“Burn this bitch down!”
Ferguson, Garner, & the End of Gentrification

"Burn this bitch down!" [1]

“Burn this bitch down!”

2,212 words

German translation here [2]

To listen in a player, click here [3].

To download the mp3, right-click here [3] and choose “save link as” or “save target as.”

“One law for the lion and the ox is oppression.”–William Blake

I recently picked up Face to Face with Race [4], Jared Taylor’s anthology of first-person accounts of race relations in America from various contributors to American Renaissance. Interestingly, the harrowing stories of racial animosity in New York City struck me as exaggerated, based on my own experiences in New York.

I do not question the accuracy and honesty of these reports, some of which go back to the 1990s, so I have to ask: Has non-white behavior actually improved in the United States, despite continued multiculturalism, non-white immigration, and erosion of white norms? Crime statistics certainly bear out this impression, particularly for New York City [5].

But what has caused it? Are the races finally learning to live together peacefully in a multiracial, multicultural society? Is all the multicultural propaganda finally paying off? I doubt this for two main reasons.

First, racial and ethnic consciousness are hard-wired into the brain [6]. It is natural for us to feel greater trust for people who are like us, greater fear of those who are unlike us. The human forebrain might be taught to disdain and ignore these feelings, but they never go away, and in some circumstances — like emergencies — they will trump our multicultural programming. This means that any multicultural amity that might exist is psychologically superficial. Thus multiracial institutions are weak and prone to break down under pressure.

Second, whites seem to be the only people who widely accept multiculturalism as an ideal. Whites think that if they only set aside everything about their interests, tastes, and expectations that might clash with those of other races, they can demonstrate sufficient openness and good will that non-whites will drop their resentment, hike up their pants, join hands, and help them usher in a new age of post-racial harmony. Non-whites, however, are encouraged to be as ethnocentric, aggressive, and accusatory as possible in their dealings with whites. Thus present-day multiculturalism is a formula for the exploitation and victimization of whites, which can only increase racial tensions.

Although I am sure there is a host of reasons why non-white crime is down in many urban areas, two stand out: aggressive policing and “gentrification.”

In New York, crime fell during the Giuliani and Bloomberg years, because the NYPD was aggressive and efficient in locking up criminals.

During the same period, whites began to “gentrify” racially-mixed neighborhoods. Gentrification begins with gays, straight singles, and childless young couples attracted by low prices, interesting architecture, walkable neighborhoods, and shorter commutes to work and cultural attractions. When whites create and attract new businesses, property values and rents rise, and non-whites find themselves priced out of the neighborhood. Many non-whites, aided by Section 8 housing money, end up in “slumburbs” like Ferguson, Missouri, where they ruin the lives and property values of “white bread” suburbanites disdained by hip urban “gentry.” Simply by decreasing the non-white percentage of the population, gentrification decreases crime — partly by relocating it to the suburbs.

Gentrification and aggressive policing are mutually reinforcing phenomena: lower crime encourages gentrification, and once whites move into racially-mixed neighborhoods, they demand even more aggressive policing to bring the neighborhood up to their standards.

When I lived in Atlanta, I spent a lot of time reading at a particular coffee house. One afternoon, I listened in on a conversation between a young gay couple (one white, the other black) and a few of their friends. All of them were starry-eyed liberal utopians. A few months before, the couple had purchased a great old house for practically nothing because it was in a black neighborhood. As soon as they moved in, they were horrified by the loud noise, littering, loitering, and street crime. Nothing in their presumably suburban and middle-class upbringings had prepared them for feral inner city blacks. And with perfectly clean consciences, they set to work cleaning up their neighborhood, which entailed frequent calls to the police, who obligingly locked up some of their neighbors. The shiftless and criminal element that remained free started looking for more comfortable environments.

If this couple had been straight, white, and conservative, their behavior would have immediately been decried as racist. And it is racist. For, in effect, what they were demanding is that the police enforce white standards of behavior on a black neighborhood. But because they were a liberal, gay, interracial couple, they got a pass on what is essentially racist oppression. Indeed, in places like Atlanta, Washington, D.C., and New York City, white liberal gentrifiers have been getting a pass on this kind of racist oppression for more than 20 years now.

But the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York City spell the end of gentrification, for both deaths came about because the police were simply routinely enforcing white behavior standards, and aggressive enforcement of white standards is what makes gentrification possible in the first place.

The altercation in Ferguson began when Officer Darren Wilson told Michael Brown and his friend to walk on the sidewalk rather than in the middle of the street. Blacks typically have less intelligence, less empathy for others, and less impulse control than whites. Thus they simply can’t be bothered with the white man’s rules. When I lived in Atlanta, I would see blacks dart into 4 lanes of moving traffic rather than go to a crosswalk and wait for the signal. It was like those wildlife parks, where zebras and antelope dash in front of your Range Rover. “Urban wildlife” was my term for such behavior.

The altercation in Staten Island began when police apprehended Eric Garner for selling single cigarettes. Typical black impulsiveness and high time preferences mean that they will gladly pay more per unit for a single cigarette now rather than walk ten feet or wait ten minutes to buy a whole pack. Forcing blacks to buy cigarettes by the pack is just more arbitrary white man’s law, which gets in the way of hustlers like Eric Garner (who had 30 previous arrests [7]) making a living gratifying the impulsiveness of his kind.

I think that in both cases, the police acted rightly to enforce the existing laws and broader white standards of behavior. Whites built this country, after all. I also think that Officer Wilson was right to kill Michael Brown. It was a clear case of self-defense.

Eric Garner did not deserve to die. But he did deserve to be arrested, and his death was simply an accidental effect of his arrest.

The police were right to subdue this large, agitated, black street criminal by force. Softer measures would have endangered the police themselves, and we cannot expect the police to defend our safety if they cannot defend their own.

The police were right to ignore Garner’s protests that he could not breathe, because if you can talk, you can breathe. Garner also claimed he “dindu nuffin” before his arrest, an all-too-typical lie that the police have heard a thousand times before. (Blacks have a very weak sense of moral responsiblity and shame.) If the cops thought that Garner’s claim that he could not breathe was also false, whose fault is that, exactly?

Garner did not die from being roughly subdued by the police. He died of cardiac arrest in the ambulance because he was obese and in poor health. He just wasn’t up to the rigors of being arrested. But he chose his life of crime. And the police can’t give a free pass to fat criminals because they might find arrest too strenuous.

Frankly, neither life is much of a loss, and I resent being told that “Black Lives Matter,” when it is all too obvious from black behavior that they regard both their lives and ours as quite cheap.

So the angry black mobs protesting both deaths are wrong on all the facts. But they are still fundamentally justified in their anger.

American blacks have a huge chip on their shoulder. Let us call it the chocolate chip. A chip on one’s shoulder means a set of preexisting grievances that are merely triggered by current events. Such behavior is essentially neurotic, because the reaction is seldom appropriate, either in kind or intensity, to what triggers it.

Sensible blacks should feel ashamed of Michael Brown’s behavior. Frankly, they should also feel somewhat safer because of his death, for if his criminal career had not been cut short, his own community would have been his most likely victims. Eric Garner did not deserve to die, but neither was he a credit to his race.

Still, the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, regardless of the facts, have tapped into a vast reservoir of bitterness about “racism.”

It is easy to be dismissive of black complaints about racism. Legal racial discrimination and segregation have been dismantled decades ago. Blacks today are objectively a privileged group in America, the beneficiaries of immense unearned wealth and prestige. But even with all their privileges, blacks are the sorriest racial group in America. Yet that is largely due to their own biological nature, not white ill-will. Blacks are arrested for more crimes because they commit more crimes. Blacks are poorer than whites because they work less, are less intelligent, and lack self-control.

But there is an underlying truth to the black charge that their unhappiness is largely due to deep, systemic American racism. America is essentially a white society. It is the kind of society that first arose in Europe and never arose in Africa. Europeans and Africans have dramatically different biological natures. (The best account of the biological differences between whites and blacks is Michael Levin’s Why Race Matters [8]. Levin does not just focus on intelligence, but also on a whole array of moral and psychological differences.)

Our differing natures give rise to different kinds of societies, societies that conform to our natures, that fit them as comfortably as properly-sized shoes. European societies are just not a good fit for Africans, just as African societies are not a good fit for Europeans. And when we force Africans to live in European societies, it is like forcing them to wear tight shoes. When we impose white norms on blacks, we resent them for not meeting our expectations, and they resent us for setting expectations they cannot meet.

One law for the white man and the black man is oppression. America was created by whites, so naturally it is run by the white man’s law.

Routine liberal oppression of blacks has been the fuel of gentrification for more than two decades. But the Obama administration will no longer tolerate it. In a country of more than 300 million people, it is inevitable that the enforcement of even the most minor laws will sometimes escalate into accidental or justifiable deaths. If the administration does not back the police in such cases when they are merely enforcing white community standards, then those standards will no longer be enforced. That is the death knell of gentrification and the false impression of workable multiculturalism that it fosters.

No joy in Mudville: Ferguson after dark [9]

No joy in Mudville: Ferguson after dark

Moving whites into the inner cities and non-whites into the suburbs has massively increased interactions between the races. Racial diversity inevitably leads to tensions, hatred, and violence. Aggressive policing has kept a lid on the violence. But Barack Obama and Eric Holder have removed the lid, which can only increase polarization between the races. The collapse of gentrification could even increase solidarity between whites as well. Besieged urban liberals may come to sympathize with suburban whites who are fighting the same battle against the same enemy. They may even come to understand why earlier generations fled to the suburbs. But now that the enemy is in the suburbs as well, the hipsters might as well stand and fight.

From a White Nationalist perspective, anything that increases non-white lawlessness, racial polarization, and white solidarity are good things. The worst possible outcome is a police state that keeps the lid on racial violence and polarization for a few more decades, allowing miscegenation, collapsing white birthrates, and surging non-white populations to drive our race on this continent beyond recall. Thus White Nationalists must resist the conservative tendency to side with the police and demand increasingly aggressive enforcement of white standards. Why try to preserve a society in which everything white is slated for destruction? Don’t we want to “burn this bitch down” too?

The races really are different. Thus to maintain white standards, we must oppress blacks. But I don’t wish to oppress blacks, and neither do most decent, fair-minded whites. But that leaves us only two options. First, we can surrender our standards and let blacks rule us, which is a non-starter, given the history of post-colonial Africa, post-white Detroit, and the widely televised chimp-out in Ferguson. Second, we can maintain our standards and go our separate ways by creating separate, racially homogeneous homelands for whites and blacks in North America. That is the ethnonationalist solution. It is the only solution that takes the well-being of both races into account.