Why Ben Shapiro is Wrong About BLM

If Ben Shapiro really wants answers to his condemnations of BLM, he should start by reading a few books, and then some. For example, he can find all of the answer's he's looking for in:

Slavery By Another Name, by Douglas Blackmon, which shows how "thousands of African Americans were pulled back into forced labor with shocking force and brutality," right up until the 1970s, when I was still in grade school.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Civil Rights litigator and legal scholar, Michelle Alexander, which explains how "mass incarceration" under the ruse of a War on Drugs, has effectively created a caste system that is as pronounced in America today as it was in the Jim Crow south, if not more.

Ghosts of Jim Crow, which was written by Constitutional Law Professor, F. Michael Higgenbotham, which explains in great detail how "the shadows of Jim Crow era laws and attitudes continue to perpetuate insidious, systemic prejudice and racism in the 21st century."

With Liberty and Justice for Some, by Glenn Greenwald, which shows how a two tiered justice system has been used over the last four decades to effectively destroy the concept of equality before the law, not just in our courtrooms, but through our legislatures as well. And coupled with the War on Drugs, which disproportionately targets poor black people, it's no wonder there has been a rise of single parent families in the black community- because many of the "other" parents have been locked up.

That two tiered system of justice was mirrored in a study prepared for the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future (NCTAF), Fifty Years After Brown v. Board of Education: A Two-Tiered Education System. Among other things, that report stated:

 The President’s Commission on Education Resource Equity declared in 2001, (that) long-standing gaps in access to educational resources exist, including disparities based on race and ethnicity. These economic reports are new, but the news is not. Thirty years ago, the Presidential Commission on School Finance found that disparities in educational resource distribution among public school districts resulted from a reliance on local district financing for educational revenues. Since that time, there have been lawsuits in forty-five states targeted at remedies for unequal and inadequate funding of public schools.[iv]

What's more, in their book, Urban Schools: Crisis and Revolution, James Deneen and Carmen Catanese explained how such a system contributes to creating a new slave system in America:

During a recent education conference at Princeton University, one speaker referred to America’s urban schools as “a new form of slavery.” The great majority of Black and Latino students are trapped in schools that don’t provide the learning they need to lead dignified and productive lives. They are being equipped to perform society’s least desirable work at minimal wages, and condemned to lives of depending that can readily turn to bitterness and despair. It doesn’t seem an exaggeration to term this reality an enslavement of the majority of children in our impoverished major cities.[iii]

And the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report, 2001-2002, found that the U.S ranked “dead last among developed countries when it comes to the difference in the quality of schools available to rich vs. poor children.”

What's more, racial quotas for schools and universities intended to help alleviate such inequality, are undermined by the even greater quota demands that police departments put on their officers to fund their budgets, and the private prison system puts on the American tax payer to satisfy their investors and their shareholders.

I saw this first hand inside a number of high schools in inner city Baltimore. Roughly a decade ago, I had visited several of these high schools to install a new computer lab that was going to be donated to one of them.  But even though every student had a cell phone in these schools, some of the libraries appeared to have fewer than a hundred books.  And many of those, it seemed, were of thoroughly warn copies of The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew (which was ironic, of course, since someone should've been looking into what the hell happened to all of the other books in these libraries).

In fact, after reading Fredrick Douglas's autobiography, I was amazed to see the many parallels in his life to that of so many people caught in the revolving door of a justice system that too often curtsies to a private prison system that makes certain kinds of addiction a crime, in order to serve its own addiction to profits. And because that system lives parasitically off of the American taxpayer, those private profits always rise in tandem with public debts.

It was, in part, the lobbying efforts of such private prisons that lobbied for a continually harsher prosecution of the War on Drugs, which has gotten rich by getting everyone from the legislators to the courts to incarcerate more people than anyone else in the world, most of whom are black nonviolent offenders. This was true, even though studies showed that white youth abused hard drugs more than black youth, and another study showed that when the same charges were applied to people of similar socioeconomic backgrounds, black people were much more likely to be incarcerated than white people.

Instead of reading any of this, however, Shapiro seems to prefer the thinking of people like Charles Murray, who's book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010, argued that the differences between blacks and whites wasn't because the schools of the former were generally worse now then they were before Brown v Board of Education, but because of "differences in or lack thereof in regards to religiosity, work ethic, industriousness, family, etc.."

Perhaps Shapiro and Murray should both consider who it was that began tearing all those families apart in the first place, over the course of a couple centuries; and who it is that continues to do so even today through a bogus War on Drugs. 

And if such people truly lacked "work ethic" and "industriousness," how were Southern plantation owners so successful in building their fortunes with such lousy workers? And, even more curious, why did those plantation owners fight a Civil War to keep such lousy workers on their plantations? Such a claim implies, in other words, that poor black people used to have "work ethic" and "industriousness" - back before the Civil War - but that their emancipation has presumably resulted in a gradual erosion of both.  

Murray goes on to provide evidence that religiosity, work ethic, industriousness, and family etc. have either remained strong or have weakened minimally in the New Upper Class (of mostly white people), whereas these same attributes have either weakened substantially or have become almost nonexistent in the New Lower Class (.i.e. of mostly black people). And as a result, Murray believes America needs "a kind of civic Great Awakening - a return to the republic's original foundations of family, vocation, community, and faith."

Aside from the unfortunate fact that such claims sound eerily similar to the book, My Awakening: A Path to Racial Understanding, by former Ku Klux Klansman, David Duke, reading it also made me feel like I had somehow been transported back to the 1800's. These were manifestos to the religion of race. It was like a statistician had done with statistics what Smaual Cartwright had done as a doctor in coming up with the mental condition of "drapetomania," with the former concluding that black people were poor because they were stupid and lazy, and the latter concluding that slaves ran away from their masters because they were crazy.

It's like this whole thing is just one really big, and really bad, joke. And Murray's theory was proven to be just that, when studies showed that that the poorer and less educated someone was, the more likely they were to believe in God (we see this in third would countries too, for example), and the more money a person had, the more likely there were to be an atheist. In fact, Murray's assertion seemed to be based on America alone, since church attendance in Europe has been roughly only 7%, for at least a decade.

In sum, Ben Shapiro and Charles Murray both engage in what the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, who authored a study of race relations in the United States in 1944, called An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. In his study, Myrdal painstakingly detailed what he saw as obstacles to full participation in American society by African Americans in the 1940s. The ideals of liberty, justice, and fair treatment of all people formed an “American Creed” that shaped all political and social interactions in the United State.   But despite this creed, Myrdal saw a vicious cycle in which whites oppressed blacks, and then pointed to blacks' poor performance as reason for the oppression.


.Instead, the cycle continues as people like Ben Shapiro and Charles Murray continually mischaracterize the "effects" of racism, as the "cause" of inequality, which is how the most insidious forms of racism have always operated in polite societies. But beneath the veneer of that lie, is a machine responsible for all slavery and every genocide. And today, not much has changed