Fun with Race. For a While, Anyway, by Fred Reed
America’s racial circumstances, its lightning demographic transformation unimaginable a half century ago, runs apace, not just with Latinos filtering across the southern border, but with the federal government inexplicably importing people from Somalia and Afghanistan and, apparently, trying to intensify racial division. It is an astonishment of a high order, the best show in town. How, why, and whither?
A surprising number of people seem unfamiliar with the figures. America is about thirteen percent black, eighteen percent Latino, and something like six percent Asian, whatever that means. Over half of children eighteen and under are not white. Thus in an uncertain but small number of years, America will mostly not be white. This, like sunrise, is going to happen no matter what anyone thinks about it. Wow.
The southern border is largely open. Immigrants pour across the frontier, chiefly Central American, badly educated or actually illiterate, sometimes speaking only Indian languages. Mr. Trump once said that “Mexico is not sending its best.” This is true of all Latin American countries. Cardiac surgeons and systems programmers do not swim the Rio Bravo to pick oranges in Florida. While the influx of Mexicans has decreased with the improvement in the Mexican economy, the Central Americans arrive in droves. Along with them come Haitians, various Africans, and Afghans, groups even less qualified to become American. This seems likely to continue, at least during the administration of Biden.
So how does the racial map look? Latinos concentrated in the Southwest, where they seem certain to become the majority. In California they now outnumber whites. New Mexico, aptly named, seems poised to follow. These states were wrested from Mexico in the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848, so in a sense they are just returning to their origins. Some call it poetic justice. Be that as it may, it is happening, and the concentration in a few states gives Latinos power that they would not have if spread evenly across the country.
Blacks, following a different pattern, dominate America’s cities. Typically the downtown contains a sprawling, impoverished black ghetto, crime-ridden, hopeless, and dangerous, semiliterate, and very angry. Residents have little or no contact with the surrounding country. They exercise control either by electing the city government or just by numbers and intimidation. Philadelphia, Newark, Camden, Trenton, Washington, Richmond, Baltimore, Detroit, St. Louis, Chicago, Milwaukee, New Orleans, Cincinnati, Birmingham, Jackson, and so on. For practical purposes, these cities are not under control of national or state government. Whites dare not walk in them. Black women, seemingly more able than the men to engage in organized effort, are now mayors in Washington, Baltimore, Chicago, St. Louis.
Blacks exercise power out of proportion to their numbers in the population. The reasons are several. Blacks bloc vote. Their percentage of the vote in presidential elections is greater than the margin of victory. In the cities their high rates of crime drive out whites. Governments at all levels are afraid of blacks, who if crossed will riot, loot, and burn. Any attempt to crack down on crime would result in explosion, and everyone knows it, so law does not extend to these regions. In aggregate, these enclaves constitute a sort of distributed country within a country.
Further, blacks now control American culture and politics. This is manifest in the overwhelming presence of blacks in television, popular music, in the toppling of statues and renaming of buildings, military bases, and so on, in the search for systemic racism, the lowering of standards in almost everything, and insistence on racial quotas on boards of corporate directors and high-tech industry.
East Asians and, increasingly, Indians dominate America’s high-tech world. They are less conspicuous than blacks and Latinos, but the country grows rapidly more dependent on them. They make up around seventy percent of the very high-end high schools—Thomas Jefferson in Virginia, Brooklyn, Stuyvesant, Bronx. The pattern holds in the elite tech universities: CalTech, MIT, Harvard. Not only the students but the professors are heavily Asian.
Interestingly, India supplies a growing part of America’s brains. One telling example is that Indians are CEOs of IBM, Google, Twitter, Microsoft, Adobe, and Mastercard, among others.
As US Schools Prioritize Diversity Over Merit, China Is Becoming the World’s STEM Leader
“First, and most obvious, is the deplorable state of our K-12 math education system. Far too few American public-school children are prepared for careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). This leaves us increasingly dependent on a constant inflow of foreign talent, especially from mainland China, Taiwan, South Korea, and India. In a 2015 survey conducted by the Council of Graduate Schools and the Graduate Record Examinations Board, about 55 percent of all participating graduate students in mathematics, computer sciences, and engineering at US schools were found to be foreign nationals.”
So: The Southwest to Latinos, the cities and culture to blacks, universities and laboratories to the Chinese, and a noticeable savor of curry in managerial ranks. This is America.
Whites? In decline, both proportionately in the population and in dwindling numbers in science and engineering. This is perhaps most conspicuous in the downgrading of mathematics in schools and universities as being racist.
There is among many whites opposition to what is sometimes called the browning of America. Various, often overlapping, groups with names like the Alt Right, White Nationalists, and Dissident Right. They express alarm over the colorizing of America. Contrary to assertions in the media, they are usually decent people, certainly not “terrorists, but they fight a battle already lost. Large numbers of whites not formally involved with these groups strongly oppose immigration. Often they are supporters of Trump. Conservative romantics, they accept American founding myths vaguely related to reality and remember the security, amiability, and unity of the former America (which existed: I was there.) They see the country they knew fading, the poor academic performance of blacks and Latinos, crime high and rising, and point to race riots as evidence of decline. Oldsters among them remember a time when you could leave your bicycle anywhere and it would still be there when you came back.
This White Revivalist movement seems dead on arrival. For one thing, the Dissident Righters are in the impossible position of being against all people except whites and, not infrequently, express themselves as favoring only North European whites. This reduces them to political hobbyists, unable to compromise. Further, Latinos are simply not behaving badly enough to support a white racial consciousness. If there were going to be serious conflict between Anglos and Hispanics, California would be the place. Nobody seems interested. Asians? Few whites will be upset over Chinese programmers or Vietnamese wide-area engineers. Finally, white advocates seem to have no practical program beyond closing the border. Their other ideas, such as ending birthright citizenship, would have little effect or, like fantasies of dividing America into three racially pure countries, are impossible. Likewise, laws reinstating racial segregation or forbidding intermarriage have exactly zero chance of coming about. Likewise mass deportations of people who increasingly are citizens. Remember, they vote. For better or worse, the country seems destined to muddle along with what it has.
Whites of European origin, though still a majority, fade in influence. Blacks and Hispanics now have enough votes that neither Republicans nor Democrats can afford to trifle with them. While whites, Asians, and Latinos get along reasonably well, blacks get along with nobody. The attacks on Asians we hear about are all by blacks, who do not like Latinos, and who engage in the Knockout Game against whites. Black crime drives whites and middle-class blacks from the cities. Because the media downplay or conceal problems with blacks, many are unaware of the gravity of circumstances, of the illiteracy and hopelessness and fury in the big ghettos. They exist. Nothing is being done about them and probably nothing can be done.
If there comes a racial explosion in the United States, it will be between black and white. At present the media keep the lid on by concealing violence, and this may be the wisest course, though it is hard to see how it is any more than kicking the can down the road. The following links make depressing reading. Whatever one may think of the author, he seems to have the facts.
Why is all of the foregoing not an accurate description of America today? Where leads the growing dependence on Asians for brainwork? The exodus of stores from cities because of crime? The very real enstupidation of the schools to hide the failings of minorities? The heavy-handed enforcement of centrally devised racial policies on people who don’t want them? Economic decline? You tell me.