Black Bellyaching

James Baldwin, who made a career out of being a black bellyacher. (Image source: Wikimedia Commons)

2,965 words

Bellyaching is an argumentation tactic featuring overblown complaining, typically combining elements of whimpering with indignation. It’s rather like pouting, but often sullener than that. It’s done for a reason, of course. The usual object is to tug at the listener’s heartstrings. With enough repetition, perhaps it will even induce a guilt complex.

Note that bellyaching is not simple passive-aggressiveness, such as a moody girlfriend who says that she’s “Fine!” but clearly means nothing of the sort. Neither is this the same as the dignified airing of grievances. The Declaration of Independence is a classic example of that. On the other hand, a punk kid who complains to Amnesty International about being grounded needs to shut his yap.

This tactic is something common to all the constituencies comprising cultural Marxism’s ideological seven-layer burrito. Among them, blacks are some of the most exceptional practitioners. Time and again, they’ve demonstrated maestro-level talent at bellyaching. Blacks can even out-complain radical feminists; no mean feat indeed.

The origins of Afro-dyspepsia

This goes all the way back to the days of antebellum Dixie. Slaves are commonly work-avoidant, which is understandable given that there’s nothing in it for them. Accordingly, they came up with ways to get what they want despite their station in life. An exaggerated complaint or display of misery to the overseer or the master might be able to get them the day off, or even obtain easier working conditions.

If bellyaching includes an outlandish verbal barrage, this can baffle the target. There’s a cinematographic example in the remarkably politically incorrect film Blazing Saddles. The newly-arriving black Sheriff flips the script on an angry crowd by holding himself hostage. Here he pretends to be a victim, the woe is greatly overdone, and he’s obviously playacting, but it works. Although it’s not something that would be believable in real life — it is a comedy film, after all — it’s recognizable enough to be funny.

An early literary example is found in The Ebony Idol. Note that the author is a Southern belle who was surely familiar with malingering blacks. The story’s Reverend character is a pathologically altruistic Yankee who has no experience with them. When caught misbehaving, the runaway slave couch-surfing at the Reverend’s place pretends to have a literal bellyache. The scene turns out to be a real gas — again, literally.

“Answer me, Caesar. Why did you frighten my child?”

“Lor’ Gor ‘Mighty, Massa Cary, hope you don’t tink dis nigger go for to frighten dat blessed cherubim? I’se berry much ‘flicted wid de win’ colic; my blessed mudder had it her own sef, an’ when she die, dis was all de poor woman lef’ me. Oh, Lor’! I’se gwoin into it agin for sartin!” and embracing the portion of his corporeal system which had been so fatally endowed by maternal affection, Caesar hugged, and yelled, and rolled up his eyes, until the clergyman bent over him with undisguised alarm. “Oh, Gor!” cried Caesar, as the temporary pangs subsided, and he withdrew one arm to fan himself with his hand, “just to tink of agonizing like dat-ar’, and den be ‘cused of going fur to frighten dat angel chile!”

It was impossible for the unsophisticated witness of this impromptu attack to decide satisfactorily whether the agonizing was real or fictitious, but as he was himself a dyspeptic and no small victim to flatulency, he was rather inclined to the opinion that Caesar had lavished an extra amount of groans upon a small capital of mind.

Whenever you encounter black bellyaching, remember that this is a cultural legacy of cringing slaves who were trying to dodge work or avoid punishment.

Weaponized bellyaching

More recently, demagogues and “community organizers” have found bellyaching useful as well. During the great African tantrum known as the civil rights movement, they moaned endlessly about their constant oppression. Commendably, there were those such as Stokely Carmichael who could state their cases without interminable grousing. On the other hand, James Baldwin — a skintellectual gifted with the Innsmouth Look — couldn’t open his froggy yap without croaking out a complaint. For example, a selection from his classic The Fire Next Time:

My friends were now “downtown”, busy, as they put it, “fighting the man”. They began to care less about the way they looked, the way they dressed, the things they did; presently, one found them in twos and threes and fours, in a hallway, sharing a jug of wine or a bottle of whiskey, talking, cursing, fighting, sometimes weeping: lost, and unable to say what it was that oppressed them, except that they knew it was “the man” — the white man. And there seemed to be no way whatever to remove this cloud that stood between them and the sun, between them and love and life and power, between them and whatever it was that they wanted. One did not have to be very bright to realize how little one could do to change one’s situation; one did not have to be abnormally sensitive to be worn down to a cutting edge by the incessant and gratuitous humiliation and danger one encountered every working day, all day long.

You can buy Greg Johnson’s It’s Okay to Be White here.

Cry me a river, bub. James Baldwin’s Afro-dyspepsia was a lot fresher back in 1963, but this sort of thing is pretty stale by now. Even so, The Fire Next Time was a literary influence on Between the World and Me, an odyssey of victimization porn from 2015 by Ta-Nehisi Coates. After half a century of society’s acquiescence to black demands and wrongheaded tolerance for freeloading, do we get any thanks? Hardly; blacks are being oppressed just as badly — or worse, if anything — according to the way they tell it. The rhetoric hasn’t become any less lurid and inflammatory, certainly. It’s funny how that works.

Note that in the quotation above, James Baldwin was describing his early adolescence during the Harlem Renaissance. It was a remarkably charmed era compared to what happened there following black “liberation.” The ‘hood that he grew up in was experiencing an era characterized by cultural sparkle, people dressed classy back then, and — best of all — the streets were safe. Then, after the downtrodden blacks got their much-awaited freeeedumb from “The Man,” Harlem became the Big Apple’s rotten core, a crime-ridden no-go zone infested with heroin and despair. Still, we get blamed for everything. What the hell do they want?

By the mid-1960s, when de jure segregation had given up its last gasp, something strange happened. The bellyaching intensified, even though they had gotten what they said they wanted. The tactic was working. After equality under law was granted, then five minutes later came the demands for equality of results — what they’re calling “equity” lately. The minoritist moaning yet continued, even after preferential treatment programs such as Affirmative Action began. At that point, it was rather implausible to say that blacks were getting the fuzzy end of the lollipop, since politicians were catering to them and handing out free goodies like confetti.

Worse, the endless griping was taking on a more truculent character. What began as an overblown tactic to tug on Whitey’s heartstrings had mutated. The guff and bluster now had a second target audience. Among their own people, it became agitprop. Meanwhile, the Big Megaphone signal-boosted their complaining. At around this time, there was a dramatic upsurge in race riots. Fortunately, that settled down after the 1960s, and was seldom seen since until recent times. Crime sharply rose, too, and didn’t reach its peak until the early 1990s.

Bellyaching is hardly over. It’s still a tactic for minoritists and third worldists to get what they want. They make overblown complaints while signaling feigned helplessness. Afro-dyspepsia yet remains a big-ticket item in the literary-industrial complex, since it helps reinforce The System’s ethnic pecking order. Skintellectuals will kvetch endlessly about Whitey’s cruelty and oppression, and these intrepid rebels get rewarded with lucrative book royalties and speaking fees.

Two recent remarkable cases

Instances of minority bellyaching are so frequent that they’re as unquantifiable as the number of grains of sand in Egypt. I’ll limit myself to a couple of examples that came up recently here.

One of these was Reggie Jackson. Since he’s one of the most celebrated baseball players of all time, and allegedly has an IQ of 160, one would expect that he’s on top of the world. Quite strangely, then, his talk on June 20 told another story entirely. A few minutes into the discussion, he let loose with memories of being barred from Birmingham’s restaurants and hotels. Then he mentioned the bad old Bull Connor. (Come on, at least he knew how to cool down a crowd — sounds like a man of peace to me!) Right after that, Reggie brought up the infamous church bombing that killed four black girls, for which there was no indictment. Apparently not everyone has heard that the perp was a fed. That gruesome business was our tax dollars at work, not the Klan.

Reggie Jackson seemed quite irritated about his memories of Birmingham, almost as if it happened yesterday. He was indeed there in 1967, though. These were the ancient times when Lyndon Johnson was in office, Vietnam was our current spit-in-your-eye war, and the Beatles were still going strong. Looking back on it over five decades later, he didn’t have any words of appreciation for the liberalized attitudes about race which were arising then, or of course the preferential treatment his people have received since then. Blacks are still not happy, and thus this badly-considered magnanimity by white society at the time turned out to be more or less a waste, at the very best.

Moreover, if not for the desegregation that had taken place by that point, he would’ve been confined to an athletic ghetto rather than becoming a Major League ball player. If nothing had changed since the 1940s, he would’ve had to settle for the Negro League. Thanks to white society’s sportsball addiction, Reggie Jackson got money and fame far beyond the wildest dreams of working stiffs, all from playing a game that’s mostly for children. His life wasn’t exactly a living Hell, now was it? Looking at it that way, the one-sided grousing long after the fact seems quite curious. It rather makes me wonder. Did becoming a famous sportsball star make him happier than if he’d been a 160-IQ bus driver? If not, then his career was a waste.

Lastly, I find it difficult to understand why someone would wish to go places where he’s not welcome. He didn’t show any awareness of why whites didn’t want blacks in their public spaces. For those who wonder, the present condition of integrated Birmingham might give some clues.

Another recent example of Afro-dyspepsia, brief like an acid reflux bubble, gurgled out of the throat of the latest “British” foreign secretary. David Lammy was granted a top position — as they say, “Bob’s yer uncle” — in the government of a country where he doesn’t even belong. He was merely one of the latest passive beneficiaries of the current bipartisan virtue-signaling mania, in which an important qualification for high office in Britain is not being British. His acceptance speech began thusly: “It is the honor of my life to stand before you as Foreign Secretary, a descendant of enslaved people.”

Compounding the nonsense, he just had to open with that petulant line. Uh, why? Whatever he meant by harping on race, this also served as an in-your-face reminder to the British public that the job was handed to him because he’s black. Thanks to contemporary politically-correct racial fixations, he effectively jumped the queue past countless Britons who are more gifted in the gray matter department. Of course, being a diversity hire is no great accomplishment, especially for a highly prestigious job. (In fact, the less someone deserves a prominent position, the less reason there is to brag about it!) Therefore, rather than waving the race card, it would’ve made more sense for him to keep his gob shut. Unfortunately, I doubt there’ll be a movie called The Silence of the Lammy anytime soon.

Moreover, since slaves had a socioeconomic status somewhere between vagrants and criminals, where’s the glory in pointing out this heritage? Was David Lammy engaging in a very strange form of humble-bragging? Britain’s Slavery Abolition Act liberated his distant ancestors in 1833, but in the first sentence of his speech, he felt the need to rub it in. Again, why? Is it to remind the public that he’s black? Well, that’s pretty obvious, except to the visually impaired. More likely it was an attempt to brandish the guilt stick, and meanwhile show the public that he’s still nursing a 191-year-old grudge.

As a side note, Reggie Jackson also pointedly dated outside of his race, and he seems hardly shy about his miscegenation habit. It’s quite curious that someone so enthusiastic about being black wouldn’t stick to his own kind. What’s his problem? David Lammy is a miscegenator, too, but surely that’s because he couldn’t find any black women despite years of diligent effort, leaving him no other choice, right?

Bellyaching rings hollow

It’s true that multiracialism sucks for everyone, but the discourse is entirely one-sided. As a writer in the November 1990 edition of Instauration put it, reflecting on the nice white neighborhood of his youth that became a run-down barrio:

Despite their bleating about brotherhood and constitutional rights, Jews knew all along where America would end up once the Majority had been betrayed to the dark hordes. It’s the same shell game they have played many times before in their history. We hear endless whining and gnashing of teeth; we witness eternal hand-wringing and breast-beating about the sufferings of nonwhites. Never a whisper about the inestimable physical and mental suffering we have endured at their hands when they violated our living space.

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While the urban orcs intrude on our territory, supposedly we’re the bad guys. Precious, isn’t it?

The crocodile tears are play-acting to keep us on the defensive and angle for more free goodies. Stylistically, bellyaching comes across rather like the yelping of a frightened puppy, but the overt meaning amounts to a constant refrain of “How could you be so cruel?” What it has in common with name-calling and historical gaslighting is that it works only because we actually care about what they say — for now.

Once again, dignified complaining is entirely different from bellyaching. The website Culture Critique has some good points about legitimate and illegitimate anger:

There is a difference between being angry at real injustice and being a hothead narcissist with a fragile ego. While Americans or citizens of this or that Western European country are angry at the harm their government is doing to their land, countrymen, themselves and their families; the anger of woke special interest groups is based on them not getting what they want, which in the end is to rule over and live parasitically off the majority.

Given that these special interest groups base their demands on their identity and not their achievement, their anger is illegitimate, as they are demanding something they have not earned from a majority that has built the society they live in over generations and from which they benefit as free riders. This is what is meant by illegitimate anger: it is the externalised shame of low-performing, predatory, and self-loathing outgroups which expresses itself as hatred and ultimately violence.

Another telltale sign of gaslighting is unrelenting negativity, as in James Baldwin’s pout-a-thons. In cases of dignified complaint, one is likely to find occasional acknowledgement of positive facets of whatever is being criticized. Even if not that, then at least the complaints are plausibly rational and bear a recognizable semblance to reality.

James Baldwin wasn’t only published by black presses, praised only by black critics, and read only by black readers, now was he? If not for a lot of others who — unwisely, in my opinion — got his books into print, made him famous, and funded his royalty checks by buying his drivel, where would it have left him? That’s right: He would’ve been just a malcontented minority trying to find people to pay attention to him crying in his beer. He did get this audience, white ethnomasochists who ate up his bellyaching like candy, thanks to the literary-industrial complex. This allowed the frog-faced fruitcake with a chip on his shoulder to become a noted skintellectual typist, rather than languishing in obscurity as a ghetto graphomaniac.

Did James Baldwin thank his white liberal audience and his (((enablers))), acknowledging them for being sympathetic and instrumental to his career? Somehow I missed that. He didn’t get where he was entirely through his own efforts; it helped tremendously that his writings were useful toward advancing his promoters’ sociopolitical priorities. Since he attained celebrity status with a lot of outside help, I’m not buying that he was as downtrodden as he pretended to be.

In conclusion

What are we to make of blacks wallowing in self-pity as if they were groaning slaves, while throwing guilt barbs to try to manipulate us? It’s so ridiculous that I’m embarrassed for them. Really, they should enroll in a distance learning course at STFU.

One would expect bellyaching to be profoundly disempowering, yet the tactic is surprisingly effective. First, finger-pointing allows blacks to deflect blame and avoid the painful thought that they might be responsible for at least some of their own woes. Ultimately it isn’t constructive; they’d be doing a lot better if they’d work to get drug abuse under control, take education more seriously, and tone it down with the rebellion for its own sake. Second, it gets them attention and ultimately more freebies. If nobody cared, it wouldn’t work. Now that’s something to consider!