I recently presented a lecture for the University of Colorado, Boulder's Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization. In this hour-long talk, available in video on Youtube and in text at Quillette, I describe and lament the constraint which political correctness imposes on vigorous public discussion about the causes of and remedies for persistent racial inequality.
A friend of mine later objected to my lamentations, and I just wrote him a letter, which I want to make public here. Please see below.
Doug: No offense taken.
But, I'm not only scared about where things are going. I'm in despair. And, I'll admit to a bit of anger.
I think the summer of 2020 was a disaster for the future of "race" in the country. I think it reflects Obama's mishandling of Ferguson and Baltimore and Sanford, FL. I think it bespeaks the complete bankruptcy of the political governing forces representing the interest of blacks.
I'm unreservedly cynical about "civil rights" claims. Mississippi crusades were a half-century ago—as long as from Appamattox to Versailles!
The race debate has become a distraction—and a hustle. Make the social contract better—for all Americans—and you'll solve the only part of the racial disparity problem that warrants government involvement.
These killings by cops and their aftermath are national theater—a macabre enactment of lies, bluffs and self-delusions... The impositions of police are not the first, or second or third-order factors in determining the quality of black life—way behind families and schools and jobs...
Of course I know that structures matter. But, I think a central fact of our time is the failure of blacks at every level—from criminal behavior to performance on college exams—to measure-up to the plentiful opportunities at hand. A racial blame game has emerged to cover these failures which increasingly seems to corrupt everything.
And the tragedy is, I'm the only one who's saying so...
GL
You need to NOT LET UP! I am often in the same despair. I am white, not black. I suppose this means I do not look on this ongoing tragedy with the same sort of despair. However, my family does have a history of commitment to civil rights. A cousin of my mother was president of the NAACP in the 1960s and '70s. I fought the civil rights battles myself at college and later in the '60s and '70s and on, distracting and diverting my life course, in some ways for good reasons and in some ways for lousy reasons. I make no claim to any sort of suffering as to what I can imagine you feel, but I do feel betrayed by the perversion of the civil rights movement, tragically by some who even were a part of it, and all too many who came later and do not see how opposite their conceptual take on it all is now to what it in fact was. Please as I say, do not let up. You ARE having an effect. In the very long run, at least, it will survive and take.
Although there will always be a bit of lag, policy tends to mirror the priorities expressed in the public discourse; if the discourse assigns 90% of the blame for inequality to discrimination, something like that proportion of public dollars and policy efforts will go to addressing discrimination (and given the mechanics of the political arena, one might imagine that a discourse assigning any clear majority of responsibility for a public ill to a given phenomenon will lead to close to 100% of policy efforts going to address that phenomenon). The delta between the proportion of the public that agree with the public narrative represents the ideological disconnect between policy and the people - a crude measure of national dissatisfaction, disaffection and discord with "politics" or "government." So as long as the discourse continues to inflate the scope and impact of discrimination, the real causes will remain mostly (if not entirely) ignored and the PEOPLE will be forced to angrily witness it. This is fundamentally why everyone following Glenn and John and other heterodox voices on these issues must spread these messages as bravely as Glenn does. Every federal or state dollar spent addressing discrimination is one not spent on addressing the phenomena that truly limit our capacity as a society to bridge the many racial achievement and wealth gaps. So when someone asks, why is this issue, above climate change and natural disaster risk, or the threat of future pandemics, so important to me (or Glenn or John) I think of the dynamics of this policy zero sum game, and how getting the focus wrong means not only no progress on the issues, but a disgruntled populace forced to witness our politicians bumbling around podiums feeding us trite and dated versions of a simple reality that never was...