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:

…given that I identify with a few too many of these behaviors.

(Yes, I know I am the millionth person to link to this site in the past few weeks. Bite me.)

A lot of the behaviors described on this site can also be found discussed in more depth in the book Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There by David Brooks.

If you want to know more about the book Bobos In Paradise, this review by Robert Locke covers it pretty well. The opening paragraphs from the review:

Bobos, or bourgeois bohemians, are, to put it bluntly, the new establishment. Bill Clinton is a bobo. So is anyone else who has the income and power that only fat old men in oil paintings used to have, but who also has the mores, personal tastes, and culture of a 60′s radical college student. This is easy to laugh at, but it is not a superficial phenomenon. Brooks has put his finger on the central weirdness of our current ruling class: they have blithely combined the power and wealth of the old establishment with the cultural and intellectual trappings of its supposed mortal enemy, the counterculture. The two camps that have seemed to be warring for America’s soul since the 60′s have not just reached a detente, they have merged. This is, of course, exactly what you get when you send your best and brightest to universities where bohemian ideals are taught and then release them into a world where the realities of material life inexorably impel them into moneyed positions. As the author puts it,

“This is an elite that has been raised to oppose elites. They are affluent yet opposed to materialism. They may spend their lives selling yet worry about selling out. They are by instinct anti-establishmentarian yet somehow sense they have become a new establishment.”

Brooks describes in great detail the bobo lifestyle, which one can visualize most easily by thinking of its characteristic locales: Greenwich Village, NY; Berkeley, CA; Boulder, CO; Cambridge, MA; Georgetown, DC; Austin, TX; Portland, OR; Seattle, WA; Santa Fe, NM; Ann Arbor, MI; Madison, WI; Athens, GA; Wilmington, NC; Missoula, MT; Burlington, VT; Princeton, NJ, South Beach, FL. This is the world of cappuccino and Volvos, Sierra Club memberships and private schools. Bobos love to live in places that have artiness as their mythical identity but seven-figure real estate prices as their reality. Brooks calls these latte towns or neighborhoods.

The essence of the bobo lifestyle is being rich while pretending you’re not. Bobos love luxury as much as anyone else with five senses, but because they have been educated in a leftist critique of it, they would suffer damage to their self-image if they openly and honestly imbibed it. Therefore their lives are a peculiar dance, whose subtle application of abstract rules to everyday life would boggle the mind of an ultra-Orthodox Jew, in which they seek to indulge luxury in ways that somehow, according to the bobo code, don’t count.

They employ a number of strategies to this end. For example, the cult of the Absurdly Expensive Ordinary Object, in which the bobo pays $75 for a gardening trowel or $3.50 for a cup of coffee. The first item escapes the stigma of yuppie materialism, which bobos despise, because gardening is a) environmentalist and b) manual labor, and the second because it is only a cup of coffee, after all, and therefore cannot possibly constitute a luxury. Another strategy can be called the Magical Power of Progressive Association: anything, however luxurious, that is somehow associated with progressive politics is thereby purified of the despised taint of consumerism. Thus the fattiest ice-cream on the market, Ben & Jerry’s, survives this usual bobo no-no (they are usually health nuts who eat whole-grain bread) by donating a portion of its profits to approved leftist causes. There is also the Magical Power of Primitive Cultures and other magical powers associated with sports, art, wilderness, tools, and other things. Tools are especially valuable because they enable bobos to play at manual labor and thereby deny their class status. None of this comes cheap. As the author says, “A person who follows these precepts can dispose of up to $4-$5 million annually in a manner that demonstrates how little he or she cares about material things.”

Bobos extend this pseudo-modesty to their social relationships. They talk about the nannies and servants they frequently have as if they are close personal friends and it is merely an odd quirk that these servants have to commute two hours each way from the slums of L.A. to the bobo’s house near the beach. Because they love to appropriate peasant clothing like clogs and the Latin American poncho, they are the first ruling class in history to aspire to dress like its servants. But of course bobos would never dream of dressing like the real American working class, in polyester pantsuits, designer jeans, and big hair, because then they would run the risk of resembling a lower social class that they could actually be mistaken for. They only posture at belonging to proletariats that are sufficiently foreign or archaic that no one could make this error. Similarly, they love to decorate with old farm implements and industrial artifacts, but would never dream of doing their office to look like a real contemporary working-class environment like the inside of a McDonalds.

Anyone who has noticed the way American leftism runs on sentimental fantasies about the poor will find this pattern familiar. The bobo style can be described as the concepts of liberalism, aestheticized into pretty visual images.

When bobos run corporations, as they increasingly do, they do so in an “anti-hierarchical” manner with respect to everything but the actual salaries. Salaries are not supposed to be the point of work anyway, since we are all creative visionaries now, not wage slaves. This is of course the perfect way to stop employees from asking difficult questions about whether all this anti-hierarchy translates into their paychecks. Bobo corporate boardrooms look like garages and nobody wears a tie or has a fixed desk. Commercials for the company’s products have alternative-rock soundtracks. Prosaic items like shampoo are sold as tools for achieving new-age spirituality. And, as Brooks notes of that quintessential bobo company Ben & Jerry’s, “Ice cream companies now possess their own foreign-policy doctrines.”

Note that what bobos really despise is not consumerism as an actual way of life, the way people who genuinely renounce it like nuns, the Amish or the U.S. Marines do, but consumerism in the abstract, which offends their exquisitely refined ideological sensibilities. Bobos have ideological sensibilities as subtle as wine-tasters. They have been educated in an elaborate leftist critique of how money makes you its possession, not the other way round, and commodifies you, et cetera et cetera, and have responded by mastering the art of faking one way culturally to feel good about themselves while living the other way in the real world. If a $500 sweater is made in Tibet, a place that represents purity and anti-consumerism, then this anti-consumerism in the ideological significance of the thing neatly cancels out the materialism of buying it, and the bobo is home free. One almost imagines an enterprising shaman could make a living running around in a 4-wheel drive vehicle (the bobo standard in flat suburban areas) blessing their household establishments like a Shinto priest in Japan blessing a new automobile assembly line. The problem, of course, is that this would make the whole thing explicit, and this rank cultural con game could never survive the light of day…

Basically, if you enjoy the website Stuff White People Like, I recommend reading the rest of Locke’s review of Bobos In Paradise, and of course the actual book Bobos in Paradise.

Recommended Products:

In Part 1, we focused on how human nature is driven by two primary drives, the drive of self-preservation and the drive to spread our genes through reproduction. In this part, we’ll focus on the role one particular aspect of our human nature, the tendency to stereotype, satisfies those two drives.

First things first, let’s be honest about one thing: we all stereotype. For example, say you were running late to attend an opera and you get lost. You see two groups of people walking by. Who would you rather stop to ask for directions to the opera hall?

This one?

Or this one?

Now what if you were asking for directions to a indie rock venue instead? Would your answer change then?

One benefit stereotyping has is to simplify our lives by helping us make split-second choices. It’s a mental shorthand for making decisions. This was especially important for our ancestors, given the dangerous conditions they lived in. Picture the time you’d waste if every time you were faced with the same specific scenario, you had to take the time to reevaluate that scenario from scratch, and how much more danger you would be in as a result.

For example, one of our ancestors faces a sabretooth tiger. The tiger attacks it, and our ancestor barely gets away with his life. Later on, he faces a different sabretooth tiger. A certain part of him is going to be wary of that tiger based on his experience with the previous tiger. He has stereotyped sabretooth tigers as bloodthirsty maneaters. This wariness will change all his future interactions with sabretooth tigers, thereby increasing his chances of surviving and living to reproduce and spread genes.

Now picture other members in the community who don’t have this tendency to stereotype. These dumbasses, no matter how many sabretooth tigers they encounter, are going to stop and wonder each time “I wonder if this fuzzy guy wants to eat me. Let me find out.” They never change their future behavior toward a tiger on account of their previous encounters with tigers. Instead of using the initial moments of encounter to run away or kill the tiger, they waste precious time making a brand new, independent assessment, giving the tiger more time to pounce on them.

It’s important at this time to discuss an evolutionary concept known as the least costly mistake. The least costly mistake says that when an organism is faced with a choice that requires risk assessment, the organism that risks the least costly mistake is more likely to be the one who survives to pass on his or her genes. Although the least costly mistake varies greatly from situation, the most costly mistake is remarkably consistent: it’s almost always death or loss of opportunity to pass on genes.

To illustrate the least costly mistake concept with stereotyping, let’s revisit the sabretooth tiger example. If the man does stereotype the tiger as a vicious killer when it turns out it’s a nice, friendly animal, what is the costliest consequence of this mistake? He’s missed out on a possible new pet maybe? He misses out on the chance to bond and play for a while with a fuzzy animal? Now if a man doesn’t stereotype a tiger as a vicious killer and it turns out it really is a horrific maneater, what is the costliest consequence of this mistake? Serious injury or death.

So which is the least costly mistake for our ancestors? Stereotyping or not stereotyping? And since natural and sexual selection tends to favor the organisms that consistently choose the least costly mistake, who has the better advantage, the organism that stereotypes or the organism that doesn’t? The ones who do stereotype obviously. And these people are going too pass along the same stereotyping tendencies to their children, while the people who don’t stereotype won’t be passing their aversion to snap judgments onto their children…because they won’t survive to reproduce. They’ll get weeded out of the gene pool.

Now most people would find no fault in stereotyping tigers. Everyone except the nuttiest PETA activist would admit that most tigers are out to get us. Stereotyping becomes more controversial in our modern society when applying stereotypes to groups that are not by and large out to get you. As shown by the fact that affirmative action continues to thrive and a black man is leading the charge for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, most whites are not as racist as some would like you to believe. And even though blacks and hispanics have higher crime rates per capita than other races in America, a vast majority of blacks and hispanics aren’t criminals. So unlike the tiger scenario, stereotyping most whites as racist or most blacks and latinos as criminals makes no sense, right? Well, it isn’t that easy.

The problem is that humans don’t weigh good events equally with bad events. As shown in The Power of Persuasion: How We’re Bought and Sold by Robert Levine:

[P]eople experience more pain from a loss than they do pleasure from an equal gain. We get more upset over losing $100 than we feel happy about gaining $100. This is true not only for money but for our lives in general. It’s been shown, for example, that bad emotions feel bad more than good emotions feel good: people try harder to escape bad moods than they do to prolong good mood and they remember their bad moods longer than their good ones…As one of my clinical psychology colleagues estimated it, the average person needs five good experiences to balance out a single bad one.

From an evolutionary viewpoint, a bias toward the negative makes perfect sense. Once again it comes down the survival of our species has always been more closely linked to avoiding disaster than to finding happiness. We’re primed to see threats. People pick an angry face out of a happy crowd much more quickly than they pick a happy face out of an angry crowd. Potential danger signals action needs to be taken. The only action positive events usually call for is celebration, and nobody’s ever died from forgetting to plan a party.

Focusing on the negative over the positive is another example of the least costly mistake principle. Misjudging a bad person as friendly is a more costly mistake than misjudging a good person as evil. The latter mistake will just lead to maybe hurt feelings and the loss of a potential friendship. You can possibly recover from that, and if not, fuck it, life goes on. The former mistake however can lead to serious injury and possibly death, from which there’s no recovery.

So if you’re black in the deep south in the 60s, and lynchings are a real possibility, avoiding death is a much bigger concern to you than taking the time to think of all the good white people you might be misjudging as racist. You would have had some negative experience with a white person in your life, or you would at least had had friends and family with bad experiences, and this would cause you to view all white people, fairly or unfairly, with suspicion. You waste time wondering if that white mob coming at you at night are out to lynch or out for a nighttime walk and you can end up lynched.

In his book, Larry Elder describes some disturbing trends in black crime in his book The Ten Things You Can’t Say In America. Although a majority of blacks and latinos are not criminals, they have proportionately higher rates of criminality against whites:

“Twenty-five percent of young black men are in jail, on parole, or on probation. A black man is ten times more likely to rape a white woman than a white man is to rape a black woman. Blacks account for 50 percent of the nation’s prisoners [despite only being 13% of the population]. Gang-bangers are almost inevitably black or Latino. Hurts the image, you know. Don’t think the young white woman in that elevator is oblivious. Don’t think that a white woman living in the city hasn’t seen, experienced, or had friends who experienced crime at the hands of black thugs…If Jesse Jackson himself says he’s relieved when the late-night footsteps on the street behind him belong to white rather than black feet, all bets are off.”

So it doesn’t matter that a majority of blacks and latinos aren’t criminals, or that a majority of whites aren’t violent racists. So long as the perception is out there that a higher than normal amount of criminality exists in minority communities or a higher than normal amount of racism exists among whites, humans are going to lapse into the hardwired behavior that allowed their ancestors to survive for generations: accentuating the bad, being overly cautious and applying negative sterotypes to protect themselves.

But the best thing that can come out of negative stereotyping is that it’s a symptom that alerts us to greater societal ills. Rather than just demanding that people stop stereotyping, we should instead try to understand the reasons why we’ve evolved with this tendency and try to figure out what the stereotypes are telling us. Stereotypes arise for one of two reasons: because they are true conclusions based on valid premises or they are bad or exaggerated conclusions based on bad exaggerated premises. If the stereotype is true and is negative to boot, we should focus on changing the reality of the situation for the better rather than chastising the stereotyper and forcing him to be politically correct. If the stereotype is false, than we should try to attack the faulty premises at the root of the stereotype rather than just demand the stereotyper “play nice” and be PC. But remember, if your only response to a stereotyper is to point out “Well most blacks/whites/latinos/gays aren’t like that” you’re wasting your time because our minds are programmed to give negative things five times the weight as positive things. You have to create the impression that the negative is outweighed by a vast and substantial positive majority if you want to really deter a stereotype.

Recommended Reading:

• The Power of Persuasion by Levine is so useful and has such a breadth of information that I can’t overstate its value in understanding the human mind enough. Especially when it comes to fallacies in logic and thinking, and how those fallacies get exploited.
• Larry Elder is a black conservative that gets a lot of flack for his conservative viewpoints and politically incorrect views, but he is a very sharp cat that makes very compelling and thought-provoking arguments that are worth reading, even if you ultimately end up disagreeing with him. This book, 10 Things You Can’t Say In America, is one of my all-time favorite books.