbing to employment termination to outright violence.

Once you have established some cred, then you have to move on to step 2, which is the Earn-Reward method. I got the term from Tariq Nasheed’s The Mack Within book. What it basically boils down to is that you make someone earn ever reward before you give it to them. The opposite would be Reward-Earn, where you reward someone first in hopes that they’ll work to earn the reward afterwards.

It seems like a ridiculously common sense principle, and we all practice it to a degree, but thanks to compartmentalized thinking we often forget to transfer this principle into every area of our lives and end up getting frustrated. For example, with a child most of us know not to reward the child first and hope for good behavior later because what you end up with is a spoiled, uncooperative child with a sense of entitlement who views such rewards as a birthright. They don’t even feel they need to earn the reward anymore. Same with training dogs, if you reward the dog with a ton of treats first and then try to get it to do tricks and behave afterwards, it’s not going to work. With both children and dogs, good parents and trainers practice Earn-Reward.

Yet many of the same people who grasp this principle when applied to kids and animals won’t transfer this principle elsewhere. For example a guy will buy a girl a drink when they first meet and wonder why he’s not getting the instant cooperation he expected. Or a woman will give a guy sex way too soon and wonder why she’s not getting wined and dined and romanced afterward in the way she expected. Some hippie teacher will give ever kid in class a gold star and give them all an A to boost their self-esteem, then wonder why they aren’t motivated to excel.

A good illustration of Earn-Reward is federal entitlements. Regardless of how you feel about entitlements in general, most people, both liberal and conservative, can at least agree that older entitlements from the New Deal era like the G.I. Bill, Social Security and Unemployment Insurance have been more successful than Lydon Johnson’s Great Society welfare entitlements that came about in the ’60s. What was the difference between the two sets of entitlements? The first set were in accordance with the Earn-Reward method. G.I. Bill: you serve in the army first (earn) and you get money for school later (reward). Social Security: you work at a job for years and pay a small part of your salary (earn) and you get retirement money later (reward). Unemployment insurance: you have a job first and pay a portion of your salary regularly (earn) and you get money during periods of unemployment later (reward). Later benefits were created in accordance with the Reward-Earn method. We’ll give you a welfare check now (reward) and expect you to look for work later (earn). We’ll give you housing for next to nothing now (reward) and expect you to value and improve the property later (earn). And so forth. The problem with Reward-Earn is that it’s in our human nature to both devalue and feel entitled to things that we get without earning, and as a result, we’re less motivated to alter our behavior and try to prove ourselves worthy of said reward. If anything, we start demanding more rewards.

I touched on this principle during pimp week, when I described how a pimp won’t have sex with one of his prostitutes unless she pays him first. It’s a cardinal rule of pimping. If he breaks it, he’s moved into the Reward-Earn method and the whole dynamic will begin to slowly unravel. If you want any type of compliance in any relationship, whether it’s boss/employee, boyfriend/girlfriend, parent/child, donor/beneficiary or just plain friends, you have to demand the correct behavior first and only then can you reward. If you get in the habit of rewarding first and expecting compliance later, you are screwed. In fact, once you set a reward-earn dynamic, it’s almost impossible to reverse the sense of entitlement you’ve created, and your chances of fixing the damage are close to zero. At that point you’re better off just terminating the old relationship and establishing a fresh one under the right dynamic.

Another crucial element to the Earn-Reward method is to punish disrespect. It’s not enough to just reward cooperation, you also have to clearly punish lack of cooperation and disrespect. Otherwise you send a message to the person that such behavior is tolerable. Avoiding negative results is an even more powerful motivator to people than gaining positive rewards, so it’s crucial that you punish bad behavior as well as reward good behavior. Even if the punishment is something small in response to a trivial transgression, you have to do something and not just let it slide. If you get stood up on a date for example, don’t just pick up the phone and act business as usual the next day like nothing happened. Avoid the person for a while, or briefly, but clearly, mention that you didn’t appreciate being stood up, and then move on to another topic. Maybe make the person work a little harder to get you back out again. Or if it was done in an extremely disrespectful or cavalier way, never go out with them again. Just always do something. Never let any form of disrespect go unchecked. It sends a subconscious signal to the transgressor, to obsevers, and most importantly to yourself that it is okay to disrespect you. And that’s a message you do not want to internalize.

Next time is the final component of the compliance recipe, intermittent rewards.

Recommended Reading:

Ghetto men have a reputation for being tough guys.  To the untrained eye it may seem that the problems many ghetto guys have with violence and the legal system are a result of them being textbook alpha males. But I think that’s not quite the case. I think these problems actually come about not totally because of manhood run wild but because a combination of testosterone running wild and the feminine side running wild.

The black community in general has a high illegitimacy rate.  And I bet if you isolated the illegitimacy rates to just the ghetto, the percentage of single mother homes would be even higher. As a result, the ghetto tends to be a very matriarchal community. There aren’t many men, and most of the men you do find tend to be young. As Tariq Nasheed says in his book The Mack Within, you hardly see older men in the hood. This is because when most guys get past a certain age in the hood, they have either worked their way out, gone to jail, entered the military or died from violence or drugs.  The few old men you do still see in the hood tend to be burnouts.  So not only do young ghetto guys lack fathers to instruct them in how to be men, but they also lack older male authority figures outside their family to look up to (most teachers are female too) in their neighborhood.

Like most young men, they have testosterone surges making them aggressive and competitive.  However they don’t have reliable older men to teach them how to channel this testosterone-fueled aggression positively, and this creates an insecurity in their male identity and causes them to create their own hyperexaggerated ideal of what a man should be. Supermacho, obnoxious, fearless to the point of knuckleheaded, overaggressive…basically the parody of manhood we see in gangster rap. It’s overcompensation to the worst degree.

But even though they are doing their best to be supernigga, they still end up doing things in a feminine way because feminine influences are most of what they know.  Most of their role models and involved family members are women, and the few men in their lives were likely raised by only women too. And it shows in how they handle conflict: grudges are held forever, they never know how to let anything slide, they think primarily with emotion and are prone to outbursts, drama and confrontation and most importantly, they don’t know how to choose their battles.

True male behavior isn’t being a drama queen, being highly prone to emotional outbursts and holding onto grudges; true male behavior is picking your battles, knowing when to fight and when to let things slide, analyzing things calmly and logically and having discipline over your moods and emotions and exercising emotional restraint. There are times when it’s acceptable to lose your shit and times when it’s not.  These are things that a true mature male influence teaches you, and such influences have almost disappeared completely from the hood.

A chick in the hood can get away with all the drama queen meltdowns and public displays of emotion and confrontation because most people, guys and girls, don’t feel as threatened by a woman and are more likely to let her just yap without serious repercussions. Or at worst just argue back and never let it escalate to a physical level (although it does happen on occasion). When guys are the ones melting down and getting overly emotional and confrontational, it’s a lot scarier and it invites a much more serious retaliation, because now you have the extra ingredients of male size. more muscle and a whole lot of testosterone, which means escalation into serious, possibly fatal, violence is a real possibility. That’s why a society of men learning to manage conflict and emotions from women is a disaster waiting to happen, because what’s acceptable for a woman in this case can get a young man arrested or killed.

Sure a lot of male tendencies are going to show on the surface. These guys are young and are bursting with testosterone after all. But look at a lot of the other behaviors that are there also. Sitting on the stoop getting their hair braided by other girls. Long t-shirts that go down to the kneecaps and look like skirts. Colorful clothes. Obsession with fashion, shopping, shoes and accessorizing. Love of jewelry. Grooming obsessions that would put metrosexuals to shame. The more you think about it, the more you’ll notice and come up with your own examples.

Recommended Reading:

• Don’t let the cover of Tariq Nasheed’s The Mack Within fool you, this book drops some serious knowledge:
• Also of interest is his brutally frank dating advice book for women Play or Be Played: What Every Female Should Know About Men, Dating, and Relationships, which I highly recommend: