Kum Ya…Bah!

‘People of different sorts seldom want to live together. When forced to do so, the results often are suboptimal, such as mass murder. For example  Protestants and Catholics in Ireland, Hutus and Tutsis in Burundi, Israelis and Palestinians in Palestine, Chinese and Indonesians in Jakarta, Shias and Sunnis in many places, Moslem and Hindus in India, Jews and almost everybody almost everywhere, blacks and whites and Latinos in America, Sinhalese and Tamils in Sri Lanka, Anglophones and Franco phones in Canada, and Muslims and Thais in southern Thailand. The list could be extended.

The cause is not the inherent malignity of any of these groups, who probably don’t have any. In isolation, those with whom I am familiar are agreeable enough. I can’t tell one flavor of Irishman from the other and have no idea why they persisted in killing each other. Numbers have much to do with it. Problems arise between groups when the number  of one group entering the territory of  another reaches a a tipping point.

I recently read in the New York Times, a journal of collapsing grammar, and Appropriate Values, of a group of White Nationalists in maybe  Arkansas who are building what they hope will be an all-white town. Their thought is that under the current administration this may be allowed. Squawking and clucking  erupted. The settlers were called, and were, racists, a condition they share with most of humanity.

In the United States of course required thought holds that  we should all love each other and have drumming circles and hold hands, if you can do that while drumming, and sing Kum Ba Ya. That we don’t love each and aren’t going to is thought of no relevance. But, against all custom, let us think:

In America, the greatest friction arises between whites and blacks. The obligatory view in the public prints is that whites, who eat children and want to reinstate slavery, refuse to live with blacks, who are helpless and without agency but want desperately to live among whites. Is this true?  It seems not. America is intensely segregated, with many cities having vast black regions with nary a pale face to be seen. America is so segregated that few notice.

Herewith a few questions never asked but that Gallup might ask of blacks:

Would you prefer that your children go to an integrated school with whites, or to an entirely black school if it had the same salaries, quality of teachers, funding, and so on as the white school?

Same question, but asked of black children.

Would you rather live in a largely white neighborhood, or an entirely black neighborhood if the quality of housing and services were the same?

Would you prefer to have your neighborhood policed by an entirely black force run by local black government if by law pay, training and retirements were equal?

Would you like your daughter to marry a white man?

How would blacks answer these questions? I don’t know. I think I do know how whites would answer parallel questions, at least if their names were not used. Someone said that integration is the time between the arrival of the first black and the exit  of the last white. But blacks react as hostilely to whites integrating black-neighborhoods. Observation suggests that when the races can, they self-segregate.

If it turned out that blacks were more interested in quality of housings, schools, policing, equal salaries, but not in living next to whites, we would have to conclude that our national approach is faulty, if not bass-backward. Would it not be worth finding out? Are we forcing on people something that almost nobody wants?

The evidence suggests a desire, BY NO MEANS necessarily hostile, of people to be among their own.  When the races can, they self-segregate. In Washington when blacks weary of city living, they move to Prince George County, heavily black. Whites go to Fairfax and Montgomery counties, very white. Immigrants clump together–Chinatown, Little Saigon–until a generation of their young women marry out.

An idea that will have me hunted down and stoned:  Blacks often express anger at the unfairness of drug laws, under which they are arrested  and severely penalized for crimes –“crimes”–for which whites are not. For examples, white college students routinely sell drugs to each other and then use them. No arrest, no penalty.

Suppose that large black barrios in the cities were allowed to establish their own rules on things like use and sale of drugs. The agreement would be that as long as they did it in their own jurisdiction, the population could decide what if anything to do about it.  whether they chose harshness or leniency, it would end the racial hatred that comes of whites over-policng blacks.

But of course many parents (me, for example) particularly in cities,  would like their children to go to cosmopolitan schools if academic and behavioral standards were upheld. Others (me, for example) with bright chillun would prefer schools highly selective by intelligence. Yet others might want Catholic or Jewish schools.

A solution might be to allow any group to establish a school and determine who would be admitted, all schools getting the same per-student funding as long as they met basic academic standards. Each school would select and hire its teachers. Federal educrats to so much as mentioned “guidelines” would be shot on site under an exception to the murder laws and stuffed into abandoned oil wells. The only federal intervention to this would be the purchase of abandoned oil wells.

I will now go into hiding