September 16, 2015
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Coates” autodidacticism is personally admirable, but it’s also embarrassing in that he doesn”t notice what he doesn”t notice. For instance, if you ask people what the most famous decade in the history of the world is, many would say: the “60s. Everybody has a different opinion on the “60s, but at least they have an opinion. Except Coates, for whom the sheer existence of the “60s is an embarrassment for the tale he’s trying to tell. Thus, Coates goes on about the “past 50 years”:
A serious reformation of our carceral policy”one seeking a smaller prison population, and a prison population that looks more like America”cannot concern itself merely with sentencing reform, cannot pretend as though the past 50 years of criminal-justice policy did not do real damage.
But 50 years ago was 1965, and the Warren Court’s criminal-justice policy was to go soft on crime. Liberalism held the whip hand, so imprisonment rates per crime committed were cut sharply. Crime exploded from 1964 onward. This vast liberal social-engineering experiment is a massively obvious feature of the civil rights era.
But not for Coates, for whom the “60s barely exist.
Coates” new article is built around the 50th anniversary of LBJ adviser Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report dissenting from the liberal mainstream, warning about growing illegitimacy among black families (22 percent back then, versus 71 percent in 2014) and the social decay this portended.
But surely the single most obvious fact about Moynihan’s report on its 50th anniversary is that it happened 50 years ago. Already by 1965 liberals dominated race policy so completely that one ornery liberal had to speak up about what was being occluded by proto”political correctness.
Since then a huge amount of time has passed in which liberals have remained in charge of almost all aspects regarding race, with the exception that conservatives eventually wrested back the criminal-justice system after crime destroyed much of urban America.
Coates is pleased to discover that back in 1965, Moynihan blamed white people for blacks” family problems:
In essence, the Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it is so out of line with the rest of the American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole, and imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male and, in consequence, on a great many Negro women as well.
Coates complains that as the years went by, however, an older and wiser Moynihan became more skeptical about his 1965 assumption that African-Americans bear no responsibility for their difficulties. This doesn”t raise doubts in Coates” mind, of course, since it’s just additional evidence for him that white racism is an all-powerful force deforming the brains of even those people who once agreed with him.
The unmentionable reality that Moynihan apparently didn”t grasp in 1965, but may have comprehended through his alcoholic haze as the decades of liberalism rolled by (Moynihan’s late contributions include his amusing 1993 Law of the Canadian Border), was that African-Americans brought many of their tendencies with them from Africa. The huge expansion in welfare in the 1960s and 1970s merely allowed them to revert back to the social order under which they had been evolving since their invention of agriculture a few thousand years before.
Moynihan used the word “matriarchal” to loosely describe what’s distinctive about African-American life. But the same can be said for Africa. This doesn”t mean that African women exercise formal political control. In the tropics, the ecological conditions are such that most of the farmwork is done by women. But since African women largely bring home the bacon, they are less likely to choose mates who are boring but hardworking providers. Instead, because they are going to be paying for their pleasure, they tend to choose sexy bad boys. Not surprisingly, the top box office movie in America over the past month was Straight Outta Compton about gangsta rappers N.W.A, who made their fortunes by egging on black youths to shoot each other in petty disputes.
As Darwin’s theory of sexual selection would imply, that leads to more sexy bad boys being born in Africa and in the African diaspora than in other parts of the world.
It’s crucial for us to start trying to understand Africans because there are going to be so many of them. In 1995, the populations of the continents of Europe and Africa were the same at about 730 million. But today, while the number of Europeans is stable, there are now 1,186 million Africans, which explains much about the causes of the “migrant crisis” in Europe.
Back in April, I called attention to the U.N.’s 2012 forecast that by 2100 there would be 4.2 billion Africans, calling it the most important statistic in the world.
But the U.N.’s new 2015 forecast says there will be 4.4 billion Africans.
Occam’s Rubber Room is clearly capacious, but can it deal with those kinds of numbers?
