The great missed opportunity with blacks.

Elizabeth Wright shines a spotlight on the implications of black elites’ late 20th-century choice to follow the path of “integration.” That choice was simply one to pursue political power with the aid of white beneficence -- and insufferable^[1] white condescension, let it be said:

Blacks once had some of the best teachers and mentors steering them in the right direction, that of economics. However, the opponents among them, who strove only for "social justice" and "equality," the theme so beloved by whites, were determined that recalcitrant entrepreneurial types would not mess up their game plan. . . . The elites were not dumb. They surmised that the strategy of "civil rights" would lead more quickly to greater power than they could acquire at a slower economic pace.

This is the key to why so much terrible stuff befell blacks and ultimately befell the country. The elites who ran such organizations as the NAACP cared nothing about the overall health or long-term welfare of the group, but only about how they might take short cuts to power via the beneficence of whites.

With the help of their white compatriots they managed to turn what was essentially an economic problem to be solved into a moral crusade. And the typical white ate it up. . . .

* * * *

. . . It was much more gratifying to point to the "immorality" of whites who initially refused to forego their own individual rights at the behest of the black cause.^[2]

This turning away from self sufficiency to embrace dependency has led to dismal black school performance and wastelands where there ought to be vibrant black communities, among other evils, all necessarily "explained" by:

• Thelegacyofslavery and
  
• Institutionalracism.

Which doctrines to be defended and propounded with religious zeal.

The correct approach, says Ms. Wright, would be to have required blacks to produce through their own efforts and imagination instead of depending on what goodies whites, in their infinite beneficence, allowed to fall off the table. Instead we ended up with blacks “led” by clowns and a legal regime at odds with a Constitution that “forbids the government from removing the rights of one set of citizens (white property owners) in order to exalt the rights of another.”^[3]

The benchmarks of progress along the entrepreneurial/self-sufficiency path are plain for all to see. There is or there isn't a well-run convenience store, dry cleaning establishment, machine shop, or architectural firm in town. "Social justice," on the other hand, is a concept for morons and guarantees oceans of ink will be spilled by intellectual lightweights pondering imponderables like Hamlet Yorick's skull. Ditto, "civil rights" which is a concept with no substantive meaning and nothing more than a club to use on some poor white schlub who was lucky enough to get a jury of his peers.

Such is the debased nature of our current tiered racial system that is only a slightly less virulent inversion of the one it replaced. It comes saturated with hypocrisy, the elevation of clowns and devils, and fanatic hostility to common sense.

There was another way and, like fish in water, it's hard for us to keep in mind that we exist in a strange miasma indeed. Elizabeth Wright reminds us of that other way.

Notes
^[1] Baron Bodissey at Gates of Vienna points out that it’s liberals who “regard black people as unable to restrain themselves or control their emotions when they feel slighted” and who believe that blacks “cannot accomplish what white people accomplish unless they are granted lowered standards, affirmative action, and minority set-asides.”
^[2] "The Civil Rights Myth. Integration & the End of Black Self-Reliance." By Elizabeth Wright, Issues and Views, 5/29/10.
^[3] Id.