It's interesting here to point out that one of the things the Woke cannot stand is real cultural criticism from within their pet dimensions. Specifically, how they absolutely need racial unanimity from black Americans despite the fact that black Americans have been pushing against that since the 80s when the majority of black college graduates no longer came from HBCUs. The extent to which millions of black American *desired* mainstream inclusion *without* multicultural authenticity is something they must vilify. This is exactly why Coleman Hughes gets metaphorically shot in the head. The calls for internal racial unity and authenticity of black people is that deeply rooted, and wokeness is the latest expression. If these particular woke black Americans cannot energize the cultural and political ties they assume all blacks must for our own very survival, then all of their claims fall short.
Quick reaction is that Woke ideology also misidentifies the seats of power - so that in the woke model the poor white family holds power over the tenured black University prof. And of course, a central tenet of wokeism is that the woke adherents always cling to their self-identification as outsiders fighting the establishment - even though wokeism is the current religion OF the establishment. It is a spectacle of the ridiculous.
Curious how economists do not advocate for mandatory accounting in the schools. Since double-entry accounting was invented in Italy 700 years ago and spread throughout the Western world shouldn't it be considered part of culture. It is older than Shakespeare.
From a black liberal, thanks for using the adjective “some” when discussing progressives, for we come in subgroups as well. There is a vanguard of us out here that is mindful that it is a troubled black society that keeps bunches of us from taking the last steps into the Promised Land. A racist system is one of the variables but no longer the main encumbrance that drags us down.
The “some” of us would not have been as pleasant as you, for we think that our culture has become somewhat pathological, when looking at a fragile black family that raises 68 percent of its children in fatherless homes. This is the causal factor for impoverishment, and crime stats that see us as committing 49 percent of all robberies and over half of the murders in the US each year, with 89 percent of the slaughtered being our own people.
This is a self-genocide, though slung boldly and bloodily in our faces, that we refuse to see or give awareness. These crime stats come from the FBI’s crime database and are so massive that we cannot fault it on subcultures among us, for all of us in the race have a hand in it, if only denial and inaction. This is a nasty reality that we must admit before we can apply a fix.
One theory on the failure of Neanderthals is that their inability to form social groups beyond the band level left them without the ability to compete with homo sapiens whose sociality has led us to grouping as high as the nation state. Will we blacks devolve by failing to keep the base unit of society, the family, healthy and intact?
Thanks also for giving the vanguard a supporting article. We need more essays like this. I am passing this on.
John, you are the most advanced here. I have done a ton of research. But I need your guidance. America has never known about its greatest group of murderers. In fact they have no real name. As we speak you and I both know that they're teaching a new generation of black children that crime and especially murder is cool. It's not the musicians. It's the guys on the street who act like they're trapped in a gangster rap video. This can be fixed by movies. Let America hear these guys speak. I have free scripts for anyone who makes a movie whether it's a big director or some high school student who knows how to make one on youtube. I hope you will help me refine those scripts and find somebody, anybody, who's willing to let America know about its biggest murder subculture.
I am delighted to see someone else in shining armor ridding out of the castle to fight this painful scourge. You can get those stats from the FBI’s crime database at the link below. It will take you a bit of time to figure your way around for there is a bit of complication to it. How can if find out what you are up to on your project?
Message me your email. I will keep you informed and I also would like to request your input.
Can you tell me where there is somebody already working on this so I can aid them?
Can you tell me where I can send free scripts to anybody who can make a movie? (Who is not woke of course).
Can you tell me your view of the best way to communicate to the country that nobody acts gangsta because of the color of their skin and they don't act that way because they're part of a black culture either, that it is an ancient white crime culture that they share with white hillbillies? Thx
John, I have a high number of original anti-woke scripts that can be made into social media vids. How do I fimd someone who is as fed up with the woke as I am who can help me get them created?
As a cultural anthropologist, I harken to the essay and comments. A minor addition. Try getting a definition of "culture" and we run into this 1952 attempt: "Culture is a notoriously difficult term to define. In 1952, the American anthropologists, Kroeber and Kluckhohn, critically reviewed concepts and definitions of culture, and compiled a list of 164 different definitions." For me, I was trained (1970s) to study the interplay of social, cultural and psychological systems. What I often found was agency -- individuals who were adept at manipulating the ("cultural") rules of the game of life and those who were being manipulated. When I teach about abstracting general concepts, I begin with the example of the American family having 2.2 people (or whatever it is now). "How many real families have 2.2 people?" I would ask my students. Part of the problem is reality, part of it is recognizing the frailties of the human mind in representing it. Having grown up in a Brooklyn housing project when it was going from one "hood" into "another," I realized early on the multiple adventures being played with multiple "cultural" rules. Anybody wanna play "who stole the cookie from the cookie jar?"
Thank you for these illuminating and useful disaggregations. Also appreciating that you used the word "racialized" to acknowledge the flimsy foundation beneath racial categories.
How important is culture compared to technology? Has technology become culture and we just don't think of it that way? There is no question that technology has changed the history of the last 500 years because of who had it and who didn't but short of some kind of massive collapse we will live with technology for the next 10,000 years. There can never be another 1st heavier than air flight. There can never be another first nuclear explosion. There can never be another first Moon landing.
There may be lots of different types of music from various cultures enjoyed in the United States, but how much is live and how depends on electricity. Is the electricity really the culture now and our thinking is out of date?
How many high school graduates can explain electricity? So we have made a defective culture.
Too much English literature and not enough science culture.
I 100% agree. It's amazing he speaks so accurately for somebody who's never spent significant time in the hood. Of course even if he had the author is forbidden by all aspects of our society to specifically describe the culture he's referring to. Mainstream Black culture is fine. But there's a subculture of people who teach children that violence especially murder is cool. This results in thousands of black people being murdered every year. This subgroup constitutes America's greatest murder culture. Yet nobody speaks of it few know of it not even the author in depth. America refuses to criticize its greatest murder culture. A movie can fix this. Imagine how successful a movie would be that introduces America to its biggest group of murders. One that it's never heard of before. I have free scripts. Please pass this message on to anyone even a high schooler capable of making a YouTube video. luv1st9
Why do the vast majority of people who murder black people speak and act in a dialect that is not mainstream black culture? A subculture that mirrors that of hillbillies? The answer is historians have discovered that hundreds of years ago the ancient Kelts had a subculture of teaching children that hard work and school are not cool. But crime and especially violence is cool. They communicated primarily by a language of threats of violence over trivial things, streams of abusive language, and unresearched accusation. They also practiced making babies by multiple women then not raising them to be good citizens. Does any of this sound familiar? The gangsta culture is a white culture. All of these elements can be found by watching a gangsta rap video. But music is not the problem. Guys on the street are teaching black kids as we speak to act this way. To get those children the truth a movie needs to be made. I have free scripts. luv1st9@gmail.com
Brilliant. The article lacks one thing. The author has not been to the hood. Because in the hood are the truths that tear BLM and the woke apart.
I encourage everyone reading these words to contact me personally pick my mind learn of my experiences and use that to write articles to become famous. Luv1st9@ Gmail.com
Oct 4, 2022·edited Oct 4, 2022Liked by Free Black Thought
We can go back far further, too: When the glaciers retreated, the human beings living in Europe found a wild grass growing that was nutrionally rich, digestible to humans, fairly easy to harvest, and fairly easy to cultivate: Wheat.
When the glaciers retreated in North America, the human beings living here found wild grasses growing that were not digestible by humans (not easily), and not particularly nutritious to humans. (It was what we now play football and baseball on - grass.)
So the Europeans were more easily able to feed their communities through agriculture - to build settlements, which led to the division of labor, which led to the development of metallurgy, and woodworking, etc.
The upshot being that the Europeans were able to develop modern weaponry (after borrowing gunpowder from the Chinese - who had found wild rice growing, which like wheat was nutrient-dense, easy to cultivate, etc.). Huge advantage when the cultures inevitably met.
The Europeans weren't smarter than the Amerindians, nor braver - nor more evil for that matter. They were the benficiaries of geography - just as the Chinese and the folks in the Indian subcontinent were. In South America, the wild grass was maize - not quite as easily digestible for humans as wheat or rice, but as easy to cultivate, harvest, and store.
And so you had great cities and civilizations where you had wheat, rice and maize (and some other crops in Central Africa that combined nutrition and ease of storage), whereas without that option in North America and the Arctic regions of all the continents, you did not - and so the hunter-gatherer approach to eating (and culture) remained.
Accidents of geography influenced a lot of what has happened in the millennia since, but it gets very little credit or attention.
Yes, it seems that structural factors, like the physical environment in inner cities, and cultural factors, interact with each other. It's a tough cycle to break out of...
Not bad for an "out of your ass" analysis. What you've named are TRUE elements of "structural" and "systemic". These problems need to be solved where they ARE-- As an educator, I am livid that people seem to be arguing that teachers are supposed to be able to solve this kind of structural and systemic racism from their classrooms AS TEACHERS--- As if their teaching strategies CAUSED lead poisoning, police violence, poverty, and environmental contamination of all sorts. Really, some of the rhetoric in Language Arts education would make you think that English teachers shot George Floyd. And we wonder why teachers are quitting right and left???
Teachers are both innocent and the solution to the entire problem. They just need to be resourced and redirected. George Floyd was taught by his peers that crime and threatening violence was cool. If we teach kids that it is not then less will get high, go out to do crimes while high and wrestle armed cops while high and having dangerous medical conditions. Like George did. This will prevent the cop who killed him from having the pretext to do so. It's the murder culture taught by the gangsta rappers that needs to be attacked. Anyone preventing that is increasing the sky high murder rate of black people. I suggest movies shown to kids in class. White cops kill less than 20 unarmed blacks a year. People who teach kids to murder kill thousands. BLM gets black people killed by defending those thousands of murderers. It's culture. Not race.
It's interesting here to point out that one of the things the Woke cannot stand is real cultural criticism from within their pet dimensions. Specifically, how they absolutely need racial unanimity from black Americans despite the fact that black Americans have been pushing against that since the 80s when the majority of black college graduates no longer came from HBCUs. The extent to which millions of black American *desired* mainstream inclusion *without* multicultural authenticity is something they must vilify. This is exactly why Coleman Hughes gets metaphorically shot in the head. The calls for internal racial unity and authenticity of black people is that deeply rooted, and wokeness is the latest expression. If these particular woke black Americans cannot energize the cultural and political ties they assume all blacks must for our own very survival, then all of their claims fall short.
Maybe I should write about it.
Thanks for the love. I did write about it. https://mdcbowen.substack.com/p/cultural-edification-vs-empowerment?r=7br8e&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Quick reaction is that Woke ideology also misidentifies the seats of power - so that in the woke model the poor white family holds power over the tenured black University prof. And of course, a central tenet of wokeism is that the woke adherents always cling to their self-identification as outsiders fighting the establishment - even though wokeism is the current religion OF the establishment. It is a spectacle of the ridiculous.
Thomas Sowell has discussed the effect of culture on economic outcomes and social issues for decades. His writings are well worth reading.
Curious how economists do not advocate for mandatory accounting in the schools. Since double-entry accounting was invented in Italy 700 years ago and spread throughout the Western world shouldn't it be considered part of culture. It is older than Shakespeare.
From a black liberal, thanks for using the adjective “some” when discussing progressives, for we come in subgroups as well. There is a vanguard of us out here that is mindful that it is a troubled black society that keeps bunches of us from taking the last steps into the Promised Land. A racist system is one of the variables but no longer the main encumbrance that drags us down.
The “some” of us would not have been as pleasant as you, for we think that our culture has become somewhat pathological, when looking at a fragile black family that raises 68 percent of its children in fatherless homes. This is the causal factor for impoverishment, and crime stats that see us as committing 49 percent of all robberies and over half of the murders in the US each year, with 89 percent of the slaughtered being our own people.
This is a self-genocide, though slung boldly and bloodily in our faces, that we refuse to see or give awareness. These crime stats come from the FBI’s crime database and are so massive that we cannot fault it on subcultures among us, for all of us in the race have a hand in it, if only denial and inaction. This is a nasty reality that we must admit before we can apply a fix.
One theory on the failure of Neanderthals is that their inability to form social groups beyond the band level left them without the ability to compete with homo sapiens whose sociality has led us to grouping as high as the nation state. Will we blacks devolve by failing to keep the base unit of society, the family, healthy and intact?
Thanks also for giving the vanguard a supporting article. We need more essays like this. I am passing this on.
John, you are the most advanced here. I have done a ton of research. But I need your guidance. America has never known about its greatest group of murderers. In fact they have no real name. As we speak you and I both know that they're teaching a new generation of black children that crime and especially murder is cool. It's not the musicians. It's the guys on the street who act like they're trapped in a gangster rap video. This can be fixed by movies. Let America hear these guys speak. I have free scripts for anyone who makes a movie whether it's a big director or some high school student who knows how to make one on youtube. I hope you will help me refine those scripts and find somebody, anybody, who's willing to let America know about its biggest murder subculture.
luv1st9
@
gmail.com
I am delighted to see someone else in shining armor ridding out of the castle to fight this painful scourge. You can get those stats from the FBI’s crime database at the link below. It will take you a bit of time to figure your way around for there is a bit of complication to it. How can if find out what you are up to on your project?
https://crime-data-explorer.app.cloud.gov/pages/home
Thx for the stats.
Message me your email. I will keep you informed and I also would like to request your input.
Can you tell me where there is somebody already working on this so I can aid them?
Can you tell me where I can send free scripts to anybody who can make a movie? (Who is not woke of course).
Can you tell me your view of the best way to communicate to the country that nobody acts gangsta because of the color of their skin and they don't act that way because they're part of a black culture either, that it is an ancient white crime culture that they share with white hillbillies? Thx
luv1st9
@gmail.com
Yes. I read about this in Sowell's https://www.amazon.com/Black-Rednecks-Liberals-Thomas-Sowell/dp/1594031436 Much came into focus for me after reading this. I don't know the answer but I do know that you've unearthed a very powerful root cause. Hoping doors open for you on this...
John, I have a high number of original anti-woke scripts that can be made into social media vids. How do I fimd someone who is as fed up with the woke as I am who can help me get them created?
As a cultural anthropologist, I harken to the essay and comments. A minor addition. Try getting a definition of "culture" and we run into this 1952 attempt: "Culture is a notoriously difficult term to define. In 1952, the American anthropologists, Kroeber and Kluckhohn, critically reviewed concepts and definitions of culture, and compiled a list of 164 different definitions." For me, I was trained (1970s) to study the interplay of social, cultural and psychological systems. What I often found was agency -- individuals who were adept at manipulating the ("cultural") rules of the game of life and those who were being manipulated. When I teach about abstracting general concepts, I begin with the example of the American family having 2.2 people (or whatever it is now). "How many real families have 2.2 people?" I would ask my students. Part of the problem is reality, part of it is recognizing the frailties of the human mind in representing it. Having grown up in a Brooklyn housing project when it was going from one "hood" into "another," I realized early on the multiple adventures being played with multiple "cultural" rules. Anybody wanna play "who stole the cookie from the cookie jar?"
Thank you for these illuminating and useful disaggregations. Also appreciating that you used the word "racialized" to acknowledge the flimsy foundation beneath racial categories.
Unfortunately their aim is to increase racism and destroy all cultures but Marxist Progressivism.
How important is culture compared to technology? Has technology become culture and we just don't think of it that way? There is no question that technology has changed the history of the last 500 years because of who had it and who didn't but short of some kind of massive collapse we will live with technology for the next 10,000 years. There can never be another 1st heavier than air flight. There can never be another first nuclear explosion. There can never be another first Moon landing.
There may be lots of different types of music from various cultures enjoyed in the United States, but how much is live and how depends on electricity. Is the electricity really the culture now and our thinking is out of date?
How many high school graduates can explain electricity? So we have made a defective culture.
Too much English literature and not enough science culture.
I 100% agree. It's amazing he speaks so accurately for somebody who's never spent significant time in the hood. Of course even if he had the author is forbidden by all aspects of our society to specifically describe the culture he's referring to. Mainstream Black culture is fine. But there's a subculture of people who teach children that violence especially murder is cool. This results in thousands of black people being murdered every year. This subgroup constitutes America's greatest murder culture. Yet nobody speaks of it few know of it not even the author in depth. America refuses to criticize its greatest murder culture. A movie can fix this. Imagine how successful a movie would be that introduces America to its biggest group of murders. One that it's never heard of before. I have free scripts. Please pass this message on to anyone even a high schooler capable of making a YouTube video. luv1st9
@gmail.
com
Why do the vast majority of people who murder black people speak and act in a dialect that is not mainstream black culture? A subculture that mirrors that of hillbillies? The answer is historians have discovered that hundreds of years ago the ancient Kelts had a subculture of teaching children that hard work and school are not cool. But crime and especially violence is cool. They communicated primarily by a language of threats of violence over trivial things, streams of abusive language, and unresearched accusation. They also practiced making babies by multiple women then not raising them to be good citizens. Does any of this sound familiar? The gangsta culture is a white culture. All of these elements can be found by watching a gangsta rap video. But music is not the problem. Guys on the street are teaching black kids as we speak to act this way. To get those children the truth a movie needs to be made. I have free scripts. luv1st9@gmail.com
Brilliant. The article lacks one thing. The author has not been to the hood. Because in the hood are the truths that tear BLM and the woke apart.
I encourage everyone reading these words to contact me personally pick my mind learn of my experiences and use that to write articles to become famous. Luv1st9@ Gmail.com
We can go back far further, too: When the glaciers retreated, the human beings living in Europe found a wild grass growing that was nutrionally rich, digestible to humans, fairly easy to harvest, and fairly easy to cultivate: Wheat.
When the glaciers retreated in North America, the human beings living here found wild grasses growing that were not digestible by humans (not easily), and not particularly nutritious to humans. (It was what we now play football and baseball on - grass.)
So the Europeans were more easily able to feed their communities through agriculture - to build settlements, which led to the division of labor, which led to the development of metallurgy, and woodworking, etc.
The upshot being that the Europeans were able to develop modern weaponry (after borrowing gunpowder from the Chinese - who had found wild rice growing, which like wheat was nutrient-dense, easy to cultivate, etc.). Huge advantage when the cultures inevitably met.
The Europeans weren't smarter than the Amerindians, nor braver - nor more evil for that matter. They were the benficiaries of geography - just as the Chinese and the folks in the Indian subcontinent were. In South America, the wild grass was maize - not quite as easily digestible for humans as wheat or rice, but as easy to cultivate, harvest, and store.
And so you had great cities and civilizations where you had wheat, rice and maize (and some other crops in Central Africa that combined nutrition and ease of storage), whereas without that option in North America and the Arctic regions of all the continents, you did not - and so the hunter-gatherer approach to eating (and culture) remained.
Accidents of geography influenced a lot of what has happened in the millennia since, but it gets very little credit or attention.
Yes, it seems that structural factors, like the physical environment in inner cities, and cultural factors, interact with each other. It's a tough cycle to break out of...
Not bad for an "out of your ass" analysis. What you've named are TRUE elements of "structural" and "systemic". These problems need to be solved where they ARE-- As an educator, I am livid that people seem to be arguing that teachers are supposed to be able to solve this kind of structural and systemic racism from their classrooms AS TEACHERS--- As if their teaching strategies CAUSED lead poisoning, police violence, poverty, and environmental contamination of all sorts. Really, some of the rhetoric in Language Arts education would make you think that English teachers shot George Floyd. And we wonder why teachers are quitting right and left???
Teachers are both innocent and the solution to the entire problem. They just need to be resourced and redirected. George Floyd was taught by his peers that crime and threatening violence was cool. If we teach kids that it is not then less will get high, go out to do crimes while high and wrestle armed cops while high and having dangerous medical conditions. Like George did. This will prevent the cop who killed him from having the pretext to do so. It's the murder culture taught by the gangsta rappers that needs to be attacked. Anyone preventing that is increasing the sky high murder rate of black people. I suggest movies shown to kids in class. White cops kill less than 20 unarmed blacks a year. People who teach kids to murder kill thousands. BLM gets black people killed by defending those thousands of murderers. It's culture. Not race.