Being Taken for Granted Looks Like This

When you’ve mechanically voted at 90%+ margins for one political party for 80-odd years, no matter how objectionable that party’s candidate(s) is or are; when you turn out by the hundreds or thousands to carry the signs they’ve pre-printed for you and chant the slogans you’re instructed to yell; when you turn over your religious institutions to the party operatives, this is how the party you’ve given yourself to thinks of you.  A member of the Commission on Civil Rights points out the obvious:  Granting — or more exactly stated, purporting to grant — legal status to millions upon millions of criminals, people whose mere presence in this country is a criminal offense, will have massive and destructive effects on the people with whom all those newly-amnestied illegals compete for economic support, viz. blacks and especially black males.

“Illegal immigration has a disparate impact on African American men because these men are disproportionately represented in the low-skilled labor force,” writes a Peter Kirsanow, a member of the commission.  He’s exactly, precisely, spot-on.  The people yelping the loudest for amnesty are exactly those groups with whom the amnestied illegals will not be competing for work.  I could be wrong, but with the exception of the illegal immigrant who managed to graduate from law school and now wants to take the bar exam and be admitted to practice — which involves an oath, by the way, to uphold the constitutions of the United States and the state to which admitted — I’m just going to question whether there are many doctors, Ph.D. candidates, engineers, venture capitalists, or others of similar economic status among the millions of illegal immigrants here.

Blacks, and especially black males, and especially young black males, are perhaps the most vulnerable of all the statistically significant population groups.  Their labor force participation rate is abysmal.  Among the few who do have jobs, they tend to skew very strongly towards un-skilled or low-skilled jobs.  Those who do have jobs or who are actively seeking jobs also have powerful cultural forces dragging them down.  Day by day they get told that it’s objectionable for them to work, that they’re fools and patsies for not riding the system for everything they can get from it.  They can look around them and see large numbers of their age cohort living on the sweat of others’ brows.  Even if the actual proportion of their age cohort doing that isn’t in fact that large, it’s exactly that part of it that gets the most attention, and so the (bad) example they set is unusually influential.

Try to imagine yourself as a, say, 23-year-old black male.  Maybe you hung around to graduate from high school, but very likely you didn’t, if only because the public school you got sent to was a war zone staffed by all the dead-wood staff and administrators who got run out of every other school in the district but because they couldn’t be fired (gotta love them teachers’ unions, eh wot?) they sifted down to your school.  But somehow you’ve got a job on a construction site.  Right now you’re still in the gopher phase of your work; someone needs a bundle of re-bar, it’s yours to go fetch it.  Tote a wheelbarrow of mortar?  You.  But you’re young and ambitious and you’ve got your eyes and ears open, watching how the masons, the carpenters, the glaziers, the electricians, the HVAC guys, the plumbers do their work.  You’re trying to figure out which of those areas you’d like to make a play for.  You listen to them talk among themselves.  Now try to imagine how hard it must be to get out of bed at 4:45 a.m. so you can be on the site, hatted, booted, and ready to go, by 6:00 a.m.  Now try to imagine how hard that must be when you’re the first male in your family to have held a job in two or three generations.  When all your cousins and the guys you ran with in school are spending their days hanging out down at the bar, or propping up a lamp post on the street corner, or sitting around the living room watching television.  If you’re that kid you’ve got to have not just the ordinary get-up-and-go needed to get by, but a truly extraordinary degree of commitment to bettering yourself, because most of your universe is reminding you how easy is the life on their side.

And now imagine that a president who’s trolling for votes from another ethnic group just decides he’s going to free up 11,000,000 or so people to come gunning for your job.  And yes, a large number of those folks are also in the construction trades.  How hard is it to resist the human urge to say, “Aw, to hell with it all.  If I’m going to lose my job anyway, I may as well quit”?

Anyone want to bet on what that president’s calculus would look like if he had to reckon with a major exodus of support for his party from black America?  But he doesn’t, you see.  He knows that no matter what he does, they’ll still vote 90%+ for his party, cycle after cycle after disastrous cycle.  And the result has been nothing less than the re-creation of the Jim Crow South, only this time all over the country.  This time it’s all the harder to fight against because back then, all you had were laws.  Laws are easy to break.  This time you’ve got the population itself opting to live in a parallel universe in which there is a clear and nearly-hermetic separation between Things That Exist for One Group, and Things That Exist for Others.  You don’t have to do a great deal of searching to find hard numbers on the degree of segregation that now exists for much of black America.  Urban America is full of public schools the minority enrollment in which tops 95%.  There are entire parts of most cities where there are Places the Blacks Shop, and other, noticeably nicer, places where you can go and not see one black face in 200 patrons.  There are public parks, and areas of public parks, where the folks sitting around on blankets or at picnic tables are mono-chromatic.  Ever looked around the main downtown transit bus station?  Except in places like NYC, you’ll not see one white face in twenty.  Public swimming pools?  Ditto.

At least they don’t have whites-only drinking fountains.  I know it’s hyperbole to say it, but it’s hard to resist the temptation to wonder that if getting rid of whites-only drinking fountains was all the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement, just what was it all about in the first place?

They used to say that the credo of the Roman Catholic Church was pray, pay, and obey.  I’m struggling to see in exactly what respects the relationship between the Democrat Party and those of our fellow citizens whose ancestors were brought here in chains differs from just that.

I forget which war it was — First or Second — but years ago I read about a Belgian priest who was active in his city in, if not “resistance” to the occupation, then at least getting his people through the war alive.  He was widely beloved.  The Germans shot him, and left a note pinned to his clothes:  Schwein, du hast dennoch für uns gearbeitet!  Swine, you worked for us all the same!  I seem to recall coming across that story in The Arms of Krupp, which would make it World War II.

Dear Leader is about to leave just that note pinned to the clothing of those whom his attorney general calls “my people.”