Motus Mentis

It seems to me that race is more in the news today than ever — and I’m old enough to remember the 1960s. For something that, according to all goodthinkful people, doesn’t even exist, it sure does get a lot of attention.

Or not, depending on the context. For example, the media seem just now to be noticing some things that have been going on for quite some time: spontaneous black-on-white assaults, and looting and mayhem by black “flash mobs”.

Both of these things have been going on for years, and have been written about at length in books and blogs, but as far as the mainstream media are concerned, it’s a brand-new problem. Here, for example, is Diane Sawyer, from just a few days ago, alerting us to a “new type of crime, popping up across the country.” She’s referring to the robbing of stores by flash mobs. (There’s nothing new about this at all, we “neoreactianary” types have had our eyes on all this stuff for ages.)

Who are these people? They are described only as “thieves”, “kids”, and “teenagers”.

On the radio today I heard “breaking news” about another “brand-new” kind of crime, one that has also been going on for years now under a near-total news blackout: the “knockout game“, also known as “polar-bear hunting”. This consists of young black men “cold-cocking” white and Asian passersby (that is to say, punching them in the head without warning, in an attempt to knock them unconscious with a single blow). It is occasionally fatal.

Who are these people? “Teens”.

Thomas Sowell has written at least two essays on this topic in recent weeks. Back in October he wrote this piece about a coming race war, and today he gives us an article about the “knockout game”, in which he comments on the media’s silence:

The main reason for many people’s surprise is that the mainstream media have usually suppressed news about the “knockout game’ or about other and larger forms of similar orchestrated racial violence in dozens of cities in every region of the country. Sometimes the attacks are reported, but only as isolated attacks by unspecified “teens’ or “young people’ against unspecified victims, without any reference to the racial makeup of the attackers or the victims ”” and with no mention of racial epithets used by the young hoodlums exulting in their own “achievement.’

Despite such pious phrases as “troubled youths,’ the attackers are often in a merry, festive mood. In a sustained mass attack in Milwaukee, going far beyond the dimensions of a passing “knockout game,’ the attackers were laughing and eating chips, as if it were a picnic. One of them observed casually, “white girl bleed a lot.’

That phrase ”” “White Girl Bleed a Lot’ ”” is also the title of a book by Colin Flaherty, which documents both the racial attacks across the nation and the media attempts to cover them up, as well as the local political and police officials who try to say that race had nothing to do with these attacks.

Race certainly does exist, however, when the aggrieved party is black. Also on the news today was a story headlining the fact that blacks in New York are 25 times more likely to be shooting victims. The story made reference to this report from the NYPD, which summarizes the city’s violent-crime statistics for the first half of this year. The report does indeed show that blacks were 73.9% of the city’s shooting victims, while whites made up a paltry 2.8%. The report left it there: blacks are victims 25 times as often as whites. Talk about privilege!

Left unmentioned, however, was another statistic, from the same table in the same report: blacks also committed shootings at far higher rates than whites, 70% to 2.9%. (Blacks and Hispanics together committed over 95% of all shootings.) Given that blacks make up 25.5% of the city’s population, while whites make up 45.5%, this means that blacks in New York commit gun violence at roughly 42 times the per-capita rate of whites. You don’t hear much about this.

You do hear, however, about the constant, oppressive threat that white people pose to black people, and how ‘unconscious bias’ makes them guilty in perpetuity. (Well, maybe not quite: Oprah thinks things may get better once a lot more white people are dead.)

I worked for many years — decades — as a recording engineer here in New York, and as far as race relations go, it was downright Utopian. If there is a more sweet-natured and race-blind community of people anywhere in the world than New York’s community of musicians, I haven’t heard of it. Musicians of all races come here from everywhere in the world, with one thing in mind — to make beautiful music together — and musicians are generally gentle, empathetic, big-hearted people. At the very least, they are united as members of a global and well-connected trait-group, and the bond is a strong one.

Musicians, however, are few — and living for so long in that anomalous, extraordinary bubble of pan-ethnic, trans-racial fellow-feeling gave me what was, sadly, rather a skewed perspective. In the real world, and for the great majority of people, there are very few trait-axes that exert a stronger assortative — and divisive — influence than race and ethnicity. (Language and religion, perhaps.) This is not a ‘social construct’, though of course a great many social constructs are built upon it; it is rather, at least in large part, an evolved expression of genetic self-interest, reflected in near-universal social and behavioral dispositions.

I imagined, back in those blithe, younger days, that we really had put all this behind us. It was naive of me to think that. We have not. Nor are we likely to.

Race is real. In aggregate, human populations differ. Because of those differences, their interests can differ, too — and that can lead to various kinds of unpleasantness. Birds of a feather, whether we approve or not, still tend to flock together.

This is the reality we must live with — and no matter what our race, we ignore it at our peril. As Thomas Sowell wrote:

[M]ost of the media see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil. In such an atmosphere, the evil not only persists but grows…

Apparently political correctness trumps human lives.