THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

WHAT THE FLAG BOYCOTT REALLY MEANS | 1999-10-30

Recently a black South Carolina legislator was organizing a campaign against the deadliest scourge presently threatening the black community, drug addiction. Bob Jones University offered to help. With its enthusiasm and funds, Bob Jones would have been a great help.

But Bob Jones prohibits interracial dating. So the legislator decided its help would not be accepted, since interracial dating is more important to black leaders than drug addiction is. This is a typical example of the black leadership's priorities.

The estimates vary, but as many as half of this entire generation of young black men are somewhere in the legal justice system. They are in prison, on parole, or on probation. So naturally the first priority of the black leadership is interracial dating.

AIDS is cutting a murderous swath into the black population. Blacks have that always-fatal disease several times as often as do whites. So national leaders of the black community, represented by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, have launched a boycott against South Carolina to get the Confederate flag down off the state capitol dome.

The American public school system is a disaster, and getting worse. In white communities, the parents usually have enough education to protest or send their children to private schools. Since black "leaders" take liberal orders absolutely, their response to this situation is to back every policy that has created this collapse.

The priorities of the "leaders" of the black community are insanely out of sync with the priorities of the real black community. Interracial dating and the Confederate flag have nothing to do with the desperate needs of the mass of black people. If your son is a crack addict and your daughter has two children out of wedlock, the Confederate flag on the South Carolina dome is not a big deal with you. These are issues for the comfortable and well fed who are living safely inside a well-protected, upper middle class community.

Interracial dating is a huge priority for liberals, respectable conservatives, and suburban blacks. It is therefore the only priority that really matters for the so-called "black" leadership. There is no one who speaks for the needs of the mass of blacks. This is because blacks in leadership positions live in a completely different world from the rest of the people of their race. This is a direct result of integration. This situation was predicted by segregationists a generation ago.

In the late 1960s, heretical sociologist Ernst Van Den Haag was the last person allowed to criticize integration in the pages of National Review. He stated the obvious fact that blacks have a far lower average IQ than do whites. Van Den Haag said that, since the average IQ of blacks was so much lower than that of whites, integration would cause the upper IQ blacks to go into the white community. The rest of the blacks, he predicted, would be ghettoized. Not only would they be ghettoized, but they would be HOPELESSLY ghettoized, because their natural leaders would be integrated into the white community.

That is exactly what has happened.

The only priority of black "leaders" is to get themselves accepted into white society. The white liberals who finance them dictate their priorities.

A good example of the kind of white liberal thinking that dictates to black leaders may be picked up in a little debate I had with a graduate student in political science some years back. There were a few other students listening, and the subject of South Africa came up. I brought up the little known fact that, under apartheid, one of the more serious problems South Africa had was illegal BLACK immigration. While the black countries were talking about how great they were and how awful South Africa was, hundreds of thousands of Africans were voting with their feet each year to live under that Evil Oppression.

Her answer was, "Yes, but they only leave their own countries because they were starving there."

I responded, "You know, starvation can be pretty important to the person doing the starving." Everybody laughed, and she looked like the ass she was.

But this is standard liberal thinking. Interracial dating is important. Starvation or AIDS is irrelevant.

The black legislator who feels that interracial dating has a higher priority than drug addiction is reflecting the same outlook.

The fact that blacks have a lower mean intelligence level than whites is something nobody really doubts. But like all facts, it has implications, and these implications are intolerable to liberal doctrine.

So liberals toss a label at it and all respectable conservatives back down and grovel.

Black Africa cannot feed its people. All over black Africa, the standard of living has plummeted. Starvation is everywhere. There is oppression at a level no colonial country would have tolerated.

What is happening is the result of the liberal need for blacks to integrate Europe. Blacks with ambition are pouring into Europe and America.

Educated blacks remain in white majority countries, where liberals need them for their racial program.

So who is left to govern the black countries? Most African rulers and their functionaries are exploiters with black faces. They are in Africa only because they could not make it in the white world.

Precisely because of their relative disabilities, the mass of blacks need leaders even more than other people do. This is a fact. Liberals simply denounce this fact as "paternalism." Liberals throw a label at it, so all respectable conservatives immediately grovel and denounce any mention of this reality.

But the fact is that blacks do need their leaders desperately. Those leaders are now pursuing liberal aims, not black interests. They only talk about real black problems when it is useful for pushing an item in the liberal agenda.

The serious concerns of the mass of blacks are simply out of the picture, just as Van Den Haag said they would be.