by Jacques Delacroix
Indians are everywhere in the US, in positions of responsibility and sometimes and increasingly, of power. Most Indians here are markedly brown-skinned. No one objects. They ignore the color line. Indians are almost invariably attempting to go unperceived, they are afraid they might trigger something akin to anti-Semitism: hatred of the successful.
Other Asians, East Asians of the rice eating variety, do their homework, go to work, and are neat in their persons. The women are often elegant. Nobody cares about Asians one way or the other except that they are too good at taking exams. These Asians mind their own business and don’t have any claim except, they want to be treated equally. They are losing. They too ignore the color line.
Pacific islanders are a motley crew. They are big and they swim in the ocean. I don’t know that they ask for anything. There are only ten or twenty of them anyway, it seems. I don’t know them well because I only see them at the beach, once in a while. They live among themselves. I don’t think they know of any color line.
“Hispanics” is a huge variegated category concocted by the Federal Government. I think it designates “people who speak Spanish at home and their descendants, although they don’t know any Spanish.” Among them, people of Mexican heritage are probably the most numerous in the US. They are also the biggest bulk of Hispanics in my area where they constitute 30% of the population, probably 40% if you count the illegals. The majority are brown-skinned. Once you have said that, you have said next to nothing. Instead, I think you can tell the social status of any population based on the stories told about them. In point of fact, in 40 years in my area, I have heard only one (one) negative story about Hispanics (Mexicans). It’s comical and only mildly disapproving. (I will tell you it at the bottom of this essay.)1
The Hispanics I know, Mexican and Mexican-Americans, do all the hard work; they mind their own business. They make no claim to special treatment at all. I actually think none, zero of them, does. There used to be a demanding organization called La Raza (“The Race”) that claimed to represent them. It has not been heard of for fifteen years perhaps because of its founders’ aging, I think. Again, people of Mexican descent don’t ask for anything except jobs. Their US-born children go to college and work in banks.
I don’t know much about the other kinds of Hispanics. Yet, I doubt that the Cubans want anything because they are almost all conservative. I don’t know much about Dominicans. I have not heard that they had any claims and, as immigrants, they should not. But. I am willing to learn. I suspect the Puerto Ricans of being beggars because the governments they elect beg constantly. (By the way, if the Puerto Ricans don’t like it here, they can go. They have been very careful to not say anything about that eventuality: Puerto Rican independence.) That’s about it.
Hispanics are too numerous to see a color line. Maybe there is one but they don’t care, living contentedly among themselves.
African Americans or Blacks
So, I wonder, where is the color line that African Americans and more so, liberals in general keep denouncing. Or, in broader terms, who are these “people of color” liberals and some Blacks keep talking about, sometimes with compassion sometimes with venom. I don’t get it.
By elimination, I find that only African Americans (and American Indians, of which more at the end of this essay2) make a clear claim to special treatment. They do so all the time, openly and covertly.
Blacks are about 14 % of the US population or 44,800,000. Of the Blacks currently in the US, about 20 % are immigrants from the West Indies and from Africa, or about 9 million. Like all immigrants, on the whole they probably do quite well, somewhat better than the native-born, black or white, actually. They wouldn’t dream of making any demand. So, we are left with something like 35 or 36 million African Americans who are likely to be descendants of American slaves and who, potentially make demands of the body politic. About half of these are children too young to push a claim. That’s about 17 million people. That leaves 18 to 19 million people able and perhaps willing to make demands. It seems to me that’s a very small number in the face of a total population of 331 million or 332 million.
Now, I am frankly guessing but I think that about half of these people lead normal lives, with reasonable employment in various fields, including, and especially, government (which favors actively inclusion of Blacks). I mean they range from mailman to billionaire. This leaves us with about nine to ten million people who are in more or less dire need of help. That looks manageable to me. Note that if my estimations are wrong, perhaps it’s eleven million or twelve million that require help. It does not make much of a difference. Those are the ghetto Blacks that occupy the popular imagination and who give rise to many of the stereotypes about African Americans in general, especially in the movies.
Now, the habit to count “people of color” who, I think have nothing in common with one another, masks the modesty of this figure, the figure for black Americans descended from slaves, both the relatively prosperous and the others. I think the amalgam between these so-called “people of colors” is intended to give some heft to the Blacks’ claims. It seems to multiply the number of claimants although the claimants other than Blacks don’t claim hardly anything at all. Or, possibly, nothing.
Anti-Black Sentiment
Note that there is a difference between prejudice against the dark races in general and a negative sentiment against one race in particular which shares a common historical experience. Let’s face it: it’s only African Americans we are really, really concerned with here. We are commonly prejudiced against Blacks, or against some Blacks. Whites and others generally don’t care at all about other people of color. The category “people of color” seems like a pure imaginary construct. It appears to be only brought in as reinforcement for the claims of Blacks.
The anti-Black sentiment in an unknown part of the white and other populations may have several sources we may freely speculate about. One intriguing explanation is that we hold against black former slaves what we did to them. This is made credible by disparate facts such as Americans once held the same resentment against a formerly ostracized group, Italians, for example. (Eleven of whom were lynched in New Orleans in the early 1900s.) Again, this is an intriguing explanation although I don’t know if it’s true. At any rate, it does not exclude others.
What is true is that within the black race in the US, one finds a prodigious number of criminals. (Read this again, hardly anyone wants to say it.) Doing the calculations: 14% of the population is black. Of these, about half are children and about half of the remainder women, who hardly ever kill anyone. This means that about 3.5% of the total population are black men. These few men together account for about 40% to 45% of murders. (Table 6: Expanded Homicide Data. FBI, Crime in the United States; Murder: Race, Sex and Ethnicity of Victim by Race, Sex and Ethnicity of Offender.) Note that the advantage of drawing inferences from murder figures as opposed to other crimes is that they are scrutinized many times, at every level of the justice system with its numerous appeals, and thus are least likely to confound fact and prejudice.
The figures mean that black men are more than 10 times more likely to commit murder than anyone else. I wouldn’t be far-fetched to imagine that Blacks are as over-represented in every kind of crime as they are with murder. Note what I am not saying: I am not saying that all black men are criminals, obviously. I am not saying that the average black man has committed a crime. I am saying that criminals come largely from a group whose membership in the group is like printed on their faces: Such people are more likely to act criminally than other people. The expected response: Let’s stay away from them, thinks the average white person, not too irrationally. So do others. Let’s not have anything to do with them which is a way of denying them everything, deliberately or not. There may be other reasons for persistent anti-Black sentiment but that presumptive criminality would be enough to explain it.
Let’s dig superficially into causes. “Superficially” because if you have six researchers, you have six causes of criminality and if there are twelve researchers, there are twelve causes. And I am not digging far. But, sometimes, one cause suffices. Blacks used not to be especially criminal, before integration. Something changed in the sixties. 70% of Black children today are born in single-parent families headed almost entirely by women. (The white proportion is about 30%.) We know from studying the children of white single parent families that it’s a recipe for bringing up bad girls and bad boys (mostly bad boys). It would be a miracle if the same were not true for black children. Again, the single-parent black family seems like a clever device to produce bad children, bad boys, principally. (For a simple review, see the black commentator Jason L. Riley, “The Biggest Root Cause of Crime is Fatherlessness.” Wall Street Journal, P.A17, December 13th 2023.) Nothing has changed for a long time: Black young men are delinquent to an extent unknown in any other segment of society. At the same time there is little evidence of old fashion racism. The Ku Klux Klan has trouble bringing 30 people to any of its parades, and they are scared. There is no other significant organization dedicated to the persecution of Black people. It looks like the liberal and decent fiber in the American people has won. Apologists for black criminals, Black and white, have to rely on the illusory concept of systemic racism which need to be imposed more and more by sheer intellectual terrorism.
Black Supremacy
The lower half, least fortunate segment of the Blacks need money, I think. The upper half — including the numerous pretend-advocates for the lower half – want special privileges and preferential work conditions. And, this is the rub. Special working privileges, privileges in general, are a problem for two reasons. First, they dilute the quality of everything, including work. Second, they are endless. The search for privileges knows no limit. Three examples will suffice.
Would you believe that the state of Tennessee has a seat reserved for minorities on its Board of Podiatry that is 1/6 of the board, almost exactly equal to the percentage of Blacks in the population. (Wall Street Journal, November 9 2023. “Tennessee Racial Podiatry Rule.”) Next, we were given a splendid example of black privilege on February 15th 2024. Atlanta district attorney Fani Willis, a proud black woman, testified how she gave her inexperienced lover the job of lead attorney in an important prosecution, assorted with splendid fees, but only before he became her lover (which makes it alright), she said. She went on to admit that she took three foreign vacations with him in the next year. But, she explained, she did not profit by the juicy fees she had ordered paid him because she reimbursed him for much of his expenditure from her cash stash. (I did not make up any part of this story.) It turned out afterwards that she had given the job to that man when he was already her lover. But that’s neither here nor there.
In the disaster that was black President Gay’s remaining in office after her inability to declare that calling for genocide of the Jews was contrary to Harvard’s code of conduct, something else was swiftly swept under the rug. Or possibly, it was not explained well. Pres. Gay is a serial plagiarizer. But she is a professional academic. Among academics plagiarizing is not common practice: it’s one of the few cardinal sins. It’s cheating and it’s stealing other people’s work. She cheated and she stole much before she became President. It is very doubtful that she would have gotten away with it had she not been black. Many who should have looked into it did not because she was black. Ms. Gay has resigned from her position as President of Harvard, leaving behind a $900,000 salary. Unaccountably, she is still a tenured professor there, tenured. By the way, since Ms. Gay’s demotion, three other black professors at Harvard were called to order for plagiarism.
Mrs. Willis’ self-assurance in the face of the public disclosure of her turpitude, Mrs. Gay’s stubbornness, her refusal to be fired, even when her plagiarizing became public knowledge are inconceivable in a white person, or in a Hispanic person, or in an Asian person. Both constitute a claim to impunity which is a sort of superiority. They reveal a kind of black supremacy.
The calculus of black privilege is clear. Relatively well-off Blacks demand special privileges and special conditions of work as a compensation for the poverty of the ghetto blacks.
Reparations
So, let’s deal with the easiest problem first, the 18 to 19 million people (including children) who simply need material help. In this connection, let’s look at the actions of the Federal Government. It is the same Federal Government that we have known that existed in slavery times. It’s fundamentally unchanged. It has perfect continuity. After 1850, the date of the promulgation of the Fugitive Slave Act, it acted as a slave catcher for private slave owners. This went on till about 1862.
On the basis of an impeccably conservative reasoning, I argue that the Federal Government owes descendants of slave reparation. Here is the reasoning: good things are transmitted through the family. Slavery interfered gravely with the slaves’ ability to form families. Present-day descendants of slaves were cheated of the good things that come through families. Note that what’s at stake here is only the compensation owed by the Federal Government for the short time it acted as slave catcher. It’s not absurd to argue that the individual states owe much greater compensation for the 200 years+ they help actively hold people in bondage, including by force of law.
Let’s suppose for a minute (for a minute) that we earmark $1,000 for each of the putative descendants of slaves, or about 35 or 36 billion dollars, to compensate them for the harm the Federal Government did to their ancestors, and indirectly to them, by acting as a slave catcher. That’s not a large amount of money for being deprived of their freedom. But, frankly, most of them did not try to gain their freedom and neither would have they tried had the obstacle presented by the Federal Government not been present. That amount puts these people in the relatively enviable situation of immigrants who would arrive in this country with $1,000 each, or $4,000 for a family of four. (Personal note: I arrived in this country with less than $10. It did not stop me from getting a PhD and living most of my adult life comfortably as a college professor. And no, I did not work extra hard.)
There are imaginative ways to compensate the beneficiaries but they can’t be precise. The only precise way is to give each one of those individuals $1,000 and hope for the best. It’s a bold move that would be worth considering but that would probably be unacceptable to modern day moralists. The easiest and, possibly, the least controversial way would be to give schools the money. One would begin by giving – over five or six years – $400 per student to the schools with 100% black students, and then prorate to the number of black students in their student body. You have 30 black students, you get $12,000 the first year. You have one black student, you get enough for a new printer. This would go on a long as the money in the reparations till lasts. Think of it as a pilot program.
Such a program would have two consequences. First, it would make it possible, for a while, to have better teachers teaching all-black and predominantly black schools, the worst schools in the nation. The demonstration might inspire imitation. Second, it would make such schools momentarily attractive to all, including white parents, also for a while. Desirable consequences would ensue. Note that this method does not distinguish strictly between relatively prosperous blacks and those mired in poverty. That’s alright because the distribution of black students across schools must fairly closely map this distinction. Some relatively rich black students in good schools would accidentally benefit. That’s OK; precision is not needed here. And yes, there would be grift and graft, that’s OK too. Exactitude is not required here.
Reparation and the End of Black Supremacy
This practice of reparation means that the presence of a single poor descendant of slaves benefits the community. Many poor descendants of slaves means many tangible benefits. All black areas would benefit most. With this scheme, the benefits to the community are not mediated by more prosperous black people but they flow directly from the presence of poor Blacks. This is an important feature because it eliminates completely the possibility that the benefits associated with the compensation exist because of the intercession of anyone, including more prosperous or better positioned Blacks. (The distribution has to be direct to the schools otherwise it will be captured by well positioned more prosperous Blacks.) Note that, at the margin, prosperous Blacks see their fate improved a little because of the poverty of ghetto blacks. And, to the extent that the poverty of poor Blacks is alleviated, the pretensions of prosperous Blacks to special privileges are undermined.
One result of this operation is that good things accrue to poor blacks without the intercession of the usual black elites. It does not promote middle class black jobs. It does not favor black privilege in the job market or elsewhere. It gives an example of benefits accruing to poor blacks without the intervention of their better. As such, it may undermine the tendency to give prosperous Blacks privileges to compensate for the poverty of other black people. If it’s imitated by some of the many polities guilty of favoring slavery, this action might be the beginning of the end for the well entrenched black supremacy exemplified above.
Theoretically, when black poverty is extinguished, black privilege also is, or shortly is.
NOTES
- The anti-Mexican joke: How do you call a screwdriver in Spanish? Un tiratornillos. How do you call a hammer in Spanish? Un tiratornillos. ↩︎
- American Indians are a complicated case. Briefly, white society dealt with them through a series of broken treaties. They are subdivided into hundreds of tribes and bands. Each subdivision has one or more broken treaties. A polity should respect its treaties. There is no statute of limitation. If you broke a treaty 200 years ago, you should go back and fix it now. Another story, obviously. ↩︎
Jacques Delacroix is a writer who lives in Santa Cruz, California. He used to be a college professor. Send him mail.
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