The Fear of White Power
A new report by the American Enterprise Institute, “Black Men Making It in America,” uses Census data to show that African-American men are succeeding in the United States. Written by University of Virginia sociology professor W. Bradford Wilcox, director of research at the Institute for Family Studies Wendy Wang and Columbia University social policy professor Maurice Russel, the report reveals that more than one-in-two black males–57 percent–now belong to the country’s middle or upper class. That is up from 38 percent in 1960. Meanwhile, the share of black men in poverty has fallen from 41 percent in 1960 to 18 percent today. In comparison, 55 percent of Hispanic-Americans belong to the middle or upper class while the figures stand at 73 percent for Asian-Americans and 75 percent for white Americans. There is still clearly work to be done, but this cannot be described as anything other than huge socio-economic progress for black American males, a group often unfairly associated primarily with crime and unemployment.
Remi Adekoya, a Ph.D. student researching group identity at Sheffield University in the UK, has written this poignant essay on the political and racial dynamics of black and white power in the West. Adekoya is half Nigerian and half Polish. He was raised in Nigeria and Poland and now lives the UK.
The policeman became defensive, muttering nervously it had nothing to do with race. The whole affair ended with the officer issuing a caution, the British equivalent of a citation. My friend who was in the car asked his colleague why he brought up race when he knew he was in the wrong. “Dude, when in a tough spot with a white person, bring up racism and there’s a 99 percent chance they’ll get defensive and back down,” his colleague responded and laughed.
“I can’t stand such attitudes,” my friend declared, launching us into a debate on race in Britain. He fumed at the black ‘race experts’ claiming to see racism everywhere. “They’re so full of it, encouraging black people to blame racism for all their problems. I’ve never encountered racism in my career, nor can I claim to have worked twice as hard as my white colleagues to get where I am today.”
Recently, I stopped at a small liquor store in Teaneck, New Jersey that happens to sell a certain beer hard to find around here. In this state, liquor retailers can have attached bars in their facility with a special license. This establishment serves a predominantly middle-class black neighborhood and there was a spirited conversation taking place in the bar within earshot among several middle-aged black people. The discussion was about how young blacks were constantly getting in trouble with the cops because of their attitude. The participants were giving their opinions about how the young should behave with proper respect when they are pulled over in a traffic stop by the police.
Word for word, it was a conversation surely held by mature white adults everyday in this society. I wondered for a moment if they would have stopped talking should I have walked around the corner into the bar.
Over the years, I’ve heard similar sentiments expressed by more than a few black people who don’t buy the racialist dogmas of the identitarian left but consider them necessary to their survival because they help keep in-check what many blacks living in white-majority societies fear most: unrestrained white power. This is why black people often discuss race very differently in private (i.e. when only blacks are in the room). In private, we can be frank and slay black identity politics but in public we need to remember the “big picture” and not act to discredit it. Such calculations, driven by the instinct for self-preservation, keep many black freethinkers from decisively criticizing divisive and hyperbolic radical identitarians.
This is very good and I think you should RTWDT.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.