Simply put, society-wide disgust with ghetto culture and its values must intensify
hen thinking about poor Austin Metcalf, I sometimes wonder about his reactions during those last fatal moments on April 2 of last year. When murderer Karmelo Anthony drew that knife, could he not, being young and athletic, have avoided at least a deadly strike? Perhaps Anthony was just too quick. But then I realize something:
The two boys were from vastly different worlds.
Austin occupied the world most of us inhabit. It’s a place where, among other things, proportionate force is instinctively understood. Sure, boys and men, being boys and men, will sometimes have physical conflict, and we understand that part of manliness is standing up for yourself. But we also reflexively know that a shove is to be met with a shove, a swing with a swing. This norm, reflected in Queensberry rules, is necessary for preservation of life and civilization.
Anthony’s world is clearly different. Egos are as big there as virtue is small; touchy and prideful to the hilt, the instinct can be that if you feel “dissed,” you can smoke the other guy. This is why it isn’t unusual hearing about ghetto altercations in which an “offended” party departs, returns with a gun and shoots multiple people. It’s why so many rappers (e.g., Tupac) suffer violent deaths.
So Austin, perhaps poorly acquainted with this world, might understandably have been completely shocked at the drawing of a knife amidst an adolescent locking of horns. It’s not something civilized people may expect. (Perhaps such warnings should be in an updated version of “The Talk: Nonblack Version” — the article that got commentator John Derbyshire canceled.)
Whatever the case, Anthony’s world is reflected in his reprobate supporters, too. Out protesting and uber-emotional, they generally speak as if a shove among youths can warrant deadly action. Yet they don’t just reject proportionate force, a foundational principle in Western law and something operative in all 50 states.
Such people also reject the other laws, rules, social codes, traditions, and customs of the wider and polite society. They’re self-righteous about it now, too, because they identify such limitations as “white.” (Even punctuality has been called a “white norm.”)
Make no mistake, however. Someone rejecting proportionate force and civilization's strictures generally is described in one obvious way.
Uncivilized.
You could also call such a person a barbarian (a word we should make fashionable again).
Or you could call them, as the great Professor Thomas Sowell has, “black rednecks.”
As Sowell pointed out in his 2005 book Black Rednecks and White Liberals, what’s now called “black culture” is largely just appropriated redneck culture. You can, too, trace its roots back 500 years to England, and even then such people were called “rednecks” and “crackers,” the professor noted.
Thus is it no coincidence that redneck and “black” culture share similarities beyond the obvious speech patterns. Just a few that Sowell noted are: aversion to steady work and lack of entrepreneurship; neglect of education and anti-intellectualism; sexual promiscuity and degraded family norms; and, relating to killer Karmelo, proneness to violence and pride-induced touchiness.
Whatever you call it, however, something’s for certain: “Black culture” has got to go.
More and more people of all races are realizing this, including an increasing number of black Americans. Commentator and podcaster Jason Whitlock says that ghetto-mentality blacks should be given the AIR option: assimilation, incarceration or reservation (that is, American-Indian style. Note: I don’t believe in creating more reservations.) And the young black woman here is so disgusted with redneck-black culture that she uses the n-word to identify those epitomizing it.
It’s these people’s desire that the black community shed this black-redneck culture, just as white southerners did ages ago with white-redneck culture. But this hasn’t happened and won’t anytime soon—and this is for good reason.
White redneck culture mostly disappeared because we didn’t exalt it. We didn’t put white rednecks in entertainment, singing stupid, decadent “songs” and getting filthy rich in the process. We didn’t portray their sub-culture as cool and desirable. We didn’t claim that because it was “their” culture, we had to respect it. We didn’t give their style of speech a respectable name and blather on about how language norms are just social constructs, anyway. We didn’t witness them give their kids inane names, as if the child is a new pet ferret, and then wink at their “creativity.” We didn’t recognize their own national anthem. We didn’t elevate “redneck pride” to ethnicity-like status so that maintaining it became a matter of perverse principle. And we wouldn’t have had one of its representatives co-host the Olympics.
Yet we do all this and more with black-redneck culture. We make the aforementioned rap disgorgers rich before someone makes them dead. Today you can monetize ghetto-rat status—and what you reward you get more of—though, of course, only a select few benefit materially. Virtually all are more likely to end up like Karmelo.
This is demonstrated daily, too. Activists wanted police wearing body-cams, and we all have video recording devices. The result: Endless footage reveals that blacks are rarely victims of non-blacks. What is common is to see black rednecks acting like barbarians. And this has all led to a “condition,” affecting all races, dubbed “black fatigue.”
This phenomenon is good, too, because getting fed up with a cultural norm is the first step toward changing it. And here’s what must happen to reform black ghetto culture (again, lamentably, I don’t expect this to occur anytime soon).
The greater mass of people must say, in no uncertain terms, that if you embrace this culture, we’ll have nothing to do with you. We won’t do business with you or hire you; you’ll be scorned and ostracized. Leverage is necessary to this end, and thus should anti-discrimination law be rescinded. (I’ve advocated this for decades for other reasons; e.g., such law violates freedom of association and invites government tyranny.)
Just as significantly, we must shed the affirmative-action mentality. This means that in response to studies showing that people with “black” names are less likely to get job-interview callbacks, our only response will be, “So what?” When parents name their child De’Quan, La’Teesha—or Karmelo—that screams out, “My mission in life is to oppose ‘white’ [read: mainstream] culture.” And they almost invariably transmit this hang-up to their kids; hence the profiling.
We’re also not going to worry about racial disparities in academics, income and general accomplishment. (These exist between whites and Asian-descent Americans, too.) White rednecks didn’t fare so well in those areas, either.
Another prerequisite is purging ghetto culture from entertainment. To this end, we’d need a traditionalist version of the NAACP to arise and, along with other groups, pressure corporations to cease monetizing black-redneck culture. This is much as how the NAACP and allied entities successfully pressured CBS into canceling black sitcom Amos ’n’ Andy in the 1950s. The kicker, too, is that today’s rap-thug imagery reflects infinitely worse stereotyping than anything on that show. (In fact, Amos ’n’ Andy placed its goofy main characters inside a very well-functioning black world in Harlem, NYC.) I can only imagine how embarrassing some black Americans find it.
Simply put, society-wide disgust with ghetto culture must intensify. We must say, pull up your pants and pull out your ego by the roots. Shed the gold chains and mind chains of imagined oppression. Focus not on victimhood but virtue, not on race but righteousness, not on taxpayer-handouts but Truth, not on gripes but God. You, black-redneck culture, are a dinosaur, and that asteroid with your name on it has finally struck.
