The Cedar Rapids Sweet Corn Festival: When you see these
reports, ask "What COLOR boy?"
This week we saw some more fruits of Midwestern Nice. By
a pleasant concinnity,
the scene was Wisconsin’s 4th Congressional District, right up against
Wisconsin’s 1st, where Paul Ryan, the Dark Lord of
Midwestern Nice, crushed his enemies in
last week’s primary.
Those two Congressional Districts are considerably different.
District 1, Paul Ryan’s, is91 percent white, less
than five percent black. District 4 is only 55 percent white, more than 33
percent black. By contrast with Paul Ryan, whose darkness is entirely
spiritual, District 4 actually has a black representative,
six-termer Gwen Moore—the
first black congresscritter from Wisconsin ever when she
was first elected in 2004.
District 4 includes the city of Milwaukee,
which is forty percent black. Last weekend an armed black criminal
resisting arrest was shot by a (black) cop. A black riot ensued, with
cars and businesses burned and, of course, much looting.
Mrs. Clinton and
her Social Justice Warriors want to bring in further masses of poor Third
Worlders to enhance our nation’s diversity. A thoughtful observer might
question the wisdom of this in light of our failure to make any progress coping
with the diversity we already have.
Look: Next year is the fiftieth anniversary of the 1967 black
riots in Detroit,Newark,
and, yes, Milwaukee.
Fifty years—two entire human generations—and still they riot. Fifty
years of fretting and fussing, of nagging and shaming, of affirmative action
and contracting set-asides; fifty years of jobs programs, food programs,billion-dollar overhauls
of school systems. Fifty years of pushing role models, black
doctors and detectives in movies and TV, black athletes as culture heroes,
black actors playing God. Fifty years
of Martin Luther King Day s,
Black History Months, and Kwanzaas. Fifty years of black mayors, black police chiefs,
black Attorneys General, a
black President…And still they riot.
Wouldn’t prudence suggest that we hold off on importing more
diversity until we’ve made some progress in getting blacks to stop rioting?
I guess Prudence doesn’t live here any more.
What has the riot got to do with Midwestern Nice? One
manifestation of Midwestern Nice has been the Midwest’s pioneering of the
welfare state. In the later 20th century Wisconsin had
some of the most generous welfare
provisions in the country. This was, however, just the
point at which low-level factory employment drifted off to Asia; and what didn’t drift off was colonized by immigrants from
Mexico and Central America, who were easier to manage than blacks and worked
for lower wages. Blacks who’d come up in the Great
Migration of mid-century, n ow with no work they could do,
fell back on those generous welfare programs. Milwaukee now has this sullen
mass of unemployable, disaffected blacks, just waiting for an opportunity to
riot.
It wasn’t just Milwaukee where black rioters turned, snarling,
on nice Midwesterners last Saturday.
Here’s a report from Cedar Rapids, 200 miles west of
Milwaukee: Gang War Erupts
at Sweet Corn Festival! Cedar Rapids Defender,
August 14, 2016
This one
goes into the file labeled “Why We Can’t Have Nice Things Any More.” The Sweet
Corn Festival is an annualstate-fair-type eventyou
get all over the Midwest towards the end of the school summer vacation. Farmers
and artisans set up stalls selling sweet corn, of course, and paintings and
handicrafts and tchotchkes. Mom and Dad take the kids along. You meet neighbors,
eat some nice corn on the cob, buy a nice jar of pickles and a nice landscape
painting for Grandma, and everyone has a good time soaking in all the niceness.
That’s what’s supposed to
happen. What actually happened in Cedar
Rapids last Saturday was, to quote from the Cedar Rapids Defender:
… described
as a nightmare and pure chaos by those at the scene. The event attracted mass
hordes of teenagers, some claiming to be from Black Lives Matter, loitering
about, bickering with rival gangs and threatening violence …
A police officer attempting to detain a teenage youth, was
subsequently ambushed by dozens of kids, who kicked and stomped, beating him on
the ground.
The Defender notes,
by the way, that this was “the third year in a row the Sweet Corn Festival has
been disrupted by violence.”
The Defender was at
least honest enough to mention the blackness of the rioters, if only obliquely.
The indispensable Colin Flaherty, writing
up the incident forAmerican Thinker, tells us that
The rest
of the media in Cedar Rapids stuck to the usual script of “groups of racially
ambiguous children doing all sorts of bad things for no reason whatsoever,
other than that is just kids blowing off some steam.”
My own favorite headline came from one of the TV stations: [Headline]“St. Jude Sweet Corn Festival
Shut Down Due to Reckless Children.”
Since video clips of these events now show up on YouTube within
a couple of hours, making it perfectly plain who’s doing the rioting, you have
to wonder why the reporters cling so doggedly to their Narrative about raceless
“teens,” “youths,” and, in the case of that TV station, “children.”
But that’s Midwestern Niceness for you. Rampaging Blacks Shut Down Nice White Festival would
be a more honest headline. But it wouldn’t be nice.
When these riots happen, you get a lot of thumb-sucking pieces
about why they happen, what causes them. Well, what does cause them?
You’re asking me? Well, I’m a race
realist, so I’ll give you an answer in that vein. Then, in scrupulous fairness,
I’ll give you some of the other hypotheses on offer, and compare and contrast
them with mine.
My answer: Different races—different local varieties of Homo sap., that have followed different paths through
evolutionary space for many, many generations, end up with different
distributions on most heritable traits. That includes traits of intelligence,
behavior, and personality.
So in a multiracial society that rewards certain traits and
penalizes others, different races will precipitate out, average-average, at
different social levels. American blacks, for example, with low average IQ, low
average impulse control, and
high average inclinations to antisocial behavior, will tend to pool at the
bottom of society, in slums and prisons and criminal gangs.
The blacks thus pooled, being too dimwitted to understand
anything about biology or statistics, will attribute their sorry plight to the
malice of hostile agents. They’ll develop a lot of anger against those agents,
the anger occasionally breaking out in riots.
Their attributing their crappy life outcomes to the machinations
of evil agents is itself a hypothesis of course, one that you can set down on
the table next to mine. It’s Hypothesis Two.
Here’s one black guy expounding Hypothesis Two last Saturday,
one of the Milwaukee rioters.
Clip:
It’s sad, because, you know, this what happen because they not helping the
black community. They, like, you know … The rich people, they got all this
money, and they not, like, you know, trying to give us none …
I’m going to go out on a limb here and speculate that when that
man says “rich people” he
doesn’t have Oprah Winfrey in
mind, or Kanye West, or Magic Johnson, or Barack Obama, or Morgan Freeman…
But that’s just me speculating.
Here’s Hypothesis Three, offered by The New York Times. This one must be serious stuff,
backed by rock-ribbed deep social analysis, to be aired in such a prestigious
outlet. Right?
Well, the NYT consults Reggie Moore (email him) Director of
Milwaukee’s Office of Violence Prevention:
Tackling
the root causes of crime would be the most effective way to make the community
safer and calm tensions, [Mr. Moore] said. “I think it’s a matter of having a
dual conversation about what justice needs to look like in this particular
situation, but also the broader conversation of what a just community looks
like,” Mr. Moore said.
By John Eligon, August 14, 2016
Brilliant! Tackle the root causes of
crime! Have a conversation!—a dualconversation!
And then a broader conversation!
With a penetrating intellect like Mr. Moore’s on the job, we
should have the problem solved in no time. How can it be that, in these fifty
years since the long hot summer of
1967, how can it be that no-one ever thought we need to
tackle the root causes of crime? And
have a conversation? It’s so simple!
So there you are: three hypotheses about what causes riots.
·
Hypothesis One: cranky old Derb with his stupid, bigoted,
so-called “race realism.”
·
Hypothesis Two: It’s the fault of rich people not giving money
to the black community.
·
Hypothesis Three: It’s our failure to tackle the root causes of
crime and to have conversations.
Take your pick.
The Social Justice Warriors will protest. I haven’t takenaccount of history,
they’ll say, wagging their fingers at
me—of the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. That’swhat underlies the anger, the resentment, the
failure.
Is it, though? Let’s look at a different black riot, and see
which hypothesis better fits the case, my race-realist one or the one from
history.
When scanning the Western world for stories about race and
diversity, I always like to take in the Antipodes.
For one thing, I have some slight family
connections with that zone. For another, the issues they’re
having with diversity down under shed interesting light on our own troubles.
And then, I just hate to see the Aussies and Kiwis left
out. They were stalwart allies
in WW2. One of my very first VDARE.com pieces was about Australia;
and I’m pretty sure I’m the only contributor to have written an entire full-length
columnabout diversity in New Zealand, albeit on a different
website.
One blogger I follow is the one who calls himself Oz
Conservative. He’s very much on my wavelength, or I’m on his.
Well, reading Oz Conservative the other day I
caught a reference to the Apex gang, which I’d quite forgotten about.
Who they? They a criminal gang in Melbourne, Australia, who
staged a nasty riot of their own back on March 12 this year, the so-called
Moomba riot.[Police charge
34, some with links to Apex, over Moomba riots, The
Melbourne Age, April 19, 2016]
There seems not to have been any particular cause for the Moomba
riot. The only thing the news reports are all agreed on is that it was nothing
to do with race. Absolutely nothing, I tell you! The Melbourne Herald-Sun, April 10th:
A
four-week police probe has ruled out race as being a motivation for the
violence.
Again, this one a headline from a different local
newspaper, The Age, April 11th,
headline: Moomba riots: Police rule
out race as a motive.
So if you think the Moomba riots had anything whatever to do
with race, you are a very bad person, and you should go wash your mouth out
with soap and water.
Strange to say, though, when you look at video clips of the riot,
what you see is mostly black guys. Yes, there are white people around here and
there in the videos; but that’s because Moomba, like Sweet Corn, is the name
of a family festival,
with rides and stalls and musicians and floats, and a fireworks display at
night.
Someone better tell the Aussies they can’t have nice things any
more either—not if they’re going to climb on the Diversity wagon.
The Moomba riot seems in fact to have been a gang rumble, with
the major gang involved being this Apex gang, most of whose members are black.
These are not indigenous Australian
blacks, mind. They don’t cause much trouble.Like
our own indigenes,
they live mostly out of sight on
remote reservations, peacefully drinking themselves to
death. No, the Apex gang is made up of South Sudanese,
who flooded into Australia in
quantity in the middle years of
the last decade. These are black Africans.
Apex have been fortifying their numbers in recent years by
recruiting from “PIs.” That’s Antipodes-slang for “Pacific Islanders“—Polynesian
peoples from the islands of the South Pacific, who have settled in Australia
and New Zealand in
great numbers over the past few decades. I mentioned in that Richard Lynn’s estimate
for the mean IQ of PIs is 85, same as the mean IQ of black Americans:
While of course there is much variation, as there is in any
large group, Polynesian New Zealanders as a whole are underachievers … Polynesians
… are way over-represented among high school dropouts. PIs are unemployed at
twice the national rate …
So this mayhem in Melbourne fits pretty well with my race
realism hypothesis.
I can’t see that it fits at all with the historical Hypothesis
Three, even if the New York Times does
support it. There was no plantation slavery in Australia, and no hundred years
of Jim Crow. Practically none of the Sudanese have been in Australia even
twenty years. Some of the PIs would have been there longer, but they weren’t
there in any quantity before the 1970s.
And of course they arrived voluntarily, as did
the Sudanese.
Yet there they are in Melbourne: racially distinct groups with
depressed mean IQ and presumably corresponding statistical differences in
heritable patterns of behavior and personality.
And they’re doing just what the blacks in Milwaukee and Cedar
Rapids do.
I’m going to mark up one for race realism here.
John Derbyshire [email him] writes an on all sorts of subjectsfor all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National
Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him. ) He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming
Conservative Pessimism and several other books. He’s had two books published by VDARE.com: FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT (also available
in Kindle) and From the
Dissident Right II: Essays 2013. His writings are archived atJohnDerbyshire.com.
Full text with photos and videos at: http://www.unz.com/jderbyshire/milwaukee-cedar-falls-melbourne-three-black-riots-three-explanations/