Dennis Prager wonders where the African-Americans went:
I was recently shown a videotape of people reacting to radio talk shows. Organized by a firm that specializes in analyzing radio talk shows, the members of the listening panel were carefully chosen to represent all major listening groups within American society. But I quickly noticed something odd – I saw no blacks among the selected listeners. I asked why. And the response was stunning.
Blacks had always been included, I was told, but no more. Not because the firm was not interested in black listeners – on the contrary, blacks are an important part of the radio audience. They were not invited to give their opinion about various radio shows because in its previous experience, the company had discovered that almost no whites would publicly differ with the opinions of the blacks on the panel. Therefore, once a black listener spoke, whites stopped saying what they really thought, if what they thought differed from what a black had said….
So I posed this question to my radio audience, and, sure enough, whites from around the country called in to say that they are afraid to differ with blacks lest they be labeled racist.
I don’t think this is a conservative or liberal thing any longer, I think it’s become a cultural problem. In fact, I saw the phenomenon at work during a soccer tournament not too long ago. When the black girlfriend of one of my black teammates ludicrously began shouting that our team had been disqualified due to the racism of the tournament directors and the other teams, a few people went so far as to shake their heads but no one dared to say otherwise in front of her.
And this was despite the fact that her cluelessness was apparent to everyone. The problem wasn’t that we had three times more Africans than all the other teams combined, it was that my blond Dutch friend rightly admitted that he wasn’t properly eligible when asked about it by another team’s captain. (We weren’t trying to bring in ringers, we simply didn’t have enough players to field a team without drafting a few friends.) The tournament director and I worked out a compromise where we would compete and play all our games, but voluntarily give up our place in the championship game should we qualify for it. It was a good compromise; the other teams were satisfied while we went undefeated and finished by beating the eventual tournament winner in a very hard-fought game.
This was, of course, unacceptable racism of the highest order to the black girl. She was convinced that no one wanted to see a team with six blacks win the trophy and that was all that she needed to know. At the time, I found it difficult to understand how anyone could be that blitheringly stupid in the face of conclusive evidence, but in light of Prager’s column today, it is pretty obvious. That girl, like so many blacks in America, had been intellectually stunted by an absence of criticism. (Needless to say, I provided her with an abundance of that with which she had hitherto been unacquainted.)
As much as you might mislike hearing others tell you that you are wrong, you should keep in mind that it is actually a vital service they are providing you. If one never hears criticism, or if one refuses to listen to it, one will never develop the ability to refine one’s thinking. Over time, this means one’s thinking will be left to decay in the juvenile morass of one’s early intellectual development. Think on that and shudder!
Sheer cognitive incapacity is largely hereditary, but willful stupidity and reliable buffoonery requires development. The less that an individual, or taken in the collective, a group, allows itself to be criticized, the more surely it guarantees its descent into buffonery and cognitive dysfunctionality. This is precisely why so many black leaders remain popular and powerful despite repeatedly demonstrating that they are intellectual clowns.
When our elegant, but surprisingly dirty Ghanaian midfielder commits a violent foul at the edge of the penalty area, I don’t refrain from chewing him out because he’s – horrors, black! – I tell him not to be such a freaking moron and not to do it again, at the very least not there. Modern white society, on the other hand, would look the other way and pretend not to see it, say nothing, then quietly sit him on the bench where he can’t do any harm at the first opportunity. But how, I wonder, does that do anyone, black or white, any good whatsoever?