'The Atlantic' Says Ferguson Riots White People's Fault

-By Warner Todd Huston

Hey, you racist, black-murdering, stupid, heatless white people, The Atlantic wants you to know that the riots in Ferguson are all your fault because you don’t care… or something like that.

The liberal rag has lighted on the worst, most rote left-wing apologia for rioting that can be imagined essentially telling whites that they should excuse the riots, that blacks are totally in the right for destroying their own neighborhoods, and that the reason it happens is because stupid, racist, moron white people only talk to other stupid, racist, moron white people.

The Atlantic first doles out the many polls that show how whites and blacks differ in their reaction to the riots in Ferguson as well as in how police interact with the public, and the shooting of Michael Brown itself. The polls the magazine cited show that whites are a bit less concerned than blacks are over the issues and that blacks view the Ferguson case as emblematic of how cops mistreat all black people everywhere.

The reasons for this are two fold, according to columnist Robert P. Jones: Whites are racist against young black men and whites self-segregate and don’t talk to blacks in order to understand why blacks feel the way they do.

Jones went on to note that young black men are taught that the system is preternaturally against them. He points to another columnist who recently wrote about the advice his mother gave him when he was young.

How I shouldn’t run in public, lest I arouse undue suspicion. How I most definitely should not run with anything in my hands, lest anyone think I stole something. The lesson included not talking back to the police, lest you give them a reason to take you to jail–or worse. And I was taught to never, ever leave home without identification.

Seems to me this isn’t that much different than how white boys are taught to deal with the police.

Anyway, Jones also pointed to a 2012 PRRI survey that “found that black Americans report higher levels of problems in their communities compared to whites. Black Americans were, on average, nearly 20 percentage points more likely than white Americans to say a range of issues were major problems in their community.”

Jones went on to add the experience of a black minister who related an incident that happened to him in 1999 when two white police officers beat him.

This happened because they felt like I was not being obedient enough. The way they saw the world and me in their world created a certain kind of fear and reaction to my actions that caused me harm. I live with that experience as many folks of color live with that experience.

Now, there is no reason at all to doubt that blacks are raised to think the system is against them nor to doubt the 2012 PRRI survey about problems in the black community. In fact, I’d guess that the system just might be more prone to distrust blacks over whites.

I see no reason at all to scoff at the claim that blacks fear the system more than whites. I think they do and I am not 100% against the idea that the system is tougher on blacks than whites in many ways.

But what Jones failed to do in his piece is to pinpoint why all this is fact. Why is it that blacks are treated more harshly by the system than whites? It certainly isn’t because whites self-segregate.

In fact, whites self-segregate because of the way blacks act not because whites are essentially racist at their core. It is reaction, not “pre” action.

You see, the problem with the black community is not that it is put upon by the system. It is that they give the system so much reason to be looked upon with suspicion.

This is NOT a race-based conclusion. This is a cultural conclusion and a strictly American one at that. After all, when actual Africans, Negroes from Africa itself, migrate here they look upon black culture in America with a certain level of disdain. They want to come here and work and learn and become useful members of society and the way many American blacks comport themselves disgusts these immigrants.

The condition is not congenital to black people. It just isn’t.

Of course, many in the African American community will blame slavery for all this. But slavery, while being a contributor, is not the cause of today’s cultural rot in the black community.

Two other, more important reasons are why the black community is in such poor shape, especially in the inner city.

Democrat Party politics and its pushing of the welfare state is one cause, certainly. The welfare state has devastated the black family, eliminated jobs for young blacks, and made cities a poverty trap for them.

But a more important reason that black culture in America has sunk to the depths of its current depravity is the war that was raged over black intellectualism early in the 1900s.

A war was waged between the optimism and self-reliance of the sort championed by Booker T. Washington and the victimhood and un-American integration of socialism as evinced by W.E.B. Dubois just as the black community began to find its independence and cultural footing once slavery was finally a thing of the past. Just as the black community was gaining its cultural footing and gearing up to beat Jim Crow, black intellectuals decided en masse to go with the self-defeating ideology of finger pointing, excuse making, anti-Americanism and ignorance of Du Bois instead of accepting the more American optimism that Booker T. Washington offered.

Early in the 1900s when black leaders such as Du Bois came to control the cultural mind of black intellectuals, the stage was set to create the riots in Ferguson, Missouri. It is because the black cultural elite rejected the American ethos and tried to eliminate the ideas of self-reliance, education, small government, and local control and decided that a communist/socialist society was the ideal to work towards that blacks in America ended up doing so poorly.

African Americans had a lot to over come, certainly. Slavery, Jim Crow, a lack of equal rights, lynching… all of these were an evil directed at them by the system. There is no doubt.

But the cure was worse than the disease for the black community and it was a cure set in motion by their own intellectuals, a cure that is now so plainly a disaster for them all.

They should have gone with Booker T’s ideals instead of rejecting the essential truth of the American way of life. Now they are reaping what they sowed early in the 1900s.

Incidentally, for those who just can’t understand why blacks went form supporting the GOP to becoming Democrats, the move toward communism indulged by their intellectual leaders answers your question. The black intellectuals who prepared the ideological road for how the black community thinks today was paved with communist ideology and coincided with the Democrat Party’s drift t the far, far left. So, it was natural that blacks started to drift toward the party of modern plantation ideology.

Finally, I’d actually say that if whites really do refuse to deal with blacks in America today, it isn’t because they are racists like The Atlantic and Robert T. Jones insist. It is because blacks reject them and there is no way for whites to approach them. There is no “in” there for whites unless they accept 100% the communist ideology that most blacks militantly profess. Any hint that whites don’t agree with them fully and blacks reject them as “racists” and “haters.”

Blacks have to turn away from the culture of victimhood. They have to reject racemongers like Jesse Jackson and Al Shaprton. They must look at the American ethos with a clear eye, one not clouded by slavery-based finger pointing. Though it will take some time to get there, only then will they find that their lives as a group will improve.

My Other Coverage of the Events in Ferguson

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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson

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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, Wizbang.com, among many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.

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‘The Atlantic’ Says Ferguson Riots White People’s Fault

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