Have you seen this story? “Howard University cancels graduation mid-ceremony after furious family members pound on doors, smash window.” Not good. It’s a pattern.
“Because of the size of the room and because our relatives sometimes do not know how to act, the fire department is now here to shut us down,” Dr. Gina S. Brown, dean of the College of Nursing and Allied Health Sciences, said to boos.
Booing is a symptom of the pathology. Brown is right. There’s a cultural problem here. To be sure, as Brown assumes in formulating her statement, not everybody associated with a particular cultural variation acts like this—but when, in culturally relative terms, a significant proportion of individuals do, it’s time to take an honest look at the norms and values of that culture.
The collective irrational disruption of public events (and I emphasize irrational), the internecine tribal warfare associated with gangland conditions, the smash and grab robbery tactics forcing stores to close and businesses to leave—all these result from a dysfunctional culture.
We have been told that to speak about this is racist because of differential demographic profiles across cultural varieties. It’s a double standard. White culture is said to have the criticisms directed at it coming; black culture, on the other hand, is sacrosanct. But to observe that cultures differ from one another, and that some cultures are, at least in certain of their norms and values, superior, is not a racist observation but a rational one.
To say that the culture associated with a race is inferior is not to say that the race is inferior. Race is not culture. Race is an observation of the existence of constellations of phenotypic characteristics. Culture has a historical development. Indeed, to root culture in race is the original meaning of racism.
Listen to Dom Lucre:
I have written a lot about how progressive policy affects the life chances of black Americans (see, e.g., America’s Crime Problem and Why Progressives are to Blame). Lucre is not wrong. Do you know who did this to the black community? Progressives. When I say there is no systemic racism, I mean that it is not those who are blamed for the situation of blacks who perpetuate that situation. White conservatives don’t run blue cities. Democrats do. Joblessness, fatherlessness, poverty, demoralization, nihilism, crime, despair—these are miseries the Democratic Party brings. What they’ve done to black people, they will do to the rest of the working class. The Democratic Party is the party of the managed decline of the American Republic and everything dear to Western Civilization.
freedom and reason 