Malcolm X Was Right

The worst enemy that the Negro have is this white man that runs around here drooling at the mouth professing to love Negros, and calling himself a liberal, and it is following these white liberals that has perpetuated problems that Negros have. If the Negro wasn’t taken, tricked, or deceived by the white liberal then Negros would get together and solve our own problems.

-          Malcolm X

I grew up in a city that would be considered a large bedroom community of a much larger city.  My hometown had a mixed population – mixed in total, but not so much by neighborhood; mixed, meaning, basically black and white.  During my school years, our public school district began the program of forced integration via bussing, and I was sent to the other side of town along with some of my earlier classmates.

While reading an essay entitled “My Career as a White Police Officer,” by Daniel Vinyard, I thought: this was not my experience.  What was his experience?  Read the essay – every sort of nasty, brutish, and violent behavior you can imagine.

Of course, he is a cop and I was a school student – we were certainly not dealing with the same randomly selected population.  At my school, yes there would be occasional fights – almost always black against black, occasionally females going at it but usually males.  While Vinyard describes fights as always involving large groups of blacks, I don’t recall anything like this – just two people pissed off at each other for whatever reason. 

Even with large groups gathered around to watch the fight, it wouldn’t turn into a riot.  Unlike what Vinyard describes today, there were “rules”: third parties wouldn’t get involved, there were no weapons, there were no cheap shots when the fight was over.  I don’t recall a stabbing or shooting at the school, and this was even before metal detectors and high security fences became standard; our campus was as open as could be.

In all of those years of forced integration (seven, in total), I only had meaningful trouble with a black individual once.  He was looking over the shoulder of a friend of mine while my friend was opening his locker.  The guy wanted to see the combination.  I stepped in and stopped it.  The guy didn’t like this and said he would come after us, which he did a couple of days later.

Upon receiving this threat, my friend no longer came to school – there was only about a week or two left in the school year – leaving me to deal with the problem.  So much for whites watching out for each other.  It got dealt with, and I was just a little worse for wear.  Frankly, I had more trouble with those of my “tribe” who were recent immigrants than I did with any of the black students. 

Yes, I attended an integrated school – but integrated almost only in name, although I had a few good friends who were black.  During lunch, mostly the white kids hung out in one area, and the black kids in another.  Rarely was there any trouble between the groups.  I would attend many of the high school football and basketball games.  Large crowds, no trouble.

I had a few friends who lived on the other side of town.  I never had a problem visiting, not even at night.  Sure, there were neighborhoods that no one wanted to go to – especially after dark.  I am just saying that this wasn’t true everywhere.  I remember even walking home from school a few times without a concern and without an issue – several miles, at least half of which were through predominantly black neighborhoods.

As an aside, and not correlated to race in any way that I can remember: there was a large field between the main campus and the student parking lot.  By the time you got to your car, you were quite high from the fumes…. Just like at the best rock concerts of the time!  Our sense of smell offers some of the best memories in life.

I had a job after school.  Also, at work, I had a couple of good friends who were black – good guys, hardworking; nothing like what Vinyard describes.  Again, I know: we are dealing with different subsets, but still.

A couple of years ago I went to my high school reunion.  I was talking to a classmate – a black woman who just retired from the police department of the same city where we grew up and went to school.  I asked her about the schools: what has happened since the forced bussing began.  Let’s just say it has been a disaster for the black community.

When bussing started, we had three private schools in town; today there are twenty.  The schools are segregated again, now based on those who can afford to pay double for school: once through taxes and again through private tuition.  And this, as you can imagine, primarily breaks down by race.

Now, those with money no longer care about the quality of the schools in the district.  When I was young, and before bussing, this wasn’t the case.  Yes, we went to the neighborhood school, but the district office had jurisdiction over all the schools.  She described the hell-hole that is the public schools now.  Again, nothing at all like my experience from my high school years.

I wouldn’t trade my high school experience for any other.  However, given her description of the situation today, I wouldn’t wish today’s experience on my worst enemy.

I know this experience seems from another world, given what we see on the news every day.  Yet, I am certain that my experience during that time in our history wasn’t unique or even rare.  So, why am I offering such detail?  What has changed, from the time of these experiences until today?

From “Why America Has Gone Mad,” by Jared Taylor:

Ever since Jamestown, we have groped for a solution to the terrible problem of trying to build a nation of different races. Could it not be clearer that the attempt has failed?

We were one of the earlier high school classes to go through forced bussing.  This was not terribly long after LBJ’s Great Society programs, which brings me back to the quote by Malcolm X.  If one can say – as Taylor does – that the attempt has failed, it has only failed due to the efforts of white liberals, and it is white liberals who are driving the failure even today and it is white liberals who are stoking the flames of the divide.

Since the end of slavery in America, I think it is safe to say that slowly, but surely, progress was being made in this “attempt” of building a nation of different races in America.  No, not uninterrupted progress, and no, not always peaceful; there were always setbacks: for example, Charles Burris recently commented on the Tulsa Race Massacre, a horrendous episode. 

But blacks were moving into the middle class, black business owners were on the increase, black families were intact, there were schools for blacks that ranked with some of the finest in the country.

White liberals felt none of this was moving fast enough, or they felt that pandering to blacks would gain more votes.  Every line of black progress on every measure takes a bend for the worse starting in the mid-1960s, and it is tied to the government programs enacted by white liberals.  For example, from Walter Williams:

According to the 1938 Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, that year only 11 percent of black children were born to unwed mothers. As late as 1950, female-headed households constituted only 18 percent of the black population. Today it’s close to 70 percent. In much earlier times, during the late 1800s, there were only slight differences between the black family structure and those of other ethnic groups. In New York City in 1925, 85 percent of kin-related black households were two-parent households.

Exacerbating this situation was the purposely destructive weaponizing of Cultural Marxism and Critical Race Theory, taught at universities and in school districts across the country, all run by – you guessed it – white liberals.

Malcolm X wasn’t one sided on this.  He also knew that white conservatives were a threat – but at least they didn’t pretend.  His main point, as I take it: if left alone, blacks can solve their own problems.  And, until the 1960s and despite still suffering under many troubling yokes, the track record would support his contention.

Sixty years of purposeful cultural destruction, driven by white liberals, has taken its toll.

Conclusion

No, I don’t have the black experience.  Maybe I should just shut up.  But I am guessing that I have more of the black experience than most of the white liberals who are doing all of the damage or who are virtue-signal posting BLM signs on their front lawns.  In any case, there is no hope for justice, peace, or progress if we cannot speak openly on such matters.

Today, the loudest mouthpieces on these issues – both white and black mouthpieces – scream about what white people must do to solve black problems.  Malcolm X offered the opposite message:  that the place to start is for white liberals to stop “helping” the black community and for leadership in the black community to focus on the problems and solutions within the black community. 

Apparently LeBron James is reading The Autobiography of Malcom X; let’s hope he understands the message.  His is one voice that can bring some peace, if he chooses to do so.

I will suggest that another place to start is to string up the white liberals in the town square – actually, let’s start here first.  If reparations are necessary to right this wrong, this is a good place to start – an eye for an eye, so to speak.

Epilogue

The passage from Malcolm X begins with the following, which I did not include above: “The white liberal is the worst enemy to America….”

He is right on this point as well.  It isn’t an America of more than one race that cannot work; it is an America divided by drastically different values that is the problem.  America doesn’t have a racial divide; it has a values divide. 

I have been harmed far more by white people in this country who hold to radical liberal and neocon values than by black people.