I: Reality and ILLUSION
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Our katabasis (our descent to the underworld, from which we will hopefully return, like Aeneas, laden with forbidden knowledge) could take many paths. But it is 2020, and America is gripped only by the latest killing of a black man by the police. You know the problem, it goes to the very sick heart of the nation: pervasive racism, the legacy of slavery and racial oppression, revealing, once genteel hypocrisies are cast off, its naked, murderous face.
"Why do we have to keep telling you that black lives matter?", as a protester put it. Why indeed? This narrative has many merits: it is simple, it is righteous, it is even internally coherent. Examine it closely, though, and little flaws start appearing here and there on the surface. Things that do not quite fit. Take Mr. Floyd, for instance. What do you know about him? In the world of the simulacrum, he is not a real man; he is a symbol, the martyred victim. But in reality George Floyd was an individual, about whom nothing has been allowed to filter through to you, dear reader. The real Mr. Floyd was a hulking chap with a storied criminal record for aggravated robbery, theft and drug dealing. The acme of his career consisted in holding up a woman at knifepoint after he had disguised himself as a municipal worker to get inside her home. On the day of his arrest, he was high on an imaginative cocktail of meth, multiple opioids, and much more . Body camera footage, leaked by defense attorneys in the arresting officers' trial, shows a heavily drug-addled Floyd resisting the police endlessly (no mainstream media, of course, has broadcast it). The officer that restrained him, Derek Chauvin, in pinning him to the ground for 8 minutes, was following to the letter a protocol designed to deal with a subject suffering from drug-induced delirium, which poses a danger not only to the subject himself but also to those around him. And this brings us to the ultimate grotesque truth: George Floyd did not die from neck asphyxia. He died of complications from multiple drugs overdose, aggravated by his generally abysmal health. Of the whole pharmacy coursing through his veins that day, fentanyl alone was 3 times the ordinary lethal dose. No matter--you may say. The police conduct was still too heavy-handed, and that is because of racism. Dear friend, this opinion is legitimate but it would carry more weight if it didn't come, as a rule, from upper-middle-class types with only the slightest conception of police work, acquired (if at all) from watching The Wire on Netflix. Quite simply, you are passing judgment on people whose lives you know nothing about (an attitude called "prejudice"), and who deal with unimaginable shit every day in order to protect you while you sleep. This opinion also leaves curious loose ends. What do you make, for instance, of the similar police incidents (chokeholds and all) involving white victims? How come that the four arresting officers in the Floyd affair were an ethnic medley as diverse as they come (white, south-east Asian, middle eastern)? Unexplained facts pile up as soon as the most cursory scrutiny is applied. |
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Of course, we can explain away every little incongruity. Perhaps the non-white officers suffer from internalized racism. Perhaps the white victims in this sort of incidents are being mistaken for mulattos. But one point remains, fair-minded progressive friend: Why weren't all these facts presented for your critical evaluation on DailyKos or CNN? Why have all our trustworthy authorities latched onto the victim's race, effectively inciting mobs to riot in over 200 cities and hack monuments (an ever-expanding list, now including of Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln) and unleash a crime wave that still persists?
At least 30 innocent people have been killed. Billions of dollars' worth of property have been destroyed, and hundreds have lost their livelihood in the most violent civil unrest in American history. 
I bring up here an example close to my heart: my dear fellow inmates in academia (that vanguard of enlightened opinion), who have fallen over themselves in the later stages of COVID lockdown to inveigh against “white supremacy” and “systemic racism”--Zoom vigils have been held for racially-traumatized students; plantation slavery (no, not this one) has been bandied in mass-emailed guilt trips, and so on. An outside observer would get the distinct impression that, for all their perusal of the opinion pages of The New York Times (the newspaper of records), all good sense has fled from them . Yet I remain confident that they are committed to the truth. We share common values. Racism may be hard to discern "as in the clear light of day" in the Floyd affair, but how come that there are so many police killings of black men? An excellent question. We are moving from the anecdotal to the statistic, a less murky habitat for the truth. The BBC, staffed as it is nowadays with so many graduates from Sociology departments, informs us that in 2018 ... “...although African-Americans made up less than 14% of the population, they accounted for more than 23% of the just over 1,000 fatal shootings by the police”, adding that “African-Americans […] represented almost a third of the country’s prison population”. Somber figures, no doubt. One could ask if they are due, by any chance, to differences in crime rates. After all, if subpopulation X commits more crimes than average, it stands to reason that it will suffer more hostile encounters with the police.
What I discovered (not on the BBC, and with considerable difficulty) is that 56% of all murders in America are committed by black offenders, and therefore a black person in America is statistically 7 times more likely to commit murder than a non-black. |
(note that most murders today are within-races, e.g. black-on-black)
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Thanks to the National Incident-Based Reporting System, we learn that there are dramatic differences in crime rates by race. Asians have the lowest rates; blacks by far the highest. This is true for all crime categories and all age groups.
Are these figures an artifact due to racist differences in arrests? It does not appear so, and the rock-bottom arrest rates of Asians don’t square well, in any case, with a white-supremacist conspiracy among the police. Controlling for this confounding factor, the evidence for racial discrimination in police shootings evaporates. Furthermore, white officers are no more likely to use lethal force against minorities than nonwhite officers are. |
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The official orthodoxy is showing definite and fearsome-looking cracks. How can this be? Everyone just knows that "systemic racism" pervades America!
Surely even if the police isn't directly motivated by racism, there is a deeper truth here: blacks, as a group and on average, commit more crimes because they are poorer, and they are poorer because racism robs them of economic opportunities! I’m sympathetic. One cannot quite make out how this hypothesis, even if true, would justify abolishing the police, but it's no matter. Abolishing the police is a palliative. We can use the money saved that way to hire more social workers, and utopia will be at hand (by the way, did you know that stunt was already tried in the 1960s? Oh, yes, and with astonishing results!). Let's leave this aside for the nonce and examine the poverty-crime link instead. I find confirmation that the poverty rate for blacks (20%) is double that for whites. Only one final objection springs to the mind of the inveterate skeptic: What happens if we compare the relationship between the crime rate and the poverty rate across different subpopulations, including similarly disadvantaged groups? |
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Oops! There is indeed a correlation between poverty and crime (surprise!--but also note that causality could go both ways). However, poverty alone does not even begin to explain the extraordinary level of violence in most black-majority areas. No, dear friend, "white supremacy" doesn't either, as Hispanics (just like Asians before) actually exhibit lower-than-expected crime rates.
We are forced to conclude that the problem is not our old go-to bogeyman, i.e. The Man victimizing minorities. The simple truth is that too many "underclass" black people in the US are raised by single mothers into a rotten criminal subculture, which was fostered by the "progressive" cultural revolution of the 1960s, and exacerbated today by social work based on the same destructive and malign ideology. |
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If anyone actually gave a damn about this state of affairs, we would be having an honest conversation about how it could be realistically rectified. Instead, all we get from the top is bullshit. This is an important clue: it reveals that "systemic racism", an embarrassingly stupid construct concocted in academia, has nothing to do whatsoever with the emancipation of black people. This will be a recurrent theme: over and over we'll see how "minorities" are used as an expendable battering ram to destroy the only real "threatening Other" of academic and media elites.
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You see, dear reader, the same forces that now, in the media, have been manufacturing an alternative reality for you, one in which blacks are killed for sport by the 'racist police', have been at work for a long time, and their role has been an unmitigated calamity for African Americans as much as for America at large. Don't believe me?
Good! A wholesome methodological doubt is part of the deprogramming you must undergo to reclaim your sanity and your country. |
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