Mistaken Identity

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Mistaken Identity

The following is from Thomas Sowell. Barbarians inside the Gates. pp. 159 - 161

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Mistaken Identity

WHEN A COUPLE OF BLACK KIDS were being boisterous in a public place, their aunt let them know that she was unhappy and embarrassed by their misbehaving. One of the kids said: "Why do white people get to make the rules about how we behave?'

No white people had been mentioned, but already these children had picked up the message that how they talked and acted was their own business and that any constraints put on them was white people's doing—and a violation of their black "identity."

The tragedy and the farce in all this is that what these children—and many older people—see as black identity is in fact a cultural legacy left over from ignorant whites in times past.

What the multiculturalists call "black English" is a dialect that existed in parts of southern and western England three centuries ago. As often happens, this cultural legacy survived where it was transplanted—to the American South—longer than it survived where it originated. And it survived longer among blacks in the urban ghettos than it survived among Southern whites.

The same has been true of a whole spectrum of things—from something as incidental as playing the card game whist to a boisterous, wisecracking, violent lifestyle. The term "crackers," for example, originated in Britain to describe the wisecracking ancestors of people who later moved to the Southern United States.

Illegitimacy, illiteracy, and a whole set of attitudes toward work and toward life were part of a distinctive culture that travelled across the ocean from Britain to the American South, just as a very different way of life crossed the ocean with people from other parts of Britain who went to New England and other regions.

Those ghetto youths who think that talking jive, playing whist, getting girls pregnant and being belligerent are all part of black identity do not realize how much they are just being crackers with darker complexions.

In the past, over a period of generations, education and rising economic and social standards eroded this kind of self-destructive culture, among both whites and blacks. The more fortunate and more educated people of both races were the first to discard this way of life. But those who were poorer and less educated tended to discard this counterproductive lifestyle later.

By the 1960s, millions of blacks had escaped this essentially red-neck culture—as millions of whites had. But now the new cult of "identity," romanticized—or at least "understood"—this lifestyle among ghetto blacks and treated any criticism of it as racism.

Exempting any group of people from criticism is not a blessing but a curse. One of the reasons so many kings did so many self-destructive things in centuries past—things which sometimes cost them their kingdoms or even their heads—was that they were surrounded by people who flattered them, instead of telling them the truth.

Young people in the ghettos do not have any kingdoms to lose. They only have a future to lose. That future is going to belong to whoever can function in the increasingly high-tech, internationally competitive world. Those who cling to the obsolete past are going to be left behind.

In the normal course of events, cultural characteristics come and go, as people decide what to treasure and what to discard. That is why most blacks and most whites no longer behave as they did before a changing world led them to adjust to new circumstances and new opportunities. But those blacks who have not yet made it beyond the cultural handicaps of the past are being encouraged to cling to this millstone around their necks.

Why? Because such blacks have been adopted as mascots by the white counterculture. There has even been a federal case over teachers' attempts to get ghetto students to speak standard English rather than "black English."

It is great fun for countercultural whites to tweak the establishment by championing the cause of anti-social behavior among blacks. It also helps them to feel morally one-up on those who criticize such behavior. Blacks are the mascots of these whites.

What all this does for blacks is a different story. Mascots serve a symbolic purpose for others but what actually happens to the mascots themselves is usually of little concern.

It would be sad enough if people painted themselves into a corner by clinging to an authentic culture that was now obsolete. To do so for a culture that represents somebody else's leftovers is truly tragic.

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13 June 2024