Integration Has Failed. Now What?
By Eugene GANT
Coming near the 38th Martin Luther King Day, it is obvious to everybody that integration has stopped working. The Floyd and Black Lives Matter Hoax riots last year, the ludicrous dispute over Vital Race Theory, invites a question no one, least of all the worthies who run Conservatism, Inc., wishes to ask: Now what? And that concern occasions an appearance back at 2 remarkably truthful essays, one from Hannah Arendt, Reflections on Little Rock [https://www.normfriesen.info/forgotten/little_rock1.pdf” target=”_blank”>Dissent, Winter season 1959 (PDF)], and the other from Norman Podhoretz, My Negro Problem– And Ours for Commentary [February 1963(PDF). Both tacitly suggested that black-white racial issues were insoluble.
Arendt originally composed her piece for Commentary, but the editors surged it due to the fact that her views “were at variance with the magazine’s stand on matters of discrimination and segregation.” That was rich given the atom bomb Podhoretz dropped four years later. Arendt wrote that federal intervention to desegregate southern schools was a precariously dumb concept, especially President Eisenhower’s release of the fabled 101st Airborne to Little Rock, AR implement the U.S. Supreme Court’s post-Brown v. Board judgment to desegregate schools with “all deliberate speed.”
On this day in 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower releases soldiers from the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Department to Arkansas to enforce the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School. pic.twitter.com/Rj0FIM8z5M
— Military History Now (@MilHistNow) September 24, 2020
Though “things had silenced down temporarily,” she composed, but” [r] ecent developments have persuaded me that such hopes are useless and that the routine repetition of liberal cliches might be even more dangerous than l believed a year back.”
“The accomplishment of social, economic, and instructional equality for the Negro might hone the color issue in this nation instead of assuaging it,” Arendt composed, and although this didn’t necessarily need to occur “it would be only natural if it did, and it would be very unexpected if it did not.”
By “equality,” Arendt suggested required desegregation and integration. Forecasting they would cause more racial trouble did not suggest one opposed them, she wrote, but such foreknowledge ought to “dedicate one to promoting that government intervention be directed by care and moderation instead of by impatience and ill-advised measures.”
The federal government needs to proceed cautiously:
It has been stated, I reconsider by [https://users.soc.umn.edu/~samaha/cases/faulkner_letter_northern_ed.html” target=”_blank”>Southern author William] Faulkner, that imposed combination is no better than enforced segregation, and this is perfectly real. The only factor that the Supreme Court had the ability to address itself to the matter of desegregation in the first location was that partition has actually been a legal, and not simply a social, concern in the South for many generations. For the critical point to remember is that it is not the social customized of segregation that is unconstitutional, however its legal enforcement.
Hence the law should desegregate buses, hotels, and restaurants since they are required for an individual to carry on life’s quotidian routine. With an apparently straight face, Arendt concluded “this does not apply to theaters and museums, where individuals undoubtedly do not congregate for the function of associating with each other.”
They do not ?!
Then Arendt pushed the gas pedal. The Civil Rights Act of 1957 that inspired the Southern Manifesto “did not go far enough” to eliminate “unconstitutional [state] legislation,” she composed:
[F] or it left untouched the most outrageous law of Southern states– the law which makes blended marital relationship a criminal offense. The right to marry whoever one dreams is a primary human right compared to which the right to attend an integrated school, the right to sit where one pleases on a bus, the right to go into any hotel or leisure location or place of amusement, no matter one’s skin or color or race” are minor certainly.
But a minimum of Arendt included a proviso. SCOTUS, which eventually prohibited anti-hybrid laws in Loving V. Virginia, never ever would “have actually felt compelled to encourage, not to mention impose, combined marital relationships.” Yet it did feel obliged to require combination .
That aside, Arendt lamented that Leftists were conscripting kids to function as human guards, which forced combination implied parents would lose the right of complimentary association:
It definitely did not need too much imagination to see that this was to problem kids, black and white, with the working out of an issue which adults for generations have actually admitted themselves not able to solve. … [D] o we intend to have our political battles fought in the school backyards? …
To require moms and dads to send their kids to an integrated school versus their will means to deprive them of rights which clearly belong to them in all totally free societies– the private right over their children and the social right to free association. …
[G] overnment intervention, even at its best, will constantly be rather controversial. Thus it appears highly doubtful whether it was smart to start enforcement of civil liberties in a domain where no basic human and no fundamental political right is at stake, and where other rights– social and private– whose security is no less important, can so quickly be injured.
It appears difficult to think that a public intellectual, especially a Jewish one, might or would compose that public education is a “domain where no fundamental human and no standard political right is at stake.” Then again, that’s one apparent reason Commentary rejected Arendt’s piece.
An entertaining note about Arendt’s piece, versus Podhoretz’s, is how she presented it. “Like many people of European origin I have difficulty in understanding, let alone sharing the typical prejudices of Americans in this area,” she wrote:
[A] s a Jew I take my sympathy for the cause of the Negroes when it comes to all oppressed or impoverished individuals for granted and ought to appreciate it if the reader did also.
Naturally. Like many Europeans at that time, Arendt had no direct experience with blacks. This was in significant contrast to Norman Podhoretz, who extremely honestly reported that, during his Brooklyn youth, black kids beat him to a pulp on his method home from school.
Podhoretz was mystified. Why do blacks dislike Jews with the very same ferocity they dislike all other whites? he wondered.
“To me, at the age of twelve, it seemed extremely clear that Negroes were much better off than Jews– certainly, than all whites” [in his area] he composed. This was in spite of his older, extreme sis’s claim that black were oppressed:
[I] n my world it was the whites, the Italians and Jews, who feared the Negroes, not the other method around. The Negroes were tougher than we were, more ruthless, and on the whole they were better professional athletes. What could it imply, then, to state that they were terribly off which we were more fortunate? Yet my sibling’s viewpoints, like print, were spiritual, and when she informed me about exploitation and financial forces I believed her. I thought her, but I was still afraid of Negroes. And I still hated them with all my heart.
Nobody might blame him. The beatings were ruthless, on par with attempted murder. He got a bat throughout the head for answering a question correctly in class that a black goon had actually missed out on. A track group that cheated and lost a satisfy versus Podhoretz’s high school attacked him and his colleagues. The blacks wished to take the medals. And so on. Podhoretz learned early the knowledge encapsulated in the late Colin Flaherty‘s book title: “Don’t make the black kids angry.”
Podhoretz candidly kept in mind that blacks are low IQ scholastic underachievers, then attempted to describe why “the Negro-white dispute had– and no doubt still has– an unique strength and was conducted with a ferocity unrivaled by intramural white battling.”
Wrote Podhoretz:
[A] good deal of bitterness existed in between the Italian kids (most of whose parents were immigrants from Sicily) and the Jewish kids (who came mostly from East European immigrant households). Yet everybody had buddies, sometimes close friends, in the other “camp,” and we frequently went to one another’s strange-smelling homes, if not for meals, then for glasses of milk, and sometimes for some special event like a wedding event or a wake. If it took place that we divided into warring factions and did fight, it would inevitably be half-hearted and quickly repaired. Our parents, to be sure, had nothing to do with one another and were mutually suspicious and hostile. But we, the kids, who all spoke Yiddish or Italian at home, were Americans, or New Yorkers, or Brooklyn young boys: we shared a culture, the culture of the street, and at least for a while this culture showed to be more powerful than the opposing cultures of the home.
Why, why should it have been so various as in between the Negroes and us?
Leftist homosexual James Baldwin “describe [d] the sense of entrapment that toxins the soul of the Negro with hatred for the white man whom he knows to be his jailer,” Podhoretz observed.
Yet he was still “troubled and puzzled”:
How could the Negroes in my area have related to the whites throughout the street and around the corner as jailers? On the whole, the whites were not so poor as the Negroes, however they were rather poor enough, and the years were years of Anxiety. When it comes to white hatred of the Negro, how could regret have had anything to do with it? What share had these Italian and Jewish immigrants in the enslavement of the Negro? What share had they– downtrodden people themselves breaking their own necks to eke out a living– in the exploitation of the Negro?
Baldwin himself responded to that question four years later on in The New York City Times under this refreshingly frank headline: Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Due To The Fact That They’re Anti-White [April 9, 1967]
The opening paragraphs prosecuted Jews by stereotyping them as dishonest, moneygrubbing property managers, grocers, and merchants who kept blacks in debt:
The butcher was a Jew and, yes, we certainly paid more for bad cuts of meat than other New york city citizens, and we very frequently carried insults home, in addition to the meat. We bought our clothing from a Jew and, in some cases, our previously owned shoes, and the pawnbroker was a Jew– maybe we disliked him most of all. The merchants along 125th Street were Jewish– a minimum of much of them were; I don’t understand if Grant’s or Woolworth’s are Jewish names– and I well bear in mind that it was only after the Harlem riot of 1935 that Negroes were enabled to make a little cash in some of the stores where they spent so much.
However in the end, that exploitation didn’t matter. White Christians were Baldwin’s real enemy:
The crisis taking place on the planet, and in the minds and hearts of black men everywhere, is not produced by the star of David, however by the old, rugged Roman cross on which Christendom’s most well known Jew was killed. And not by Jews.
Baldwin definitely understood not to rile individuals who bankrolled and offered legal and intellectual firepower to the Civil rights movement that got blacks everything they required and more, not least anti-white discrimination.
Fast forward 50 years.
Blacks are angry and dissatisfied despite being among the most effective political leaders and wealthiest professional athletes, doctors, attorneys, entertainers, teachers, and public intellectuals worldwide. Blacks are mad and unhappy thirty years after the federal government canonized rapist Martin Luther King. Blacks are angry and unhappy 13 years after Americans elected a black president, then elected him again.
Nearly 70 years after Brown, practically 60 years after the Civil and Ballot Rights acts, years after Oprah Winfrey, Tiger Woods, and Barack Hussein Obama became family names– the farther away we go from Jim Crow and segregation— the angrier and unhappier blacks become.
Podhoretz might consider only one solution, an early blueprint of The Excellent Replacement. A black man’s color must “vanish as a reality of awareness,” Podhoretz wrote:
[I] t will ever be realized unless color performs in reality disappear: and that means not integration, it means assimilation, it indicates– let the harsh word come out– miscegenation. …
[T] the wholesale combining of the 2 races is the most desirable alternative for everyone worried. … [T] he Negro problem can be solved in this nation in no other way.
If removing the white race is the only solution to Podhoretz’s “Negro problem and ours,” then it might never be resolved. Many whites won’t go along, consisting of Leftists whose zeal for black freedom, Podhoretz confessed, did not match their desire not to live anywhere near or put their kids in school with blacks.
As Joe Sobran as soon as quipped, college provides white leftists all the right mindsets about minorities … and the education and earnings to move as far away from them as possible.
They have good factor. Even Leftists understand, to rephrase Rodney King, that we just can’t get along.
When will we confess?