Flash Mobs: Being Young, Black, and Male in America Today

By Alan Caruba

Those who follow my commentaries know that I rarely discuss race in America. I find it an unhappy topic at best and, from my readings in U.S. history, I feel safe in saying there was never a good time to be Black in America.

Slavery before, during and after the American Revolution was a stain on the nation and, though some were slave owners, the Founding Fathers knew it. To get the new Constitution ratified among the thirteen States, they had to trim their sails to the point where Article One, Section Two refers to “those bound to service” and, for the purpose of taxation of “free persons”, the slaves were counted as “three fifths of all other Persons.” Ugh.

It would, of course, take a Civil War to end slavery, though Lincoln’s preferred solution was to put the slaves on a ship back to Africa. That was not likely because by 1861 when the war began, there were 3,954,000 slaves, the majority of whom lived on plantations where, from Virginia to Texas, they often outnumbered whites by 13 to 1.

My awareness of Blacks was limited in my youth, growing up in an upscale New Jersey suburban community where they were quite scarce. You could count the number of Black students in my high school on one hand. When I was drafted in the Army most of my service in the early 1960s was on a base in the Deep South. It gave me a close up view of segregation. When I was discharged, I became a journalist on a weekly serving a small New Jersey city neighboring Newark. I was there when the city’s first Black mayor was elected.

It was the time of the Civil Rights movement, filled with marches and tumult. I met Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In 1967 Newark erupted in rioting, the result of poverty, and of sense of being powerless and disenfranchised. The Italians who had run the city gave way to Black politicians and, five decades later, they still are in charge, but the social problems remain.

If anyone would have told me that America would elect a Black President, I would have said that was impossible. I was wrong and so were the many Blacks who rejoiced in the election of Barack Obama, confident that he would take the lead, representing them, paying particular attention to their issues. Obama proved to be more concerned with Islam.

I got to thinking about that when several commentators, referring to how he would be remembered, said that Obama would no longer be remembered as the first Black President, but rather as the first Downgrade President. When he addressed the nation on August 8, his cool detachment seemed alarmingly at odds with the tumult on Wall Street and around the world that had been triggered by Standard & Poor’s decision.

How do Blacks perceive Obama, I wondered.

A friend, Milton, a retired Black corporate executive, attorney, business owner who edits and writes for BlackQuillandInk.com, a website for Black conservatives, responded to my question noting that Black support for Obama’s candidacy was about 98%, but has slipped since to around 86%.

It was his view that the Blacks “have been poisoned to dislike non-Blacks” and to see themselves “as victims.” I understand the victim part, but was surprised by his observation regarding the animosity, if only because White America has gone to fairly extraordinary lengths to redress the ills of the past.

As America’s most famous minority, Blacks are now outnumbered by Hispanics and are being by-passed by virtually all other minority in America in terms of achievement and upward mobility. The chains may have been removed, but, as the syndicated columnist. Walter E. Williams, noted in July 2010, “The pathology seen among a large segment of the Black population is not likely to change because it is not seen for what it is. It has little to do with slavery, poverty and racial discrimination.”

“Today’s black illegitimacy rate is about 70%,” said Williams. “When I was a youngster, during the 1940s, illegitimacy was around 15%...Today, only 35% of black children are raised in two-parent households.”

And it gets worse. In an August 2010 Washington Post article by columnist George Will, he wrote that “By the early 2000s, more than a third of all young black non-college men were under the supervision of the corrections system. More than 60% of black high school dropouts born since the mid-1960s go to prison. Mass incarceration blights the prospects of black women.”

In recent weeks, from the Wisconsin State Fair to Philadelphia, from Milwaukee to Los Angeles, reports of flash mobs of young Blacks attacking whites are stirring racial fears. The most dangerous factor in Black cities and neighborhoods are the hordes of young males, raised by one parent, dropouts from school, no skills, no jobs, no prospects, and lots of angry energy that is too often diverted into crime and violence.

Barack Obama’s economic policies have failed the nation, but they have been especially adverse on Blacks. Black unemployment and foreclosures, for example, have skyrocketed under Obama and remain disproportionately high as compared to other communities. In short, Obama has done nothing for Blacks in America either on the macro and micro level to improve their opportunities or attitudes.

He has nothing in common with them; a half-white Columbia University graduate and Harvard educated lawyer, former instructor at the University of Chicago, married to a Princeton and Harvard graduate, herself an attorney. They have two girls that go to private school and their inner circle of friends, Black and white, are dedicated Marxists.

The editor of BlackQuillandInk.com says. “The Black community refuses to admit how wrong they were in voting for Obama.”

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Betraying Our History

By Alan Caruba

June 6, 1944 is a significant day in American history; the day that the Normandy invasion began, leading to the defeat of Nazi Germany. I was seven years old at the time and blithely ignorant of it.

Though it occurred 67 years ago, I am sure it is regarded as “ancient history” to the current generation in our nation’s public schools. In point of fact, the American Civil War had ended just 72 years before I was born, easily the lifetime of a man born at the end of that war or even one who had served in it.

June 6, 1944 marks D-Day and is the subject of many books and films, but many wars were being fought on the same day in different years.

In 1813, U.S. forces suffered a defeat by the British at the Battle of Stoney Creek in what is now called the War of 1812.

In 1862, during the Civil War, the Battle of Memphis was fought and the Union captured the city.

In 1918, during World War One, it marks the day the Battle of Belleau Wood resulted in the worst single day’s casualties for the U.S. Marine Corps.

In 1942, during World War Two, the Battle of Midway took place, turning the tide of war against the Japanese as U.S. dive bombers sunk a cruiser and four carriers in the Pacific theatre.

Like every single day of the year, a litany of battles and wars fills the history books and on any single day—like June 6, 1944—the lives of people and nations are changed forever in the ancient battle between good and evil.

It is understandable that children should be ignorant of history until they have been taught its highlights in school, but what are they being taught these days?

Most history books represent a national curriculum because what they include is determined by statewide purchases in Texas, California, and Florida. They account for thirty percent of the K-12 market.

In 2000, at the beginning of the decade, a study by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation involving 1,000 teenagers nationwide found that:

• 22% could not name the country from which the United States declared its independence!

• 17% did not know there were 13 original colonies.

• 15% did not know the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776.

• 24% did not know who fought in the Civil War and 13% thought it was between the U.S. and Great Britain.

• 19% could not identify the three branches of the U.S. government.

• 31% did not know who wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

The questions asked in the survey represented a fourth grade-level test for 8-9 year-olds, but this level of ignorance must also be seen against a larger figure. By the time it was administered, the U.S. had spent more than $125 billion on education over the previous twenty-five years. During that time SAT scores had dropped 37 points.

Is it little wonder that, in May 2011, the Bill of Rights Institute issued a call for support of civic education based on the discouraging results from the most recent National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP)?

The NAEP had found that fewer high school students reported being taught about the Constitution than in previous years. Only 67% reported studying the Constitution in 2010, down from 72% in 2006. “This leaves nearly a third of American students with no exposure to the Constitution, and 40% of those students are a voting age.”

So, yes, we should pause and recall the courage of those men who stormed the beaches of Normandy and we should keep in mind that it is not “ancient history.” Though that generation of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines is passing from the scene, some still live. Some veterans of the Civil War were still alive when I was born.

A nation has to have a collective memory of the events that shaped it and a collective knowledge of its most important, essential documents. If the statistics about more recent generations passing through our schools are any indication, they do not.

That is an act of betrayal. I can’t prove that it is deliberate, but it surely does not bode well for a nation so poorly led by its elected representatives since June 6, 1944 that it constitutes an insult to the sacrifices and acts of valor that day represents.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Confederate Memorial Day

By Alan Caruba

It seems odd, even to me, that a northerner, born and bred, should join in the celebration of Confederate Memorial Day on May 7th. Odder still because I saw the worst of the South with its Jim Crow laws that so cruelly oppressed the Blacks that lived there, but I spent enough years in the South to love its people, its music, its culture, and its history.

It is said that the winner of wars gets to write the history of those conflicts and that is true, but there is ample history of the Confederacy to gain a much-needed understanding of why, on February 4, 1861, the representatives of seven States, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas, would meet to formally secede from the Union to form a new republic. On February 8, the convention announced the establishment of the Confederate States of America and declared itself its provisional Congress.

State's Rights Versus the Federal Government

The Confederacy was always a paradox. The central issue for the South was states’ rights, not slavery, though slavery was the stain that shaped elements of the U.S. Constitution, an issue that the Founders had concluded must await the judgment of a later time.

It was about the South’s interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. In his inaugural address, Jefferson Davis said, “The constitution formed by our fathers is the constitution of the (newly formed) Confederate States." The Civil War was a war against the federal government in 1861 and the years leading up to it that had led the South to conclude it could no longer remain in the Union.

The Confederacy lasted from 1861 to 1885 and its history constituted the first modern war in which the awful technologies of war left the South with an estimated 94,000 battle deaths, and 164,000 dead from disease. Fully 258,000 men fought under its flag. The North lost a total of 360,222 to death and disease. Along with the Reconstruction, the South paid a fearsome price for its integrity and beliefs.

It is a little known fact that there is a monument to the Confederate dead at Arlington National Cemetery. Its inscription says, “Not for fame or reward, Not for place or for rank, Not lured by ambition, Or goaded by necessity, But in Simple Obedience to Duty as they understood it, These men suffered all, Sacrificed all, Dared all—and died.”

Confederate Memorial Day will be celebrated throughout the South. On May 7th in North Carolina, the Sons of Confederate Veterans will gather at the Columbus County Courthouse and the Whiteville Memorial Cemetery.

Here’s where the past and present meet. The featured speaker will be H.K, Edgerton, a man who had spoken last year. “At times the audience was laughing, uproariously, and at others weeping. His presentation is knowledgeable, perceptive, sensitive, politically incorrect, historically correct, humor, and serious—all rolled into a professional presentation of Confederate history that will leave you wanting more.” Edgerton is a Black American of southern heritage, a former president of the NAACP’s Ashville, North Carolina branch.

He has said of his ancestors, they “went to war with their masters”, serving as cooks or farriers, even taking up arms. “There was a love that existed between black and white in the South that transcended the bonds of slavery. We were family.”

That’s something those raised in the North and other regions are not taught and do not understand. It would take, however, another hundred years for the wrongs of slavery to be fully set right in the era of the civil rights movement. It takes more than a Constitutional Amendment to change the human heart.

The sharp political divide that present-day America is experiencing is every bit related to the issue of state’s rights as any that preceded it.

The fear that the federal government has grown too large and is too intrusive in the affairs of the States and of all Americans is a legitimate one. The Union is being severely tested and it is an irony of history that the source of much of that fear and anger is the nation’s first Black President.

It is common parlance these days that “In 2008 we voted for Obama to prove we were not racists. In 2012 we must vote for someone else to prove we are not idiots.”

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Civil War Began 150 Years Ago - April 12, 1861

By Alan Caruba

The American Civil War began one hundred and fifty years ago on April 12, 1861.

Historians will tell you that the South never had a chance of winning it. Theirs was an agrarian society, heavily dependent on millions of slaves. How many millions? An 1860 census found that slaves constituted 13% of the population, numbering 3,950,528, most of whom were in the South.

Even the Founding Fathers knew that slavery was an issue that would one day create a terrible problem, but their priority was to come up with a Constitution that would rectify the problems that the Articles of Confederation posed.

Perhaps at no other time in the nation’s history did it have such an astonishing collection of brilliance gathered in one place. They needed the Southern States to secure ratification so the problem of slavery was pushed off to the future.

Depending on which side of the Mason-Dixon Line you’re on, you will still get a dispute over why the Civil War was fought. The South says it was about state’s rights and, indeed, had expectations that they could secede lawfully. The North said it was about the issue of slavery and most agree it was.

Lincoln’s first inaugural speech on March 4, 1861 began with an assertion rarely noted.

“I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”

Lincoln ended, saying, “I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

On April 12, 1861, Confederate Brig. General, P.G.T. Beauregard, an expert artilleryman, graduate of West Point, laid siege to Fort Sumpter in the harbor of Charleston, S.C., where federal troops had been withdrawn in anticipation of war.

The War of Independence that had concluded after eight years in 1783 had cost about 25,000 lives. The Revolution was still relatively fresh in the minds of Americans in that era. Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams had both died on July 4, 1826,

The Constitution went into force in 1788. The Civil War began 73 years later. It is regarded as the first “modern” war for its use of locomotives, the telegraph, and the development of new weapons.

It was surely the first modern war in terms of its casualties. Between 1861 and 1865, they totaled 618,222. The slaughter in some battles was so vast one could walk across a field of battle on the bodies of the dead. The Civil War battle in The Wilderness killed 17,666, Spotsylvania killed 10,920, and Petersburg cost 16,569. Total battle deaths for the Union, including disease, numbered 360,222. For the South, it was 258,000.

By contrast, U.S. casualties in World War Two, 1941 to1945, numbered 407,316. The toll of the Iraq conflict, 2003-2011, was 4,430. Afghanistan has cost 4,430 lives.

It is not until one grapples with such numbers can one understand the price paid to keep the Union intact. Three Presidents played key roles. James Buchanan did little to avert the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln pursued it for the entirety of his two terms, the latter cut short by assassination. Andrew Johnson allowed Reconstruction to fall into corruption and resentment. It matters who is President.

It took another century into the 1960s for blacks in America to finally secure their civil rights. In that decade, Americans endured riots in their cities and the loss of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. along with a number of generally forgotten martyrs.

Perhaps the greatest irony of the Civil War was the belief on both sides that it would be over quickly. All people in all times want wars to be short, but they rarely are. Their aftermath can last a very long time. A Cold War followed the end of World War Two and lasted for nearly a half century.

Within and beyond nation’s borders, wars have raged somewhere since what we call civilization began around 5,000 years ago. They have various causes for good or ill. They are, however, the way nations have settled their differences.

Anti-war protesters and those who disrespect our Armed Forces will never understand this, but they owe a debt called liberty to those who do.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Official Apologies as Empty Gestures

By Alan Caruba

The front page of the Star-Ledger, New Jersey’s largest circulation daily, had a story on January 8, “Jewish Cemetery Vandalized.” In its New Jersey news section inside the paper, among the “Action in Trenton” roundup, was a short item, “Apology for slavery sails through legislature.”

I wonder if there will be an apology for the damage done to the graves of dead Jews? Not likely. Perhaps it was just some teenage vandals or perhaps it was some kind of Islamofascist message being sent?

Germany has made significant efforts to apologize for the Holocaust, but anyone who lives there will tell you that considerable anti-Semitism exists among the generations born well after that event. In many Middle East nations, the Holocaust—the deliberate murder of some six million Jews—continues to be denied.

In the United Nations, there’s a resolution condemning acts of hatred against religions, but the only one specifically named is Islam. Condemning Islam as the source of the atrocities that have been occurring in recent decades is apparently a bad thing.

These thoughts, however, are not about anti-Semitism. They are about the efficacy of apologies. This is particularly true of apologies for events in which the current residents of New Jersey or any other State did not participate. In short, why bother? What good does it do?

Slavery had been part of America’s history almost from the beginning. It was widespread throughout the world and was (and is) a mark of man’s inhumanity to man. The Founding Fathers found the issue of slavery so intractable they concluded that it should be ignored while fashioning the world’s oldest living Constitution.

A century later the northern and southern states fought a war in which slavery was the moral cause, but other issues such as state’s rights and tensions over economic issues were the driving forces. In 1800, there were 12,422 slaves in New Jersey. The 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments clarified issues of citizenship and rights of former slaves after the Civil War. This was then followed by a hundred years of segregation and the denial of those rights until, in the 1960s, these wrongs were laid to rest.

All of which is to say that history often is a very long and frequently painful journey to achieve a moral and legal resolution to societal wrongs. Today, a mulatto with an Islamic name is running for President. The U.S. Secretary of State is Black. Her predecessor was Black. There’s a national holiday in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who led the struggle for racial equality. Some people would call that progress.

Some people, however, have to demand apologies. Virginia, North Carolina, Alabama, and Maryland have issued apologies. There are similar bills pending in Massachusetts, New York, and Arkansas.

I cited the desecration of the Jewish cemetery to remind us that hate never really goes away. There will always be people who hate Jews. There will always be people who hate Blacks. Official apologies for past wrong will not change this. They are vacant gestures and, in my opinion, an affront to those who did not participate in, nor condone, past wrongs.