I think it’s preposterous to champion the idea that race realism is necessary to defeat wokism when it is demonstrably true that political and social indoctrination based on dubious premises is what created wokism in the first place. It’s a good idea to consider the mental health of individuals supportive of any subculture - the subculture of wealthy white cocaine users, for example - would certainly be of more telling than to default to one drop rules of racialism. Do the truly intelligent and gifted individuals never use drugs? Never ruin themselves or their families because of drugs or alcohol? Is there some genetic predisposition in Jews that keep them from having addictive personalities? What about Quakers? I think Cofnas is too dismissive of the psychological attraction to functional or dysfunctional cultures, which is to be expected if stereotype realism asks everything of race and nothing more of mental health and culture.

So this reminds me of the amount of subtlety I am likely to call up when somebody is veering into one of the more transparent modes of racial thinking. In other words, there’s nothing in my mind that snaps like a bear trap when I detect race being used as a causal factor. That’s part of my pedagogy. I’m not like that first year chemistry professor who tells frosh that half of them will fail the class on the first day. I don’t get triggered. Then again, half of the frosh still flunk.

Secondarily, I don’t have a particularly big dog in battles for dignity. So I have a neutral attitude about who is where. The closest analog I might think appropriate is that I’m a racial actuary. I have a fairly good sense of how much catastrophe is possible given the wrecks that happen in society. There’s nothing accurate about zero-tolerance, except perhaps that it’s positively correlated to virtue signaling. I’m just patrolling the baseline assumption that race, as a social / ethical / political construction is always prejudicial. It’s as prejudicial and meaningless as zodiac signs and genetic marking.

Bottom Line
Is Cofnas racist? Now that he is in the public eye, he’s going to have to propagandize and recruit defenders against his detractors. That means he’s in the middle of the big binary fight, chastising the Right or Left as the case may be. In order to make the wisest statement, every element in the illustration cannot be crystal clear. You cannot go from zero to truth in one gear. So I can’t estimate today whether his mind is running on all cylinders. Nevertheless, something tells me that he’s on a vector similar to that of Charles Murray, which would be something of a credible start. Meanwhile let’s start with the following from Cofnas.

A newly hereditarian elite would not look like the current community of self-identified race realists. As of now, some race realists are truth seekers who followed the evidence where it leads. But many others are misfits looking for an outlet to express “hate,” or they are contrarians who reflexively disagree with the establishment about everything. In the General Social Survey, whites who endorse a hereditarian explanation for black–white socioeconomic disparities score 8.5 WORDSUM IQ points lower than whites who endorse environmentalism. Most self-identified race realists are probably not realists, but subscribers to a different kind of wokism that substitutes Jews for whites and blames the world’s ills on “Jewish supremacy” instead of “white supremacy.” Once we start chipping away at the taboo on hereditarianism and presenting information in a way that smart, relatively normal people can appreciate, race realism will be associated with a higher caliber of person, and it will take a different form.

Let’s call this something of a central thesis, but I will admit that I cranked his essay through my favorite LLM which suggests that his concept of the hereditarianism is just another term for ‘racial realism’ and that essentially means race is a reasonable heuristic for making group comparisons. This is kind of the same place that got another intellectual in trouble several years ago. That would be John Derbyshire. The fundamental issue that Derbyshire and Cofnas share is what I have termed statistical morality. It’s basically angry white math. It’s against racial integration and against the deracialization of sociology. That’s racial realism in a nutshell.

Hereditarianism
I say the burden on Cofnas is to make a clear distinction between his term and the garden variety general understanding of race. The very idea of establishing a hereditary elite directly contradicts Jefferson’s concept of an ‘aristocracy of merit’. So while his words allow him to do a few headfakes I don’t think inserting sociological terms and tiers with sophisticated exceptions gets us to any sort of moral clarity.

So that’s basically it. I’m tired of all this stupidity. Sorry I dragged up Derbyshire. I’ve over thinked the whole thing.

Dateline September 2006

John Derbyshire makes some interesting observations about race in American society. His analysis has a rather nice syllogistic air to it but I’m afraid he’s a bit short on some details. Specifically, he initiates a dialog with an audience that is not accustomed to talking about race, and he knows it. While he hits on many cogent points, he invents new terms and combats them without really addressing the reasons he talks to this imaginary group those who cannot disambiguate his implications.

Derbyshire points out that Conservatives are both ignorant and cowardly when it comes to the subject of race. He’s right. It is a daunting challenge but not a pressing one. It is analogous to the matter of being 40 pounds overweight. It’s something you can live with, but it’s unhealthy and you really have to work at changing. But overweight people get love too. The current atmosphere of anti-racism is the equivalent of drinking Diet Coke, or sometimes two Diet Cokes, just to be sure. In other words, we Conservatives are the elephant in the room.

The problem with race in America is not petty details of our inability to talk about race healthily, its that we don’t understand, we meaning mutually understood between blacks and whites about the nature of what is, and how it came to be. This is because the political parties have their narratives about racial justice and the Democrats is larger only because the Democratic base is more black. Blackfolks have their own narrative about race in America and it doesnt often coincide with what the parties are saying nor with what they have done. Serious black anti-racists don’t trust either party to have their best interests at heart. Still, conservatives and Republicans are perceived to have much more to prove.

When it comes to the GOP, there are high points to talk about, but broadly speaking most blackfolks are ignorant of the Dirksen story and largely overly impressed with the Southern Strategy. Republicans and conservatives will get nowhere with African American voters until they can disabuse themselves of an image which is agnostic about black progress. What conservatives need is a creation myth that resonates with blackfolks. The facts are not enough and it is the fault of the Conservative Movement for not bringing blackfolks along, deep in the dialog.

Conservatives don’t talk about race because they are socially inept and not familiar with the ways black people discuss it amongst themselves. So they are incapable of distinguishing between the rhetoric and ideology of our so-called ‘black leaders’ and the actual aims of African Americans. It is for this reason that I am convinced that to even have this conversation, the GOP must be integrated. And no conversation about race solves any significant social problems unless it begins by generating enthusiasm with all parties involved. And no politics that fails to communicate in common terms across lines are going to enable successful coalitions. We know that political operatives spend a great deal of time crafting ‘message’, and anything that is ‘off message’ is cast aside. But there is no ‘message’ that points to advancement of racial dialog. And this is insufficient for the extended conversation that must take place for there to be a black/white consensus on race matters.

A more thoroughly integrated GOP must be a reflection of the political will of the people, it cannot reach out to blacks merely for the sake of solving racial issues. Blackfolks are political animals, but we don’t have a nose ring labeled ‘racial issues’ through which we can be led around. This sets up a paradox. Blacks will not migrate to the Republican Party because of its policy on race, but Republican weakness on racial issues of the past and present remains the greatest disincentive keeping blacks away. This is why you will consistently find black Republicans who appear to be indifferent about the lack of a GOP ‘racial agenda’.

Let’s be clear about something here. Talking about racial issues in a way that generates consensus and enthusiasm is an important matter, but it is not the same thing as ‘raising the race’. Talking about something and doing something are two different things. Republicans certainly want black progress, but they only expect to facilitate it the same way they facilitate middle class folks. Furthermore . Republican conversations never get off the ground with blackfolks because there is an unstated desire that Republicans use their power to do something for African America, according to the way the black narrative runs. As part of that narrative, the Republicans have to first admit that they are all closet racists who secretly hate blacks and shelter overt racists, all because of the Southern Strategy.

This status quo works because the Republican party has the blessing of naive consistency. It preaches no special considerations by race and delivers none. Instead, the only people who talk about race 24/7 are unelected white liberal activists and unelected black political activists who are working out of a static view of the government solution to our social problems. Conservatives rightly criticize the very basis of this thinking, but by doing so are hitting their greatest stumbling block in addressing the concerns of black voters, which is a presumption of making progress on the racial front.

So the problem is black progress. Who’s responsible?

The kneejerk Right answer is that blackfolks are responsible for their own progress, that there is nothing that the government can do for them. This is sheer hypocrisy. Why have politics? Why have government if it doesn’t benefit its constituents? In countering the welfare-state mentality, which they should, some conservatives wrongly assume they have eliminated the entire basis of their appeal to the majority of African Americans. That is because they pay too much attention to think-tank wars and not enough to the people themselves. But this is not delusion in a vacuum. Every black voice that states opposition to the Republican party on the basis of it not supporting Affirmative Action and entitlement programs fuels this fire.

The Affirmative Action debate as the locus of black/Republican relations is an exercise in futility. Anyone who engages in that is doomed. Consider the following, while keeping in mind Malcolm X’s position. He saw right through it. Whites and Asians don’t talk about race because it is generally accepted, while untrue, that Asians are superior to whites on average. So while Asians seem to be more integrated into white society, I argue that is a consequence of the size of the statistical sample. A common sense way to look at this is to imagine that any social program, or Affirmative Action has a certain amount of force.

And to exercise that force on the object to be lifted. We all know that in the main, Affirmative Action has had a strikingly positive effect on the careers of white women. On aggregate, white families have benefited as much as black families. So it has done some excellent and exceptional things, but it is not what has raised the race, and anyone who believes its impact can be anything more than marginal hasn’t learned what Malcolm X knew 40 years ago.

White Conservatives won’t say so because they don’t generally understand the black racial narrative, nor the message of Malcolm X, but in fact they are in perfect harmony in their basic beliefs. It will not be politics or government largess that will raise the depressed stature of the Black Man, it will be a revolution of values based on religious discipline. Whitefolks are not fundamentally a part of that equation of refining the qualities of the Black Man towards the ends of self-sufficiency. It continues to stun me that this parallel isn’t widely understood, but it does go to underscore how weak Conservatives are on matters of understanding the black narrative on race and how they bumble around searching for the right message. Hello. It’s not coming from the Heritage Foundation. Here is Malcolm:

The platform that the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, our religious leader, stands on is the platform of complete freedom, justice and equality for the 20 million black people or so-called Negroes here in America. And he teaches us that because of the seriousness of the condition that our people now find themselves in that it is absolutely impossible to solve our problems with means other than religion. And he teaches us that the religion of Islam is the only religion that will instill within our people the incentive to stand on our own feet. And instead of trying to force ourselves upon whites or force ourselves into the white society or blame the white man for our predicament and constantly beg him for what he has, he says that the only way that we can solve our problem is to unite together among ourselves, among our own kind, clean ourselves up, rid ourselves of the evils that we’ve become addicted to here in this society and try and solve our problem ourselves.

Props to the Struggle
Black culture retains a dialog and conversation about the progress of the race which is assumed to be the part-time avocation of anyone involved in successful life. The presumptions against blacks, whether stated or unstated present various stumbling blocks to success, and successful blacks are always presumed to ‘work twice as hard’. Whether or not that is actually the case, all those who persevere against the racial problems of America are expected to understand this conversation and communicate something about that back to the black community at large. We must testify. Whether it is a rap song about bling, a gospel song about deliverance, or Colin Powell being booed when he speaks positively about Affirmative Action at the GOP National Convention, there is communication that must go down about The Struggle. What is never, under any circumstances acceptable to this ethos is that we suck up to The Man at the expense of black pride. This is the very definition of Tomming.

The unfortunate presumption has always been with regard to the upward mobility on the Right, an individual must be a part-time or full-time Tom. What irks blackfolks is not the upward mobility, but that someone cannot stand up to their full height as a black man or woman. When we perceive that that fundamental element of their humanity is being suppressed in any way, we dismiss that person as a sellout. And who wouldn’t?

The recent endorsement of Republican candidate for Senate Michael S. Steele, who is currently Lt. Governor of Maryland by hiphop mogul Russell Simmons and CEO Cathy Hughes of Radio One is immensely significant in this regard because it communicates within that dialog of Struggle that Steele is one who has a common bond with those popularly acknowledged by blackfolks not to be sellouts in their ascent.

African Americans today are suffering the ill effects of diaspora. Since the passage of the Civil Rights Movement and the ascent of black social capital, African America has disbursed through the country. In 1950, only 14% of blackfolks graduated from highschool. Today it is not uncommon for there to be married black families with two college graduates who grew up in different parts of the nation and live in a third. This is a tremendous increase in social mobility. And yet it comes at the expense of the traditional black ghettos where we were all once forced to live. The end of the Civil Rights and subsequent Black Power movements dispersed black leadership who have been absorbed into mainstream professional and managerial classes. The principle of ‘each one teach one’ is challenged. The role of racial testimony has gone cyber. Gone are the corner men and the ‘mayors’ of black neighborhoods. Here in Southern California, many traditional black neighborhoods aren’t even majority black any longer. So the quality of the narrative of black struggle is undergoing great change - it is borne today by more media at more levels with less signal and more noise. So it is increasingly difficult to steer African American opinion either by traditional media or by blacks themselves.

Therefore conservatives face a very daunting challenge in addressing the narrative of black progress in ways that resonate with blacks from the old ways of their communication reconciled with their new media sophistication. But it is insufficient for them to stand on the sidelines and not engage in the subject of black progress, especially given the massive investments the Conservative Movement has made and continues to make against the tradition of liberally angled journalism in all media. What an embarrassment it is for John Derbyshire, a Brit, to be the one who initiates this debate.

I could go into examples of the Conservative default. They are numerous, but I would like to highlight two which I find rather notable. The first is the career of neoconservative David Horowitz who constantly and consistently demonizes his association with the Black Panthers and the second is the attack on Kwanzaa sustained on an annual basis by Ann Coulter. There are certainly perfectly logical and sound reasons to offer critiques of the Panthers and of the personal history of Ron Karenga, founder of Kwanzaa. But like the dismissal of Affirmative Action these very narrow ways of dealing with issues of interest and importance to the narrative of black progress is insulting and reinforces the stereotypes against conservatives and Republicans. I get mad about it and I’m already an activist for the Right.

Waiting for black accretion towards the Right, which I believe is inevitable as blacks advance through society, is lazy and unacceptable. The Old School values which are clear and present in black politics and society are close to conservative values in more ways than just Bible thumping black evangelicals. Conservatives need to move forward. It will take work, persistence and patience, but most of all it will take initiative. The direction to go is in the direction of success, and that is what the conversation needs to be about. That is what will generate enthusiasm. Conversations about dysfunction and pathology and the analysis of such.. well that’s the province of the Left agenda, and it is a non-starter. At least it is over here at Cobb. I challenge Conservatives to talk about upward mobility in synch with the enormous desire within African Americans to fulfill their potential in that regard. America is unified in its antipathy to racism so both blacks and the Right should stop pretending that racism is what’s keeping them apart. It is not. It is a demonstrated inability to appreciate each others narratives about black success and what it means. When they both start talking about it with each other instead of past each other, eyes will begin to open.

Dateline April 2012

Derbyshire’s Miscalculation

I’ve only read that John Derbyshire has been fired from National Review a moment ago. That’s a nice gesture and one that is entirely reasonable considering the depth at which matters of intellectual and moral import ought to be taken. Thoughtful men such as myself see this as a small victory, not against racism or against an individual racist, but against sloppy thinking that begins and ends with facts and ignores humanity altogether.

I was thinking today while waiting to get a haircut in Inglewood how foolish is The Root for announcing once more that there needs to be an ongoing national discussion on race and until such a thing happens we are doomed in some embarrassing and even perilous way. But I think it is most fair to say that this is a species of the Root’s failure to realize that it already encapsulates that discussion, it has for years, and it is not ever going to get any better. The editors of The Root are mad that everyone doesn’t obsess, debate, pontificate and otherwise take advantage of every ‘teachable moment’ on the affairs of race. To be honest, there is no good faith anywhere. 

People who want to talk about race actually just can’t shut up about it - they get mad and stay mad because the others are not up on the theory. People who don’t want to talk about race actually depend too much on shortcuts - they get mad because the others are too deep into theory. 

The shortcut John Derbyshire has taken is one that is familiar to me. Me speaking as someone who used to spend a lot of time talking about race and even more time being sick of listening to people talk about race. Derbyshire’s shortcut is what I call ‘Statistical Morality’. It is a social error that has become more acceptable under the banner of ‘racial realism’. Racial realism suggests there are no hard and fast doctrines about genetic race, but behaviorally speaking that which quacks like a duck...The error of statistical morality as I think of it today is much like the error of the neo-atheist who believes the errors of religion invalidate moral discipline established by religion. Thus a new logical regime of moral discipline must supplant the old. So, any way of thinking about how to deal with black Americans must follow a new regime - one that is fact based. Since it’s impossibly difficult to treat people as if they had no group proclivities, dispense with the old abstracts about blacks and use these statistically proven ones instead. Imagine yourself going to a country of black Americans, which 40 page brochure should you read? Heaven forbid you use anything but the properly derived stereotypes, all in the name of ‘statistical common sense’.

• Stats and Morals

• Statistical Morality: The Logic of Life

• More Statistical Morality

As the characteristic moaning and groaning about how unfortunate this is drones on, the great irony (whether intended or not) in Derbyshire’s piece is that the exact same logic is treated with great reverence when the shoe is on the other foot. But nobody is going to fire this guy for the talk he has with his son about rolling the dice in mixed(!) company. (Can’t find the video somebody showed me last week - but it was basically ‘wise’ black father telling black son (for TV cameras) that what happens to Trayvon Martin can happen to him because white cops can’t be trusted)

But there is a higher standard for nationally syndicated writers; the greater intellectual error suggests a moral failing which sounds rather obvious when stated like this: Let’s come up with a mathematical formula that allows us to make an exception to the Golden Rule when it comes to black people. It will be factual and scientific, and people will doubt their intelligence if they defy it.

That is not incorrect, but it is wrong. And that is exactly how I came across ‘The Talk - The Nonblack Version’ on Google Plus this afternoon. Via an article posted on a blog which asks questions about intelligence, facts, hypocrisy and that level of bourgeois sensibility. (Oh, that was Eric Raymond)

As for Derbyshire himself. Well he’s had a similar problem for a long time. IE, he thinks he can make sense of a nonsensical problem. 

Dateline August 2026

A couple notes. It’s interesting that Trump was able to simply and directly engage black and hispanic working families without any sort of explicit racial appeal while the Left characterized him as a racist. This to me indicates the improvement of black Americans’ confidence in their middle class status, especially during the Woke era of complaint. Simply stated, black grit didn’t buy in totally to the that narrative. They expressly rejected the black female candidate. This is so very obvious to me, there’s not much else to say, except that not Russell Simmons but Jay Z turned out to be the real mogul, and I don’t believe he has much street cred with black Millennials. But it makes perfect sense that he would be aligned with the Left elite in that same ass-backwards way that luxury beliefs like BLM worked.

he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

If you have children in school, print this up for them to give to their teachers. Don’t believe me, believe the Library of Congress. Or don’t.

George III was the mad bully boy. It took several decades for Great Britain to correct themselves on that particular point. Great Britain abolished slavery through the Slavery Abolition Act 1833, passed during the reign of King William IV. It took effect on August 1, 1834, freeing enslaved people across most of the British Empire.

By the way, they were later than Mexico. I remember that in my lifetime I recall that. September 15, 1829 – President Vicente Guerrero issued a presidential decree formally abolishing slavery throughout Mexico. Guerrero, who was himself of African and Indigenous descent (Afromestizo), issued this as one of his signature acts during his brief presidency. This is generally cited as the definitive date of Mexican abolition. Also in Mexico’s favor was Cinco de Mayo which I learned was about the Battle of Puebla, essentially the last time any Europeans decided to war against countries in the New World. That would be 1862. I learned that from a military drill instructor when I was 57 years old.

You can live a very long time in ignorance, but a lot of things can change in one lifetime.

Dateline December 2015

These days I am thinking back through several evolutions of my writing and going back some 20 odd years. As I present materials here, I am doing so in collaboration with an oral history project sponsored by Polytechnic School in Pasadena. I have presented them the following essay as well as some background materials from my old websites. There are three contexts of interest in looking back.

• Firstly is my own evolution as a writer in expressing more directly what I think and feel and my commitment to clarity rather than cleverness. It was my desire to be artistic and clever that obscured the few things I had worth saying back in the day.

• Second is expansion upon the idea that Americans are drawn to the political aspects of social control in much of their politics. I used to speak often of the ‘political majority’ with the direct implication that they wished to use law and order issues to clumsily exert control through police on political minorities, including and especially me. I still find politics overburdened with social traffic and it is still my number one issue when it comes to politics, but I appreciate more the dissonance inherent and the lack of continuity in governance.

• Third is my satisfaction with my own appreciation for and explanation of black rage in American politics. I wonder if it will remain as front of mind and captivating in these coming post-Obama years. I suspect that as soon as the King is out of office, these will become the ‘good old days’ of racial amity. But it’s certainly not as called for these days as it was when America lived in fear of NWA, Public Enemy, Khalid Muhammad and Spike Lee.

To the essay:

In the days after the beating of Rodney King, I thought a lot about whether or not it was reasonable to distrust police. I myself had never feared police, but I did get a lot of police attention. Having lived all over Los Angeles County, I had a variety of experiences with cops. One day, long from LA I counted the number and it was 17. 16 traffic stops and detentions and one arrest, for a traffic warrant on a car I no longer drove. 2 citations, maybe 3. I was part of a captive population, a population driven to fear gangs and rap. I was caught up in the crosswinds.

There have been many times since that I have tried to make something out of all that because it’s something many people want to hear. But the truth of it all is very simple. None of that truly hurt me.

Nevertheless while I still lived in Los Angeles, I couldn’t do nothing. And so I did what I thought I should, which was to take my weekends up driving around and searching for police brutality. I had never been struck by an officer, but surely somebody had. I had never been cursed by an officer, but surely somebody had. I have seen officers behaving rudely and in one case my girlfriend and I had our parking space stolen by an off duty cop. She told me that he threatened her after the fact, and although I never saw it myself, I supported her testimony in court. I hear he was severely reprimanded. And yet I have never been a victim. I have never been frightened. I have been unsure. I have been angry. I have even been disgusted. I have never been hurt. But I wanted to find somebody who had, and so I searched. I thought it would be an easy search because I was convinced we were over-policed.

I searched up and down Crenshaw Boulevard. I searched Inglewood. I searched Leimert Park. I followed the sirens in my BMW. I followed them with my videocamera, because surely I had seen the black youth cuffed on the curb. That happened all the time, right? But when I looked I didn’t find what I was searching for. I arrived at car accidents minutes after the fact. I arrived at fires. After having given up far too many weekend afternoons looking for trouble and finding none, I found myself in Mar Vista one day. I followed yet another squad car and stumbled onto a bonanza. At least 6 cars were just behind Venice High School. It was a charity basketball game. The cops weren’t giving bruises, they were giving prizes. And so I stopped searching.

But everyone was still angry. Everyone could recite the names by heart. Latasha Harlins got no justice. Rodney King got no justice. Michael Zinzun lost an eye. We all still yelled about Ron Settles. We all knew about Don Jackson and the plate glass window. We lived in a time of loud talk and misunderstanding. Ahh when do we not?

And we all had plenty to say. But I was a writer, probably not a very good one, as I look back in retrospect, but not a bad one either. I was a guerrilla poet. A YouTuber before the days of YouTube trying to get my footage on community TV. My words from those days still evoke the world of those days. They expressed the searching for meaning in the anger and frustration. They expressed the desire for truth in a sea of uncertainty. They sought the head bobs of recognition and the head shakes of sadness. But what was the end?

My last chance for romance was a date to the Umbrellas installation by Christo. It never happened. I decided not to care. For these and other personal and economic reasons, I decided to leave Los Angeles. When I left it, just after my 30th birthday, LA seemed destined in every way to end up as corrupt and dysfunctional as the film ‘Strange Days’. My girlfriend at the time met Angela Bassett on the set and they discussed and debated the ending of the film, a film that was about a desperate, corrupt city heading for self-destruction amidst the doomsaying rap prophets of rage at the end of the millennium. So I got sick and tired of Los Angeles and was glad to be rid of the place. I found in New York, a very different kind of view of what happened in my hometown. It was both refreshing and tiresome to hear a completely new kind of misinformation and distance from the seething on the ground in LA. Still, I hated Los Angeles. I couldn’t take it any longer.

I continued my writing, determined to keep my real experiences alive. I was part of that mob of disappointment, but I was articulate in a different dimension. I would be heard wherever. New York, now. I would continue with my poetry and my raps and my novel in the East.

The night of the riots found me in my Brooklyn apartment waking up to the news. It was late Thursday evening when I heard about the verdicts. I’m glad I wasn’t in Los Angeles, but I felt as though I had a strange kind of brotherhood with the place. I expected that brotherhood to show up in the streets of Brooklyn where they had their own explosions about Gavin Cato and Yankel Rosenbaum, whom I didn’t care about. So when I went outdoors to experience that street, the street was silent. I walked alone at midnight in Brooklyn, communing with no one. The silence was absurd. Brooklyn cared about Brooklyn, not Los Angeles.

Yet the following day, all of us professionals in Midtown Manhattan were excused to go home early. People who wanted to riot were getting up their nerve, and so the message went out for us to head for the hills. So I did, and I then immediately returned in my street gear and found myself in Times Square. Here was my chance to make myself known - LA is my hometown I said. I was having a whirlwind of associative thoughts in my own head, and I wanted to say what I wanted to say, but the emotion of the day was to be rage. I was no prophet of rage, but I did what I could to rock the boulevard. To my right, on stage at Times Square was the legendary lawyer William Kunstler. Mine was the last speech, and so we departed southbound to Thompkins Square Park. Whose Streets? Our Streets!

I mocked the people who didn’t care and I found it ironically delicious that they were now caught up in our crosswinds. They now had to fear our self-righteous condescension instead of the other way around for once. But it wasn’t truly rewarding. I ended up corralled by New York’s finest who had determined that we wouldn’t reach the symbolic ground zero of Thompkins Square, whose radical history I couldn’t get a straight answer about weeks afterwards.

But I got no satisfaction. My dense evocative prose collapsed under its own overburdened symbolism. It was atrocious writing that could only make sense to people who shared all of my insights. But I never had an audience to unpack all that weight, to go through it piece by piece and put the right emphasis on the right parts. I learned at long last to put all that in perspective, and I am grateful for the pain and passion I put into that part of my life. In the final measure I have had meaning and richness not only from family and career, but from the life of a writer making sense of himself and his times.

The LA Riots gave us all an opportunity to find out what goes wrong when people fail to trust their democratic institutions. We fall back to our tribes, tribes who cannot support us in the end, like political writing that tries to tie everything of significance to one or two events in history. Analogies always fail. Nothing can ever be summarized. There is not enough text in the world to contain a single soul, so no words here or anywhere can truthfully say what it fully means to the survivors of the dead. They will just be names, and do we know them? No, we don’t.

My father spent hours taking photos of the ruins. I got sick of looking at them and pulled them out of my photo album. All the links on my Los Angeles Riot Research Page have gone dead, and only a few scanned pictures remain. Everything has been hacked and repacked, and all that remain are ghosts and echoes.

I have become the man who understands what I didn’t as the young man blowing at his own sails thinking I was powering my own ship forward. I can read the crosswinds now and I am relaxed on a friendly shore. I understand our responsibilities better. I recognize the time it takes to capture an idea for what it is alone without pulling in an entire symbolic universe. So I am happy to stand and talk about what I believed and why, what I learned and how, and what I now know and what that means. We are changed.

Today, I think the most important lesson to be learned is similar to what I thought it was then. We are over-policed. We over-police ourselves and we don’t let go of old ideas and old bad behaviors. We think that everything and everyone can be corrected and thus must be corrected. We pretend to want every kind of justice at all times, but in fact none of us can stand the scrutiny. And sometimes what we need most of all, when we think we can join a brotherhood of righteous anger and contempt just around the corner, is a perfectly silent night. 

Ever since somewhere around 1998 when I finished reading Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks, the definitive biography of John Brown, I made it clear in my thinking that the moral clarity of ignoring race is paramount. The small irony was, that against that very principle, Americans needed to be convinced that today’s whitefolks were not special with regard to the purity of their anti-discrimination ethics. Banks’ book convinced me that few people of any stripe were as determined to make the African a full equal in every respect as those who ran the Underground Railroad.

Several years earlier, in 1991, I read Faces At The Bottom Of The Well, the landmark book by Derrick Bell. In it, he proposed the existence of a theoretical group of white American militiamen who would pledge to defend black Americans from racism to the death with force. This is essentially what most people believed that armed Black Panthers would do. Bell posed the theoretical question of whether or not black Americans would trust the nominal ‘White Citizens for Black Survival’. Bell concluded that he would not.

Yet examples from reality proved Bell to be a cynic. I only had to look to my own father’s service in the USMC (although not in combat) and the continuing stories of fraternity that integrated combat units do exactly that; trust armed fighters with their lives under deadly conditions. That, not only in Operation Desert Storm under Colin Powell, but in fact back to John Brown and the Underground Railroad more than a century prior. The lesson is clear.

Yet for the purposes of discrimination cases dealing with the particulars around Affirmative Action we have lived with a legal theory that justifies the presumption of racist intent when there is disproportional racial representation in our bourgeois education and employment institutions. This concept is ‘disparate impact’.

Ever since I did manpower planning at Xerox Systems Group, (1987) I recognized the logical hole in disparate impact, which is simply that black and white supply and demand do not match up under all conditions at all times. It didn’t take much doing for me to see that enormous social engineering forces would be required for that kind of equity across the board in the US. These are forces that many people expected to be engaged one way or another, and yet Americans knew clearly any number of examples when black America produced All American champions based purely on their individual ambition and skill. The compendium of these achievements are nothing more or less than the litany of Black History Month, or what it was at the time.

What we eventually witnessed in our regression from colorblind ethics to hard multiculturalism spilling over into projects for other pet minorities was an expectation of a hard racial reckoning. Rodney King and OJ Simpson provided the kindling and random sparks provided just enough heat as racial activists of all sorts stockpiled gasoline and oxygen.

Eventually the sort of flat accusation of America itself as fundamentally racist gained traction in the rhetoric of the likes of Ibram X Kendi and a host of others like Ta-Nahisi Coates whose angle of complaint, while not crying ‘Burn Baby Burn’ in the streets gave plenty people warmth and comfort from the same hearth of racial resentment and contempt. Needless to say, this spilled into the violence in the streets after the death of Minnesota’s own saint George Floyd that some called a racial reckoning.

The greater irony still is that those who bemoan the history of American slavery would call the violence of 2020 justified yet would completely discount the violence of the American Civil War. The irony reflects the same squishy and contradictory ethics of Bell’s rejection of white American militants and black American gun violence in the meanest streets of this country. Worse still, Americans accepted terms like ‘People of Color’ in express rejection of the equity of white Americans, using race with the tribal logic it has always inherently possessed. A whole class of Americans are convinced that, through the ideas propounded by Frankfort School Marxists, that the dialectic of racial oppression and victimhood is key to the deepest understanding of human history and the singular dynamic animating all power struggles on the planet. Naturally, ‘brown people’ the world over were dragged without their permission into this twisted racial narrative. If it hurt white Americans, so what? They deserved it, according to this evolving racial theory. A few years later we found it justifying a new brand of anti-semitism because obviously Palestinians and all Arabs are brown.

As long as there are activists who can cite the evidentiary standard of disparate impact, of unequal outcomes by groups, then the ‘systemic racism’ of every American institution is guaranteed to be perpetuated, because we are equal in principle, not in practices, everywhere all at once. So we have generated and sustained a species of racial trolls.

But what of the Constitution? What of the Bill of Rights and the various Titles of the Civil Rights Acts? In our bourgeois comforts, we are of course free to entertain any sort of political theories we please. Although it is coming to light that many among them are luxury beliefs, they do persist as consistently as racial stereotypes. While inclusion, diversity and equity are peppering our verbal word salads, few are willing to unweight the presumptions of disparate impacts, especially when it comes to straight, white men. Yet with the same spirit of militant equality that animated John Brown and Harriet Tubman, true American heroes, some clearly see the contradictions of fighting racial fire with fire. What has been called ‘social justice’ exists as an attempt to bury liberty and justice for all.

I’m not sure we know if any NFL quarterback is now or ever was queer, but we are well aware of which particular political philosophy would much prefer that she be a trans-man of color. We are familiar with the syllogism that explains institutional discrimination and regimes of privilege, all of which are legally anchored in affirmative action and diversity programs of the past 50 years. Current discrimination for the purposes of inclusion in justified response to prior discrimination for the purposes of exclusion.

The matter of intent is obviated by the legal concept of disparate impact. Disparate impact is in conflict with equal protection.

Forget supply. Forget demand. Forget ambition and skill. Just go by counting heads. Each head represents a group and the characteristic of that group going back to antiquity. Ignore militant defense that doesn’t toe the narrative line. Call every exception a privileged token. It’s rather sad that we are so inured to this immoral scam that Americans avoid terms like rigor, merit and discovery of racist intent beyond a reasonable doubt. I know that the federal standard is civil rather than criminal. That doesn’t change the fact that statistical disparities on outcomes is considered a prima facie case. Do we really want protected classes that require and perpetuate this double standard? How long? Not long.

My friend and colleague Gail Heriot has found something for me to sink my teeth into this morning. So my aim is to defer to her expertise and share it with you. Here is the background, and the package.

Disparate Impact Investigation

Ricci v DeStefano

In the fire department of New Haven, Connecticut—as in emergency-service agencies throughout the Nation—firefighters prize their promotion to and within the officer ranks. An agency’s officers command respect within the department and in the whole community; and, of course, added responsibilities command increased salary and benefits. Aware of the intense competition for promotions, New Haven, like many cities, relies on objective examinations to identify the best qualified candidates.

In 2003, 118 New Haven firefighters took examinations to qualify for promotion to the rank of lieutenant or captain. Promotion examinations in New Haven (or City) were infrequent, so the stakes were high. The results would determine which firefighters would be considered for promotions during the next two years, and the order in which they would be considered. Many firefighters studied for months, at considerable personal and financial cost.

When the examination results showed that white candidates had outperformed minority candidates, the mayor and other local politicians opened a public debate that turned rancorous. Some firefighters argued the tests should be discarded because the results showed the tests to be discriminatory. They threatened a discrimination lawsuit if the City made promotions based on the tests. Other firefighters said the exams were neutral and fair. And they, in turn, threatened a discrimination lawsuit if the City, relying on the statistical racial disparity, ignored the test results and denied promotions to the candidates who had performed well. In the end the City took the side of those who protested the test results. It threw out the examinations.

Sounds familiar? You already know the explanation. “The tests are racist. Anyone who defends the tests are racist.” Sure when all victims are racial victims, some victims are more equal than others, by race. Well that’s unconstitutional. The decision was reversed in 2009. Based on that, the Administration is claiming that the EEOC is violating the principles of Title VII. The Supreme Court may eventually decide properly, but Gail and I have been on the proper side of this for decades. We’re not alone.

Many of you may have been reading me for years. You know where I stand on multiculturalism. It has been simple to see the foul direction it has led us, but I think my argument bears repeating.

Ideological Tribe A
We believe that America is at its best when its mainstream is maintained without regard to race, creed, color, sexual preference, etc..

Ideological Tribe B
We believe that America is at its best when its mainstream is maintained with special regard to race, creed, color, sexual preference, etc.

Belonging to Tribe A is the natural consequence of accepting the first principles of the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights and subsequent amendments. So defend the Constitution. Feel free to spread the memes.

Details, summary and transcript here:

Get Off The X

In 1995, a writer who went by mbowen sat down and did what most political commentators refuse to do: arithmetic. His target was Pat Buchanan’s race-baiting crime statistics, but his deeper point was universal. When you actually run the numbers, violent criminals of any color are a vanishingly small fraction of the American population. Three decades later, with updated FBI data, the math is even more decisive.

The Numbers

The United States has roughly 340 million residents. In 2024, the FBI recorded an estimated 1,221,345 violent crime offenses — murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault combined. That yields a rate of 359.1 per 100,000, the lowest since at least 2014 and part of a steep decline from the 2020 pandemic spike.

What does 1.2 million offenses against 340 million people actually mean? Each incident represents about 0.36% of the population. But offenses are not offenders — many crimes involve repeat perpetrators, and many are committed by co-offenders counted once per incident. The FBI reported approximately 419,000 arrests for violent crime in 2024. Even if every arrest were a unique individual, that is 0.12% of the population — roughly one person in 800.

Murder, the Sharpest Test

Murder is the crime least subject to underreporting. In 2024, there were 16,935 murders nationwide — a 14.9% drop from the prior year and a rate of 5.0 per 100,000. That means the odds of any given American committing a murder in a given year are approximately 16,935 / 340,000,000 = 0.005%, or 1 in 20,000. Your chance of being a victim is comparably small: about 1 in 20,000 per year.

Incarceration in Context

The total incarcerated population — federal prisons, state prisons, and local jails — stands at roughly 1.9 million. That is 0.56% of the population. Include everyone on probation or parole and the figure reaches about 5 million, or 1.5%. This means 98.5% of all Americans are not under any form of criminal justice supervision at all.

The Fallacy of Group Blame

This is where the original essay’s logic cuts deepest. When a politician presents crime statistics sorted by race, religion, or national origin, the implicit argument is that the group is dangerous. But no demographic group in America has a violent crime participation rate that rises above single digits even under the least charitable assumptions. The overwhelming majority of every group — white, Black, Hispanic, Asian, immigrant, native-born — will never commit a violent crime. Exposed to the actual arithmetic, group-blame arguments collapse into what they always were: the substitution of fear for thought.

The math is not complicated. It never was. America’s violent crime problem is real but concentrated in a tiny, tiny sliver of the population. Any political argument that smears an entire demographic with the actions of that sliver is not analysis — it is propaganda. Do the math yourself and you will see exactly what mbowen saw in 1995: the numbers do not support the fear.

Sources: FBI Uniform Crime Report 2024; Bureau of Justice Statistics; Prison Policy Initiative, “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2025.”

Dateline September 24, 2018 — Cobb’s Diary

Q: As a minority, what is life like in the United States compared to your white counterparts?

A: It is fortunate that you speak of counterparts because that is a rather useful term.

I have never been, since my highschool days, one to consider white Americans to be a block, and it has always been my experience even as a black nationalist, to understand the difficult work involved in creating an ideological racial unity. Let us take religion for example. My mother grew up Catholic and my father grew up Episcopalian. Neighbors in our all black neighborhood went to different churches, and of course there were heathens as well. Neither of my parents had any religious devotion until the end of their radical politics somewhere around 1968 for my mother and 1972 for my father. Much as people desired to create and sustain black unity all manner of simple differences among black Americans kept that from happening on a consistent basis.

Nevertheless, you could always find counterparts. When I went to church with my father, I had one set of friends. When I went with my mother, a different set. When I went to Catholic school, I had another set of friends different from those in the neighborhood’s public school. I did not attend school with any white kids until I was 12, for summer school. That was one set. The following fall, I attended a different school with white students. The following summer, I went to a day camp with another set of white kids. Within a year of my 12th birthday I found three different counterparts of white kids my age. I cannot say how common such an experience is, but it was out of the ordinary at the time, and yet I found a great deal in common with other black students with similar experiences. Over my highschool days I was somewhat uncomfortable with my own lack of general popularity like any teen, and yet I got on well enough with the various cliques, swim team, soccer team, computer club, monogram club, national merit kids.

As a big brain but a lousy student, I was well rounded but didn’t understand much at all about American society or what was expected of prep students in any deep way. I had no extended contacts of any sort into the upper middle class or upper class other than the shallow associations of alma mater. I could wear boat shoes but didn’t know anyone with a boat. Soon enough, I was sidelined from college because no money, and I found myself with a union job. New counterparts altogether. Eventually I worked my way through college and got a serious good job and moved into the upscale community that is where I live now, but then I moved at the age of 30 to New York City from LA where I grew up.

By the time I was 30 I was perfectly comfortable and used to dealing with people from pretty much all walks of life, but I did so as a particular stripe of black American and spent a lot of time perfecting that image. In doing so, I didn’t really expect any parallels.

The best way I could explain it was this: if all Americans were surprised and shocked at the very existence of Denzel Washington and The Cosby Show, and eventually and ultimately Barack Obama, I was the smug one who was living that life all along. To the extent I took any pride in that you could call me a Black American Prince. I don’t think I was such a douchebag, but there are I’m sure plenty folks who might disagree. Like most people with relatively good looks, relatively high IQ and relatively affluent employment, I played the role. This is something akin to what is now called ‘white privilege’, which basically means you act like gangsta rappers and diss everyone else as a sucka, except you do it with precise diction while wearing a tie and boat shoes. In this attitude as well, I had counterparts.

As I matured in my career, got married, had babies and moved to the suburbs, I found various counterparts as well, but finding them became less and less important over time. During my 30s, my ambitions had to do with finding the proper teams and markets to advance my wealth — this outside of pretty much every world generally associated with ‘minorities’.

But I should say something about being black in America which any successful black person will tell you. It’s very much like being Rocky Balboa. Sylvester Stallone is 5′ 9″. It would be ridiculous to try to deal with him as if he were short and every kind of lack in confidence you would think short men have. It’s like trying to punk Henry Kissinger because he wears glasses, or Jay Leno because he has a big chin. You’re just an idiot to assume people think of it as a handicap the way you assume. And that is precisely the idiot position that prejudiced people put themselves into. Do you actually think you’re doing me a favor by not calling me nigger? Do you actually believe I’m psychologically handicapped by something so brain dead obvious? I would literally be shocked if something like that would get to me, not by the racism itself, but the fact that I’m facing someone so stupid and provincial that they think it would work.

At any rate, I don’t see how anyone who is reasonably successful in America doesn’t figure out a way to identify with their peers and counterparts in all different areas of their lives. It is why I think ‘race relations’ is stupid, rather like I think collective bargaining is stupid. But, having been a union employee back when I was still a teenager, I understand and recognize that there are some people who cannot negotiate with the boss on their own behalf. There are people who would seriously screw themselves over trying to get a raise or air complaints about their job, and they need some agency to work things out for them. Understood and respected, but not for me at all. So I understand that millions of Americans need to feel some confidence that they are being properly represented to The Man. I wish them the best of luck, honestly, but I know that can only get them so far.

These days I endeavor to make deeper connections to my tribes. I belong to many. As well, I make connections to history — to people who are no longer alive, to ideas and traditions deep in Western and non-Western cultures. I have lived long enough to get bored drinking KoolAid, so I’m down with scotch, (and soju and cachaça.)

About a decade ago, a lot of Americans liked to think they were living at the beginning of a ‘post-racial’ era, which makes about as much sense as saying that once you’ve been accepted to Stanford you are living in ‘post-stupid’ era or once you make six figures you are living in a ‘post-poverty’ era. No. You’re just working with a different set of counterparts, for the time being.

I suppose I should add as a final note that as the Jedi said, “There’s always a bigger fish.” I don’t waste time or energy worrying myself about the existence of people who are not actually my counterparts but are clearly my superiors, wherever they may be in life or in history. My own ambition is quite enough work for me, thanks.

---

There was a young man whose name I cannot remember, a colleague of mine. We were out drinking in the late 90s somewhere in Federal Way, WA. We were working together trying to land a deal with Boeing. He was talking about his background and a particular difficulty he had. As the conversation went on, I suddenly realized as he described his family background that I was very much like his father. Perhaps that was the reason we got along. Economically speaking, he had certain advantages that I never had being the son of social workers. He understood money and business in a way that seemed natural to me, whereas I would have to consciously discipline myself to be as financially scrupulous as he. He had good money habits and I did not.

Some years after that, I began to think about generational capabilities of economic development. It wasn’t the first time, but this time (around 2003?) I did so outside of the context of demand but in supply. People often say that minorities do not succeed in various areas because of prejudices against them on the demand side. “Nobody wants to watch movies with black stars outside of America” or “There’s a glass ceiling and nobody wants black CEOs.” But starting after the LA Riots, I thought, nobody black I know studying business wants to run a grocery store like Koreans do. Nobody black wants to be a craft brewer. What is the shape of black ambition to begin with, and what legacies do they create to make that easy? Well that’s an interesting economic study, but it is often ignored when people like to make broad comparisons between ‘black’ and ‘white’ income and wealth. Next time you hear such a discussion, ask a black person if they would like to be a cotton farmer. If you manage not to be rudely accosted, the honest answer will likely be that the thought never occurred. Black Americans may have had at one point in time, every skill but no opportunity to master the cotton industry. When the color bar was lifted, ambitions pointed in another direction. The Great Migration depleted the South of its sharecroppers.

Dateline December 2005
Back in the day, around 1986, I was a freshly minted entry level programmer in El Segundo, the aerospace capital of the Western US. From my office on the 14th floor of the Xerox Centre (home of the Golden Tale), I could see Hughes ESDG, TRW, Aerospace, Northrop and a host of other high-tech firms. Although I hung with a host of other NSBE grads, black engineers & scientists all, I had issues with uppity blackness. And so I did what comes naturally to me, I went to extremes. In my search around LA for black culture of a decidedly highbrow nature, I found myself beset by myths about Los Angeles in general.

In the Reagan era, during the War on Drugs & the Culture Wars most blackfolks, myself especially, were very concerned about our portrayals in media. We made a big fuss about the success of the Cosby Show and of Arsenio Hall. We were wrestling with monolithic portrayals of ‘the’ black community on television. With blacks now infiltrating MTV with the popular Yo! and Spike Lee turning movie audiences on their ear, it was a boisterous time. My favorite of course was ‘Mo Better Blues’. But where was black culture on the ground in LA? Before the release of Boyz N the Hood, Colors was just about it. Though you’d have to count Shabba-Doo in Breakin’ on Venice Beach too. Sheesh. Given my history with The People of the Dons and the buppie party scene I was into in the late 80s, you could imagine my consternation. Part of my rebellion was GDZ, but that’s another long buppie story that ends around 1990.

With 1990 came a kind of alternate rebellion for me. I was sick and bored with being a Nordstrom’s fashion plate and started in with grit of the city. My guidebook was Mike Davis’ City of Quartz. Somewhere in the middle of that Davis makes a strong connection between gangs and political life - a fixation that has never quite been broken in the minds of millions, especially after Rodney King and the fall of CRASH. The oppositional pose of opposing anything establishment was good leaven for my BAP upbringing. So I listened.

During that time I started writing my Great American Novel that was going to pit the aspirations of the white collar and blue collar paradigms of black Los Angeles. In this novel, as in life, I confronted the problems arising from gangbanging and its connection to hiphop. In particular, I addressed the fate of Wild Style Graffiti, the one aspect of hiphop that has completely been submerged and abandoned by commercialization. As a novelist, I was actively engaged in trying to recoup some authenticity of black Los Angeles that was being lost and ignored by the popularization of various trendy aspects of emergent black and hiphop culture. There were two things that utterly destroyed the prospects of my book. The first was the huge success of Boyz N The Hood (and to a lesser degree ‘White Men Can’t Jump’). The second was the LA Riots. But while I was doing research for the book one of the people I had to talk to was Donald Bakeer.

Bakeer, loosely speaking, is a griot. He’s a man of the neighborhood, who while working in the decidedly gang-plagued areas of LA, has seen hundreds of gangbangers come and go. Very little of what he knows has translated well into print, and that includes his own book ‘Crips’, later translated into the movie ‘South Central’ The man who has done a much better job describing the black neighborhoods and kids of LA in conflict with gangs has been Jervey Tervalon, although I can only speak from the experience of one book (that made all the difference) ‘Understand This’. So the controversy at the time, while I was working on my stuff, was that of the ‘white interloper’ Leon Bing who wrote ‘Do or Die’ about Monster Kody Scott. A lot has been written *since* the LA Riots and the CRASH scandal, but there was little attention in print at the time. I wanted to frame the discussion in terms of the political aspirations of black families in LA. As far as I know, it has yet to be done, and if so, it certainly hasn’t changed the popular consciousness. I did Bakeer a personal favor at his request and bought and read his book instead of ‘Do or Die’.

I met Bakeer at the Aquarian Bookstore where I attended seminars on the regular for a period of time. Our family was tight with the Ligons who owned and ran the bookstore from way back in the mid 60s. Alfred Ligon may be forgotten by many, but not by me. And the surviving members of the Watts Poets, (like Quincy Troupe whose contempt for Stanley Crouch was palpable) took it upon themselves to instruct me informally about the finer points of becoming a published author. In this atmosphere of black bookstore politics (and you think barbershops get crazy?) there was much talk about gangbanging. The consensus was that the political aspects of the bangers had been lost in contemporary Cripdom, but that in the days of The Avenues it was more foreward. But it wasn’t only because Crips and Bloods themselves had passed to a generation of young ignorant thugs, but because the LAPD had declared a ‘low level war’ against black gangs. Comparisons to the Palestinian Intifada were frequent and impassioned. It was this broadly and fiercely held sentiment that bolstered the political pretensions of LA Gangsta rap. So while everybody to a person wanted very little to do with Crips and gangs in general, the whole media blackout of the real black Los Angeles (what you talkin’ bout Willis?) left a desperately need for expression. Any kind of expression.

Unlike other cities, notably New York, blacks lived all over LA, and all the black neighborhoods were not alike. While Spike Lee’s Brooklyn was getting media sunshine, all we had, before Singleton’s bomb, was Arsenio Hall and he was from Cleveland. So if NWA hadn’t come straight outta Compton, we would have invented it. Anything to get the message out. One particular message that needed getting out was how stupid policies of Police Chief Darryl Gates had turned the black middle class against him. During the 80s, he deployed the infamous ‘batterram’ against crack houses, and he deployed gang sweeps against black kids who wore gang colors. Anyone who reads Streetgangs thoroughly recognizes that with over 100 different Crip sets alone in LA County, there is not a major league sports team whose colors haven’t been appropriated. The result was the arrest and detention of hundreds of ordinary kids with a incredibly paltry criminal booking rate of 2%. The reaction was explosive and the resentment was thorough and long-lasting. While few people know about the 2% booking rate on gang-sweeps, everybody knows ‘Fuck the Police’. Thus began the reduction of a cogent political process to the jackleg ministrations of the Coalition of the Damned today 15 years later.

I have my doubts that better writers are still belaboring the point, there being so much more in the world, even in the black images world, to write about. Yet in those days the connection between black expression, the readiness to get any word out over the volume of glamour-puss writers like Bing, and black street life was at a high pitch. There were so many stereotypes to overcome, and during the culture wars before the triumph of multiculturalism the stakes were much higher.

I have unburdened myself of a need and a desire to write grandiose novels as large as black Los Angeles, though I still think I might do Jordan Crossing when I retire from this computer career. Maybe I should rename it Crenshaw. But I wonder if a substantial number of writers who would write about blackfolks in Los Angeles have unburdened themselves. What I see consistently here in the blogosphere about Tookie is that some liberal white writer fell in love with Tookie and basically started the whole Tookie Movement. Was it Venise Wagner at Mother Jones who influenced Mario Fehr? Who knows? Clearly some of the same distortions about who Crips are and what black LA is like persist through these years and have charged with myth what might otherwise be a relatively inconsequential execution.

Hollywood is in this, and their appetite for the violent dram of gangsta life reflects America’s own. That may come at the expense of the truth, or at least a likable story of black LA. Certainly ‘Devil in a Blue Dress’ isn’t truth, but it’s a story I’d rather see about black LA than Boyz. The Mouse in that story, portrayed by Don Cheadle, is nothing like Tookie’s partner Mouse, but was a killer nonetheless. Someday we might look back on some comical portrayal of Tookie in a retro movie about 70s black Los Angeles, but today it’s no fantasy. Today is no time to romanticize the ‘politics’ of gangbanging. Gangs have stood in too long for symbols of the real people who live in ‘Southcentral’ that myriad area made sociopolitically fascinating by the lefty work and imagination of Mike Davis. It’s time to break through the myths and the mystique.

Once again, the victims of this mystique, or perhaps I should say the targets of this obsession, are black youth. Are we to believe that they are so preoccupied and fascinated by the media inflation of Tookie that his influence is real? Whose fault is it if Tookie’s word on the futility of gang-life beats out the word of socially responsible people? I knew better than to take drugs as a kid, but the State of California insured that my classroom had a huge color poster of every kind of hallucinogenic, amphetamine, barbiturate, narcotic and psychotropic agent known to mankind. If Tookie can have a positive influence, perhaps he should do it in full media post-mortem glory like Yul Brynner did. Saying ‘I’m dead now, and gang life is what killed me’. But all of us who survive need to remind ourselves that our job is not to punt to the likes of Tookie, but to stand up for what we know to be right and true.

Even before that, most Americans considered the Black Nationalist movement to be primarily political and boiled it down to Martin vs Malcolm or Panthers and Police. But there was a Black Arts movement as well, and here on the west coast, my father was in the thick of it. Probably the most prominent of those members of the Watts Poets were Elaine Brown, Quincy Troupe and Stanley Crouch. My father was one of the elders, a bit more mature and of course with four children as well.

Some folks I respect have forwarded some interesting commentary on Crouch to whom I owe a debt of gratitude for existing. He, notably, was the only black writer I can recall, who publicly discounted the genius of Spike Lee. Since I was already convinced about the truth of black diversity way back then, I was glad to hear him say so. His Notes of a Hanging Judge was a brilliant signpost for me when I read it in 1991. I have mentioned before that I was aligned with the triumvirate of Crouch, Murray and Marsalis, but it bears repeating. At any rate, being the curator of my father’s papers, I have a treat for you all in the following archive. It’s a PDF with high quality photos, but without copyrighted material.

Download

I could use a collaborator to get these papers curated by a competent university. We’ll see what I can find, then maybe hundreds more of such books, plays, poetry and correspondence can see public light. Drop me an email if you know someplace good.

NOT a synonym for horny.....
Thirsty means desperate for sex
Horny means in the mood for sex

Tuesday is Millennial Scary Movie Night at my place so it’s difficult to avoid my kids’ enjoyment for lowbrow, so I’ve heard this. Also Love Island, nuff said. I use the term sometimes, but in the context of general human irrational desperation.

So this morning I hear there’s going to be a black Snape in the new Harry Potter TV series. That’s not weird, really. Yet I can’t think of a decent reason why Snape is trending on X.

There are, by my reckoning three or four ways to look at this.

GIVEN:
Snape is white because the first character to play Snape on film was white and when it came to black characters, JK Rowling called them out in the books. Still they were all British at Hogwarts. Nevertheless Snape dies in the last book of the series.

FIND:
A reason to have Snape be black in a TV series.

REASONING:
Conjecture A: Original Intent
You can’t change a characters’ race just to appeal to a broader audience. It’s not true to the original intent of the author.

Yeah but what if the intent wasn’t racial?

Conjecture B: Multicultural Fidelity
You can’t change a character’s race because each character must represent the original race portrayed, because that’s the only way you can appeal to the race of the audience. IE if it’s a black hero, the movie is for black audiences. If it’s a white hero the movie is for white audiences on down the line. Edward Scissorhands is for goths. Moana is for islanders.

Yeah but buddy cop movies prove.. something.

Conjecture C: Multicultural Diversity
You can change any character’s race but only if there is balance. You have to have one of each even if that’s not representative of the audience. There should be a rainbow of races and genders because our past is oppressive.

Yeah but that’s just tokenism; equally oppressive.

Conjecture D: Everybody’s Racist
Whatever you do, some race is necessarily going to complain because they’re thirsty for racial representation regardless of the author’s intent. All they care is that they can curate their uplifting racial images, or else they boycott. James Bond is white forever. James Brown is black forever. Cesar Chavez is brown forever.

Yeah but what about Hamilton?

From my perspective, the overwhelming majority of films are of a lowbrow cast and few transcend to the level of literate significance. Nevertheless, writers are, for the most part in their high concept aspirations doing good work. I think of shows that I mostly watch and that would include Apple TV Plus. Shows like Severance, Black Mirror, Breaking Bad, Ozark, Paradise, Pluribus, Mr Robot, Counterpart, Mad Men. These are all excellent.

Each of those shows demonstrates characters that are irretrievably unforgettable. This goes to the only argument that I find reasonably credible which is that if your fictional characters are memorably written and well-acted, they will always be associated with that actor. So no matter how race thirsty you might be, there is some integrity broken when you switch the race or sex of a character to monetize sequels. And there is a particular defect in the rationale of multicultural plurality that is performative.

So I actually do buy the argument, in principle, “They always just make the main character black because they can’t come up with an original black character.”

In Severance, Paradise and See in particular, the original characters who are black have those kinds of irretrievably unforgettable roles. I cannot see anyone else at all to play those roles. And I would back that up with shows like Bewitched and The Fresh Prince. And of course the third Matrix without the original Oracle played by Gloria Foster was tragic. I didn’t watch it but the changing of actors to play Bobby Draper in Mad Men supposedly handled things well.

For The Record
As for James Bond. I think Chewetel Ejiofor could do it without breaking a sweat. His character in the film Serenity was an interstellar, although celibate, James Bond. I think Idris Elba would be wrong because he’s too big, both physically and star-wise. It would be like making Denzel Washington or Bruce Willis James Bond. I think Elba would make a better Bond villain. But I’m not so thirsty either way. Could he do it? If anybody could do it and make it work, Elba could but we’d just have to see.

I think the movie Sinners was very good and an ambitious plot. Of course I did not know what to expect at all. I’m not into magical realism and I think that to the extent that it attempted to wrap all that around the blues got clunky at times, but only clunky by its own terms. Considering how many unique elements it had as a vampire musical with twin protagonists played by the same actor set in the rural South… I mean how do you climax such a film with a shootout against the Klan?

The second Wakanda film was a cornball cacophony. The first one barely made it. I think when I reviewed the original Black Panther, I was much more into black cultural criticism than I am now, so let’s look at that. Here’s your bonus.;

Dateline February 2018

Obligatory Seriousness on the Potential Politicization of Black Panther

Politics has overstepped its bounds into the realms of society and culture, and Americans are caught up in social debates that they think can be politicized. Politicians, recognizing the opportunity and not being sufficiently qualified to actually write good policy, take advantage of this moment and attempt to ride herd on such social and cultural issues. This has gone on long enough to be mistaken for ordinary politics. It is not, and sooner or later people will tire of it.

In the meantime we are stuck with identity politics and errors of judgment, ie current affairs and personalities taking place of principled ideology. Somehow people believe that the person of Donald Trump actually represents Conservatism. Somehow people believe that the person of Hillary Clinton actually represents Liberalism. So while people march against a person believing they are attacking a wayward ideology and the idiots who support it, only a few people negotiate the difference. And so with the same masses of people who believed that the person of Barack Obama represented a particular ideology the noise will continue.

Apart from that on the purely social and cultural side, I have much to say about the role of superheros and such movies in American culture. In short, we’ve gotten cartoony. I think it says more than a little when our cinema is most predictably popular around Disney animations and Marvel comics. We can’t hope for Cary Grant and Grace Kelly, nor should we, but we should notice how much our role models in film have become two dimensional.

And so it stands to reason that many black Americans, although they might know better, want everything the mainstream gets. Therefore we have dark ‘skinned’ emojis and browsers that remember which ones we choose. Similarly, we have superheros painted into ‘inner-city’ tropes, like Luke Cage. I happened to think Luke Cage was not so super at all, nor were his contemporaries ‘The Defenders’. For me, Daredevil had potential, but in the end failed miserably. Only Gotham held my attention for more than one binge. To the extent Gotham had rich plots and characters, it was much more satisfying to watch Jada Pinkett Smith’s deliciously evil and devilishly charismatic portrayal of Fish Mooney. But her’s was the year of ‘Oscars Too White’ or some such hashtag noise and people want to racially represent. Some political mouthing off from certain quarters are inevitable.

Without having seen much more than an exciting trailer complete with stereotypical rap beats, and knowing Marvel Studios’ ability to deliver, I expect just what has been promised, an excellent action film that goes a bit deeper than the norm. That deeper bit, as demonstrated with Wonder Woman, is certainly enough to get the multiculturalists among us standing on their hind legs and yelping. Yes you too can learn from the example of someone who can bend steel with their bare hands! Heaven forbid Marvel has any superhero who eats laundry detergent like candy as well. And so it will be predictable that if Black Panther is as least as good as Wonder Woman then perhaps in the minds of such people who really really care, it might make up for the failure of Idris Elba’s Dark Tower. Then again, I don’t think even most political black Americans really cared. They wanted Elba to be James Bond, or so I’ve been told. Wasn’t he good enough in Pacific Rim?

Black Panther however, raises the whole black nationalist and pan-africanist notions above the level of academic debate. And though I don’t know how much the original comic dealt with some concept of Malcolm X with vibranium claws, its got an appeal that is at least as relevant as the Jewish origins of Superman and the reasons we Americans have superheroes in the first place. Which again, I must emphasize, is not inherently political as it is explicitly social and cultural as is any serious literature. Can superheroes be serious literature? It depends on the filmmaker. Western films can certainly include cowboys and indians and not be expressly about cowboys and indians. So too superhero action films can transcend the simplistic genre formulas. Witness this year’s extraordinary Hostiles and Tarantino’s Hateful Eight. Maybe Black Panther can do a better than average job, which won’t be so hard given what Marvel has (not) done before.

There is a contingent of political black Americans who play the race game which sometimes tries to be more politically significant than it can possibly be. We don’t know who BLM is, it has no one the caliber of even the second and third tiers of the Civil Rights Movement. But we live in a social mediasphere where that’s not important. And from that corner that represents itself as representing the stereotypical downtrodden oppressed black American, there will issue a call and expectation that Black Panther be an important lesson for all Americans, and as a bracing role-modeling experience. I daresay it cannot be taken so seriously as much of Spike Lee’s work. But that’s another generation. I can only tell you that my son and daughter, millennials who do cosplay, are hyped to the max. But they have no need for role modeling any more than I did. It was really something for me to have Richard Pryor and Muhammad Ali in the 1970s when I was in high school and in my early 20s it was a comfort and an honor to meet Guy Bluford. But those were real heroes not superheroes.

So I cannot possibly take seriously the idea, even if perfectly executed, that the politics of identity and all that could have Black Panther as its platform. It’s not a race film. Do The Right Thing was a race film. It’s a black cast film, and that’s plenty. As such, Black Panther may stand a chance to compete with Michael Jackson’s Remember the Time video as a showcase for beautiful people. God knows these baldheaded women in the preview are stunning. Black Panther may stand a chance to even approach Hall & Murphy’s Coming to America, although that’s a very high bar. I expect it to be at least as fun as Mo’ Betta Blues and maybe as good as Boomerang which is saying a lot. And I am quite frankly relieved to see a new generation of actors and filmmakers take the stage. They didn’t need Denzel. (and his Equalizer’s nail gun (cringe)) Good on them.

If it comes to pass that some fragment of America wants to go there and make Black Panther into a vehicle for their political agenda, I won’t be surprised or impressed. Such a move will indicate yet another example of post-modern symbolism eclipsing reality-based politics. So what. At this moment there are so many other more significant films dealing with reality. I could throw Remember The Titans at them and see if they can do that well. Antwone Fisher. Fences. Sometimes the hardest thing to explain is how nobody represents black Americans’ social, cultural and political diversity but themselves, but it’s just that simple.

I was just reviewing some of my old video when I came across these two, which not ironically have some resonance today.

Detail: https://notegpt.io/share/99a00b4b2

Abstract: The video discusses the complexities surrounding Special Order 40, Jamiel’s Law, and immigration enforcement in Los Angeles. Special Order 40, established in 1979 by former LAPD Chief Daryl Gates, prohibits LAPD officers from initiating investigations solely based on a person’s immigration status. The intent was to encourage cooperation between immigrant communities and law enforcement by separating local policing from federal immigration enforcement. However, Jameel’s Law advocates for rescinding Special Order 40 after the tragic killing of Jamiel Shaw, an all-star football player, by a Mexican national gang member recently released from jail. The video explores the broader systemic issues, including jurisdictional challenges between local police forces, the role of gangs with transnational ties, and the limitations of the criminal justice and immigration systems working in tandem. Programs like 287(g), which deputize local law enforcement to assist in immigration enforcement, reflect attempts to bridge these gaps but also generate concerns about civil rights and due process. The speaker stresses the need for better systemic coordination, tighter controls on dangerous criminals, and thoughtful legislative reform to address these intertwined public safety and immigration challenges.

This one, I recorded around the same time, and it certainly goes to the question of whether or not communities are or are not determined to disagree with police. #PublicNullification

Detail: https://notegpt.io/share/ca58a1208

Abstract: The video presents a reflective and nuanced discussion surrounding the Sean Bell case, focusing on the complexities of police tactics, community expectations, and the unfortunate circumstances that led to a tragic incident. The speaker, drawing on insights from Professor Spence and personal observations, explores the standards by which police actions are judged, particularly in high-risk environments like strip clubs operating late at night. The incident occurred at 4 a.m. in a Queens strip club during an undercover police operation involving multiple officers. A confrontation escalated when someone threatened to retrieve a gun, culminating in the victim running over an undercover officer with a car. The speaker emphasizes that while the chaotic and dangerous setting does not justify the loss of life, it helps explain how the situation spiraled out of control.

The video delves into the legal perspective of what constitutes “reasonable” police behavior, highlighting the difference between a judge’s viewpoint of what a “reasonable police officer” would do versus a layperson’s understanding of what a “reasonable person” might expect. This distinction is critical in judicial decisions but complicates public perception, especially when racial and community dynamics influence expectations and interpretations of police action. The speaker also reflects on the societal and community failures that allow such dangerous establishments to operate, questioning why the community does not take more responsibility for shutting them down and why police must intervene in such hostile environments. Ultimately, the video is a meditation on the intersecting responsibilities of police, citizens, and the justice system in preventing tragedies and maintaining order in difficult, morally ambiguous circumstances.

Like many people I was outraged when a predictable chorus of activists against the ‘Prison Industrial Complex’ weighed in against the execution of Tookie Williams, leader of the Crips in Southern California who was convicted of four counts of murder. We should always remember that there are people who will use arguments and political or racial solidarity and victimization to excuse legitimate acts of justice. Such a minority cannot and should not be silenced, but their existence and persistence shows that the public, especially a postmodernist sand populists can not always expect justice to be served.

Seventeen years later, I still have to make the same arguments. Any city government that decides that the criminal element has the right to continue to ply their trades is no different from those of the Jim Crow South or Dodge City, Kansas. Sanctuary is the job of churches, not of the state.

This morning I found myself humming some of the saddest lyrics I have ever known from his cut “I’m Just A Prisoner”.

My wife and my kids
I know they miss me
The baby is five years old
And she don’t even know who her daddy is.

Hearing it again for the first time in decades brings tears to the eyes as I’m sure they did at the beginning of my teenage years. It was a different world then, a world of amazement and violence, of disaster movies, impeached presidents and gasoline shortages. Of blaxploitation films and Patty Hearst. The questions surrounding the fate of the black man was often expressed in the guttural grunts and groans of James Brown and Issac Hayes. Sometimes it was comic as with songs like Jungle Boogie and the Bertha Butt Boogie. What was all that boogie about, especially in those days before George Clinton took it all to outer-space?

Well, of course it was about the Revolution and the Counterculture in which the black man was portrayed as just a prisoner in America. It was about a war in Vietnam that seemed to be the excuse for everything and anything. Right in the middle of all that were chants about freedom coming from some of the freest people on earth, Black Power Americans.

It wasn’t just Billy Paul I’m talking about, but some of this idea was explicitly crafted in words that were burned into my adolescent head written by no other than Gamble & Huff.

We're gonna move on up
Two by two
And this whole world
Is gonna be brand-new

Am I black enough for you?
Am I black enough for you?

Get in line
Start marching in time
You better make up your mind
We're gonna leave you behind

We're gonna move on up
Three by three
We gotta get rid of poverty
I got to stay black
Black enough for you
I got to stay black
Black enough for you

We're gonna move on up
Four by four
We ain't never gonna suffer no more

I got to stay black
Black enough for you
I got to stay black
Black enough for you
Get in line
Start marching on time
You better make up your mind
We're gonna leave you behind

There lies the genius. How could any black kid resist such a revolution? Blackness and a new world order, racial unity and militant marching all combined to an irresistible funky beat. Compare that to Stevie Wonder, or add it on top of Higher Ground and You Haven’t Done Nothin’. And don’t forget Curtis Mayfield’s soundtrack to Super Fly. All building upon Marvin Gaye’s miracle album. There was the wall of soul. It’s almost impossible to imagine a Soul Brother or Soul Sister without a raised fist. That was our collectivism.

Sometimes there was an express rejection, or a sly cut against America’s achievements. Nothing quite says so like Gil Scott-Heron’s Whitey on the Moon. Sometimes there was a transcendent vision like the O’Jays Love Train, also written by Gamble & Huff. Sometimes, as music often does, it’s just music for the sake of dance or music itself. But the music of revolution, of the presumptions against freedom and the gravity of the edge against mainstream America is present in lyrics like those in Am I Black Enough For You.

In retrospect, such things are obvious to me as an adult. It’s wasn’t always so clear as a younger person how much of that which wasn’t expressly subversive angled away from a healthy patriotism.

Everybody knew that Boris Badenov and Natasha, and any cartoon referencing mind-control or brainwashing was aimed against the Soviet Union. Even those mocking the idiocy of brain-dead square-jawed patriotism was easy enough to spot. But a lot of it was much more subtle.

Nevertheless, appeals to racial unity are strikingly clear to me now as I purposefully use the term ‘racialization’ and call out when people are inserting racial theories into their explanation of how the world operates. So while I don’t resent the emotions wrapped up in the philosophical transgressions of Billy Paul, I can no longer not see them.

To paraphrase Me & Mrs Jones: We all know that it’s wrong, and it’s not too strong to let it go now.

Get out of line
There’s plenty of time
Make up your own mind
Let your anger unwind.

As an aside, the Friday’s at Marina Del Rey was so extraordinarily popular in the late 80s that... well it was a phenomenon nobody who attended will ever forget. Back in the days of Aunt Kizzy’s Back Porch, brothers and sisters from all over Los Angeles would stream down to the Marina for a happy hour that stretched all the way until 1 in the morning. I must update you all however, because Houston has a hotspot called Cabo (on Richmond) that really does put this new Ladera Friday’s to shame and is more like the old Marina Friday’s, plus a huge parking lot, plus a huge dance floor, plus an outdoor patio. The new Ladera Friday’s does generate lines and the catch action is stupendous, but I’m too old to be impressed with all that.

What I do enjoy very much is Friday’s association with Jack Daniels and the associations I can make with Jack and a bar full of black strangers who are always friendly, and sometimes attractive. I was there just Saturday and I had a fairly interesting (for a bar) discussion with a brother whose name I forget. I’ll call him Monroe, even though he was from Baton Rouge.

Monroe is a Que, but also a retired military officer. He was wearing his Omega Psi Phi hat proudly. This came to that and he wound up telling me about how he is seriously reaching out to young black men. He told me that at Westchester High School just around the way, most of the black kids there were girls, and there were no young black men who weren’t just athletes. He despaired that the rest were all running the streets and not in school; that their aspirations were stereotypical and impossible. He took his community activism very seriously. Monroe is a man on a mission, and I have no doubt that he will make a difference.

We talked about the difference between Los Angeles and the South, and I have come to an interesting insight that I’ve been thinking about all week. It used to always get on my nerves to hear blackfolks from the South complain about how brothers in LA were ‘fake’, etc. But Monroe’s other comment, (Monroe is a very positive brother) made an impression on me that helps me see something. He said, you all are blessed, you have so many different things to do out here. There are so many opportunities, that’s what makes me so upset about these knucklehead boys. They don’t take advantage.

Since I am an Alpha Phi Alpha, I don’t care about knucklehead boys, unless they happen to be family in which case I got something for they ass. But every Alpha is secretly a Que and every Que is secretly an Alpha. We care that the others are doing their job and secretly admire them for it. So I care about knuckleheaded boys in that I hope that Ques are rescuing them. Since Monroe is not satisfied, I’m not satisfied, but I expect him to actually do the work. Aside from the fact that I’ve paid my debt to society, I don’t have the patience. Although I would be very pleased to find knucklehead boys reading my blog, I honestly don’t expect it, nor do I expect to do much more than blog. Writing is my religion.

But the idea that finally materialized in my thick skull was that in Los Angeles, we are accustomed to people not being exactly what they seem to be. When you are from here, you sit down to dinner with the stranger and we let them ramble on about what they’re up do. If we hear something different the next time, we don’t have a hissy fit. We understand that people change; we expect it. We reserve greater imaginations for ourselves than brothers from the South precisely because we have more choices. We may not make the right choices, but we have them. That we do is what must make it so frustrating for everyone else. We don’t have to fight for space, and we are not getting beat down.

Clearly, most of African America is not from Los Angeles, but I think that if they were, they would know that it’s not everybody’s job to try to raise the race. Not everyone is well-suited to the task, nor does it only depend on everyone. Just as it’s a little bit foolish (or perhaps a lot) for knucklehead boys to think they are going to be big ballers when they should just be in school or in the military; it is likewise foolish for every black person to think he’s Monroe.

Once people get accustomed to that idea, perhaps we can get rid of Jesse Jackson. Don’t forget you heard it first in Los Angeles.

Dateline December 2025
It is only occasionally that I think about ‘being black’ in line with what a very likely majority of Americans associate with black American life. It’s no big deal. But one of those occasions was my recent reminiscing about my time in Houston, TX, which was about that particular time when I wrote the above essay. I particularly remember, of a number of things, that I was about to purchase a Ducati motorcycle to be my transportation for a long-time contract I had there. Which in turn reminded me of the film Fled with Larry Fishburne and that song Hot in Here by Nelly which was the move in that club called Cabo on Richmond in Houston.

Considering that my father was USMC but cared more about raising his own kids rather than other people’s kids, there’s a degree to which I followed suit. I didn’t want to be like Monroe, and I was somewhat resentful of actually having little brothers I had to slow down and take responsibility for. I have a good idea about the consequences of my abdication of those particularly patriarchal roles, main non, je ne regrette rien. I always have been and always will be more faithful to my family than to the race.

Also it was Dave Chappelle’s new show which stuck with me and took me back to the night I hung out with him in New York City, which is just another moment etched into my own memory and story. At that time, in 1991, I was pro-black in a particular way and it struck me in listening to his comedy routine how he mixed truth with fiction in order to make the jokes work. The core of it was to understand the extent to which so many Americans are ready to hear just-so stories and prop up conspiracy theories with them. I could sense it in his audience reaction to this phrase and that phrase.

What I remember and respect about Chappelle is that he has had every opportunity, and surely taken them, to meet the elite of the [black] entertainment universe, which absolutely drowning in real world class talent. It is a privilege I once chased basically in another, intellectual dimension. I have to say it was ultimately frustrating to have met some fractional subsection of the pinnacle of that dimension of black American achievement and have a kind of lukewarm afterglow. But in the end, I did what I wanted to do, off the beaten path where I was destined to hike. Uphill. In the snow. Barefoot. Interestingly, I never met the king of one of my hills, John ‘Corrupt’ Lee.

At any rate, Chappelle has stories to tell that resonate with his audience, but if and when you get back to the import of the deeper message, rather than the lightweight interpretations, I think he understands how much myth stands in for truth, but also how much evil operates below the glamour. He said it’s easier to speak the truth in Saudi Arabia than in America, and in his closer he flips off Israel. Which is rather predictable for anyone who wears a camo jacket with Kaepernick’s name on the back and is in fact Muslim. I don’t begrudge his grudge, it’s just salt and pepper and not the hard boiled egg. In that regard Chappelle is just another studio gangster. Let him rap.

In the end, there are those who find it their sacred duty to address the casual in a casual way while signifying some world-historical symbolism. If you can’t be MLK, make sure you mention MLK. If you can’t be Charlie Kirk, make sure you mention Charlie Kirk. It’s one thing to make waves, it’s something else entirely to surf the ones you can paddle out to and catch. I can’t tell you with any confidence which messages will have the most lasting effect in today’s interwebz, but hopefully it’s not the meta-message, which of course includes everything I’ve written here. Sorta.

The bottom line is that Chappelle has his audience and he makes them laugh. I hope I can make mine think, or at least continue in the literary tradition of keeping essays and criticism alive. I’m putting things together across the decades. It’s not for knucklehead kids who need Black Daddy.

The Final Point
Since 2003 we have fallen fifty feet into the retrenchment of racial thinking here in these United States and nobody quite knows what that means yet or what the echoes of that Woke wave will be. What’s entirely and patently clear to me is that the black American race doesn’t belong to me and I’m never going to attempt to speak for it. Because of that, people who think racially will claim that I’ve abandoned a certain political ethos which is closer to the truth than what I’m saying. I disagree, but not in upper-case bold. Such disagreement doesn’t require volume and fire, it can be simply stated. Standing in the shoes of Jessie Jackson or Al Sharpton has never been my goal, nor has shaping up knuckleheads. I don’t reflect them and they don’t reflect me. But I do hope I make it easier for individuals to be recognized as such. It’s not so easy to be both Alpha Phi Alpha and a goddamned individual. Then again, it’s not so easy to be any kind of individual if your aim is to imagine differently.

Here’s to imagination. It cannot be taught, only encouraged and inspired.

It turns out I have some other stuff I wrote which I’m sure hasn’t seen the light of day in over 20 years. So here goes, originally from The Well’s autobiographical forum.

Dateline 3Q1992

Journal - Third Quarter, Nineteen Ninety Two

As I was explaining to homeboy over my speakerphone, Terry McMillan could not have happened 20 years ago. Perhaps I am mistaken, certainly there were black writers getting published with talent and vision equal to that of Ms. McMillan, but the readership this time has changed. NYT bestseller list only requires so much, and now the hungry black public is all that. It seems to me that the age of Spike Lee, Public Enemy, Arsenio Hall and Terry McMillan is upon us. Media, unquestionably has been forced open to the willing black public. We are in there, marginally of course, creating a new style of media star - super star status of performers created by black populist movement forcing itself upon the private worlds of American publishing. The professional exploiters, working for bottom line capitalists remain the master manipulators. The opportunity soon comes for political counter revolution within the establishment as only the perversely otherworldly black stars can do as they ply their magic on the bottom lines of these businesses.

White liberals have been replaced by black liberals. Inspired by personal experience, they broker the terms of this experience into political rhetoric and press demands upon whatever establishments there be more or less regularly.

----

There once was an ancient monastery to which the faithful peasants flocked weekly to confess their sins. The monks, having heard the confessions took upon themselves the burden of the people and forgave them. They would then retire to the monastery and whip themselves on their own backs for the sins of the peasants. One monk, however would always only flog his feet. His screams were the loudest. One day the head monk asked him, brother why do you flog your feet so? To which the monk replied. They itch goddammit! Draw your own moral, or make it a dirty joke through ad hoc replacement of feet.

----

These days I am reading histories. Joan Didion, Howard Zinn, Gore Vidal. What is to become of me? It is almost unbearable to recount the cruel nature of American slavery, indentured servitude and the repressive laws of Virginia’s House of Burgesses. The traveling down the path of history for the sake of perspective almost narrows it. There are so many examples of rebellions whose resonance begs repetition in these cruel times. But what sort of students of history should we be? Should mind zinging parallels be drawn? To whose benefit accrues the knowledge history - whose unknown slant we come to know only through repetitive backwards journeys - provides? The very act of reading about the past to draw wisdom forces acknowledgement of my bourgeois isolation. I face the Ibo’s dilemma without the advantage of capable nobility. Should I write or should I act? Should I breathe life through my words or through my loins? Which is wasted seed?

Dateline April 1997

19970428.1700

Several years ago I read Darryl Pinckney’s ‘high cotton’ and found a big chunk of myself. Never having succumbed totally to the quaint form of madness we call writing, I kept my day job. Nevertheless, in my diary, now spanning about 15 years, I kept watch over my soul in a way no god was supposed to care. Though I had never been born into that world where other such sentinels marked the passage of time by the influences of influences and the reading of souls, I took a great deal of comfort knowing there were those out there with the same types of measuring sticks. In ‘high cotton’ I could see another me, soul to soul. Sometimes in literary passages, I nurtured a self found in asymmetric real places, often named ‘black’, sometimes called ‘intellectual’, mostly clumsily evoked, and in those glimmering moments I would leap to call such a writer a friend. But it has always been deeper than mere friendship and the souls never met. With the rhythm it takes to dance to what we have to live through you could dance underwater and not get wet - my troupe I called my existential partners. Darryl Pinckney, Hinton Als, Paul Beatty, Sekou Sundiata, Greg Tate gathered - a circle in my head joining hands across time with Jean Toomer and others unknown - to form an imaginary band. In the context of that music, my voice never seemed too far out of tune.

Living in New York had its downside. Opportunities presented themselves to meet a real face, a real body. The dismemberment of persons touched in a reality based context forced a reconciliation of sorts. And Cornel dropped from the fairy ring, and Charles Wright fell from supernal grace, and Lisa Jones became an ordinary woman, and Harlem became a forgotten, dirty urban village.

Yet my predominating hopes, fed by the reality of my pedestrian day job’s distance from the clang of literary looms, allowed the sweet music of existential harmonizing to continue unabated. Until I got married and moved to Atlanta, after which nothing of the sort mattered one whit. I instantly became old-school and was finally able for the first time in my life, to look forward to beer and television. I cannot explain the miracle tantamount to childbirth in women that gives men such Neanderthal focus. Perhaps it is fear, life’s most comforting fear, the fear of losing ones family. So for several years, I have been thankful for my day job and tossed the sublime subtleties of literary soul cultivation to the dreadhead poets collectives of Fort Greene and other alternative universes.

Just this weekend, having returned home to a lightning fried modem from a sales retreat in Florida, I decided to cut down on my online time. What writing I have done to satisfy that impossible urge has been spent in lowercase missives to the masses on the vague values of anti-racist politics over the Internets more or less public domains. I have found in Cornel West’s and the rest of the crew’s interactive default, ample space to carry on dozens of conversations and diatribes worthy of aspiring pillars of the Continuing Renaissance. But it was about time for that to come to a close. It may as well be now. So I invented a new project - that of transcribing my written diaries into Microsoft Word. If Spaulding Grey can get away with it, so can I. Who knows, maybe this new media might turn up something worthwhile after all. So, I arbitrarily found myself in the fourth quarter of 1991, suffering some pain long forgotten in the current context of diapers.

Shaping the web is a nightmarish task, especially when ones existential partners default. Reading the web remains interesting. So today, at my day job, I picked up a slate, electronically of course. Whats this? Pinckney? Naw, it couldn’t be. Oxford, England? It must be.

So now the fate of the diarist is serendipitously tossed into the air. Just as I thought closure was possible, now I have yet another reason to mark the ether and phlogiston for a while and gauge the measures of souls in cyberspace. What weight will fit on the narrow bytes from the fingers - the brown fingers on the white keys pounding away in that crazy attempt to express the depths of humanity from yet another abstracted distance? Then again, cyberspace is close. Very close.

I have the small honor of having been the last commenter on Discriminations. I believe that for the past several years you and I have been out on that same limb, despite the probability of having been treed from a variety of different threats. But there is clarity from that altitude and balance gained from holding tight through fair or foul winds.

My last comment was this:

I am so pleased to see that you are still out on a limb doing good work. Over the years (intermittently) I have always considered your reasoning. It turns out that you have outlined some arguments that have won me over. I guess that’s the proof that when one attends to reason, they wind up in a reasonable accord. Please keep up the good work, and consider any piece you like to be republished in our Journal.

Today, Cremieux Recueil has put together some statistical arguments about Affirmative Action that I am predisposed to believe are true, even though that’s lazy. Let’s skip to some of zero-sum implications:

Another way affirmative action wouldn’t matter would be if it actually corrected an unjust representation issue. That is, if, in the absence of affirmative action, groups were being unfairly penalized at any given level of ability and affirmative action merely fixed that. But we know from all existing data, from the MCAT, to the LSAT, to the data from SFFA v. Harvard, to so much data contained in IPEDS, that this is not the case, so we can ignore this possibility too.

Cremieux is one of the most perfectly sound rational publications in all of the noise we consume on the interwebz. I consider Cremeiux to be world class and so defer to that source. The Harvard admission chart is stunning, which only underlines to me how much my peer networks sucks. (sad trombone)

My Bottom Line
Affirmative Action is racial discrimination for the purposes of inclusion.

It sounds fair, but is it? I would say the overwhelming majority of Americans find inclusion to be a positive, yet squishy and sentimental value. The problem is that the assumption of the exclusion of racial types is overstated for two main reasons.

1. We already have anti-racial discrimination law.

2. Race isn’t who we actually are.

Roughly 7% of black Americans live in California; my kids are third generation ‘California immigrants’ with myself being the anchor baby and my parents living here since their early 20s. Considering that 56% of black Americans live in the South, I am acutely aware of my ethnic and cultural differences from the racial aggregate. So as I say it has always been easy for me to recognize my distinction within the racial mainstream.

So what would I be ‘inclusioned’ into as compared to a black Southerner? How is that the very same integration? It cannot be. Nor can its costs and tradeoffs be easily calculated. These more economic measures are indisputably more significant and meaningful than those around the sentiment of inclusion. Then again, one can not reason away that which was not reasonably adopted. The emotional adherence to Affirmative Action is non-trivial.

What I’m left with is a sad conclusion that the political majority of Americans are not interested in actively enforcing anti-racial discrimination law in order that we can feel good about engineering ‘people of color’ into bogus elite regimes defined by ‘racial inclusion’.

We need more Mordecai Johnsons in America for whom DEI would mean:

• Discipline

• Excellence

• Integrity

The biggest problem with being black in America is something people like to call ‘internalized White Supremacy’. That’s halfway correct. It is absolutely correct in that black Americans may take their racial identity in such a way that they feel defensive about it. It’s absolutely wrong in that the so-called cure for this is ‘equity’. The problem with this ‘solution’ is that it reinforces and enables racial roles. It proposes that there is something unique for each race to do.

The proper way to deal with the matter is to disable the racial.

So I understand when black people say that they cannot be racist because they don’t have power. But this is a self-deprecating argument. It says:

• I don’t have power or agency because I’m black

• Because I am black, I am blameless in all racial matters

Both of these assertions are false. Nevertheless, people believe them. If this is because of White Supremacy, then it is equally because of Black Inferiority.

In The Beginning
One should understand that racism in America was invented and repeated as an excuse for slavery. Slavery came first. Everyone understood that slavery was a gross affront to the principles of liberty. But people also understood that slavery and indenture were common in the world. It was, during the time of the Virginia House of Burgesses understood as the fate of the desperately impoverished. Instead of taking a Christian approach, they took a legalistic approach and this set up the divide in the colonies and states that would later threaten the whole of America.

Like every other stupid theory, ideas about race squirmed around logic and consistency, mutating into subtle shapes. As long as there are foolish people, foolish ideas will take root. All fools aren’t white. To this day people are trying to make excuses and discriminations for racial reasons, some with the nerve to call it anything other than racism. Similarly other fools are second-guessing correlation and calling it causation.

The proper way to deal with the matter is to disable the racial.

My generation did some good things and some foolish things when it was our turn to think about race and what to do about it. It was easier for me because I never inherited any shame about race. I was born and raised in a state with basically no history of slavery or lynching. Furthermore, I participated in the folly of Black Nationalism and Pan-Africanism as a youth. I came to understand their failings. Significantly, my career has been technical - I do objective work and I don’t work primarily for subjective judgement. That is why it has been relatively easy for me to separate the reality of my self-possession from that which is racially performative.

If you ask me for a quote, it is simple. I am not merely anti-racist, I am anti-race. I reject every form of racial identification started in America by the Virginia House of Burgesses or anywhere else around the world. I don’t recognize racial categories as having any legal standing. I absolutely reject White Supremacy. I absolutely reject Black Inferiority. I certainly understand that humans can be superior and inferior, but race has nothing to do with it. If you want to have an argument about genetics, I’m not interested. I’m interested in equality before the law. There will be no genetic exceptions, so shut your hole.

As for poor Hubbell and her play my statement goes a little like this:

There is no power in the use of race without an inherent assumption of racial essentialism. There is no intellectual excusing for the ‘ways of my people’ which allow some special exceptions for me but not for thee. The tragedy of our cultural commons is that we have poisoned the Humanities with social constructions of race that are value-laden and thus we have granted privileges and immunities by color. The more we fuss about such things, the more we grant these emotional pleas standing. It all sounds very subjective, but we do indeed have a colorblind legal standing in principle. This is the principle that must be defended without exception. So regardless of whether or not Hubbell’s work is well done, heartfelt, researched or well-received, the principle of colorblind non-discrimination must be upheld.

There are two considerations at hand. The first is the artistic merit of the production. The second is whether or not the racial identity of the performer must be considered. It is on the latter consideration that this matter must be legally decided. If you question that, then I only have one word for you. Hamilton.

Cartoon Irony
I think Americans have lost their taste for live theater, and I can only count that as some form of cultural decline. I feel the same way, coincidently for live jazz and orchestral music. At the same time, our tastes have regressed to that of 12 year olds. So too many of us adults watch too many cartoons. It is sad but ironically true that films like Her and Ex Machina touched nerves and films like Avatar and Avengers Endgame made billions. Hubbell, being a simple actor might have done a voice acting job and be disguised away from her racial appearance for the purposes of a dumbed down portrayal for colorstruck fools without the mental sophistication required for such live performance. That’s the bubble that AI will afford them and they are not likely to recognize their own dainty ignorance.

That’s no excuse not to pursue what legal remedies can be achieved for Hubbell, whether or not Black Inferiority feels insulted.

Stoic Observations

All Us So Called Blacks - Part One

Perhaps the supreme irony of black American existence is how broadly black people debate the question of cultural identity among themselves while getting branded as a cultural monolith by those who would deny us the complexity and complexion of a community, let alone a nation. If Afro Americans have never settled for the racist reductions imposed upon t…

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4 years ago · 9 likes · Michael David Cobb Bowen

The general fertility rate among Black females ages 15 to 44 was 5.8% in 2023, meaning that 5.8% of females in this age group had a birth in the previous 12 months.

Languages

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U.S. Black population Single-race, non-Hispanic Black Multiracial, non-Hispanic Black Black Hispanic

The vast majority (96%) of the Black population as of 2023 either speaks only English (88%) or speaks another language at home and say they speak English very well (8%). Besides English, other languages spoken at home by the U.S. Black population include Spanish (4%), French or Haitian Creole (3%),* Niger-Congo languages (1%), and Amharic and other Ethiopian languages (1%). (Language use is among ages 5 and older.)

* “French or Haitian Creole” combines those whose language was recorded by the American Community Survey as either “French” or “French or Haitian Creole.

Geography

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U.S. Black population Single-race, non-Hispanic Black Multiracial, non-Hispanic Black Black Hispanic

More than half of the U.S. Black population (56%) lives in the South as of 2023. Another 17% each live in the Midwest and Northeast, and 10% live in the West.

Texas is home to the largest Black population of any state, at about 4.3 million. Florida comes in a close second with 4.0 million, and Georgia comes in third with 3.7 million.

The New York City metropolitan area has the greatest number of Black residents (3.8 million). The second-largest Black metro area population is Atlanta with 2.3 million. The Washington, D.C., metro area is third-largest with 1.8 million Black residents.

Household income

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U.S. Black households Single-race, non-Hispanic Black Multiracial, non-Hispanic Black Black Hispanic

Median household income in 2023 for households headed by a Black person was $54,000, meaning half of Black households earned more than that and half earned less than that. Over a third of Black households (37%) earned $75,000 or more, including 25% that made $100,000 or more.

Household type

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U.S. Black households Single-race, non-Hispanic Black Multiracial, non-Hispanic Black Black Hispanic

About four-in-ten Black people in the U.S. (39%) live in households that are headed by married couples as of 2023. Three-in-ten Black people live in households whose household head is female, and 5% live in male-headed households. Fewer than two-in-ten (17%) are part of nonfamily households.*

* Nonfamily households include households where the householder lives alone or shares their home with only nonrelatives.

Educational attainment

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U.S. Black population Single-race, non-Hispanic Black Multiracial, non-Hispanic Black Black Hispanic

About a quarter (27%) of all Black U.S. adults ages 25 and older have a bachelor’s degree or more education: 16% earned a bachelor’s degree and 11% earned an advanced degree. As of 2023, about another third (32%) have completed some college without obtaining a bachelor’s degree, and 30% have, at most, graduated from high school (or earned an equivalent such as a GED certificate).

A bar chart showing that About a quarter of U.S. Black adults have a bachelor’s degree or higher

This fact sheet is based on Pew Research Center tabulations of microdata from the Census Bureau’s 2023 American Community Survey (ACS), provided through IPUMS from the University of Minnesota.

All displayed numbers are rounded. Shares and percent changes are calculated using unrounded numbers. The detailed tables which have been made available display unrounded tabulations using IPUMS data.

This fact sheet relies on people self-identifying their race and ethnicity in the Census Bureau’s 2023 ACS to describe the nation’s Black population. The racial and ethnic categories used in census data have changed over time, including question wording, formatting and instructions. This may affect how people identify by race and ethnicity. Read “ What Census Calls Us ” for more details on how U.S. racial and ethnic categories have changed since 1790. Moreover, individuals may change how they identify their race and ethnicity in their lifetime. For example, respondents’ perceptions of the questions and their own racial and ethnic identity can change in response to individual circumstances and the way the nation sees race and itself.

Note about data on immigrants: A recent publication by the Census Bureau shows that immigrants are underrepresented in official population estimates used for the 2023 ACS. According to these recent population estimates, the U.S. population was larger than shown by the 2023 ACS by about 2 million people, or roughly 0.6%. Almost all of the additional people were immigrants who make up about 4% of the overall immigrant population shown in the 2023 ACS. In this fact sheet, we report data on the Black population – which includes data on immigrants – using the 2023 ACS. Readers should be aware that immigrant and all population figures in this fact sheet are slightly smaller than those indicated by the new Census Bureau estimates. We are evaluating the impact of the bureau’s new population estimates on our reports about U.S. populations.

Terminology

Unless otherwise noted, adults are those who are ages 18 and older.

U.S. Black population or total Black population refers to the population of Americans who self-identify as Black in the United States. This includes those who say their race is only Black and that they are not Hispanic; those who say Black is one of two or more races in their identity and they are not Hispanic; and those who say their race is Black alone or who say that one of their races is Black but also indicate they are of Hispanic or Latino origin. The terms Black population and Black people are used interchangeably in this fact sheet.

The terms single-race, non-Hispanic Black; single-race Black; and Black alone, non-Hispanic are used interchangeably throughout this fact sheet to refer to the same population. This population is made up of individuals who self-identify only as Black and do not identify as Hispanic or Latino.

The terms multiracial, non-Hispanic Black and multiracial Black are used interchangeably throughout this fact sheet to refer to people who self-identify with two or more races and do not identify as Hispanic or Latino.

The term Black Hispanic is used to refer to those who self-identify as Hispanic or Latino and as Black, either alone or in combination with other races. This group is not the same as the nation’s Afro-Latino population as not all Black Hispanics identify as Afro-Latino, and not all Afro-Latinos identify as Black or Hispanic.

Foreign born refers to people born outside of the United States to parents neither of whom was a U.S. citizen. The terms foreign born and immigrant are used interchangeably.

In this publication, the general fertility rate refers to the share of females ages 15 to 44 who gave birth in the previous 12 months. This measure of fertility does not account for the birth of more than one child by a single female in a 12-month period.

The Black population of the United States is growing. In 2023, an estimated 48.3 million people self-identified as Black, making up 14.4% of the country’s population. This marks a 33% increase since 2000, when there were 36.2 million Black people living in the U.S.

The Black American population is diverse. This group consists of people with varied racial and ethnic identities and experiences. It includes those who say their race is Black, either alone or in combination with other racial backgrounds. It also includes Hispanics who say their race is Black (though this group is not necessarily the same as the Afro-Latino population).

This fact sheet is a profile of the demographic, geographic and economic characteristics of the U.S. Black population in 2023, presented through the lens of four different groups:

• The total U.S. Black population

• Single-race, non-Hispanic Black people

• Multiracial, non-Hispanic Black people

• Black Hispanic people

Scroll down or click through the navigation list to learn more.

Click here for a downloadable spreadsheet of these findings.

Related: Key facts about the U.S. Black population

Population growth

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U.S. Black population Single-race, non-Hispanic Black Multiracial, non-Hispanic Black Black Hispanic

An estimated 48.3 million people in the U.S. identified as Black in 2023. The Black population has grown by more than 12 million since 2000, up from 36.2 million – a 33% increase over roughly two decades.

In 2023, more than 5 million Black Americans were foreign born, about 11% of the U.S. Black population. (Read the cautionary note in “How we did this” about data on immigrants.) This is an increase from 2000, when 2.4 million people, or 7%, among the Black population were foreign born.

Age structure

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U.S. Black population Single-race, non-Hispanic Black Multiracial, non-Hispanic Black Black Hispanic

The U.S. Black population is young. The median age of Black people in 2023 was 32.6 years, about six years younger than the U.S. population’s median age of 38.2. Roughly 30% of the entire Black population was below the age of 20, while 12% were 65 or older.

More than four-in-ten Black Americans (44%) were younger than 30 in 2023. A similar share (43%) were between 30 and 64 years old.

About a quarter of Black Americans are under 18 years old (27%).

American slavery (primarily 1619–1865 in the British colonies and later United States) was overwhelmingly tied to cash-crop agriculture, with enslaved labor concentrated in the South due to climate, soil, and market demands. The system’s structure reflected the physical and technical challenges of cultivating specific crops, which required intensive, year-round manual labor in large-scale plantations. Work was almost exclusively field-based (outdoors in rural plantations), with minimal urban or industrial roles for the enslaved majority. Below, I break this down by major crop, emphasizing labor difficulty and geographic focus.

Key Crops and Their Labor Demands in the American South

1. Tobacco (Primary in Chesapeake region: Virginia, Maryland; peak 17th–18th centuries)

   • Difficulty: Moderately intensive but highly skilled and repetitive. Planting involved hand-sowing seeds in beds, transplanting seedlings, hoeing weeds multiple times per season, “topping” (pinching buds), worming (removing pests by hand), harvesting leaf-by-leaf over weeks, curing in barns, and stripping/stemming. A single plant required ~200–300 labor hours per year; gangs worked dawn-to-dusk in heat/humidity.

   • Where Done: Rural plantations along rivers for transport; fields were open, hilly, and erosion-prone, leading to soil depletion and westward expansion. Enslaved people lived in quarters near fields.

   • Scale: By 1770s, Virginia exported ~100 million lbs annually; labor gangs of 10–50 per farm.

2. Rice (Lowcountry: South Carolina, Georgia coasts; 18th–19th centuries)

   • Difficulty: Extremely grueling and dangerous—often called the “deadliest” crop. Required flooding/draining tidal swamps via elaborate dike/trench systems (built/maintained by hand), planting in mud, constant weeding in water (leading to malaria, snakes, alligators), and harvesting with sickles. Task system common (fixed daily quotas, e.g., 1/4 acre hoed), but quotas were punishing; mortality rates 2–3x higher than upland crops due to disease.

   • Where Done: Coastal wetlands and river floodplains; isolated “rice kingdoms” with vast irrigated fields. Enslaved lived in barracks-style housing on-site.

   • Scale: South Carolina produced ~2/3 of U.S. rice by 1850s; exports boomed post-1750s.

3. Cotton (Deep South: Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, etc.; dominant 19th century)

   • Difficulty: Intensely laborious and back-breaking, amplified by the 1793 cotton gin’s mechanization of processing (not planting/picking). Planting seeds by hand, chopping weeds with hoes (multiple passes), picking bolls by hand (sharp burrs caused cuts; 200–300 lbs/day quota for adults), in scorching heat. Season spanned March–December; gangs supervised by overseers with whips. Eli Whitney’s gin made short-staple cotton viable inland, exploding demand for labor.

   • Where Done: Upland interiors on vast plantations (often 1,000+ acres); “Cotton Belt” from Georgia to Texas. Enslaved quarters dotted the fields.

   • Scale: U.S. produced 75% of world cotton by 1860 (~4 million bales/year); drove internal slave trade (1+ million forcibly moved south/west).

4. Sugar (Limited: Louisiana, parts of Florida/Texas; 19th century)

   • Difficulty: Among the harshest—industrial-scale grinding/cutting cane with machetes, boiling in open kettles (scalding risks), 18–20 hour shifts during harvest/grind season (Oct–Jan). High injury/death from machinery and exhaustion.

   • Where Done: Riverine plantations in subtropical lowlands.

   • Scale: Smaller than cotton but vital; Louisiana led U.S. production.

5. Indigo and Minor Crops (e.g., hemp in Kentucky): Less dominant; indigo involved tedious dyeing/vatting, but smaller scale.

Overall Patterns in American Slavery:

• Labor Structure: Gang system (supervised groups for efficiency on large fields) for cotton/tobacco; task system for rice (individual quotas allowed some autonomy but intense pressure). Work was seasonal but near-constant, with off-seasons for fence-building, ditching, etc.

• Difficulty Drivers: Heat, pests, soil variability, and crop biology demanded unskilled but endurance-heavy manual labor—perfect for coerced, replaceable workers. No mechanization until late (e.g., post-1860s plows). Enslaved people (mostly African-descended) were ~90% field hands; ~4 million by 1860, concentrated in rural South (95%+ of enslaved in agricultural South).

• Geographic Focus: Exclusively rural/plantation-based; urban slavery (e.g., Richmond ironworks) was <5%. Northern states abolished slavery by 1804, shifting it south.

Comparison to Caribbean Slavery and Crops

Caribbean slavery (primarily 16th–19th centuries in British, French, Spanish, Dutch colonies) was even more crop-specialized, deadly, and export-oriented than America’s, with higher mortality and reliance on constant African imports. Plantations were larger/more industrialized, and work was field-based but often in mountainous or coastal terrains. Key differences stem from crop biology, climate, and scale.

Key Caribbean Crops and Labor Demands

1. Sugar Cane (Dominant: Jamaica, Barbados, Cuba, Saint-Domingue/Haiti; 90%+ of economy)

   • Difficulty: Brutal and lethal—far exceeding U.S. cotton/rice. Planting holes by hand in rocky soil, weeding, cutting mature cane with machetes (heavy, sharp stalks; 4–5 tons/day per person), carting to mills, feeding crushers (amputations common), boiling in battery of kettles (18–24 hour “crop time” shifts, no sleep). High heat, dust, and boiler explosions; life expectancy ~7–10 years post-arrival. Gang system with drivers; punishments extreme.

   • Where Done: Vast estates on flats or hillsides; mills on-site for immediate processing (cane spoils in 48 hours). Enslaved lived in barracks near fields/mills.

   • Scale: Jamaica alone had 700+ plantations by 1800; Cuba produced 1/3 world sugar by 1850s. Required 1 enslaved worker per 2–3 acres.

2. Coffee (Secondary: Jamaica highlands, Haiti): Hand-picking berries on steep slopes; processing wet/dry methods. Laborious but less deadly than sugar.

3. Other (Cacao, Indigo, Cotton): Minor; similar to U.S. but smaller.

Key Comparisons:

• Crop Variety vs. Specialization: U.S. had diverse crops (tobacco → rice → cotton dominance), allowing regional adaptation and some labor flexibility (e.g., task vs. gang). Caribbean was sugar-monoculture (80–90% of exports), creating uniform, hyper-intensive labor with no off-season respite—mills ran continuously during harvest.

• Labor Intensity & Mortality: Caribbean sugar was more deadly (death rates 5–10% annually vs. U.S. 2–3%; required importing 5–10 million Africans vs. U.S. natural increase post-1808 ban). U.S. cotton picking was grueling but allowed family reproduction; Caribbean heat/disease/exhaustion prevented it.

• Scale & Industrialization: Caribbean plantations larger (500–1,000 enslaved vs. U.S. average 20–50) and more factory-like (on-site mills/boilers). U.S. focused on raw export (ginned cotton shipped north/Europe).

• Geography & Conditions: Both rural/field-based, but Caribbean tropical islands amplified disease (yellow fever, malaria) and terrain challenges (hurricanes, mountains). U.S. continental South had varied climates but more arable land for expansion.

• Economic Driver: Both export-focused, but Caribbean sugar was the 18th-century “oil” (immense profits funded European wars); U.S. cotton fueled 19th-century textiles, sustaining slavery longer via domestic growth.

In summary, American slavery was a adaptable, expansive system molded by crop-specific hardships in southern fields, evolving from tobacco/rice to cotton hegemony. Caribbean slavery was a more rigid, sugar-driven death machine—intensified versions of U.S. sugar labor but on a monocrop island scale. Sources: Historical data from American Slavery (Kolchin), The Sugar Industry (Galloway), U.S. Census 1860, and plantation records.