I have written this lengthy response no less than half a dozen times. Why would I care to do that over a simple Tik Tok post that only 1200 people are subscribed to?
Simple.
I think you are likely a good person and I appreciate some of your content. I don’t feel like you are prone to lying, but I do think that you should reconsider the message you are sending out there.
I am hoping to appeal to your sense of duty and intellectual honesty and hope that you are willing to see my point of view on this topic. While I hate Shapiro’s delivery and I think he makes some stupid mistakes by assuming that people understand what he is saying, when you listen to the entire video and you hear what he is saying, you can see that it’s nothing like what you suggested he was saying or implying. In fact, it’s exactly the opposite.
So please, put on your objectivity cap for a moment and consider this long-winded post that I respectfully submit in the hopes that you will engage me in a conversation about the issue in good faith rather than 150 characters of nastiness back and forth.
The Myth of a single Black Culture in the United States
Although it is completely unreasonable to assume that a culture exists in which all black people exist, that seems to be your argument here. When you asked me “If not, what do you define culture as” which seems to indicate that you missed the point of why he was asking the questions about the statistics he cited.
Let’s break down what Culture means and you tell me if you can name a specific trait or traits that all black people share that would qualify them as a culture.
Borrowing heavily from the Merriam Webster’s online dictionary, I define culture as:
A Culture is the set of ideas, beliefs, and values shared by a group of people and reinforced through anecdote, appearance, tradition, ritual, and routines. By providing a descriptive name for the culture, you can use the name to also represent those who participate in its ideals.
For example:
- John only eats vegetables but doesn’t participate in the vegetarian culture. (this describes a set of values, ideas etc. that make up the vegetarian culture that eating only vegetables does not necessarily make you part of).
- Vegetarians don’t like John. (vegetarians refers to the people in the vegetarian culture).
Question:
I answered your question about what culture means, can you please show me how all black people are part of a single culture and not part of multiple cultures? If in fact, the only similarity you can name is related to the pigment in their skin, I want to point out that that’s what race is. Not culture.
Back to the Clip
Now let’s consider this clip by taking for granted the common-sense notion that when you say something about black people in general, it refers to their race and not some culture within the race.
For example:
When I ask why black people like Chitlins, I am suggesting that this is a race issue that all black people necessarily like Chitlins. We both know that not all black people like Chittlins so therefore this is not a valid argument about race.
This is the logic that Shapiro is clearly using
Addressing the False Presumption that Race is the Defining Factor in Statistics.
If the wage gap is about race and not about a culture within the race, how about these issues? These are statistics that you would argue are also about race? And he lists them out and it sounds horrible. It’s positively offensive to believe the statistics he cites are indicative of a race of people. He agrees.
When he says, in response to the dismay about his claim, “Well then you explain to me why…” That’s obviously the same as saying, “If it is race then why…” Which would be immediately offensive intentionally. Nobody thinks that all black people fail to graduate high school, but if the issue is RACE, that that would have to be true for all or at least most black people. It’s not and he knows it because he’s discussing this issue two two college graduates who prove that it’s not about race.
In fact, that’s his point. It’s not about race. It’s about a culture that exists partly within a race—not the entire race.
You need only look at the questions he asks and ask yourself, “Is this something that is common to all black people as a race?” and immediately your response should be “No”. Use yourself as an example. Did you fail high school? No. Therefore the underlying issue is not race. Period. In fact, all of the statistics that he brings up relate not to race, but to a culture within the black race.
Clever Ommission Of Key Points
But even more to the point, the parts that you cut out show that he further explains that in white Appalachia, the same culture exists. White people have the same culture in white communities.
And though you thought you were being sly by trying to say that he was insulting people from Appalachia, guess what? The people from Appalachia aren’t delusional about some of the people around them. They are well aware of the culture of criminal actions that go on in their area. They will even tell you how ignorant, destructive, and backward the people he’s talking about are.
It’s not judgment or racism or even nastiness. It’s fact. But like with Black people, like with White People, and even like with people living in Appalachia, it’s not about race, it’s about this one particular culture that sponsors uneducated violent criminal individuals.
This is why it is not about race. It’s about culture.
But this is not what you brought up in your video at all. You didn’t bring up race or culture. You simply leveraged the tired trope of racist thought that all black people “look and act” the same. He never suggested, inferred, or hinted at how black people look or act. In fact, that is exactly his argument, that black people don’t look and act the same. Black people belonging to a specific culture often look and act alike because their culture reinforces this.
For example
Nigerians are almost entirely black with a lot of pigment in their skin. They have traditions and beliefs that they cherish for being Nigerian. They may keep these traditions as they come to America. That’s a cutlure within the black community where its members may look and act alike by choice.
Gangsta Culture exists in the black community which espouses rising up against the police, breaking laws, selling drugs, doing drugs, drinking, having multiple sex partners, treating women like shit, spending lots of money, having nice cars, expensive clothes, etc. This is a culture that you see a lot of young black people attracted to, but guess what? It’s not entirely a black culture. White people buy more music from this culture than black people do by a lot.
White people in a specific culture do the same. This is not racism and it has nothing to do with what he was saying.
Clearly, he is asking the panel guests how, if it is race that explains the wage gap, how does it make sense that all black people therefore face these issues. They don’t and therefore it can’t be about race.
The answer to every single question he asks, “explain to me how black kids are killing blacks at a rate much higher than white kids are killing whites?” is that a culture of ultra-violent people exists in the black (as well as white) community that is causing these problems. In fact, you could say that a culture of white males exist that feel disenfranchised and take it out on schools and mass shootings. There’s no need to deny that this culture exists, but it is not white culture even though most mass murders end up being white men.
How Extremes Affect Racial Statistics
More importantly than just that each race has this fucked up culture within our race is the fact that this culture plays a much more significant and detrimental role in evaluating statistics based on race. I would even go so far as to say that largely this criminal culture is often isolated completely from the majority of black citizens just like it is in white communities. Out of sight is out of mind for most people. So, when a black (or white) person is called to task about this portion of their community, they deny it exists. It does.
Benefits of Cultural Influences on Racial Statistics
Rather than accept that there are some of the most violent and destructive people in a culture within the back community and seeking to resolve this problem first, instead many black activists, yourself included, want to use this community to leverage the public view of racial inequality.
You would be foolish to eliminate this community through education and community action because then statistics about race would suddenly show a remarkable improvement in the quality of black lives. With as many as 8000 young black people per year killed by other black people, don’t you think the life expectancy of a black person would jump at least 4 years if that was eliminated?
Without this group of destructive people under the umbrella of the black race, you would have to account for the vast improvement and continued rate of improvement in black lives across the country. Right now, any success is measured by including the biggest failures within the race; lowering the statistical view of the quality of black lives based on a culture within their community that they don’t ever come in contact with.
White Community and Its Cultures
Historical Wealth vs. Time
But lets just look at the white community, which also suffers from this cultural phenomenon. White people, when viewed as a whole have significant advantages given by time that nobody will ever be able to account for. There can be no doubt that racist policies have made some people extremely rich. There can be no doubt that in the past when a community of black citizens started accruing wealth, racist white people would come in and massacre them. That’s a fact.
Trying to fix the past is not going to help. But today, we have laws that prevent this. We have a national conscience that says that is wrong. If that happened today, the whole country would hunt those people down and hold them to justice.
The only way that the effects of historical family wealth will ever be leveled is through time. As more and more successful black families plan for their children’s futures, more and more wealth will be handed down and one day the gap in accumulated wealth will disappear.
The majority of Americans don’t benefit from that kind of wealth. It’s just the top percentages that get an inheritance. So again, we are comparing unlike groups when we compare the entire race. The gap between the rich and the poor affects both races and the vast majority of both don’t get the benefits that some white families do through historical wealth.
Statistical Extremes
So partly because of historical wealth accumulation and other factors, whites have a disproportionate number of super-wealthy people. Given the same exact logic that we used to say that including the poorest segment of black society in the comparison when trying to determine median wealth distorts the picture, the same has to be true for white people.
That is to say that while black people have an extreme on the poor end that is unreflective of the typical black household, white people have that same extreme on the rich end. This raises the median worth of white people and lowers the median worth of black people. This increases the gap considerably while people who are in the middle don’t experience the gap as it is being protrayed.
The “typical” black family is not affected by either extreme and the “typical” white family is not either. If you were to leave off the extremes for both groups and just evaluate like with like, there could still be a gap between household values.
At that point, and only at that point, would it be reasonable to explore the idea that current and not historical racial bias is the cause of the gap. Until then, you have to understand that the negative culture affecting both whites and blacks disproportionately affects blacks in the negative while whites are disproportionately affected in the positive by the small culture of the super-wealthy.
Yes, blacks have super-wealthy and whites have super poor people, but they are not distributed the same. In fact they are distributed inversely, doubling the appearance of the wealth gap. When the real gap in wealth for a household in the black community is likely to be more in line with the wages for a similar family in the white community.
And that has probably been your experience as well. You may see some difference that I don’t see, but for the most part, you aren’t seeing white people making 68x what you are making in the same jobs with the same experience and education. If you are, you should be seeking legal remedies which exist, not making false claims on Tik-Tok for popularity.
But What About the Social Influence on the Wage Gap?
Let’s look at what happens here though. You and other successful black citizens see this report and feel that it is evidence of racism despite that it doesn’t really play out that way in your life or experience. You tell your kids that the world is an unfair place and racism is everywhere.
How do you expect your kids, when constantly being bombarded by biased statistics and the claim that they are oppressed, how do you expect them to succeed? While you benefitted from growing up during a time where racism was considered so bad that people chose not to see it, it wasn’t until later that children get the message from every corner of the media telling them they are oppressed.
How can they have hope that they won’t just be killed by a cop (even though the chances of this happening are 1:.00000056 which is less likely than being hit by lightning) or end up in prison? How do you expect, if the menacing presence of insurmountable racism is omnipresent in their lives, where is the motivation to study hard in school with goals of growing up to be a scientist?
And before you answer, it’s important that you hear me when I say this. It is under this unfortunate burden, whether valid or not, that the vast majority of Black Americans have endured and overcome racism to make success happen in their lives. This is the message that I believe is important and one that is being left out of the current narrative by blaming racist white people for any failure by any black person.
The message that black people and white people can work together to make the country better; that while racism exists, most white people don’t feel or express it, that all people have a duty to find individual examples of racism and find legal ways of remedying those instance. There are so many white people who know, in their hearts, that the richness of our country is based not on the blandness of uniformity, but rather on the spice of our differences. That’s such a different message than what is being put out there today.
But let me ask you honestly this second question:
Do you think that growing up with the current narrative in the media that racism is systemic and that black people have no hope of ever being as successful as white people…can you predict any effect that this narrative would have on wage earnings or family wealth for black families? And if you want to use your family as an example, did your family mirror this same sentiment: that white people are always going to hold you back? Or did they tell you that while it exists, you are stronger than that. Don’t focus on it, just do your best! How were you able to overcome this insurmountable oppression that so many people today want to believe in?
If you knew that everything was constantly stacked against you and that every attempt to remedy the problem by white folks just created more problems, wouldn’t you be more likely to live your life to the fullest and fuck the man?
Wouldn’t it make more sense not to get married and settle down? Wouldn’t it be easy to justify a huge line of credit for a sports car you wreck while racing around the streets of Atlanta. If the pervasive belief is that you are going to be killed by a cop or arrested unfairly? What motivation is there to follow the law and do the hard work that YOU personally have done to succeed?
I can’t imagine it. I had a hard enough time growing up poor as a gay white male on the spectrum, I cannot begin to fathom growing up black and facing not just the actual racism, but the constant rhetoric that I am going to be a failure because of my skin color. This is the narrative being fed to young inner-city black kids. This is the narrative that perpetuates the cycle that holds the black race back when viewed as a whole.
And if you doubt what I say, simply read Derrick Bell’s novel Faces at the Bottom of the Well and then listen to interviews where he says point-blank that he struggles with the idea that after black people read his book they will lose hope. It’s because he believes that the United States will always be racist and will only allow black people to succeed when it pleases them. It’s a fundamental aspect of CRT that nobody wants to talk about while they usher it into public schools.
This is also the narrative that white people have absolutely no control over. No matter what white people do, we can’t stop this narrative. You can and yet you choose to propagate it by making false claims on Tik Tok.
And despite the fact that Shapiro is an arrogant and self-righteous asshole, that’s his message as well. It just doesn’t come across right at all because he’s on the spectrum. He’s a tantrum-throwing nerd with a head full of statistics. He doesn’t have the human interface to understand how people feel and couldn’t care less when it comes down to it.
But he does know the jeopardy that we all face when we are raised with a spectre of insurmountable force trying to hold us back. If you blame everything on racism, whether true or not, then there is no hope or room for success as a black person. You will always suffer from being less than if you believe that racism is insurmountable and omnipresent. We have had this narrative since 1986 in this country and perhaps from earlier than that.
Regardless of how long black activists have been trying to blame racism for every problem in their lives, there can be no doubt whatsoever that if black communities, especially the violent culture of black citizens killing each other, stopped focusing on racism and started focusing on their own success. Changing this narrative would have profound effects on the cultures in black communities that have given up and chosen not to participate in education, employment, etc.
And don’t even try to pull the standard social justice warrior bullshit about how since I am a cis-gendered white male, I will never understand. I never said I did understand and I never claimed that it would be easy. Somehow it worked for you and the more than 10 billionaires, the hundreds of successful black politicians, and the millions of black business owners, managers, etc. Somehow, these people were able to suffer through worse racism than we have today and still make it. Shouldn’t that be more important than racism itself?
I grew up in the midwest as a gay kid and I have been beaten up repeatedly growing up. I have had my nose broken and nearly took someone’s head off in a fight I was so fed up. I don’t know what it’s like to be black, but I do know that gay people have focused on the blessings that being gay and having a community of gay people brings. We have had in-your-face protests and violent protests and through it all, we have learned that the most effective way to live our lives is proud.
We focus on the positives despite having hundreds of thousands of our gay friends and families decimated by AIDS, drug addiction, and depression. Black people do not own a monopoly on suffering. But from where I stand, it sure looks like there is a push to make black people into victims. My black friends and family are not victims.
When you blame everything that goes wrong in your life on someone else or some specter of oppression, how can you ever hope to succeed? And how do you explain all of the black people who faced this same influence or worse and yet persevered and are successful today? Like yourself?
Even groups like Black Lives Matter come with the pregnant implication that “because you don’t seem to know, Black Lives Matter.” You seriously think it is in the children’s best interest to believe that most people don’t think that black people matter?
And then when you look at how many black people are killed every day (roughly 6 a day) in this country by other black people and compare it to the number of white people who kill black people, there’s no real comparison. White people are not the problem facing black people here. Racism is not the problem facing black people or you wouldn’t be as successful as you are. But there can be no discussion about it because to bring that up or suggest that the best focus is on the cultural values within your community is considered racist.
If you are like me, however, you know the strength and perseverance that your successful black friends use to get through all of the bullshit and live successful lives. I don’t have to post a sign full of overloaded aphorisms and trite tautologies to demonstrate my commitment to equality. I just wish that you could be supportive of the narrative that despite any obstacles, black people will prosper so long as they have hope. I’m just afraid that this current set of stories in the media is creating an atmosphere of hopelessness. One that you, inadvertently or not, are contributing to.
If you look at my neighborhood in Southwest Atlanta, it is terrifying. While the national rate of black people getting killed by other black people is 26+ per day, at least one if not more of those comes from my neighborhood. The crime is out of control and cops are 40,000 understaffed because of our corrupt Mayor and her public pandering that destroyed our police force.
When idiots are marching to support defunding the police (don’t get me started on the double-speak issue), these aren’t people from my neighborhood which is almost all black. These are people from higher income brackets appropriating what they think is affecting black poor communities. Meanwhile, people in my neighborhood, some as old as 75 years old wish these out of touch idiots would shut the fuck up. They know the harmful effects of less police involvement in their communities. They know that less police = MORE DEATH AND CRIME.
It doesn’t stop the self-righteous justice warriors. And the results are in. In Atlanta, people are shot every day within 5 miles of my house. Atlanta is a perfect example of what happens when you have fewer police. It’s not looking good for our future and I already hear the same sentiments expressed in the 1990s where black leaders are begging for more cops, stricter laws, more enforcement, more physical presence while white cops are being prohibited from entering a crime scene by mobs of angry black youth who have bought into the lies and distortions claiming that cops are trying to kill them. Why would they when they could just pull back and let them kill themselves like what’s happening in Atlanta. THIS is the actual real-time effect of your sentiment. Because you look black, according to a successful black person who doesn’t live anywhere near you, you can’t get a job. That’s bullshit and that’s what’s holding black people back. The racism is yours and you are promoting it.
And hoping that we have a history for this country, it will be the kind of sentiment that you are pushing that explains how the American experiment failed. Self-righteous successful black people appropriating the cause of poor black people (who didn’t ask for help in the first place) have created an environment that is quickly destroying the fabric of our democracy.
Quit appropriating the struggle that you don’t have to experience because you sit in your nice house afforded to you by your college education. Come live in my neighborhood for a month and see if your perspective changes. Come listen to the families of black children gun downed by other black children for no reason and tell me that racism is the problem. Come listen to the real-time list of crimes in my neighborhood and tell me how racism empirically is the cause of all of this. Come tell me why it is that you managed to overcome these influences and become successful when so many can’t. Tell me how you are part of the black culture that I live in every day, you aren’t.
Either that or you can admit once and for all that there exist different cultures within the black community. Some of them are violent, criminal, and bring everyone down. Solve that problem then we will have a much clearer view of the effects of racism and we can much more effectively address whatever needs to be addressed. Until then, all you are doing is appropriating another black culture’s struggle, wallowing in appropriated self pity, and blaming white people for all of your appropriated problems. Work with other black cultures to minimize the effects of perceived racism and you would be much more effective at reducing any real racism that still lingers. If this small culture of black people would stop committing more than half the violent crime in the country, racism would take a serious blow.
When you can quit judging all white people by the worst of our cultures, we can work together. But just because you see all white people as representative of the worst culture in the white community doesn’t mean that white people still believe that every black person is representative of the most vile cultures in your community. We don’t. We don’t see it as something that pertains to race like you do. We see it as pertaining to the culture of individuals.
