One last reading list for the summer. I’m somewhat disappointed at the intellectual class for letting CRT get out of the lab and into the mainstream without pushing back earlier, but I figured a couple of years ago that the books and studies and articles would come. It’s not your “Woke or Cancel Culture” tropes, but mercifully…logic.
Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s brilliant The Coddling of the American Mind
Jason Riley has written a biography of the great black conservative thinker Thomas Sowell. Anyone under the impression that to be a card-carrying conservative and a black person at the same time guarantees that one is caught somewhere between naïve and cynical knows little of Sowell’s lucid work and unforgivably underacknowledged volume of achievement. The book is called Maverick.
The reference is to the case of one Jared Lafer. He is a white man in his 20s who, in September of last year, was driving in Johnson City, Tennessee, when he came upon a small group of Black Lives Matter protesters in a crosswalk.
Where they were, what-- just crossing the street in an orderly fashion?
I had a similar conversation with an AA hall monitor the other day. The whole “It takes a village” crap in particular. Bill throws millions of black men in jail and Hillary says, “Nah, you don’t need them anyway.”
I can remember within my own lifetime when Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report was first issued in 1965, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, he called it. He argued then, with 25% of black children being born to a woman without a husband, that this problem was going to stand as a fundamental barrier to black progress. And indeed, if it weren’t somehow dealt with might prevent the fruit of the Civil Rights Movement’s successes from being enjoyed fully by African Americans and by the country.
He was pilloried for daring to raise the question as a white man. And since then, a political discussion about this question has been stifled and truncated. People have been wary to raise the issues and to talk about these themes. They don’t want to be accused of blaming the victim. They don’t want to seem to be judgmental. They don’t want to be imposing a moral calculus on the lives of people, especially people who have been victimized by discrimination and who may be plagued by poverty.
This, I think, is a mistake. What was 25% when Moynihan was issuing his call to arms over a half century ago is 70% now. The African American family, one could say, is in deep trouble. Again, there will be pushback. People will say, “Why do you judge family by a single norm?” They will say, “It takes a village to raise a child. Why should we think in terms of patriarchy and in terms of the nuclear family as the only model?”
I don’t want to waste my time with those arguments. I simply want to call attention to the needs of young people that have stable social foundations within the context of which they can mature and realize their human potential. And I want to say that a mother and father raising children is a sounder foundation to that end than a mother raising those children alone. I’ll have more to say about that in due course.
To be VERY fair, the GOP have done squat to reign in their nutters recently. The DEMs don’t trust one another to do what must be done to achieve their lofty goals. So, they stay mum. The GOP are worse. They see it, and it wouldn’t hurt them to tell their own to reel it the f in a bit. At this point we’re just sticking our tongues out at one another. Nation of toddlers.
Kyle is basically a scapegoat to distract from the issue. Those who govern allowed these riots to take place. That’s what we should all be talking about.
