A Black Conservative Call for Racial Uplift Based on Entrepreneurship not Political Power

Jason L. Riley, False Black Power (West Conshoshocken: Templeton Press 2017).

This is another book analysing the plight of Black America from a Black conservative perspective. According to the book, Riley’s a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, writes for the Wall Street Journal and contributes to Fox News. But the book does quote statistics and sources, which means it’s almost certainly more trustworthy than that news network. When academics from the American universities reviewed Fox’s content, they found that people who took no news at all were better informed about the world than the people who watched Fox. America is indeed being ‘dumbed’ and Murdoch’s part of it. But this book is absolutely fascinating and, if accurate, is a much needed refutation of some of the myths about Black American history.

The introduction starts with an attack on the idea that the decline of the Black American family was caused by slavery. It’s true that slavery did destroy Black family life, as slave families were frequently split up, with fathers separated from their wives and children, children separated from the parents and so on. This, so the argument goes, has made it difficult for Black men to develop the necessary feelings of attachment to form permanent, two-parent families. As a result, most Black American families are single-parent, headed by the mothers. But Riley cites Herbert Gutman’s 1976 book, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925, examined a variety of sources to the show that the disruption of the slave family did not persist into emancipation. Looking at Confederate plantation records, the testimony of former slaves and the records of Black families in Buffalo and New York City, showed that from the second half of the 19th century to the 1920s, these communities were predominantly two-parent. In Buffalo between 1850 and 1920, the figure was 82 to 92 per cent. In New York in 1925 the figure was 85 per cent. (p. 5).

Riley’s argument is that the present poverty and misery experienced by many Black American communities cannot be blamed solely on racism and the legacy of enslavement. He and the authors he cites don’t deny that racism and discrimination exist, rather that the main cause of the present troubles of family breakdown, crime, unemployment and welfare dependency are due to the misplaced social programmes of the 1970s. Like Shelby Steele, he believes that Black Americans have taken the wrong road to uplift. Since the civil rights movement, they have concentrated on acquiring political power, resulting in the election across America of Black politicos, mayor and other officials. But these have not helped ordinary Blacks. He states at one point that Black politicians will ignore the underclass just to stay elected just as White politicos will, and cites a couple of scandals were Black politicians on their constituencies’ education boards were caught fiddling the exam results. He argues instead that Blacks should have followed the example of other impoverished communities, like the Chinese and Pennsylvania Germans, who eschewed acquiring political power in favour of economic uplift. He contrasts these groups with the 19th century Irish. These had political power, but nevertheless the Irish community itself remained poor and marginal.

Riley cites a number of other authors that show the explosion of Black entrepreneurialism after the end of slavery, as Blacks took over and entered a wide variety of professions. These scholars have argued that by the end of the 19th century Black communities also had their own business districts like White communities, as well as excellent schools. The 1913 Negro Almanac boasted of this achievement, comparing the capital accumulated by Blacks with that of the former Russian serfs. The former serfs had collectively $500 million in capital and a literacy rate of 30 per cent. Black Americans had $700 million and 70 per cent ‘had some education in books’. (74). In Chicago in 1885 there were 200 Black-owned businesses operating in 27 different fields. (75). And this trend continued, with the emergence in other areas of a small, but significant Black clerical class. At the same time, the number of Black Americans owning their own homes increased massively. Black prosperity increased during the years of the two World Wars,, when Blacks took on White jobs. They were still below that of Whites, but were catching up. As were Blacks in education. Blacks typically left school four years before Whites. But as the 20th century went on, this fell to two. Between 1950 and 1960 the number of Black doctors, lawyers and social workers expanded so that in 1953 a real estate journal called Blacks ‘the newest middle class’. (77). But this professional, educational and economic rise and expansion somehow came to an end in the 1970s.

At the same time, Riley cites the statistics to show that the American cops are not gun-happy racists bent on shooting Blacks. Rather, a study by Roland Fryer, a Harvard economist, found that Blacks are 23.8 per cent less like than Whites to be shot by the police. (63). As for New York’s stop and frisk policy, that was shown to stop Blacks 20-30 per cent below the appearance of Blacks in the description of suspects.(64). As for police shootings, these fell massively in New York from 1971 to 2015. In the former year, the cops shot 314 people, killing 93. In 2015 they shot 23 people, of whom 8 were killed. (65). He also notes instances where there was still friction between the Black community and police even when the town’s leaders and senior police officers were Black.

On a less serious note, he talks about the Barbershop films and their unsparing, humorous look into the condition of Black America. Set in a Black barbershop and with a majority Black cast, these films showed Blacks making jokes at the expense of revered leaders like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, decrying their kids’ fashion sense – trousers being worn low on the hips to expose the buttocks – and worrying about gangster culture and Black on Black violence. This upset Black activists like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, but Riley maintains that they nevertheless accurately reflected the way Blacks talk when Whites aren’t around. The same concerns are held by many other Blacks, including one mayor, Nutter, who gave a similar speech at a Black church. He advised people not to dress in a threatening manner if they wanted anyone, of any race, respect them, and called for the kids to work hard at school and pull their trousers up. The crowd gave him a standing ovation, chanting ‘Buy a belt! But a belt!’ But his speech was angrily attacked by Black liberals because it didn’t reflect their priorities of blaming everything on racism. Riley also described the way Obama was often pilloried for his outspoken comments about poor standards in the Black community, while playing the race card himself. Riley also argues that the decline in Black educational standards also has its roots in dysfunctional attitudes among Black youth. If you’re too nerdy or bookish in these communities, you’re going to pilloried for ‘acting White’. This is a controversial position, but, Riley argues, the evidence for it is convincing and solid.

Despite being written from a conservative viewpoint, there are aspects of the book that can also be embraced by those on the left. Firstly, the expansion of Black businesses, jobs, and professions after slavery demonstrate that Black America is as talented as every other racial group in America. I found it a convincing refutation of the genetic argument that states that Black poverty and lack of achievement is somehow because Blacks are, on average, biologically intellectually inferior to Whites and Asians. And the argument that Blacks achieved more when they had stable, two-parent families, would have strongly appealed to a section of the British Labour party. British socialism was influenced, it has been said, more by Protestant, Methodist nonconformity than Karl Marx. Years ago the Spectator reviewed a book on the reading habits of the British working class. They found that the favourite reading matter of a solid working class Welsh community in the teens or twenties of the last century was the Bible.

Much more questionable is the apparent link between the affirmative action programmes of the 1970s and the persistence of Black poverty. Riley doesn’t anywhere show why or how they failed, and correlation is not causation. Just because their introduction was in a period of economic decay and impoverishment for Blacks doesn’t mean that they caused it. And I wondered how much of the decline was due to general, structural changes in the American economy that have also badly affected Whites. For example, Bristol used to have a flourishing print industry. There still are printers in the city, but the industry has declined considerably from what it was and many of those skilled jobs have been lost, along with those in other industries. Many Brits and Americans were hit hard by the oil crisis of the 1970s and the consequent recession and unrest. Thatcher, and then Blair, favoured the financial sector over manufacturing, which destroyed many working class jobs. And then there’s the whole nasty complex of welfare cuts, outsourcing, zero-hours contracts and wage freezes that have kept working people in Britain poor. And the same situation is true in America. This impoverishment and economic restructuring is going to hit Blacks especially hard as the Black community is poorer and less affluent. And I don’t doubt for a single minute that there are problems causes unique to the Black community, of which racism is going to be one.

But this is nevertheless a fascinating and important book, and I think it should have its place in schools if they’re teaching Critical Race Theory. That pernicious doctrine holds that Blacks are being held back solely by White privilege, in which all Whites benefit. The government recently stated that teachers must present controversial ideas impartially and was duly denounced by activist groups and the left for doing so. But I believe the truth in this issue lies somewhere between both sides, and that, if these ideas are being taught, children should be exposed to both sets or arguments. And then make their minds up.

And then, after hearing a variety of viewpoints, we might be more successful in creating a more equal society and truly enabling Black achievement.

One Positive Feature of Black Lives Matter: It Doesn’t Include the Nation of Islam

Unlike Mike, I have grave reservations about the Black Lives Matter movement. It has excellent intentions, but I feel it is unintentionally divisive and open itself to criticism for its simplistic view of racial hatred. But flicking through some of the old newspaper cuttings I kept in my scrapbook, I really that it has made one positive step over the mass anti-racism protests following the murder of Stephen Lawrence over twenty years ago. No idiot has invited the National of Islam over here.

Stephen Lawrence, as older readers of this blog will remember, was a Black teenager murdered in a racist attack by a White gang. It became a national scandal due to the Met police’s complete lack of interest in prosecuting the crims responsible, who were all the sons of leading London gangsters. It was incompetence on a massive scale, with elements of corruption and showed the institutional racism in the capital’s police force. It resulted in mass anti-racism demonstrations across Britain.

And joining these demos were the racist extremists. Lawrence’s parents made appeals for their son’s death not to be exploited. The BNP were threatening to turn up at some these. They had been active spreading lies about the late teenager, falsely claiming that he had been a gang member, who terrorised his schoolmates in order to shake them down for their dinner and other money. And from the other side, ‘African radical’ Bernie Grant, the head of Brent council, took it upon himself to invite into the country the Rev. Louis Farrakhan and his legions from the Nation of Islam.

The Nation of Islam has precious little to do with genuine Islam, whether Sunni or Shi’a. It’s a weird mixture of Sudanese Sufism, Black Freemasonry, and UFO space brothers contact ufology. It’s based around the worship of W.D. Fard, a Syrian immigrant to the US, who on his immigration papers was listed as ‘White’. It was while he working in a car factory that Fard was worshipped as another incarnation of the Almighty. This is incredibly heretical to orthodox Muslims. While Mohammed described Christ as ‘the purest of the Prophets’, conceived through divine action in the Virgin Mary, and that God poured out his spirit upon Him when He was a child in the cradle, they differ from Christians in that they strongly reject the doctrine of the Incarnation. The Nation of Islam naturally believe that Christ was also Black, a belief not confined to them, of course.

But there’s a large SF element to the religion as well. They also belief that Black people are the original human race, and arrived here millions of years ago from the Moon. They are superior to everyone else biologically, intellectually and spiritually. Eons ago they created a super-scientific civilisation. White people are albinistic mutants created by the evil Mekkan scientist Shaitan to destroy Blacks and their achievements. You won’t be surprised to hear that they’re also viciously anti-Semitic, wrongly blaming Jews for slavery. Farrakhan himself believed that he was taken aboard a UFO while meditating on the top of a Mexican mountain. He was transported to a giant Mother Wheel orbiting the Earth, which they conveyed him to Venus, where Fard and Jesus now reside, directing the war against Whites. Although their manifesto states that they believe in the dignity of all races and their right to self-determination, the National of Islam was are racial separatists. They demand that Blacks be given a separate country of their own, comprised of four states taken from the southern USA.

The Nation of Islam is also very strongly opposed to the welfare state, which they believe takes away Black people’s self-reliance. This alone should have had Grant thrown out of the Labour party, as it’s clearly incompatible with the core Labour doctrines of supporting the welfare state. And their separatism should have been incompatible with Labour’s ideas of anti-racism. Grant defended his invitation by saying that he had his views, and Farrakhan had his, and they didn’t always agree, but he regarded Farrakhan as ‘an elder statesman’. Well, he was, but chiefly in spreading more racist friction and especially anti-Semitism. He was a political liability, and effectively killed Jesse Jackson’s campaign to become America’s first Black president 15 years before Obama when Jackson started cosying up to him. Al sharpton was also trying to get into Britain at the same time. He’s still around, and seems to have quietened down somewhat with age. But in the ’80s and ’90s one of his tactics was to try to call attention to the terrible living conditions for Blacks in America by leading marches through White areas with highly racially charged chants. He claimed that by referring to them as his ‘troops’ he was only being metaphorical. May be so, but many feared that they would turn violent and they were deliberately provocative.

Farrakhan’s proposed visit to Blighty was opposed by a number of organisations, including Jewish groups, who had every right to be concerned. Racial extremists like him should never have been invited in the first place. The Black Lives Matter protests, although not without faults – there have been violent confrontations with the police – are mostly peaceful multiracial, including Whites and Asians as well as Blacks. They have been at pains to point out that they aren’t against Whites or trying to start a race war, just against anti-Black racism.

And in that they’re a definite improvement over the Stephen Lawrence protests and the way that Bernie Grant and the National of Islam tried to exploit them.

 

ITV Programme Next Thursday on Martin Luther King

Next Thursday, 22nd March 2018, ITV are broadcasting at 9.00 pm a programme about Martin Luther King, presented by that British newsreading institution, Sir Trevor McDonald. The blurb for this in the Radio Times runs

On the 50th anniversary of the civil rights leader’s death, Trevor McDonald travels to the Deep South of America to get closer to the man who meant so much to him and so many others. As well as finding out about the horrors of lynching in 20th-century America, he asks Naomi Campbell, General Colin Powell and the Reverend Al Sharpton what Martin Luther King all means to them. Disturbingly, he also meets a former member of the Ku Klux Klan who admits that he would once have targeted him because of the colour of his skin. (p. 103).

There’s also a section three pages further back, on page 100, which adds a bit more. This says

It’s 55 years since Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream speech’ in Washington transfixed the world and became a rallying call for the American civil rights movement. Fifty years after King’s assassination, Trevor McDonald looks at a remarkable life that was cut short. he talks to friends of King’s, including singer Harry Belafonte.

It’s the small, if familiar, details that still move. Like hearing how the mighty gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, seeing King struggling with notes for his speech, prompted him loudly with “Tell them about the dream, Martin”. What followed was off the cuff and remains spine-tingling to this day.

MLK was also politically far more radical than he is often portrayed. A month or so ago there were a series of articles and videos by Counterpunch and the various American left-wing news programmes pointing out that the rather anodyne image of King as preaching simple racial reconciliation was carefully crafted to exclude his criticism of capitalism and American imperialism. King did believe in racial reconciliation between White and Black, but he also believed that capitalism and big business was keeping Whites and Blacks divided in order to weaken the working class, and allow ordinary folks of whatever colour to be exploited.

He was also an opponent of the Vietnam War, which he saw as more corporate imperialism to exploit and oppress the coloured people of that country, just as Blacks in America were being exploited.

This stance led him into conflict with the Democrat Party and the president, Lyndon Johnson. After MLK made a speech denouncing capitalism and the war at the Riverside Church, Johnson removed King’s bodyguards. It was an ominous measure that everyone knew would ultimately mean King’s death.

And King also didn’t mince his words when it came to describing the atrocities of the Vietnam War and American imperialism. You may remember the fuss the Republicans kicked up about the Reverend Jeremiah Cone, the pastor at Barack Obama’s church. Cone was also strongly anti-American because of what he viewed as the country’s intrinsic racial injustice, shouting out ‘God dam’ America!’ The Republicans claimed that he was anti-White, and that his hatred of Whites must also be shared by the Obama, then just campaigning for the presidency, because Obama had worshipped in the same church without objection for something like 20 years. I honestly don’t know if Cone was anti-White or not. It’s possible he was. But his comments on American imperialism were very much in line with what MLK, who certainly wasn’t racist, also said.

This is an issue I shall have to go back to, as it’s still very, very relevant today, when the racist right is once again trying to goose step back into power, and western imperialism is exploiting and plundering the countries of the world, all under the pretext of freeing them from terror.

Jewish Chronicle Race Hucksters Make More Fake Anti-Semitism Accusation over Criticism of Luciana Berger

On Saturday Mike also put up a piece reporting how the Jewish Chronicle had taken the opportunity offered by the criticism of Luciana Berger, the Labour MP for Liverpool Wavertree, by a member of the local party’s executive to make fresh accusations of anti-Semitism against Momentum and the Labour party.

Berger had resigned from the Shadow Cabinet last year as part of the ‘chicken coup’ of Blairites hoping to weaken to Corbyn’s leadership of the party. Roy Bentham, the local officer, who made the criticisms, said

“Luciana needs to get on board quite quickly now. She will now have to sit round the table with us the next time she wants to vote for bombing in Syria or to pass a no-confidence motion in the leader of the party – she will have to be answerable to us.”

However, as Mike points out in his article, Bentham is not a member of Momentum, which has distanced itself from his comments. Angela Kehoe-Jones, the Secretary of Liverpool Wavertree constituency Labour party, said

The newly elected Executive of Liverpool Wavertree are looking forward to working with our MP Luciana Berger for our constituency.

We must disassociate ourselves from one of our officers who did not speak on behalf of the Executive. The views he has expressed do not in anyway represent the views of the CLP officers.

We have a lively and growing CLP and we have regularly campaigned together in local and national elections and to get Luciana re-elected in the General Election. We are united in our common goal to oust this Tory government and to see a Labour government elected under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn.

Berger herself has stated that she did not resign from the Cabinet because of anti-Semitism. And while Bentham’s critics, like Owen Jones, have said that his comments were ‘off’, there isn’t actually anything anti-Semitic about them. There was no mention in his comments of Berger’s religion or ethnicity.

Mike speculates that the Chronicle may have been provoked by Bentham’s remark about Berger voting to bomb Syria. But that’s actually fair comment. There’s nothing anti-Semitic in criticising an MP, who wishes to bomb a foreign country for very dubious geopolitical reasons. Likud and the American Neo-Cons want Assad deposed, as do a number of Gulf states, including Qatar and Saudi Arabia, for similar reasons to the Iraq invasion: overthrew a secular, Arab nationalist state allied to Russia and Iran, stop a source of possible aid to the Palestinians, loot the country of its industries and oil reserves, and in the case of the Gulf Arab states and Jordan, send a gas pipeline through the country to Europe and Turkey, which is currently blocked by Assad because of his alliance with the Russians and Iran.

Britain and America are already supporting rebel forces trying to overthrow Assad, and these are very unpleasant indeed. They’re al-Qaeda and ISIS. So we’re cynically supporting the very people we’re supposed to be fighting against in the Middle East, because they’re against a secular dictator the American military-industrial complex also wants to remove.

And it is by no means only Jewish politicos in the Labour party, who voted for the bombing. So was Hillary ‘Bomber’ Benn, the son of Tony Benn.

So, as Mike himself points out, this is yet another baseless accusation of anti-Semitism, like those made against Mike himself in order to prevent him from being elected to Powys council, and for which Mike is pursuing legal action.

These accusations are all the more disgusting, as they detract from the real anti-Semitic abuse Berger suffered from a genuine Nazi, who was jailed for his offences.

Mike quotes one of the commenters on Twitter, EL4JC, who states that the people throwing around these smears undermine the genuine fight against anti-Semitism, and concludes

That is exactly right. Baseless accusations, such as those made against me or Mr Bentham, undermine the fight against anti-Semitism. One wonders why people do it.

Is it to spread division, confusion, disinformation?

http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/07/08/fake-accusations-against-momentum-over-luciana-berger-are-undermining-the-fight-against-anti-semitism/

In fact, two weeks ago Tony Greenstein put up on his blog an article reporting how the Zionist lobby in the Labour party were going to launch another spate of anti-Semitism accusations after their disappointment with the results of the election. Contrary to their desires, this showed that Corbyn is massively popular with the electorate, a stance that threatens the Blairites’ neoliberal economic agenda and the Zionists’ demands that criticism of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians should be studiously avoided. Joan Ryan, the Chair of Labour Friends of Israel, even wrote to her supporters stating that Theresa May would be better than Jeremy Corbyn.

Mr Greenstein commented

The success of Jeremy Corbyn in turning the Tory tide is making these racists sick to the gills which is why they are trying to relaunch the false ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign in the hope of dividing the Party, sowing dissent and providing succour to the Tories. False anti-Semitism and false victimhood are their chosen strategy for defending a state which demolishes Palestinian homes, even of Israel’s own Arab citizens in order to make way for Jewish homes and towns.

In Israel ‘Judification’ is official policy. Google ‘The Koenig Plan’ or the ‘Prawer Plan’. In Nazi Germany they had deJewification campaigns. Israel is a state which officially does its best to stop Jews and Arabs having sexual relationships. A Jewish state means a Jewish Supremacist State. It isn’t a constitutional adornment. Purity of race and a Jewish settler state goes hand in hand. This is what Ryan, Kyle and Newmark are defending.

It is essential that if there is a further round of false ‘anti-Semitism’ allegations that Jeremy Corbyn stands firm and calls it out. There is no future in trying to appease the supporters of Israel. You cannot appease racists or the supporters of racism. If Corbyn had, at the very start, said that yes he condemns anti-Semitism and he also condemns false accusations of anti-Semitism directed against supporters of the Palestinians (and even against Jewish anti-Zionists) then he could have defused these attacks early on.

Corbyn above all knows that the ritual response of Zionism’s supporters to opposition to Israel and what it does to the Palestinians has always been false accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’. They even invented a ‘new anti-Semitism’ since the traditional anti-Semitism (hatred or hostility to Jews) didn’t accord with hatred of racist Israel.

Nothing Corbyn says or does will ever satisfy Israel’s supporters. They are part of the NATO supporting friends of US imperialism. Corbyn will never be acceptable to them which is why the Left in the Labour Party needs to be resolute in opposing any further appeasement of these people. If they think the Labour Party is anti-Semitic then they should clear off and join the Tory Party, the traditional home of genuine anti-Semitism.

http://azvsas.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/labour-friends-of-israel-zionists-are.html

In the case of the accusations made by the Jewish Chronicle and other commenters against Bentham and Momentum, this is just nasty, cynical yellow journalism. There’s nothing anti-Semitic in Bentham’s comments, and he wasn’t a member of Momentum. But they made the accusations anyway, and cynically expect the public to believe it. Who knows, perhaps they even believe it themselves? They hope that simply by repeating the smear – the big lie – they’ll get more people to believe it, just as Goebbels, the master of this type of propaganda, recommended.

There’s a very nasty element of race hucksterism here. This is what such accusations are often called in America, whenever a radical Black politician or activist, such as Al Sharpton, gets up and makes an inflammatory comments about White racism. The Republicans, backed by Fox News, immediately fall over themselves to denounce them as a ‘race huckster’ or ‘race baiter’, and try to turn it around so that the politico making the accusations of racism is the one, who is really racist.

And this is what is going on here. The Jewish Chronicle and its allies are simply playing the race card to smear their political opponents, who are genuinely anti-racists, and who include Jews and people of Jewish heritage. It’s about time the Chronicle was still held to the same standards as everyone else. Owen Jones states in one of his Tweets that they should retract their accusations. They should. And Tony Greenstein is also correct in that if they really think that Labour is anti-Semitic, then they should leave and join the Tories, who are, after all, their natural allies if Joan Ryan is to be believed.

Conservative Agent Provocateur Tries To Get Blacks to Demand Cops Murder

This is another piece from The Young Turks about Conservatives infiltrating Left-wing protests in order to provoke them into violence. James O’Keeffe is an, ahem, ‘Documentary film-maker’, who specialises in making films designed to bring down left wing causes. He was one of those, who brought down the ACORN charity organisation. His most recent smear campaign was against a Black protest march organised Al Sharpton. O’Keeffe hired Richard Valdez, who in turn tried to arrange a Muslim, Mohammed Alhomsi, to join the protest. Alhomsi was given a script, in which he was to call for the murder of the cops. Alhomsi, however, had more integrity than his employers, and refused on the grounds that he didn’t want to do anything that would reflect badly on Blacks, Muslims, or himself, or jeopardise his residence in America. Valdez then had to pass this along to O’Keeffe, who reacted accordingly, with the result that Valdez is now suing his former employer.

As so many have done in the past. O’Keeffe has a long history of being sued by former collaborators and employees, as well as for having absolutely zero journalistic ethics. nevertheless, O’Keeffe’s wretched films are still somehow being used by other Conservative media outlets in the Land of the Free.

I’ve reblogged this, as it was put up about ten days ago. As I said in my previous post, it looks like the goons in SNP masks, who jostled Miliband, were Tories trying to cause trouble. This comes shortly after The Young Turks’ report on O’Keeffe, so I wonder if someone at a Conservative Club somewhere had a brainstorm, and rather than keeping away from tactics like O’Keeffe’s, actually thought they were a good idea instead.