It’s Not All About You

UFC champ Sean Strickland, whose life story shows how whites can turn away from race realism

1,697 words

Years ago, back when he was still relevant, documentary filmmaker Michael Moore had this to say about our favorite race of people:

White people scare the crap out of me . . . I have never been attacked by a black person, never been evicted by a black person, never had my security deposit ripped off by a black landlord, never had a black landlord . . . never been pulled over by a black cop, never been sold a lemon by a black car salesman, never seen a black car salesman, never had a black person deny me a bank loan, never had a black person bury my movie, and I’ve never heard a black person say, “We’re going to eliminate ten thousand jobs here — have a nice day!”

This quote appeared in his totally-not-racist 2001 book entitled Stupid White Men . . . and Other Excuses for the State of the Nation! I’ve never read the book; I only know the quote. But I was reminded of it recently when newly crowned Ultimate Fighting Championship middleweight champion Sean Strickland said something eerily similar. Strickland has spoken on several occasions about his troubled childhood, describing the physical abuse his father had inflicted on him and his mother as well as his tutelage under his neo-Nazi grandfather. The latter relationship prompted him to draw a swastika on his shoulder with a permanent marker when he was in the seventh grade. He wanted to be like Derek Vinyard in American History X.

But Strickland turned a corner when he discovered mixed martial arts:

I started training, and like, the moment I started training, I was like, fuck, man . . . I don’t hate anybody . . . Everyone’s cool. A lot of people who helped me out in my life, they weren’t white. Usually, like white people in my life were kinda fuckin’ dicks. Like a lot of like ethnic people were the ones that kinda held their hands out. I’m a little fuckin’ Neo-Nazi Hitler Youth, and yet the people helping me out were not even fuckin’ white.

This is not to equate Sean Strickland with that oversized toad Michael Moore. Unlike Moore, Strickland has many admirable qualities. On the strength of his plethora of interviews, he is probably the most entertaining athlete alive today. Through a mix of self-deprecation, profane bombast, and caveman charm, he has found that happy hunting ground between based and popular. And he does it without playing the heel like Colby Covington. Most importantly, he wins far more often than he loses. His dominant upset victory over Israel Adesanya — yes, that Israel Adesanya — was nothing short of glorious.

Since such disparate personalities as Moore and Strickland both resort to the same anecdotal argument to fend off that race-realist boogieman, however, there has to be something to it. I cannot prove it, of course, but I would imagine many whites have a similar perspective. “How can I be racist when all the black people I know are so nice to me?” “How can I be racist when all the people who were mean to me growing up were white?” In my own life, several white people have opened up to me in this manner. Further, I engaged in something like it myself in my youth, back when I really wanted to make multiracialism in America work. So I can understand its power.

This is a natural conclusion to draw — and seemingly a very common one — but it is also tragically shortsighted. If you’re a nice person, then of course most people of any race are going to be nice or neutral to you in return. That’s just the way people are. Furthermore, familiarity breeds contempt. If your family members happen not to be very nice, then you’re likely in for some unpleasant experiences. This is just going by the odds. So a white person with a rough upbringing should not be terribly surprised when he has positive experiences with non-whites he doesn’t know very well, while harboring bad memories of whites he does know very well.

Zooming out, however, reveals the inadequacy of such a perspective. First, as we all know, there is no “I” in “data.” Observations based on an N of 1 need to be taken with a grain of salt. When we look at real data, we can see why. Blacks, who make up around 12 to 13%of the population, commit a highly disproportionate amount of violent crime. In America, they murder each other by the thousands every year (over 2,500 in 2019 alone). Also in that year, they made up over 51%  of those arrested for murder or negligent homicide. In 2018 blacks committed over 90% of the violent crime between blacks and whites (excluding murder), and just over 50% of interracial crime in general.

Furthermore, whites are disproportionately victims of interracial violent crime, with around 913,000 estimated for 2018 (or just over 68%). Here is a handy bar chart to illustrate:

Thus, using one’s own experiences to judge a racial group in toto isn’t very meaningful. It would be like a person growing up among a family of competitive basketball players and assuming that the average man is six feet, four inches tall.

We must also consider whether a particular racial attitude is accurate or warranted. Since what’s at stake here is potentially being the victim of a violent crime, the accuracy of a racial assessment trumps whether it can or cannot be considered antagonistic — unless one deems that anti-white violent crime is a good thing.

A less-obvious point to consider is the will to power. When normal individuals of any race lack the will to power, it’s very easy for them to get along. Although this describes most of humanity, it does not encompass humanity’s most important subset: those who do have the will to power. These are the people who dictate policy and determine history. And most blacks with the will to power in America hate white people. They don’t even bother to hide it.

Of course, we have classic racist statements from black demagogues such as Al Sharpton:

White folks was in the caves while we (blacks) was building empires. . . . We built pyramids before Donald Trump ever knew what architecture was. . . . We taught philosophy and astrology and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek homos ever got around to it.

You can buy Spencer J. Quinn’s young adult novel The No College Club here.

This didn’t stop President Barack Obama from inviting Sharpton to the White House dozens of times and palling around with him for photographs.

Then there’s black author Ta-Nehisi Coates: “‘White America’ is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies.”

Critical Race Theory pioneer Derrick Bell:

It is hopeless for the Negro to expect complete emancipation from the menial social and economic position into which the white man has forced him merely by trusting in the moral sense of the white race. . . . However large the number of individual white men who do and who will identify themselves completely with the Negro cause, the white race in America will not admit the Negro to equal rights if it is not forced to do so.

Nikole Hannah-Jones, founder of the 1619 Project:

I find it hard to believe that any member of the white race can have the audacity and hypocrisy to call any other culture savage. The white race is the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager, and thief of the modern world. Europeans have colonized and destroyed the indigenous populations on every continent of this planet. They have committed genocide against cultures that have never offended them in their greed and insatiable desire to control and dominate every non-white culture.

Rutgers professor Brittney Cooper:

I think that white people are committed to being villains in the aggregate. . . .You know, their thinking is so murky and spiritually bankrupt about power that they . . . they fear this really existentially letting go of power because they cannot imagine another way to be. . . . The thing I want to say to you is we got to take these motherfuckers out.

We’re only scratching the tip of the iceberg here. There’s lots more where these come from.

But what do they all have in common aside from their obvious hatred of whites? They are fundamentally dishonest, and they focus on power. The authors of these statements are less concerned with the welfare of blacks but with who wields power over them. They imply that whites wielding power over blacks is inherently bad, and that blacks wielding power over blacks in inherently good (as would be blacks wielding power over whites). But this flies in the face of history and current events. When blacks lorded over other blacks in Haiti and in sub-Saharan nations, life in all those places became appallingly bad for black people — so bad most of them prefer to leave those places for Europe, the United States, Canada, or Australia, where they can be ruled by whites. Further, when blacks gain municipal power in places such as America, things get worse for ordinary blacks there, too — so much so that they want to follow the white majority to the suburbs and beyond. Blacks have always practiced all sorts of barbarism and warfare against each other. They were slaveowners as well, as many are today. And, of course, when blacks rule whites, as they currently do in Zimbabwe and South Africa, the result is equally disastrous.

This is the bloody truth. When blacks lead other blacks, things are horrible for blacks. When whites lead blacks, however, things are less horrible for them — maybe even quite good on the whole. But admitting this truth would only hamper the black elite’s quest for power, hence they do away with it.

This is something that the Michael Moores and Sean Stricklands of the world — and all whites, for that matter — should consider. It’s not all about you. Yes, your black friends may be real nice to you. Yes, they never beat your mom or sold you that 2004 Dodge Charger with a cracked engine block. But nine out of ten of them vote Democrat — as they should. This means that nine out of ten of them support people who hate you and have the power to ensure that you remain disproportionate victims of violent crime.

We should think about that before we determine who is scary and who is cool.

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