Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Systemic Racism Is a Conceit of the Elites
If you’re one of the elite, or feel entitled to be elite without lifting a finger or breaking a sweat–but you’re not elite so obviously someone is keeping you down, oppressing you and rigging the game so that you cannot reach the exalted status to which you aspire, you have the luxury of believing in systemic racism.
If you work, you don’t care who is on your crew, as long as that person can get the job done.
Not 10 minutes ago, I finished reading and then commenting on Gary McVey’s (@garymcvey) outstanding post on Henry Ford and Nazism. Then, a couple minutes before it was time to call The Lovely and Talented Mrs. Mongo, I went outside to finish my drink and fortify myself with some nicotine. When I’m on the road, whether CONUS or overseas, from the time I step foot outside the house for the trip, until the time I shuffle back in with my suitcase and computer bag, everything negative that happens on the home front is my fault. I get it. I got it. I’ve learned how to telephonically roll with the punches. Still, my worst trips are the CONUS trips, because I can’t claim I was in a location where there was no cell coverage or landlines. No cover story for not calling, so suck it up, Cupcake.
To ensure I’m the best Mongo I can be, I ensure I’m in the right frame of mind to make the call and have the conversation and not get impatient about things that I consider irrelevant and make the fatal error of saying something akin to, “Got it, move on.” See, that’s bad marital decision-making. Better to patiently listen and, as/when appropriate make sounds like “Mm-hmm,” “Uh-huh,” and “tsk-tsk.” Also, I don’t have one big superpower, but I have several little ones. One of which is the ability to let my mind wander, during the conversation, over the things I need to do the next day of the trip, the things I need to do upon my return home, how best to echelon the tasks I have coming up.
The mini-superpower is, when I get the inevitable “You’re not listening to me!” I can recite the last five minutes of the conversation verbatim, even though, yeah, I wasn’t listening. Move over, Iron Man.
But as I walked outside, there were members of a crew pitching quarters outside the side door of the La Quinta Inn I’m at.
If you’re the manager of a construction site, and you’ve got a requirement for a surge of skilled, scheduled labor, you often import a crew. Then you put them up at a local, livable but slightly seedy (hey, never lose sight of King Bottom Line) hotel like my beloved Miami La Quinta so that they can lay the pipe, do the wiring, plumb the project.
I’ve noted over the last couple days that such a crew is staying at the (my) La Quinta. I estimate that the crew is between 11 and 14 tradesmen. Working-class men who are there to get the job done.
When I walked outside to get a little pre-phone call nicotine fortification, a slice of that crew was pitching quarters. While I was out there, another five or six exited the building, headed out for chow.
It was, something out of a movie, but whoever made the movie would be accused of stereotyping and inserting obligatory tropes. When I looked at the panorama of working-class dudes that just want to do a job: there’s the tall, lanky black dude with the jeans under his ass but the boxers covering the rest–oh, and he had a magnificent mane of dreads. There’s the Hispanic dude with tats all over his neck. There’s the long, greasy-haired white dude who is kind of short and squatty with those cargo shorts that fall below knee-length and upon whose belt you can see the chain that loops down but rises again to secure his wallet in his pocket. That dude has tats like the Latino dude, except for his tat schemata was gained trespassing somewhere, and instead of shotgunning rock salt at him, the owner shot him with salted ink. Random, no theme, no coherence.
I watched these guys, while some of them moved out for dinner and some stayed pitching quarters. I abjured the offer of joining the quarters pitching by saying, “Gentlemen, I do not partake of games of chance, lest I not be able to make this month’s rent.” Eh, I got a laugh out of it.
But while I finished my bourbon and my unfiltered Camel, with my mind on Henry Ford, antisemitism and Nazism, I realized that there was no racism anywhere near where I stood. There were men, masters of their craft, there to do a job, and I am more than sure they cared about the competence and craftsmanship of their cohort far moreso than each other’s race.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a phone call I gotta make.
———–BREAK———–
So, called The Lovely and Talented Mrs. Mongo, and the call went directly to voicemail, immediately thereupon I got a text saying, “I’m on a call, call you later.”
Okay. Proofread the post (for me, proofreading is a relative term, I’m more than sure that there are spelling/grammar mistakes aplenty). I was about to hit “send.” Then, I thinks to myself, “Hey, those guys are still out there pitching quarters. I wonder what they would think of the post?” So I went outside and asked them if they’d participate. They thought I was maybe/probably a weirdo, but said yes. I went back to my room, grabbed the MacBook, and then exited and read everything above the BREAK to them.
First, it was a point of pride that they were not tradesmen surging to a job site. They were employees of a conveyor-belt-making company, down in Miami to provide warranty service.
Out of the cast of characters depicted above, the sample was a big black guy, the Hispanic with the neck tattoo, a pure-D country redneck accented dude, and then a clean-cut kid with a beard, maybe on a summer job, dunno. Looked like Spencer Klavan’s kid brother. I told them that because the post was about systemic racism, the black guy would get to comment first.
After the post (all names here are made up) Darryl the black guy said, “well, it sounded like there were a lot of stereotypes in there.”
“Dude, you’re a big-ass black dude and–what kind of cigarette are you smoking?”
“A Kool.”
“Okay, is there a bigger stereotype than that?”
And that kind of kicked off the whole, free-wheeling conversation. Me mostly listening to the warranty servicers and throwing in a question every now and then. I don’t have the time or memory to try to reproduce the whole conversation word-for-word, but I’ll try to convey the gist of the conversation.
Hispanic Neck Tattoo Guy (HNTG) pointing at pure country redneck guy: “Yeah, we’re friends now, but I did not like this guy when I first met him. Now, we’re tight, man. We hang.”
Me: Okay, how come you didn’t like him? ‘Cause he’s white? ‘Cause he sounds so redneck he should be named Cooter (accepting a little bit of operational risk, here)?
Cooter: No, man. See, Juan used to work for the company, then he took a break to do some other stuff, then he came back.
Mongo: Lemme guess, you didn’t work there when he left, but you were there when he came back.
Cooter: You got it. And when he came back, they made him a crew boss, ’cause this guy knows things, man. You don’t let that kind of talent go to waste.
Mongo: Okay.
Cooter: So they pulled a couple guys off my crew to round out his crew, and one day in the cafeteria, I just stopped and talked for a while with my old guys that were on his crew now. And then this dude is hatin’ on me all the time.
Juan: That’s right, I couldn’t stand this guy.
Mongo: Lemme guess, I think I got it ’cause it works like this in the military. Juan, you had the ass ’cause Cooter didn’t go through you before he talked to your guys.
Juan: That’s exactly what it was.
Cooter: So, we went somewhere where we could hash it out privately. I said, “Dude, what’s your (CoC)ing problem? And he told me. And I was like, Holy (CoC), I’d feel the same way. And we been tight ever since.
Cooter: Man, this whole racism thing is just stupid. Some of my best friends are–
Mongo: Stop! You can’t ever start a defense of why you’re not a racist with that. You’re setting yourself up for failure.
Cooter: Yeah, but it’s true.
Mongo: Doesn’t matter.
Then I gave some of my insights on how to respond if one is called a racist. Can’t go into it. Severely non-CoC compliant.
Then I brought up the whole Rush Limbaugh (Peace be upon him) Rushism about how if you love this country you’ll be called a racist, bigot, homophobe. Oh, and what’s that word for when you hate women? Misogynist?
Cooter: Man, who thinks that way? Look, I got a friend from high school that I always thought was a little fruity, y’know, but after a while I figured out he was full-up gay. Now, I ain’t down with gay [insert a bunch of homoerotic jokes here that we made, asserting that he was, in fact, gay]. Nah, man, I don’t abide that stuff. But I tell you what, if I was drivin’ down the street and some dudes were beating him up, because he was gay or any other damn thing, I’d pull over and whoop some ass and take care of that guy. I’m not sure how many people would.
Mongo: Really? You’re not sure? (raise my own hand) Who here would pull over and help out a gay friend if he was getting beat up, whatever the reason?
Every hand went up.
Mongo: See, you’re not alone. They just want to make you think you’re alone.
A lot more, but I won’t go on, except for this.
HNTG: Hey man, my 16-year old kid is smart!
Cooter: Yeah, he’s got a smart kid.
HNTG: Yeah, I tol’ him I had read that there was 37 genders out there, an’ what was all that about? He said, “Dad, there’s two genders, and 35 different ways of being queer.”
I had a great time. Want to continue to write about it, but I really, really have a phone call to make.
Published in General
At one point when I was on the streets a black Sgt. trained me to work in the ‘hood’. He lived in that neighborhood and once in awhile he would call someone over to the car. They never ignored him. He told me that they knew if they didn’t talk to him he would hunt them down on his off-duty time.
He told me never to lie for him if he kicked someone’s ass. He told me to tell IA the truth. He also told me don’t let them play the white guilt game because my life would be a living hell in the hood. He said if you have to kick someone’s ass if they resist arrest then that’s what you will have to do.
Great guy, and a great teacher.
Wouldn’t longitudinally compressible, twisted wire be a spring?
I suppose the way I said it, it could be. I didn’t want to say braided wire, because that’s not what the guy used. But it was multistrand.
Three of my brothers have been in NYPD. When one of them was at the academy, his instructor in the use of the nightstick was Black, a tough, no-nonsense drill instructor. They practiced baton hits against old car tires, while he taunted them, yelled at them, and urged them on. “Come on! You can’t hit harder than that? You’re not going to last out there on the street, son. Put your back in it!”
My brother hit the tires so hard the nightstick broke. The class laughed, and the instructor paused, amused and mock-impressed. “Now, I hope”, he said, “You weren’t hitting ’em that hard just because they were black”.
My wife would insert a line about a gorilla coming in a window to see if I’d pick it up.
Them federal boys shoulda sent you to get the Ark of the Covenant, not that lazy perfessor Jones.
I mean, how many times did he lose it?
Weirdly, I first heard it from a Tae Kwon Do instructor, when talking about unmotivated people. To which I said (having grown up in Vermont): What if the rope is frozen?
Pushups.
That was my observation when I first heard it from my engineer dad. It earned me “the look.”
No push-ups, though.
I’ve heard of line drive passes in football being described as “frozen ropes.”
Here is my problem with the idea of systemic racism.
The cited evidence for systemic racism is that, in general, African-Americans have less income, less wealth, poorer health, and shorter lives than other ethnic groups, especially whites and Asian-Americans. Okay, that’s objectively true. And I will even acknowledge that it is partially true because of racism.
But here’s the problem: Most of the racist systems that helped to create this situation – e.g., slavery, Jim Crow, residential redlining – have not existed as systems for 50 years or more. Virtually all current racism is personal rather than systemic, and even personal racism can be objectively shown to have declined dramatically in recent decades. So how should the remnants of systemic racism be addressed, and how should further declines in personal racism be encouraged?
The best ways would seem to be the exact opposites of what are being advocated by those who expound Critical Race Theory. Racial preferences for minorities at the expense of the “privileged” – what people used to call “reverse racism” – exacerbates personal racism among both groups. Advocating against the perceived values of “whiteness” – for example, punctuality, industriousness, reliability, and delayed gratification – exacerbates the harmful cultural norms that make minorities poorer and sicker.
Am I missing something here?
Interestingly recent immigrants to America from Nigeria have a higher median income then the overall American median Income. I believe the same is true for immigrants from the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Clearly race isn’t the whole story or these stats would be different.
Agreed and are already illegal and therefore no longer part of the system.
Nope you are spot on. Also since the evidence seems to show that immigrants to the US who are black do better than native African-Americans it would appear to a be a 100% cultural problem that CRT will perpetuate rather than ameliorate.
It’s important not to let facts get in the way of the truth.
“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
Excellent post Boss M. And Kevin, your observation is pretty spot on.
I think liberals identified the disparities and realized that telling minorities to finish school, get a trade, be a live in dad and don’t have kids out of wedlock – would be a tough sell. They need the votes and they’re not going to get them by lecturing them for making poor life choices. Much easier to tell them that it’s someone else’s fault.
Every epic tale needs a villain, so they created one from thin air – privilege. Collective guilt makes no sense, but effectively current whites are guilty of the behavior of long dead whites. Not all dead whites, but certain dead whites.
Sort of like original sin. Original sin gets wiped out through baptism. The way you know privilege is bogus is that there’s no way out.