Hillbillies and Polynesians:

Frank talk about race in a time when so many other things are truly important

It's been my gut-level observation recently that a noticeably increased percentage of the people in my moderately upscale suburban northern-city neighborhood is black.  I began to notice it over the past year or so at the supermarket, the Community Wellness Center, bars, and restaurants in the area.

Note  -  This urban area is a melting pot.

So why do I want to bring it up?

Well, like most things people generally don't want to admit, one's racial or ethnic background has a strong biological pull and leads to disturbing emotions.  And I'd like to bring these to the surface and deal with them.  Does it bother me that the neighborhood is going black?  Candidly, yes and no.

I'm no expert in psychology, but it seems common sensible that most people feel more comfortable around people who share the same language and culture.  Certainly, if a group speaks a different language from yours, you're not going to develop a neighborhood, much less a community very easily if at all.

As to an alien culture, I think that's as difficult.

Culture amounts to one's matrix of beliefs, institutions, and behaviors.  We tend to like having people of similar culture in our own neighborhoods.  For example, a large part of Islamic culture stresses the subjugation of women, sometimes even embracing the practice of female genital mutilation (FGM) of newborn girls.  An FGM-Islamic culture is thus alien to a humanistic-liberal culture.

As a rational libertarian, I fall within this humanistic-liberal genus—liberal in this context does not mean big government, rather the classical-liberal ideals of personal freedom, economic freedom, and a nonimperialistic foreign policy.  Therefore, I personally don't want to live around too many people who believe in primitive, anti-human notions.

I have a similar reluctance to embedding myself in a small town of snake-dancing, Rapture-crazed, redneck Baptists in East Texas.  The issue then isn't one of race, but of class.  I don't want to live or to raise my children with too many people who fall under let's call it the "base threshold of rationality."  Irrational culture shows large illiteracy rates, promiscuity, sexually transmitted diseases, babies having babies, unemployment, crime, and bad teeth.

Now back to the question of neighborhoods becoming black:  My judgment is the black-American mass-culture has for whatever reason (especially since the era of big government) tended to fall slightly below this base-rationality threshold.  I would make the same generalization of Hispanic mass-culture in America.  And I believe the dire sociological statistics for communities that are predominantly one or the other ethnicity bear me out.

(Whatever is the reason?  We'll discuss that at the end.)

Now, Average Joe Whiteboy doesn't spend a lot of mental cycles trying to figure out why a community with too many black or Hispanic people tends to go downhill.  If he thinks real estate is going down, he'll move to the edge of the urban landscape... unto plastic, lily-white isolation.  He'll also pay exorbitant housing prices for his trophy home, fuel costs for his Suburban, and a whole schtickload of taxes for roads, sewers, and Taj Mahal schools.

Not much of a solution.

But on the "yes" side of my concern, I may share Joe's expectations of property decline.

The other concern for me regarding blacks, in particular, is whether lower-class blacks will become too large a percentage of the influx.  I'm sure middle-class blacks, with whom I share language and humanist-liberal culture, have the same concern about any excessive influx of lower-class people, black or otherwise.

It is politically incorrect in some circles to claim that low-class black people exist, but we know low-class people are part of any race.  The fundamental features of low-class persons are race-independent, and include the following:

• work-averse
• crime-inclined (real crimes with real victims)
• functionally illiterate
• loud, angry, inarticulate, overemotional, primitive
• habitually self-destructive
• misogynistic

If the person having the above characteristics is white, some people, mostly white, call him a hillbilly.  If the person having the above characteristics is black, some people, mostly black, call him an n-word.  Instead of stating the n-word, which could get me in trouble, I'm using the blue-collar designation "Polynesian."

Back to my concerns:  Yes, if I feel too many Polynesians are coming in, then I'll think more seriously about moving on.

I like most black people I meet or see (most of them do not sport do-rags, spout hate-rap, or put on Superfly airs).  Being a freedom person, I share the sensitivity most black individuals have to being mistreated by government.  In the reason-liberty movement, some of the best, most trenchant advocates are black: Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, and Shelby Steele come to mind immediately.

Also, the war on drugs is a war on freedom is a war on minorities.

One of the main motives of drug warriors is to incarcerate and otherwise keep down the black and brown people.  As a salient proponent of drug freedom, I feel the pain of these innumerable citizens of color who have been crushed by the state on the pretense of state-religious purity.  The reason-liberty movement must reach out to such persecuted minorities, because we provide the only way out.

My vision of healthy sociology is people of all backgrounds adopting the culture of reason and freedom: living together, working together, playing together.  Once you embrace the fundamentals of civilization, it doesn't matter where you come from.  In fact, like the Star Trek ideal of learning to delight in our differences, diversity makes life much more interesting.  Even sexy.  And I believe that healthy sociology is coming, because I believe a rational-libertarian society is coming.

We posed the question why American mass-culture blacks face such a burden in crossing the base-rationality threshold.  From a cursory examination of history and government policy, the answer is clear: since the demise of slavery, the rules of government(s) have conspired to prevent them from enjoying their freedom.

The Jim Crow laws in the South limited access to jobs and prevented voting or participation in politics.  When northern industrial jobs opened up, blacks migrated to them.  But the various northern states passed controls, compulsory union laws to protect white workers, licensing restrictions on different businesses blacks could develop in their neighborhoods, and minimum wage laws to prevent blacks from entering the workforce at all.(1)

Almost all the laws that have been passed to suppress minority workers have been extolled as altruistically wonderful.  Which is a good reason to condemn altruism.  Facts are facts, and economic restrictions to protect favored corporations and unions work the hardest against the lowest classes.  Whenever the restrictions are eased, minorities flourish... not because everyone hangs around the campfire singing Kumbaya, but because of self-interest and Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand."

The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are; it does not care what their religion is; it only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy.  It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and to help one another.

— Milton Friedman
Nobel Prize-winning economist

Another reason for economic stagnation of minorities lies in the calculated destruction of American cities by government planners.(2)  Eminent domain and state highway transportation monopolies have destroyed neighborhoods faster than new ones can be created.  Tax policy provides middle-class entitlement to home-mortgage owners, which combined with the man-made flood of asphalt, leads to ugly, inhuman, disconnected sprawl in the countryside.

Government schools then polish the poor people off.  They aren't teaching anything in the core cities, the schools are merely a form of crowd control.  Few jobs are left, because the ruling elites and their corporate-union insiders have looted any productive businesses that dared to locate there.  Many cities have income taxes.  Most are blackmailed by entrenched government-employee unions that care not a wit.

As the cities were murdered, economic options for minorities evaporated.

If I told you economic freedom was the solution to virtually all the racial problems we face in this country (and other countries), would you be astonished?

I want to make it clear, too, that we do not favor limits on what any American may do with his own property.  If I don't want to sell my house to a minority, that's my right.  By forcing people to sell to those they don't favor, people will move even farther away from a multicultural environment.

You also take away an element of control, which would otherwise discourage selling to lower-class minorities.  As we've determined, the issue is not one of race but of class.  If a neighborhood's class can be assured, most people really don't care what race their neighbors are.

Don't look to the government to provide any solutions.  Government is the problem.  As time goes on, the market will be rediscovered, and people will learn to live together in peace and abundance.  There's so much work to do, but a little freedom goes a long way.  Radical libertarian shock therapy is required.  We must have rapid, massive reduction in government consistent with the Bill of Rights.  Stay tuned to pages such as these for the latest developments.