Why I Wrote Koontown

Black people are inherently inferior. This is not something you would often hear anybody say outright—if at all. That would be racist, and we live in a time when even devout racists get offended if you actually call them “racist.” The closest we tend to get to such utterances is the coded intimations of the Newt Gingriches and Rick Santorums of the world talking about how blacks prefer welfare to actual work. (If that were so, Uncle Sam owes me over 25 years of backpay.)

Yet, the message of black inferiority is still something being transmitted today. Like air, water, and high-fructose corn syrup, it simply permeates the culture. We take no more notice of it than we do inhaling the carbon-monoxide air of our car-driven country.

Television news constantly feeds us reports of black criminality, black underachievement, black addiction. Our entertainment industry gives us a steady diet of black depravity, shoveling pimps and hustlers and playas and thugs down our throats. We can watch them on our televisions, in our movies; listen to them on our radios, iPods, and smart phones; we can read about them on our Kindles and Nooks and even—heaven forbid—actual books and thrill to their tales of violence, greed, and penicillin-resistant promiscuity.

Even science gets into the act. Phrenology may be dead, but so-called studies and statistics thrive. They tell us black kids can’t keep up academically. Drugs consume the ghetto. Jails are overflowing with black misery. Over 60 percent of black men without a high school diploma will wind up in prison. Some even say there are more black men in prison today than were enslaved in 1850. On top of all that, black men are even the least hirable demographic in these here post-racial United States.

Hell, with all these problems, no wonder we are constantly assaulted by those images I mentioned earlier. That we are just as likely to see black thuggery on our TV screens as we were the token black friend in a ‘90s sitcom (whatever happened to those?). That hip-pop (what I like to call ironically “commercial” rap) still pounds us with talk of pimping, hustling, dealing, murdering, and misogynating. That 80 percent of the books published for, by, and/or about blacks is urban or “ghetto” literature. After all, all these portrayals reflect the culture, mirror the reality of life in African-America.

Except, of course, they don’t.

A Random Thought on Race

The world wasn't even aware of the concept of "race" until after Nathaniel Bacon gathered a bunch of black and white indentured servants of slaves to fight their master in 1676.  After Bacon's Rebellion was quashed you start seeing "race"-based treatment. Indentured servitude (which was supposed to be for five to seven years but could last indefinitely) is ended for Europeans. The decision is made to finally make slavery a lifelong "occupation" for Africans and their offspring. And the Virginia House of Burgesses forces every white male in the colony to participate in regular slave hunting parties.

In other words, to base any of your assumptions, convictions, whatever--whether negatively or positively--upon "race" is to fall for the oldest trick in the slavemaster's book.

Damn ...

I just read this last night in Hoodlums: Black Villains and Social Bandits in American Life by William L. Van Deburg and needed to share it.


"In the five decades between the end of Radical Reconstruction and the start of the Great Depression, more than 3,200 black men, women, and children were executed by southern mobs. Few of the perpetrators were brought to justice, fewer still punished for their crimes. Evidencing a marked June-to-August seasonality and heavily concentrated in the "Black Belt" running through Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, this plague of lynching fever peaked during the 1890s, went into remission during World War I, reappeared in the early 1920s, and experienced a final decline during the 1930s. Despite the best efforts of the reform press, the black pulpit, and groups such as the Commission on Interracial Corporation and the NAACP, vigilante 'justice' was meted out to a black victim nearly once a week, every week between 1882 and 1930."

Why, Some of My Best Friends Are Monkeys Black

I'm sure you probably heard by now, but a California Republican (and reportedly Tea Party activist), Marilyn Davenport is being slammed for emailing this photo of Obama to fellow travelers with the heading, "Now you know why no birth certificate."

Members of her own party in her own state found this image so offensive, they've been calling on Davenport to resign from her state party's central committee.

"It's just highly inappropriate, it's a despicable message, it drips with racism and I think she should step down from the committee," [chairman of the Orange County (Calif.) Republican Party, Scott] Baugh said. "It undermines everything we are doing to reach out to ethnic communities."


Now, this is exactly the kind of drivel that will cause all kinds of shock and blah all over the blogosphere. Before it properly kicks off, I, for one, want to state for the record that I am not shocked in the least bit by any of it.