After such knowledge&#8230;
<p>I have read very little in the last few decades that is as shocking to me as this: <a href="http://www.amren.com/ar/2009/07/index.html">Essay by a teacher in a black high school</a>.</p>
<p>My first reaction was that I wanted to believe it was a bigot&#8217;s fabrication.  I&#8217;d still like to believe that, but it was <a href="http://www.black-and-right.com/2013/07/01/before-its-deleted-of-the-day/">reposted</a> by a black man who claims it is representative of “dirty laundry”: bad stuff [known among blacks] about black folk never to be said around whites. </p>
<p>My second reaction, afterwards, was: for those of us who insist that people ought to be judged by the content of their characters rather than the color of their skins, what emotionally compelling argument do we have against anti-black racism that reading this doesn&#8217;t blow to smithereens?</p>
<p>This is a question with more point now than it would have had thirty or fifty years ago, because of one thing this account makes harrowingly clear. White people didn&#8217;t impose the depraved, thuggish underculture it describes on black people; <em>they did it to themselves</em>, using a debased form of the rhetoric of white &#8220;anti-racists&#8221; and multiculturalists as rationalization.</p>
<p>Of course, all the rational arguments against racism are still sound; I&#8217;ve written about them pretty extensively on this blog.  The mass is not the individual, etcetera, etcetera. Nothing about the ugly, barbaric rampaging of these high-schoolers predicts the behavior of the blacks of the same age or older I know from martial-arts schools, SF conventions, and other places where the lives of black individuals intersect with mine.</p>
<p>But if this is really where they came from &#8211; if this is what they&#8217;re right-end-of-the-bell-curve exceptions to, and that reality becomes widely known or believed &#8211; rational argument won&#8217;t be enough.  How can we keep the bigots from winning?</p>
<p>UPDATE: I&#8217;ve replaced the link I got from the blog &#8220;Maggie&#8217;s Farm&#8221; with a link to what seems to be the original. The Maggie&#8217;s-Farm link is now behind the word &#8220;reposted&#8221;.</p>
