Over the past decade, gay marriage moved from a fringe issue that not even most gays took seriously to supposedly being the great Civil Rights crusade of our times. More recently, transgenderism went from a marginal fetish for men in dresses to being the biggest fad for teenage girls since Beatlemania.
If you didn’t see either of those coming, then you weren’t paying attention to what leftist academics and activists were saying.
Pay attention, then, to what’s sliding down the leftist alimentary tract now: reparations.
The notion that white folks owe brown folks a whole lotta gibsmedat has passed through the intestines of academia, and, after festering in the activist colon for a while, is straining at the media sphincter, ready to splatter all over the mass consciousness.
For example, the mainstream media is ramping up the antiquarianist articles about how ancient inequities in real estate practices mean that in 2021 it’s your fault that black neighborhoods have low property values and, therefore, you must pay. Redlining, which was abolished 53 years ago in 1968, is the usual suspect, but the latest fad is to emphasize racial covenants in home deeds, which the Supreme Court ruled unenforceable in 1948.
That was 73 years ago, but who’s counting?
We’re actually supposed to believe that racist practises which were outlawed when the Baby Boomers were but a twinkle in returned soldiers’ nutsacks are the root of all black inequality today. Even the supposedly “right wing” Murdoch press is buying this line of bullshit. The Wall Street Journal recently opined that black home ownership in Minneapolis lags because of long-abolished property caveats.
The WSJ article about Minneapolis is self-evidently absurd. Why? Because there were almost no blacks living in Minneapolis during the covenant era. The Wikipedia article “Demographics of Minneapolis” notes:
From the 19th century until about 1950, Minneapolis hovered around 99.0% white[…]
Moreover, there is the Heisenbergian factor: If a lot of blacks had moved into the neighborhood, it wouldn’t have gone up in value as much. The fundamental reason that homes don’t appreciate as fast in blacker neighborhoods is not their tragic dirt, but because blacks tend to be lousier neighbors. Fortunately, there is an obvious win-win solution: If blacks want to make more money off home ownership, they should work harder at being better neighbors.
Unfortunately, nobody is supposed to mention any such bracing realities to African-Americans. It is widely assumed that blacks can’t handle the truth. Instead, everybody is supposed to reassure them of how oppressed they are.
Not surprisingly, black behavior, as measured by objective standards such as their murder rate relative to other races, hasn’t much improved, and indeed blacks’ already horrific murder rate worsened sharply as soon as the racial reckoning was declared last year.
Then there is the well-documented factor of black Americans tending to fritter far more of their income on conspicuous consumption. As the sexually-disgraced Bill Cosby observed, if you’re spending hundreds of dollars on a pair of sneakers and bling instead of your child’s education, the subsequent inequality is on you.
But nobody wants to talk about that. That might hurt black Americans’ already fragile self-esteem – even though the evidence shows that they actually have self-esteem aplenty.
So, instead, we get served lies like the 1619 Project, which claim that white American wealth is solely the historical product of black slavery. In fact, even at the outbreak of the Civil War, the opposite was true. The free North was the overwhelming economic power: the slave-owning South was all genteel poverty. The South may have got much less genteel over the past 150 years, but the poverty has remained.
Since 1865, there has been a sharply negative correlation between how many slaves a state had and its current prosperity: Compare slave-free Minnesota to its partner in alliteration, slave-rich Mississippi.
As the black economist, the late Walter E. Williams observed, contrary to the left-media narrative, black Americans are on average doing pretty well. If black America was treated as a separate economy, he said, it would still be one of the richest economies in the world.
We must recognize that blacks have a very good deal in America even if they aren’t as rich as everybody else. While African-Americans are the poorest Americans, they should feel grateful that they are the richest Africans in the world.
So, why are the left persisting with the lies?
The answer might be the seismic demographic change sweeping across America from across its southern border.
Hispanics, the surging demographic in the un-whitening of America (by contrast, black fertility has fallen below replacement rate), notoriously do not get on well with blacks – the only documented lynching in the past half-century in America was the mob-murder of a black Angeleno by Hispanics. Even the SPLC admits that Hispanic gangs are “ethnically cleansing” LA neighbourhoods of blacks.
Hence the gold rush to extract as much as imaginable from the net worth of naive whites before the country is taken over by cynical immigrant nonwhites who will laugh at black claims.
Takimag
What we are seeing is a push by an activist black elite to rake in as much cash as they can, while the rakin’s good. BLM founder Patrisse Cullor’s rapacious acquisitiveness is but a sign o’ the times.
The left being nothing if not slavishly ape-ish, once it explodes on America, expect the “reparations” push to quickly engulf Australia and New Zealand.
Please share this article so that others can discover The BFD