III: Who Killed Rosa LEE?
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What may life be like in the straitened confines of black ghettos to breed so much crime and violence? At long last we find our answer. The solution is contained in a Pulitzer-prize-winning series published by the Washington Post (no far-right rag) almost 30 years ago.
Today it would never make it past the newsdesk. In 1994, one suspects, it could be published only because of the race of the reporter himself, the excellent Leon Dash. In this reportage from the depths of the black lumpenproletariat, we follow the transgenerational travails of Rosa Lee Cunningham’s family, the descendants of North Carolina sharecroppers that had migrated north during the Great Depression. Because it is exceptionally hard to convey the tenor of their existence in the ghettos of DC without arousing incredulity, the reader is invited to stop now and pore through Dash's oeuvre. To give a general idea, here are the titles of his eight gripping installments: Part 1-A difficult Journey Part 2-Stealing Became a Way of Life Part 3-Paying a Heavy Toll for Illiteracy Part 4-Wrestling With Recovery in a Changing Drug Culture Part 5-Two Sons Who Avoided The Traps Part 6-Daughter Travels the Same Troubled Path Part 7-A Grandson's Problems Start Early Part 8-A Life Comes Full Circle, and Rosa Lee Faces Loss |
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The matriarch's obituary, following her death from AIDS, summarizes the unbroken gloom:
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In The Post's series, Cunningham revealed herself as a woman who stole from stores, introduced a grandson to shoplifting, used and sold drugs, worked as a prostitute and introduced her daughter to prostitution -- all part of what she called her struggle "to survive." |
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Quite simply, this is humanity gone wrong. Plotinus described human life on earth as a sinking, a defeat, a failing of the wing. Rosa Lee and her offspring in the "projects" of DC are unsettling, like a parody of the human condition. Welfare dependence, drug addiction, casual criminality, single mothers rearing their offspring into the same debased way of life — none of this begins to flesh out the unimaginable. You have to read for yourself.
But what is most striking in the story of this family? Rosa Lee’s degradation relative to her parents and grandparents, who were more or less functioning members of society, hard workers, enterprising figures that made a decent fortune--enough to become multiple home-owners. Rosa Lee and her children, raised with very little in the way of ethical instruction to prepare them to life in a modern society, instead grew up facing government policies almost designed, in the name of Social Justice, to obliterate traditional social structures that used to help especially the least self-directed members of society. Well-established, middle-class black communities were wiped out, replaced by the languid, drug-addled criminal dregs we see chronicled in Dash's reportage. How can this be? Is it really possible that there has been nothing but degradation under Progressive rule since the 1960s for blacks and whites alike? Everyone just knows that we have made great strides. Except when we turn to the historical record, we, just like Dana Casey in the last chapter, see something quite different. We join Mr. Dash in asking:
How had Lugenia Lawrence [Rosa Lee's grandmother] scraped together enough money to become a homeowner? And why, two generations later, was her granddaughter Rosa Lee a permanent resident of public housing, with drug dealers never far from her door? Black privilege, victim mentality, constant excuse-making, under-policing, and the perma-dole: The truth, plain in the lives of people like Rosa Lee, is that nothing short of slavery could have been more corrosive than these policies . The tangle of pathology in black "ghetto culture" is not a natural state. Progressive policies incentivized women not to marry the fathers of their children in order to get welfare checks. Today 80% of black children grow up in female-headed households without a father. Men, instead of being enticed into family life, could mooch on welfare checks and lead an aimless life; they took to hanging out in packs with nothing to do except drugs, predation and vandalism. Their only ethical instruction was to reject civilized behavior: No acting white, please. Trotskyist agitators and race-grifters instilled in them a hatred and resentment of "the Man", while the criminal justice system, taken over by Progressives in the same years (long before the arrival of Soros DAs), refused to protect the honest members of the community by jailing criminals, leaving behind only wreckage and mistrust.
Had the Ku Klux Klan seized absolute power in America, it could never have done as much damage as this. 
This realization explodes, once and for all, one of the most ingrained legitimizing myths of "Progressivism". A misconception exists to this effect: social cohesion, public safety, a sense of national community may have declined since the days of yore, but just imagine the horror of being a minority 70 years ago! The progress we have made in building an inclusive society more than offsets any loss in other aspects of civic life.
By realizing the fraudulence of this myth, we acquire this most important bit of wisdom, one that will awaken us from the ideological stupor into which we have been collectively lulled: Splitting a nation into oppressor and oppressed groups, and using this dialectic to "deconstruct culture", is a malicious con that benefits only its perpetrators while harming everyone else, very much including the "minorities" used as a pretext for this game. This conclusion may seem paradoxical to those of us (especially my fellow millennials) steeped since grade school in the propaganda that buttresses the official dogma. But is it really so hard to believe that splintering a country into warring identity groups can only lead to chaos and violence? You only need to look around you and believe your lying eyes. Oh, really? You say. And what about Jim Crow? Separate bus seats and drinking fountains? What about them, dear reader? Before the great Cultural Revolution of the 1960s racial integration was proceeding at a pace that took into account the reality of racial differences on the ground, and in a way respectful of traditional social structures. Black families, as we have seen, had reached by the 1950s a level of social function never again seen after the general post-1965 breakdown. In part, the Social Justice approach seems to be driven by either cultural hostility or religions fanaticism. This leads to a disregard for both practical results and the integrity of the process. Example: School segregation is branded as Absolute Evil. Therefore bogus "social science" is manufactured to enable a Supreme Court ruling ordering Soviet-style forced busing, as nothing but compulsion will turn the wicked toward God. No groundwork is deemed necessary to make sure the policy actually works for the benefit of society, because the benefit of society is really not the object. Are radically different people thrown in together in a competitive environment? Do racial hostilities explode instead of subsiding? Is the public school system devastated? It is all of no account: Evil has been smashed. Any lingering problem must be evidence only of more Evil. Decades of this mindset in the intelligentsia have given us "systemic racism", a conspiracy theory designed to explain away the damage done by Progressives since the 1960s, and double down on the same path to national disintegration. Scheler diagnosed the spiritual malady of this species of enthusiasts: "They love humanity because they cannot love real people".
A person with direct knowledge explains how the "Social Justice" approach, after 60 years of institutional power, is now literally killing the most disadvantaged members of society: |
I worked in the social work field for about a year and a half before joining my current profession. I was a ‘Youth Care Worker’ at a group home on a campus where there were two group homes and an alternative school. |
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Let's dwell on the fact that the now-mainstream methods in education and social work are so dysfunctional that they cost the lowest members of society their lives.
How did we get to this point? It's the final outcome of political activism corrupting academic scholarship. There are now entire bodies of "scholarly literature" that are essentially cargo-cult science, so methodologically corrupt as to reflect nothing more than the ideological fever dreams of their authors. Some of them proudly denounce value-free social science ("the fetishism of facts") and advocate adopting a "moral [i.e. political] perspective": "If science as a whole follows the lead of empiricism [...], it will be participating passively in the maintenance of universal injustice". It sounds high-minded, but what does it mean in practice? Let's take a classic of "Progressive" thought in the Humanities, The Authoritarian Personality, part of the Studies in Prejudice by a group of sociologists of the Frankfurt School--a highly influential work published in 1950: “No volume published since the war in the field of social psychology has had a greater impact on the direction of the actual empirical work being carried on in the universities today.” The thrust of the book is an attempt to pathologize national culture (e.g. obedience to ingroup norms, suppression of individualism for the sake of the collective good). Any attachment to an ingroup, including one's family, is argued to be rooted in an "authoritarian" personality structure, which requires psychiatric treatment. The antithesis of the "authoritarian personality" is the "liberal personality", so mental health is equated with the authors' own political ideology.
In order to endue this pre-determined conclusion with scientific legitimacy, the authors deploy all the methodological legerdemain that plagues "social science". Because of this, we use it here as an example. The reader should keep in mind that this is the standard Modus Operandi of academic social scientists today. The study is built around interviews of subjects scored for a personality trait, "authoritarianism", defined by the authors on the basis of a psychometric scale of their own invention. What is a psychometric scale? It is just a questionnaire of items such as 'In view of the present national emergency [World War II], it is highly important to limit responsible government jobs to native, white, Christian Americans'. No attempt is ever made to demonstrate that scoring high for "authoritarianism" translates into actual tyrannical behavior, while the very construction of the scale merges two distinct concepts: "authoritarianism" and outgroup prejudice, an instance of begging the question: part of the ideological conclusions of the study (i.e. that outgroup aversion is a manifestation of "authoritarianism") is built into its very design. This is a standard technique to obtain wished-for results. Scale design is also characterized by a flaw (or feature) called "acquiescent response bias": people are in general more likely than not to answer "yes" to a direct question. So, the precise wording of a psychometric scale can substantially sway the data in the desired direction. Another flaw/feature is conceptual misframing: For instance, the question above about government jobs is not a measure of ethnocentrism in general, as the authors claim, but of ingroup bias in a specific subpopulation (namely, white Christians), a difference that can have substantial impact on the interpretation of the results. The authors' personal biases contaminate the scale: "Minor forms of military training, obedience, and discipline [...] should be made a part of elementary school"; agreement with this statement is made out to be evidence of psychopathology. Other items betray the authors' assumption that attachment to national culture is pathological, but attachment to a minority group is not, a double standard that has become rather familiar nowadays (this "study" was designed in the 1940s: the present has deep roots). Conclusions generalized to the entire population are drawn from cohorts of which 50% in one group, but none in the other, were either federal prisoners or psychiatric inpatients. The reader is getting a sense, I hope, of the vast opportunities for manipulation in social "science". The "explanatory" part of the study (Part II) strays even farther from scientific integrity, this time through wild psychoanalytic interpretations of the data. The "authoritarian" (non-Progressive) personality is traced to a disturbed parent-child relationship, but not in the way you may think. The authors had a fundamental problem: The data were not in agreement with their wishes. High-scorers for subscales of "authoritarianism" had expressed, on average, more positive views of their parents than the low-scorers had. Therefore, the authors, adamant in their "moral perspective", concluded that a child's rejection of his family as the prototypical ingroup is psychologically healthy, while lack of rebellion against one's parents is pathological. The following account by a low-authoritarian/high-liberal subject is held up as a model of affection in a healthy parent-child relationship: “But I remember when my father left, [my mother] came to my room and said ‘You’ll never see your Daddy again.’ Those were her exact words. I was crazy with grief and felt it was her fault. I threw things, emptied drawers out of the window, pulled the spreads off the bed, then threw things at the wall” Narratives of abandonment and resentment like this are more frequent among the low-authoritarians, but the authors' ideological resolve is unaffected. They claim high-authoritarian women were "victimized" by their parents because their home environment was characterized by discipline and a sense of responsibility: "Mother was terribly strict with me about learning to keep house. . . . I am glad now, but I resented it then." The fact that these women expressed a very positive view of their parents overall and of the values they were taught is interpreted as a sign of deep layers of repressed hostility ("denial of conflict"). The tepid or nonexistent affection in the low-authoritarians' memories of their parents is viewed as a sign of mental health in the subjects. The transvaluation of values continues throughout the "study", relentlessly: Pride in oneself, one's family and one's ancestors is stigmatized as the forerunner to tyranny ("fascism"), a concern with marrying and having children is another sign of "pathology", etc. etc. The low-authoritarians suffer more from depression and anxiety now that they are adults, are more socially dysfunctional, but they're held up as the way to a bright new future anyway. If you wonder how we have reached the level of public insanity engulfing us today, this deep dive into a classic of academic sociology should give you some clues. (This stuff is still in undergraduate psychology textbooks, by the way, and taught to social workers and educators) |
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