About thirty years ago, racial matters in America ran into the realities of The Great Society, and we’re still hiding the damage. Before then, during the Civil Rights years of the 1960’s , all of us (except black and white radicals), believed that white culture was the standard model for America.  Black culture was the outlier, a state of suspension; the perverse symmetry of institutionalized segregation showed a legitimate white ethos and an imitation black version.

We thought that integration and enforced legal equality would harmonize us as a nation, settle our differences over time, and locate us in a human family, the members of which had the same ambitions and needs.  It was also true, then, that black divorce rates were lower than those of whites, black business ownership was higher per capita than among whites, serious crime rates showed no population differential, school graduation rates were equivalent across the races.   So if blacks needed anything from whites, it was probably something other than what they got.

If anything, black culture in integrated America was a success story.  It was true that officially-measured poverty rates were much higher among blacks than whites,  and this measurement always simplifies the thinking of  government materialists.  To them, all life can be reduced to economics.  If you just raise incomes and opportunity, all the other matters will take care of themselves.  One problem for blacks in the 1960’s was that white cultural elites were rejecting bourgeois prosperity and aspirations at the  moment the same elites were inviting them to join up.     

And then Romantic Liberalism showed up to make things worse.  What the demographic data reliably showed then about black Americans, apart from the raw numbers, was an enormous pool of courage and determination to transcend the conditions imposed  upon them by historical, habitual,  and legal separatism.   But this genuine nobility suffered the fate of all virtues that can be specialized and attributed to groups, which is one thing liberalism is most certainly about.  Group identity.  Black courage was romanticized by the effete mobs that clambor for myths to decorate the plain old facts of life.  And once you shine the public spotlight on someone,  something, anything,  whatever virtue is isolated and  magnified, begins to rot. 

Like the earthiness attributed to truckers, the wildness attributed to Scotsmen, the eye-sparkle, melancholy and quick ironies attributed to the Irish…all the crap and flummery that Americans grope for as description and justification for differences ends up in stereotype and excuses.  This is one of the first and most poisonous effects of multiculturalism; it “celebrates” distinctions because they exist, and has no moral mechanism to evaluate  destructive and retrograde behavior.   For this reason, we Americans are unable to even discuss  the cultural divide and achievement gaps between white and black America.  

All of us, black and white, have known for thirty years that something racial has gone seriously wrong in this country.  Conservatives have, for years, been inviting a discussion of it, but the identity politics of the Democratic Party have bowdlerized the subject from its own liturgies, and condemned the heretics outside the party for questioning its racial orthodoxy.  Curiously enough, the vapid and opportunistic Barack Obama has changed all this, and not by design.