Accusing people of racism has lost its effectiveness
by John T. Reed

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I thought the election of Obama would end affirmative action for reasons I stated in my affirmative action article.

That has not yet happened, but I still think it will.

However, another thing along those lines has happened. For decades, blacks and white liberals have been intimidating critics of blacks by accusing them of being motivated by racial bias. In the 1960s, probably a small percentage of the accused were guilty of that. But racial bias against blacks by whites has faded about as far as it’s ever going to fade since then. Blacks hold every category of position in American life. Black-white marriages are commonplace. Through black TV stars like Bill Cosby, Oprah, Bryant Gumbel, and so on, white Americans have gotten to know many blacks very well and now see them as individuals rather than racial stereotypes.

Obama’s administration has caused an explosion of racial accusations against white critics of Obama thereby destroying its intimidation power

Blacks and their white liberal allies got used to using the “You’re a racist” accusation against Republicans and conservatives when leftist blacks held relatively low-level positions of authority. But when a leftist black achieved the presidency, they failed to apply the brakes on that game. As a consequence, we began to hear that virtually all Americans were racist because virtually all Americans disagreed with one Obama policy or another, disagreements which triggered the accusation willy nilly.

Obama needed an “Accuse white critics of racism” Czar to receive applications for such accusations. He or she would have approved them sparingly to ensure that overuse of the tactic would not reveal the accusations to be nothing but knee-jerk, cheap shots and intellectually-dishonest attempts to change the subject.

But he did not do that. Now it’s too late. The fact that those accusations were pro forma and insincere is now out of the bag.

The source of difficult black-white race relations in 2009

I am 63. Most Americans today are about half that age or younger. One thing that Americans my age know, that younger Americans don’t, is that black-white race relations changed dramatically for the worse in the late 1960s and early 1970s. My sense is that younger Americans think that black-white race relations today are entirely caused by America’s legacy of legal slavery and segregation going back to the 1700s.

Wrong. Slavery ended in 1865. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, various Supreme Court decisions, and White House actions more or less eliminated the remaining anti-black laws like segregation in the 1960s. That should have been the end of significant problems between black and whites stemming from segregation and discrimination against blacks under law or color of law.

Why wasn’t it?

The Black Power movement

In the late 1960s, new black leaders emerged to replace the prior generations of black leaders. The prior leaders were Martin Luther King, Jr., who was assassinated in 1968, and others who approached improving the situation of blacks in America, with regard to laws, in the same way as King. King’s approach, copied from Ghandi, was non-violent civil disobedience.

The Black Power Movement essentially dismissed King et al as a bunch of old fogies who were moving too slow, too peacefully, and too timidly.

The Black Panther Party was a big part of it. It cannot be precisely defined, but in general, the black power agitators were about guns, violence, riots, e.g., Newark, NJ riots, looting, burning, threatening posturing, threatening symbols, etc.

Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam was part of it. They were vocally anti-white. But X changed his mind about that sort of thing and was assassinated in 1965 by rival blacks.

Two American sprinters, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who won medals in the Mexico Olympics in 1968 put black leather gloves on one hand and raised that hand as a fist when they were listening to the U.S. National Anthem being played right after they received their medals. Smith and Carlos were reportedly nice guys, but the gesture gratuitously denounced and threatened white Americans for unspecified grievances. In general, black grievances in the post Civil Rights Act era are either ancient or imagined. Reverend Wright’s 2008 talk about slavery, Tuskegee, and AIDs are excellent examples of that nonsense.

The lines turn down in the late 1960s

Today, everyone knows that blacks have higher unemployment than whites, higher out-of-wedlock birth rates, higher incarceration rates, live in higher crime rate neighborhoods, and so on. The young assume it’s always been that way.

Wrong.

When I was a kid in the 1950s and early 1960s, none of that was true. The unemployment rate among blacks was lower than that among whites. Ditto for the out-of-wedlock birth rate, percentage of black convicts compared to their proportion of the population, and crime rates. If you graph the positive versions of those stats, e.g., employment rate, percent of two-parent families, etc., the lines turn sharply negative around 1970. I have not done any research today for this claim. I am basing it on my recollections of various media stories and books I have read. If anyone knows of Web sites that have the details on these stats, please tell me about them and I will link to them.

There were virtually no blacks in the town where I went to 1st through 5th grade. It was not a rich town. It just happened not to have blacks for whatever reason. I was about 6 the first time I saw a black person. It was in a hardware store. I thought he was a white guy covered in grease and commented out loud, “Look daddy! That man’s really dirty.”

My father was extremely embarrassed. The black man laughed out loud.

The next town I lived in had a black neighborhood. No one, black or white, feared walking through that neighborhood day or night.

The image of blacks then was that they were almost always poorer than we were, but that they were good people who worked hard and took care of their families and who lived in a tight-knit community. Some whites in that town called the black neighborhood “Quiet Village.” Actually, blacks had a different name then which is probably part of the problem. They were called negroes or colored people. The name “black” was introduced by the black power movement as deliberately in your face. No more Mr. Nice Colored Guy.

My college yearbook, Class of 1968, has photographic reproductions of New York Times headlines of the era including, “2,000 troops enter Los Angeles on third day of negro rioting; 4 die as fires and looting grow.” The Times and other mainstream media at first refused to use the name “black” in place of “negro” or “colored.”

Trash-talking, dancing clowns

Once when I was around 12, a couple of dozen of us kids, both white and black, were playing together at a local park. One of the black kids was a natural comedian and clown and enjoyed entertaining us as much as we enjoyed his talents. But another of the black kids kept telling him quietly, “Stop drawing attention to colored people.”

Five years later, when I entered West Point in 1964, we were urged to remain anonymous as plebes (freshmen) to avoid getting into trouble with the upperclassmen, who greatly outnumbered us and who had tremendous power over us. I did that successfully. I surmise the motivation of the black kid who was trying to quiet his black friend was similar and learned from his parents. Something like, “We are negroes living in a white country. We need to avoid anything that might upset or bother the whites because they greatly outnumber us.”

That was not a healthy black-white relationship. However, I can now see that it was a rapidly changing situation in the 1960s. For the reasons stated above—greater communication technology like TV, the Civil Rights Act, Martin Luther King, and so on—that era was rapidly ending as a result of the nonviolent civil disobedience and a simple wising up by white people.

Muhammad Ali

Muhammad Ali bears some of the responsibility for the change. Believe it or not, before him, boxing champs were rather dignified and well-behaved. Almost all pro athletes were.

Ali, to his discredit, invented trash talking. He said his reason was he was near the bottom of a long line of guys who wanted to box the then champ Sonny Liston, who was also black. Ali, or Cassius Clay as he was then named, used trash talking and calling Liston out to jump to the head of the line. It worked. Ali said he got the idea from Gorgeous George, a white pro wrestler of the day.

Clay then adopted much of the black-power shtick, changing his name to an African-sounding one, joining the Nation of Islam, and, after deliberately flunking the IQ test for the Army, refusing to be drafted during the Vietnam war.

Nowadays, it is common in TV football games to see a black player engage in celebratory dances after scoring a touchdown or making a tackle. Some whites imitate that behavior to a lesser extent. I have coached 15 football teams and like almost all coaches, black or white, I have no use for that nonsense. It is unsportsmanlike, totally violates the team concept, is amazingly immature, and has cost teams games on occasion—like the guy who blocked the game-winning field goal attempt of his opponent in a college game. The kick blocker then turned to face his stands and flex his muscles in a look-at-me manner. Meanwhile, the holder picked up the ball and ran it in for the game-winning touchdown. That actual case history is in the celebrations chapter of my book Football Clock Management.

I am not interested in arguing whether players are entitled to such “fun.” They are not, but I am well aware that the majority think they are. My point here is that blacks generally comported themselves in a dignified manner before the 1960s. Martin Luther King was a prime example. Many, like Jerry Rice, the greatest NFL receiver of all time, and Michael Jordan, still do. But part of the disconnect between blacks and whites today stems from the taunting, clowning, “I am the greatest” anti-social behavior of many prominent black athletes and that is not the fault of whites, nor was it an inevitable product of the American legacy of slavery and segregation. The current crop of taunting black clowns were not even born until decades after segregation ended.

The black power movement was unnecessary and extremely destructive to blacks. It snatched defeat from the jaws of victory over legal segregation and discrimination.

Looking for special treatment and handouts

In addition to the black power movement, black leaders changed from seeking integration to seek undeserved, unearned reparations in the form of affirmative action, minority set asides, welfare programs that benefit blacks disproportionately more than whites, and dubious academic editing and courses and majors that are affirmative action history and political rather than valid academic education. Again, the lines on the graphs of positive measurements of black community turn sharply downward when blacks started getting reparations.

Today, the black community as a group is a mess. Crime. Drugs. Single moms. Gangs. Unemployment. Disproportionate representation in prison populations. Discouraging young blacks from “acting white,” e.g., studying hard.

A number of prominent blacks like Cosby, Thomas Sowell, and others have correctly put the blame for the 1970ish sharp downward turn in black pathologies and resulting deterioration in black-white relations where it belongs—on those who encouraged that sort of behavior and the reparation types of laws out of some sort of warped notion of black pride and entitlement.

The predicament of many blacks in America today is not the product of 300 years of slavery, segregation, and discrimination. It is the product of 40 years of anti-social behavior by many blacks, behavior that was, and is, instigated and encouraged by many bad black leaders. It is a self-inflicted wound and whites are no longer buying the accusation that it’s all their fault. Black history is a big deal these days. How’s about studying the change between the pre-1964 and post 1964 eras and the real reasons for it? You cannot solve a problem until you first admit it exists and acknowledge its true causes.