Writing in the Australian edition of the Guardian, Lorena Allam says, “Rejecting the voice shows Australia is still in denial, its history of forgetting a festering wrong” The “Voice” refers to the Indigenous Voice to Parliament, which is, or was, “a proposed federal advisory body to comprise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, to represent the views of Indigenous communities.” A decisive majority of Australian voters rejected the idea. Both the Guardian articles I have linked to regard the referendum result as a disaster. Lorena Allam writes,
It will take us months and years to grasp the full impact. But it is already blindingly clear that the result has been deeply hurtful for First Nations people, regardless of how we voted.
“Regardless of how we voted” seems an odd way of putting it. While it is true that a majority of Aboriginal voters wanted the Voice, a substantial number of them did not. Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price is one of several prominent people of Aboriginal descent who campaigned against it. Why would they be hurt by getting the result they wanted?
The commenters below the line are apoplectic. The three most recommended comments are: “Further proof, as though it were needed, that Australia remains a profoundly racist country”, “Australia has looked into the mirror and racism, hatred and ignorance has stared back”, and this one by a commenter called MacGiollaGhunna:
I’m European and have lived in Australia for over half my life. Even though I’m Australian on paper, I always think of myself as European. I didn’t need today’s results to know why I will never say I’m an Australian. For the majority of First Nations, a sizeable minority are with you. I am so sorry. I’m on a suburban train now and it makes my skin crawl knowing most people on here voted no. I can only imagine how it must make you feel. Keep staying strong. No matter how many times ‘Australia’ turns away, it will always be your land. Always.
I wonder if these commenters talked to their neighbours during the campaign in the same way they talked to their political brethren after it. If they were at all typical of advocates for “Yes”, no wonder “No” won. MacGiollaGhunna wasn’t the only one who proudly denied actually being Australian. The last line of their comment is another example of the type of “Yes” talk that pushed people towards “No”:
No matter how many times ‘Australia’ turns away, it will always be your land. Always.
On their own, the words “it will always be your land” could be meant in an inclusive way. But the use of scare quotes around “Australia” suggests very strongly that by “it will always be your land” the speaker means it will never truly be the land of anyone else; that the Australians-in-scare-quotes of European or Asian or African or anything other than Indigenous descent are forever interlopers. There’s a word for that sort of belief.
Sure, that’s just the view of one Guardian commenter. And the 121 people who recommended them. And the many similar comments and all the hundreds of people who recommended them. But that politically-correct suggestion that the Voice constituted an admission that only the Indigenous are the true owners of the land was widespread among supporters of the Indigenous Voice proposal, and certainly contributed to it being rejected.
The Guardian was correct to point out that claims that the Voice would mean Australians would lose ownership of their homes were false. The next sentence I’m not so sure about: “Variations of this claim include: Australians will be forced to pay reparations or the voice will increase taxes (ie, the voice will cost you money)”. There is a growing worldwide movement for “reparations” to be paid by white people to black people, as the Guardian never tires of telling us. As for “the voice will cost you money”, duh, of course it would have cost them money. Who else would have paid the salaries of all the proposed Indigenous representatives, not to mention all their assistants, secretaries, janitors, security staff et cetera other than the Australian taxpayer?
To illustrate how far off beat the Vote Yes campaign was, this was their main campaign advert.
John Farnham’s You’re the Voice song becomes yes referendum campaign ad (YouTube)
The main problem was that there were too many unknowns about the consequences of implementing the “Uluru Statement from the Heart” which the Australian government was unwilling or unable to answer such as land and water management, particularly on the matter of reparations (the origin of which remains unclear).
The Vote No campaign used this in their slogan “If you don’t know, vote No” and that was terribly effective in the absence of any equivalent from the Yes campaign.
Is it an Australian “BRExit moment”? I guess it could be described as one, certainly it reflects a massive disconnect between the political classes in the ACT (which was the only state/territory that voted “Yes”) and the rest of the country, whose view reflected a more moderate “Yeah, Nah” kind of approach.
Go back to earlier in 2023 and polls were generally in favour of Vote Yes by a wide margin, but the unanswered questions became too much of a weight to bare.
Already though the Vote Yes campaigners are accusing the Vote No campaign of fear mongering. But it’s all water under the bridge now.
The only question remaining is whether it will cost Anthony Albanese the Premiership? Probably too early to tell on that one.
This is the fundamental disconnect that all these “advocates” have: They fail to grasp that the “indigenous people” lost.
Just like the various flavors of Native Americans or “First Peoples” that wiped out their own kind with gay abandon before Columbus ever showed up near North America. Where, pray tell, were the various “victim advocates” for the nations conquered by the Aztecs?
Likely first on the list to have their hearts torn out on top of a temple in Tenochtitlan, but… Yeah.
What happened to all the underdogs who were wiped out by the rising Zulu or Xhosa tribes? There’s quite a roster of those. Not to mention, where’re all the advocates for the original Britons, who the Romans conquered, who themselves became victims once Rome grew weak and senile, allowing Britain to fall to the invading Angles and Jutes? Anyone want to go back and tell William the Conqueror that he ought to have a “Saxon Voice” in his government? I’d pay good money for that one…
The reality is this: There’s an eternal churn in who lives where and who is in charge. You’re on the losing side? Get your act together, and adapt. The Japanese are a really excellent example, especially when compared to the lethargic Chinese and Korean experiences of suddenly waking up one morning to discover that those Western barbarians were now pretty damn powerful…
I don’t want to sound like I’m advocating for the exploitation or suffering of Australian aboriginal peoples, but… Let’s get real: The “advocates” aren’t doing them any favors; they need to get their acts together, and adapt to the now-surrounding more advanced culture they’re forced to live with due to their own inability to compete effectively. This reverse ju-jitsu move of the various flavors of romantic “advocate” types, most of whom aren’t even actual aboriginal peoples? It’s inimical to the adaptation process.
And, frankly, if they can’t adapt? What the hell are they owed? Should we mourn the loss of all those “indigenous peoples” who were wiped out by the rise of agriculture and modernity? Is anyone going to “advocate” for the natives of Europe who were supplanted by the agriculturalists coming in from Anatolia?
This is the way of it: Less efficient and effective peoples get overwhelmed by more sophisticated and efficient outsiders. It’s not a pretty sight, it ain’t fair, but unless you manage to pull off what Japan did, that’s pretty much your fate. Happened to all our ancestors, at one time or another. My own were most recently thrown out of their complacency and sloth by the Enclosures, there in Scotland and elsewhere in the British Isles; should I seek reparations from the current occupants? Actually, I’m rather grateful; we wouldn’t be where we are, had that not happened to them.
You can’t stop history, and trying to stand there and demand it is an act of utter stupidity. Aboriginals in Australia who can’t adapt to modern life? Well, do what is reasonable to help, but if they won’t or can’t take advantage of the help, what then? Should you warp everything around their essential incompetence at life?
I mean, this is the human version of the whole Spotted Owl deal; they shut down logging and put entire regions out of use in order to save that damn bird, and they’re still going extinct. Why? Because the Barred Owl is rather better at being an owl, and is out-competing them. To the point that the “environmentalists” are now paying people to shoot the Barred Owls in order to “save the Spotted Owl…”
The whole effort is nuts. Let nature take its course, and if that means that you’ve got to watch the various flavors of incompetent and incapable primitives go away, well… What’re you going to do? It’s happened to everyone, from the Neanderthalers and Denisovans on down. It’s a part of the human condition, and unfortunate though it may be, it’s also a natural process.
Looking at the “wider documentation” that provides the foundation for “The Voice”, I found the word reparations clearly stated at least 5 times and that was just a brief scan, so it seems that the Vote No concerns weren’t without some justification.
Background to Reparation Claims (Sky News Australia)
The AU Commonwealth Government is simply going to enact most of the provisions of “The Voice” individually and quietly over the next year anyway. Losing the referendum just means they can’t loudly rejoice in it.
@Bobby b – I don’t know.
If they hadn’t had all of the hype with the referendum and just done it legislatively without the constitutional change then yes, they could probably have implemented the main parts of it, but no way could they have implemented the parts that are fundamentally objectionable (dilution of property rights, land and water management changes and absolutely not reparations).
So now they’ve failed to nail it into the constitution by referendum (which would have required another referendum to remove it) any legislative changes that they now undertake will be seen (or at least can be portrayed by the opposition) as “Anti-Democratic” since it goes against the expressed will of the people in the referendum they’ve just had.
It would be the same argument as having a rerun of BRExit because the UK electorate failed to vote the right way.
…and if that doesn’t sound appalling, read it again in your angry voice.
John Galt: I agree with your main point, that it would be anti-democratic. But, when has that ever stopped them?
Say this in your angry voice: “It would be the same argument as letting government slow-walk the changes that Brexit mandated because Brexit shouldn’t have passed.”
Can you see your gov slow-walking Brexit? I think we already did in some respects. They wouldn’t try to re-run it because that would be too blatant. But they would try anything short of that to make the (bad) vote meaningless.
Ouch!
Yes, I take your point.
In fairness, I think Aussie PM Anthony Albanese looked at the polls which were very favourable towards a Yes vote earlier in the year and thought it was going to be a cake walk / Shoo-in.
A snapshot of the polls in mid-June 2023 showed support for Vote Yes still strong, but tightening.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FynuY5xaYAAshD0?format=jpg&name=medium
Why wouldn’t he think he could pull this off?
The indigenous want reparations- everywhere. Give them some, and they’ll want more. California is talking reparations for slavery, wanting people who never owned slaves to pay those who have never been slaves, in a state that never allowed slavery. The Balkans are festering cauldrons of resentment over a thousand years along, and they want their reparations in blood. And the Middle East … no way.
There seems no likeliness of a statute of limitations, but if there were one generation might be reasonable. After that? Once you have paid them the Danegeld, you’ll never be rid of he Dane.
Boo hoo, the locals in Ozzyland lost a war when the Europeans showed up. It’s the same story here in the Americas. The natives should have united, fought harder, fought smarter, and invested in post-Neolithic R&D if they wanted to keep their lands and way of life. The lesson to be learned is: don’t lose wars to invaders.
I think the lesson is do lose the wars. Then you will get free booze and housing, and many hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on you. 😉
Steven R said:
To be fair, the locals didn’t so much lose a war as suffer from the ill-effects of being exposed to the diseases of civilization. Had the New World not have been conveniently depopulated when the Europeans inadvertently exposed them to the European disease biome, well… Yeah. Things would have been a lot different. The European experience in the Americas would have had much more in common with the ones they had in India, Africa, and Asia: No “green fields” to set up on, no free run through the territories… There’d have been more continuity of experience with the one that prevailed between the Vikings and the Skraelings.
Unless they put off colonizing the Americas until they had absolute superiority of arms, which they really did not until well into the 18th Century.
Does The Guardian believe that the first inhabitants of every territory should have special privileges over newcomers, and what might that look like in, say, Bradford, UK?
When the usual “Useful Idiots” are calling your entire country racist for voting in a referendum, then you’re probably doing the right thing.
🤣
So, this ‘reparations’ thing. Are the ‘Blacks’ who demand reparations from the ‘Whites’ in the USA also liable to pay reparations (along with the ‘Whites’) to the ‘Reds’?
Even if you dress up the question into ‘Descendant of Slaves’ and ‘Indigenous Peoples’ it still exposes the lunacy of trying to atone (and it is a faux moral response) for the actions of distant ancestors who looked at the world in a completely different way.
“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,”… unless there’s money to be extracted.
@DiscoveredJoys – Acceptance of “The Voice” would have placed Australia at the mercy of the usual race grifters.
Even the Aboriginal community outside of Canberra recognized that this would do little-to-nothing to solve the problems of their community, which is why they were well represented (and front-and-centre) in the Vote No campaign.
I try to tell people that the federal Government was asking us to give them a blank cheque, and I don’t want to do that to any politician, but they see me voting in my Clan costume, so I think they’re onto me.
Q. How many politicians would it take to change a light bulb?
A. None- they love keeping us in the dark!
Q. How many politicians would it take to change a light bulb?
A. I’ll answer that in a minute, but first we have to set up a Light Bulb and Other Lighting Devices Steering Board to guide the efforts of the Ladders and Platforms Safety Group, the Light Bulb and Other Lighting Devices Group, the Licensed Light Bulb Changers Board and the cross-bench working party. And what people really want to know is who is responsible for the light bulbs failing in the first place.
Would it be too superficial to compare Jacinta Nampijinpa Price to Kemi Badenoch?
Seems odd to say that Australia is in denial when even the indigenous voted overwhelmingly against it.
Only area that voted for it was the capitol bubble.
It was a RACIST measure, explicitly about representing a group of people by RACE – as is normal these days this RACIST measure was presented as “Anti Racism”, this is the evil “Critical Theory” system of modern Marxism, where racism is presented as “anti racism”, just as Freedom of Speech is denounced as “Repressive Tolerance” (Herbert Marcuse) which “harms disadvantaged and marginalised groups” according to the Critical Theory Marxists who dominate Western institutions – including, bizarrely, Corporate Big Business (“ideological hegemony” as the Italian Marxist Gramsci called it, means that even people who one expect to oppose Marxism, parrot Marxist doctrines about “exploitation” and “oppression” without even knowing they are Marxist).
The people who will be “hurt” by the defeat of this racist measure, this effort to divide people by race, will by the psychopaths of the Guardian newspaper and the rest of the Critical Theory Marxists.
“I’m European and have lived in Australia for over half my life. Even though I’m Australian on paper, I always think of myself as European. I didn’t need today’s results to know why I will never say I’m an Australian. For the majority of First Nations, a sizeable minority are with you. I am so sorry. I’m on a suburban train now and it makes my skin crawl knowing most people on here voted no. I can only imagine how it must make you feel. Keep staying strong. No matter how many times ‘Australia’ turns away, it will always be your land. Always.”
Its odd according to this woman that immigrants into Australia will always be from somewhere else and owe their allegiance elsewhere, and Australia will always belong to the indigenous inhabitants, but if you say exactly the same thing about immigrants into the UK you’d get called a racist……..
MacGiollaGhunna: I’m European and have lived in Australia for over half my life. Even though I’m Australian on paper, I always think of myself as European.
That’s someone who really does not deserve Australian citizenship and shouldn’t be voting there.
DiscoveredJoys asked:
The can of worms opened by “reparations” is one that the agitating types never really bother to ever consider. If I can be billed for that which my ancestors supposedly did, then why cannot I bill in turn for the services they rendered?
I can document that ancestors of mine were abolitionists and helped finance the various black regiments raised to fight in the Civil War. I can also document that several of them went bankrupt doing so, and that there were branches of the family erased by th deaths of their breadwinners in that war. So… What are their descendants owed?
Do I get a discount on those of my ancestors who were involved in or profited from the slave trade? Do I get to pick and choose who I’m to be made to pay for or not? I mean, it’s a mixed ‘effing bag, that… The abolitionists of the early 1800s were descended from the pragmatists taking part in the so-called “Triangle Trade” of the 18th and 17th Centuries. Are they the ones I should use, when pleading my case? The whole thing is messy, and quite impossible to untangle at this remove.
This question of which specific generation of ancestor to pay for starts to get really troublesome once you recall that a significant amount of the genes of American blacks comes from the slaveowners, as well. Are we to say that “Hey, you’re mostly black-ish, so you get money…”, and ignore the fact that that mere “black-ish” includes a significant fraction of the slaveowning bastards? Do you get a free pass for your ancestors, while I have to pay, merely because of the current difference in melanin content of our skins?
I mean, yes, you could make a case for the immediate victims of the abuse that led to miscegenation needing recompense, but… Where the hell do you draw the line? If we’re going to go by ancestral guilt, what about the people that came before, who’d had nothing to do with the rat bastard who liked to prowl the slave cabins? Are they and their descendants responsible for this blood-guilt?
Then, we start getting into the black participation in the slave trade; hardly any of those slaves were taken in Africa by squads of white men running around and raiding villages. For one thing, the majority would have been dead of endemic disease in short order; most slaves were taken by other blacks and sold on to the white men by other blacks. There are tribes in Nigeria who did nothing but deal in slaves, and made bank doing so. So, which of them pays? How about the blacks here in America that bought and sold their fellow blacks, slaveowners themselves? The slaver whose court case established effective chattel slavery was a black man, himself. Unsure of the details about that; he may well have been a put-up job, a test case for the courts, but he is the one with the name in the records.
At this late date, attempting to establish just reparations for things is impossible. Any attempt to do so at this time is just purest politics, and divisive politics at that.
One thing’s for damn sure… Genealogists are gonna be making bank out of this, that’s for sure. There’s an irony, here: I can establish at least one ancestor who was almost certainly a slave herself, likely bought out of a New Orleans brothel. Because of that, I could probably qualify for a lot of the reparations programs I’ve seen set out, being as they’re based on that “just one drop” thing the racists used to love. That’s mostly because my family has good, solid genealogical records, and a lot of the family is recorded. Friend of mine is black; he’s got nothing but oral history as to who his ancestors were before about 1880. He can’t even establish whether or not they were slave or freedman, being as that some of them were predecessors to the Seminole Scouts, and likely escaped slaves with no records or provenance whatsoever. He literally cannot establish that he is descended from slaves, despite the almost overwhelming likelihood that he is… So, how do you like that? I can qualify for reparations, under some of the proposed programs, but he cannot… I appear as white as white could be, and he’s as black as you can get, but… I’m the one who could qualify for reparations, and he isn’t.
Depends on which idiotic program they enact, though. The whole freakin’ idea is insane at this point in history…
Tim Worstall’s point about the economics of reparations (usually in reference to descendants of the African slave trade in the USA) is that reparations should restore them to the economic situation if they had remained where they were in Africa, so it fails for even the poorest African-Americans because they are still far richer than the lucky souls who remained in East Africa (often the ones that benefitted from selling their defeated slaves to the traders).
In the case of the Aboriginals, how do you restore them to a position of equivalent “Equity” that they had before they were colonised?
Do you move them all to the Tiwi Islands off the coast of Northern Australia, cut off all their water and electricity supplies, flatten all the buildings and call it good?
What about white slaves in the Colonies? We know for a fact that French-aligned Indians would grab colonists, drag them to Quebec, and they were put on ships to work plantations in the Caribbean Islands. The English-aligned Indians did the same them to Frenchmen on the frontier. Who pays reparations for them? How about white women and children grabbed by Indians and forcibly integrated and married into those societies? Can we take some of those casino royalties to pay the relatives of those poor souls? And as Kirk brings up, what about the descendants of Union troops? We paid that debt to blacks with 400,000 dead Union troops and another million or so wounded and crippled and sick. Surely I should get something for their pain and suffering and my intergenerational trauma.
In terms of general legal principles, whilst the victim of a tort may have a claim for compensation (i.e. reparations), there is also in insurance the concept of ‘betterment’, so if your year-old car is written off, and you need a new car, if you are bought a brand-new car (worth more than the value before damage of your lost car), then you pay the insurer the difference for the betterment.
If this concept were applied to reparations, the recipients would have to give ‘credit’ for the ‘betterment’, if any, of their lives post-wrong compared to how it would have been without the wrong. Have the advocates of reparations made any calculations as to how this might be applied, it is all rather counter-factual?
The history of referendums in Australia is pretty grim. The acid test for most people is “How will this make the country better?” and “How will this improve my lot?” If you cant convincingly answer those questions you are doomed. The “Republic” referendum failed for the same reasons.
Aussies only have to look to their next door Neighbour to see what happens when symbolic changes get dragged into the legislative and legal frameworks.
In my experience, and I lived in Aus for most of my life, most people want to see the Aboriginal people’s lives lifted out of chaos and poverty. Unfortunately, every single attempt to “do something” has made either no difference or made things worse. Like many countries, they have tried everything – paternalism, interventionism, integration, isolation, autonomy you name it.
To suggest giving the Aboriginal people a symbolic “voice” will make one iota of difference to their daily misery is just idiotic.
The sad reality is that their arcadian tribal structures collapsed over a hundred years ago and by and large they have shown zero interest in becoming active participants in modern Australian daily life. Thats a one way street, there is no path back to pre-colonial times. The most egregious examples of daily misery and despair are in the indigenously controlled communities.
There is no giant conspiracy to keen the Aboriginal people down. Since at least the 1970s the door has been open, and the only ask is that you live by the same laws as the rest of the country. Again, sadly, that has been a step too far for far too many of the “first people”
“The Voice” wasn’t symbolic. Look at the details and you will find a totalitarian design that puts the race grifters in the driving seat and the “Settlers” who are the citizens of Australia as little more than slaves to the Aboriginals and their elite mentors.
Trying not to be sexist about this, but in my experience, talk of reparations is simply affluent white women’s feelings of guilt. Once they’ve pushed through black reparations, we’ll just move on to the next-worst source of guilt, and then the next, and the next . . .
The best form – the only productive form – of reparations we could give any of these groups would be to make early-to-mid education effective for everyone. That has the potential to wipe out a lot of the supposed gaps and unfairness.
Based on the currently displayed results of “education” all around us, I have my doubts about the efficacy of same.
There is no way of making reparations fair; once you start down that road, where do you stop? I mean, if Great Britain is going to be dunned for slave reparations to the blacks, then why not the Irish? The Scots, who got screwed during the Enclosures?
News flash: History happens. Sometimes, you’re on the wrong side of it. Deal.
I don’t begrudge the Japanese-Americans their checks; they really got screwed over, for however good the reason might have been. And, we paid the actual victims.
Going back even a generation is nuts, particularly when the subjects are so intertwined; there are an awful lot of people who’ve been “passing” as white who’re no doubt going to decide to “come out” as black, and then what? Do they deserve recompense for their pain and suffering as whites under Jim Crow?
This whole thing is grift from start to finish, top to bottom, side to side.
And, I guarantee you that the vast majority of the money paid out to blacks will be in the hands of various other parties in very short order, with nothing to show for it. It’ll be like lottery winners, and then they’ll come back for more, again and again. About the only way I’d countenance any of this crap would be if the parties receiving the monies were to renounce citizenship and take their asses off elsewhere and shut up about it all. The overwhelming majority of American blacks are far better off than any others, to include the ones who stayed in Africa. Hard to accept as that might be… Review the actual numbers of slaves documented as “shipped to America” vs. other locations, and you’ll get a hint of what happened. Most of the ones who wound up in Arab hands wound up dead with no issue, because that’s how Arabs roll with their slaves. Don’t even look at the death rates in the Caribbean or Central America. Very nearly as many slaves went to Mexico as went to what became the US; how many blacks are there in Mexico, these days? Like what, slightly less than 2% of the population, compared to our 12% or so? Consider how that happened, won’t you?
We’ve been dumping money into the black community hand over fist since the early 60s to the tune of trillions for schools, welfare, urban renewal, small business loans, housing loans, graft, kickbacks, housing, medical, food, all of it. There’s never an accounting for any of it and everyone knows it’s just a Danegeld at this point, and a bribe to keep them voting Democrat. How much more money needs to be kicked their way?
I would really like to see what the future holds once Whites are no longer the majority and Hispanics realize they have the numbers to be a massive political force. There is no love lost between the black and Hispanic communities, and that racial guilt the Dems have been pedaling since the 60s won’t go far with Hispanics.
I’d love to see the expressions on the faces of these grifters, were there to be an honest accounting. I mean, what was Detroit worth, back before the Democrats and their black constituents got ahold of it? Same-same for a lot of other urban areas. And, if we start reverse-charging people by ethnicity, well… Yeah. I’d like my money back from having to pay for black criminality and incarceration, thankyouverymuch.
This whole thing opens up a bunch of heretofore unthinkable options, when you start to think about it. And, as ridiculous as it sounds now, it will be carried out to its illogical extremes. I could easily see someone saying “OK… Reparations. Fine. How long has your family been net-productive citizens, paying taxes, staying out of jail? The whole time since the end of the Civil War? Fine; you get fully reparated…”
Say, on the other hand, you’ve got a family history of petty and grand larceny, and haven’t contributed a damn thing besides being on welfare for three generations? You get all the expense for that deducted off your share. ALL OF IT.
I don’t think that’d be too damn popular. But, it’d be fair.
The Guardian says it will take years to “grasp the full impact”. That gives the impression that the writer of those words is a bit thick. Getting the implications should be rapid for a person of education and average IQ, I would have thought.
“The Guardian says it will take years to “grasp the full impact”. That gives the impression that the writer of those words is a bit thick.”
On the contrary, that just means ‘We need some time to create a new narrative that will get us what we want by an alternative route’.
Like losing the Republic Referendum, it took years to fully appreciate the full impact. Years of relief.
@bobby b
The best form – the only productive form – of reparations we could give any of these groups would be to make early-to-mid education effective for everyone. That has the potential to wipe out a lot of the supposed gaps and unfairness.
This is exactly right. The root causes of poverty among African American families is not some lack of generational wealth. How is that possible when dad doesn’t even hang around for the large majority of families? That is a dreadful cultural phenomenon that is really hard to fix, and can only be fixed over many generations. But education? That is in the hands of the government, that is something that can be fixed. And it is the second major root cause. Moreover it can be fixed in a week by making the money follow the child so that that single black mother, who loves her kids and wants them to escape the poverty trap just as much as anyone else, can pull her kid out of Criminal Ed High School and put him or her in a decent school that teaches the skills that a kid actually needs. A school that can get rid of the really bad teachers, a school that can toss out the really bad kids, and provide an environment where these kids can actually learn, and get the skills they need to get a job. A school where the faculty insists on the students treating each other with respect and decency. That is what the moms of these children want and we can give it to them without it costing a penny more in taxes if we can just be brave enough to stand up to the teachers unions.
And it isn’t even a national thing. Schools are run by the states for the most part, so here, in this great laboratory of democracy, we can try it out in some of the more libertarian states. We can do it right now in Florida or Arkansas or South Dakota. It doesn’t even require dismantling the current public school system. Leave it in place, just provide a structure where a parent can redirect the funds destined for their local school to a different school and let the magic of competition do it works.
However, somehow, it never happens. Instead we get voucher programs or magnet schools or various other things that are such weak tea that we can barely tell the difference. Even though with this weak tea we see amazing success stories. Here in Chicago Whitney Young high school a small magnet school is almost entirely black kids, and the performance of these kids is just spectacular. I judge science fairs and work in math competitions in this area and the projects these kids bring are just stellar, the kids are delightful, ones you’d be proud to call your own son or daughter. And their math team regularly cleans up at competitions. Yeah, really, even though as we all know, math is racist. Apparently this particular group of black kids somehow manage to overcome that and kick the butts of the lily white high schools from the suburbs.
Needless to say they mostly all go on to college when they graduate. Give these black kids from poor neighborhoods an opportunity and they turn into doctors, scientists, astronauts, Olympic gold medalists, musicians, video game designers and, in one unfortunate case, first lady of the United States.
The one thing you can say about reparations is simple: they still won’t shut up. And if all us colonizers were to pick up our stuff and go away, the colonizees would shriek and wail even harder, and there’s a good chance their children end up as cargo cultists.
Al Sharpton hardest hit: film at 11.
Fraser Orr said:
This is some of the most insanely self-delusional twaddle I’ve ever seen. Look… You cannot make someone educated and successful. It’s not a thing you can force on someone, if they don’t want it. I mean, aside from the fundamental conceptual error that says “Education=Success”, which isn’t necessarily as true as we postulate…
The real problem here isn’t that the blacks are somehow being prevented from getting good educations. That’s a damnable lie; I’ve observed Nigerian immigrant families that were as “Tiger Mom” about their kids getting good educations as the most driven Asian family could produce. I’ve also actually, y’know… Been around a lot of black Americans from many different milieus inside that subculture. And, do you know what? The ones who didn’t give a rip about “education”…? They didn’t get educated. Period.
The problem isn’t in the educational offerings from the statist government; it’s the rest of the package.
When Mom and Dad don’t care about the kids getting an education, sloughing off responsibility for that to the state and its schools, then you have zero chance of getting those kids really educated. Education isn’t a form of personal growth to a lot of these people; it’s something being done to them, performed for them by the state. They don’t care about it. If it were left to most, the kids wouldn’t even go to school. It’s only because it’s mandated by the state that they do, and then they really don’t care about it, because, again… It’s something being inflicted on them against their will.
I used to work with lot of these people. The adult versions were not any different; the ones I worked with in the Army (which were not, emphatically, all of the blacks I worked with, either… Just the majority.) were of a mind that they needn’t bother to do any sort of self-improvement; they were of the opinion that their being black and there was enough to ensure advancement. They didn’t have to study their jobs; they didn’t have to improve their skills, and if they went to an NCO academy, they did just enough to meet the basic standard, and that was it.
It wasn’t all of them, by any means. But, the mentality is fairly widespread; they don’t see “education” as a thing they need, a necessity, something they ought to pursue for self-betterment. It was bizarre, back when the Army still did the Skills Qualification Test: You would see all sorts of study groups set up by individual soldiers, trying to get better scores. Lots of hard, self-motivated and self-directed learning going on, because those test scores figured into promotions. Heavily.
Yet, there were always those guys that didn’t study, didn’t care, and would never lift a finger to improve themselves or their scores. You’d ask why, and a goodly chunk of them would say “Why bother? I’m gonna get promoted, anyway, ‘cos of me being black/Hispanic/asian pacific-islander…”
And, they were right. Because of “Equal Opportunity” and “Affirmative Action”, they went right to the head of the queue for promotions, regardless of test scores or actual qualifications. Thus, they didn’t care about education or self-improvement; all incentives were removed by those programs and policies.
It’s the same across the education spectrum. Look at the firefighter lawsuits in the major Eastern cities; the premise was that the tests were being used to “hold back” blacks. Real truth was that those blacks didn’t study, didn’t work to improve their skills. I had a guy from one of those departments working for me in the Army; he was third-generation firefighter, with both his grandfather and father retiring as fairly high-ranking guys in the fire department he was a part of. He’d joined, become a firefighter himself, and was tracking. Then, the lawsuits came in, and all of a sudden, promotion was no longer on test scores and merit, but skin color: If you were white, don’t worry about promotion… It simply wasn’t happening. He took until his late twenties to recognize the handwriting on the wall, and say “Screw this…”, which led to his military career. Oh, and the claim he was Hispanic, based on his mother’s Puerto Rican background, which he’d failed to use while on the fire department.
Notably, what he described surrounding the test regime was similar to that which we had in the Army, before they did away with the tests entirely. You’d have little study groups of firefighters working their asses off, studying. The majority of those studying? Whites. Blacks just didn’t bother; it wasn’t that they weren’t invited, they just didn’t value it, until they figured out they could sue and bypass the system for promotions. My guy was rather bitter about it; the thing that precipitated him leaving the department and his family tradition was one of those “affirmative action hire” leaders making some very bad decisions on a fire, and getting a couple of firemen killed. Who happened to be, of course, white. And good friends of my guy. I don’t think he was really racist before that experience, but he sure as hell was a little racist after that happened. The black affirmative action hire leader? No repercussions for him, ‘cos that would have showed up the problems, so they just kicked him upstairs to a job they created specifically for him. Meanwhile, two young families were left without fathers. My guy was incredibly bitter about that…
The problem you seek to “fix” with “better education” ain’t got shit to do with education, and everything to do with culture. You might want to examine the history of the Kansas City school system, which was forced by court decree to spend much monies on improved educational facilities and programs. None of which worked, and all of which were essentially destroyed by the students themselves.
The age-old parable about leading horses to water, yet not being able to force them to drink has application, here. You want to fix the problem by imposing “better education”, but until you fix the fact that “these people” don’t want that education, and will passive-aggressively seek to stop you from forcing it on them? You’re doomed to failure. The problem lies a lot deeper in than the simple fact that the schools they have to go to suck; the real root problem lies behind that, in that they just don’t care about education. If an asian family suffers in a poor school system, they either route around it or they fix it; black family in a similar situation sees school as something they “have to do”, and care little about the quality thereof. Education isn’t an end to itself within their culture; it’s a means to an end, period. You have to change that culture, increase the importance of education and learning for them, and then maybe they’ll put more effort into it.
And, I’m going to simply go on to be even more heretical: The problem is also along another axis, in that the classroom and formal book learning isn’t at all something that many blacks are either good at or at all responsive to. You’re trying to force-feed them “a good education” through techniques that are totally ethno-centric on whites and asians, which ain’t at all effective for blacks. I don’t think it’s a question of blacks lacking the necessary intelligence, either; it’s a question of them lacking the adaptation to all that freakin’ abstraction we have in our school system. If you put your average black into a situation where “learning will occur in the classroom”, you’re likely going to experience a certain degree of failure. Put that instructional mode into “hands on and practical”, and what you’re going to find is that they tend to do a hell of a lot better, and are much more enthusiastic about doing it. Abstract classroom learning out of books, lectures, and the ever-dreaded Powerpoint presentation is anathema to an awful lot of blacks, which possibly explains a lot of their disinterest in “education”: We’re doing it wrong.
And, it’s entirely untrue to say that this is a factor with all blacks; many do not fall into this syndrome. But, there are enough that trying to “fix” the issues through the provision of “mo bettah’ edumacation” ain’t going to work. We’ve tried that, many times and many different ways; it doesn’t work.
In a lot of ways, the situation is akin to the race horse looking at the mule, and asking why the mule doesn’t do well on the race track… Then, trying to turn the mule into a race horse by imposing the race horse’s training regimen on said mule. The mule ain’t likely to either be happy about it all, or do well.
More concisely, if the only way the problems in your community can be fixed is for the people in another community to come and fix them for you … then you are doomed. Because every community in the world has problems and is actively engaged in struggling with them. And nobody will sacrifice their own children for yours, no matter how much you try to guilt them into it.
The lack of agency is tragic and dooms those suffering from it to constant failure, no matter what sort of “reparations” or competition-rigging might be thrown their way.
I think the point is that trying to fix these problems in the first place has only made them worse. Government run schools and welfare have made it so that both the parents and the child do not care about the child’s education. After all, if the state is schooling your child, why should you take any responsibility for it? And if you are going to get welfare regardless of how well you learn, why bother spending time to learn?
The problem, as Fraser and Kirk pointed out, is mainly cultural. And the cultural problems are to a large degree caused by such “interventions in the community”, which allow members of the community to abdicate their responsibility.
Instead of reparations to the Aborigines, I sometimes think that we act as though their land had been resumed, and we pay them a one-time resumption price for the land, once we identify the actual tribe that claims ownership. The money could come with a stipulation that this is a one-time cash payment, and that they agree to never ask for anything more, and we let the tribe decide what to do with the money, democratically.
@Ferox
More concisely, if the only way the problems in your community can be fixed is for the people in another community to come and fix them for you … then you are doomed.
This seems a curious response since I am proposing exactly the opposite. Giving agency to the parents to “fix” things for their children by having control over the money we chose to spend on educating them.
If it is your proposal that taxes shouldn’t be used to pay for public education, and that parents should be entirely responsible for educating their children, well that is an entirely different debate. But insofar as you think public funding of education is a good idea, then taking that funding out of the hands of the government and putting it under direct control of the people who are most affected seems to do exactly the opposite of what you are accusing me of.
TBH, I am disturbed by the implication that black parents (or, unfortunately mothers only) don’t care about helping their children escape the poverty trap. I don’t think that is true at all. It isn’t what I hear when I talk to some of these kids. What I hear is a desire to make something of their lives, but a deep frustration that their opportunities are so limited by poverty, crime and dreadful schools. Heck, why do you think they spend so much time on the basketball court? I think rather these young moms are stuck in a very bad situation with no way out, and that children can escape through education.
I wonder how far you’d have got in life if you weren’t provided with an free, decent education by the state.
@Fraser Orr,
I wonder how far you’d have got in life if you weren’t provided with an free, decent education by the state.
Truthfully? Probably further than I’ve gotten, since I wouldn’t have wasted much of my “free, decent education” time being subjected to endless rote BS from unqualified dolts that were where they were because they loved lording it over people, and the only way they’d get to do that was by becoming a teacher and abusing children.
I taught myself to read, phonetically. My mother informed me that I was reading at about second or third grade level before I started kindergarten; I grew up in a household of educated, literate people who left books all over the place, and who provided me with a fairly elaborate and “highly enriched” environment. I can’t recall ever having been challenged in any way during my “free, decent education”; I was always above grade levels in everything except math. What I do recall is mostly boredom and constantly being held back because I had to wait for the other students to catch up.
Per the current idiocy, that’s all my parent’s fault because they read to me as a child and paid attention to how I was doing in school. And, that’s the difference, really: They cared enough to provide that “enriched environment”, and ensure I was doing my schoolwork.
You go out and look at the lives of those kids who’re not “doing well in school”, and I guarantee you that you’ll find a household without books, without reading material, and whose parents don’t emphasize education at all. Those are the real reasons for the failures in education, and you’re not fixing them by somehow giving people more of the education they’re already ignoring or outright wasting.
The problem isn’t in the schools so much as it’s in the students and the parents; you can’t fix things by somehow improving the schools or “educational opportunities”. That’s pure cargo-cult wishful thinking, of which there has already been far too much. You want to know why Jewish kids do so well in school? Look at the surrounding cultural matrix, wherein the reading of the Torah is primary to their faith. I don’t think there’s a practicing Jew out there who isn’t ferociously literate, and who demands the same from their kids. God help the poor little Jewish child that’s dyslexic, because life is hell for them in ways we gentiles can’t even begin to imagine.
Educational success is downstream from the culture of the family, the way they live, the things they emphasize. You have a family of non-readers who think school is a waste of time? Hey; guess what? You’ve got about as much chance of having a straight-A student come out of that milieu as I have of dating a supermodel. It ain’t happening. And, you ain’t fixing it by spending a few billion more on schools those kids aren’t going to appreciate and which they’ll like wreck out of frustration because you’re asking them to do things that they simply do not want to do, and that they really cannot quite fathom.
I used to work around a lot of those guys, and the looks I’d get when seen packing reading material to take advantage of while bored…? “Why you taking all those books, Sergeant K? You gonna read all them, while we’re there…?” Trying to explain that to them was literally like trying to explain color to someone who not only was blind, but who had no idea that sight existed.
And, that’s not an attack on the guys who were like that. There were a few whites and Hispanic types with the same issues, same sort of background. They weren’t stupid people, either… Some of those guys were far smarter than I was, when it came to observing and connecting events going on around us, then solving problems before they got big.
But, they weren’t ever going to be successful in a world delineated by “education”, because that was a good they simply did not value or appreciate. Because of that, they had about zero educational attainments or interests… Which did not make them any lesser as human beings, just different.
And, ill-adapted to the modern world around us.
How you fix that? Ain’t got a clue, but I’ll guarantee you this much: Mo’ bettah schools won’t do it. The schools are too far downstream from where the problems originate.
The good news is, 14 states have now passed legislation that allows public ed funding to follow the student to whichever private school the parents choose, and 32 other states have bills pending that would allow the same thing.
It’s progress. And, as I expected, the effort has been supported heavily in mostly-black areas where the public schools exist primarily for the benefit of the teachers and their unions.
It’s good to see the black culture wake up in greater numbers as they see the best path to get their kids a decent life.
When black America values education, wants good education for their kids, and then follows through on that? They’ll have good educations. It’s really that simple; so long as you try to impose that on the majority, they’ll passively resist it as hard as they can.
The real trick is changing the culture that’s upstream from the schools, the one that tells kids that being a good scholar is “acting white”, and to be avoided. Nothing else will have any effect; you can put billions upon billions into the schools, and you’ll get exactly what you’re getting today. Hell, maybe even worse… Kansas City would argue that might be the case.
It’s sad, it’s tragic, and it is to be utterly deplored. But, just like dealing with an alcoholic, you can’t fix it from the outside. The alky has to want to change, to give up the liquor. You can’t effectively make that happen from the outside, at all. There’s some drug out there that causes alcoholics to suddenly become averse to alcohol; it’s not Antabuse, it’s something else they prescribe for either epilepsy or Parkinson’s. Anyway, a nurse I know was telling me that one of the doctors she works with has a daughter who was a full-blown alcoholic before she hit thirty, and he somehow finagled getting her this experimental treatment for her epilepsy that he knew would have the effect of making it virtually impossible for her to drink.
Took about six months, and she was on meth and fentanyl. The root problems that were making her drink to excess weren’t dealt with, so she just moved on to drugs she could take. And, that’s the problem with all of this: You can’t “fix” people from the outside, whether it is chemical addictions or educational deficiencies that they don’t want to fix themselves.
Personally, I think that they ought to make remedial instruction available to everyone, completely blind to color or background; if you need it, you need it. Then, if you don’t take advantage of it, well… Let nature take its course; do not ever do anything as stupid as “Affirmative Action”. Help people fix their problems and deal with their deficiencies in education, but don’t ever lower the standards to “help them succeed”… Because, that ain’t success, for anyone involved. It’s a death sentence for a society that does that, because the promotion of the incompetent and useless simply because they have the right Pantone color to their skin…? Utterly inimical to anything at all egalitarian or just.
Great! Because that’s what these efforts of several large black orgs are accomplishing. They’re pushing it themselves in many cities. The parents have had it with what the outsiders have been providing, and are working to rid themselves of the pink-haired ladies of the NEA who teach that everyone’s gender is fluid and math is racist.
I don’t think it is true that the parents don’t care at all, but some fault must lie with them. After all, if the children of recent immigrants can manage in many cases to perform as well or better, what factor could cause this aside from the parents? What disadvantages do black children have that these children do not?
And why is it that some black children do manage to go to good schools and get good educations? Surely it is more to do with the actions of their parents than anything else.
By the way, by the above I am not meaning to say that it is just “black parents” who do not care much about their children’s educations, I am talking about any parents. I do not think that race is especially relevant, except to the extent that it is considered relevant in such policies as affirmative action, in which case the impact on people of the race these policies “benefit” must be considered.
The biggest mistake the United States government ever made in relation to the tribes was to copy the Mexican and Spanish practice of handing out free food.
We have all seen Westerns with the “corrupt government officials” (and they often were corrupt – although their corruption made little real difference as it was the PRINCIPLE that was wrong) cheating the tribespeople of their free food, free medicine and so on – but it was the principle of handing this stuff in the first place that was wrong.
The Papal States (when there were Papal States) were known to have some of the worst poverty in Europe – why so? Because of the handing out of free food (and so on) by Popes acting on the example of the old Roman Emperors (the “great classist” Mary Beard says the problem with Ancient Rome was that it did not have ENOUGH “social services”, that it should have had MORE welfare – this shows the state of modern academia, the same people who nod with approval at the, utterly insane, “reforms” of the Emperor Diocletian – crippling taxes, price control edicts, state factories, tying people to their professions of their parents, tying peasants to the land as serfs, and-so-on) . This is condemned in “Cato’s Letters” and other writings the Founding Fathers of the United States knew well – yet the government they created eventually started to hand out free stuff to the tribes.
If “Uncle Sam” is going to give you free stuff, since 1934 via your own elected Tribal Council (“Democratic Socialism” at work -for it is the tribe that owns the Reservation and so on) why do anything yourself?
Whether it is Ancient Rome or the Pine Ridge Reservation today – such a policy produces an idle and criminal mob – ready to turn to violence at the drop of hat, because the stuff of other people is theirs by right, by the the doctrine of “Social Justice”.
This has what has been done to the tribal groups of Australia – and the proposal of the Australian government would have made it worse, even more race-based-welfare.
Colli said:
I am in violent agreement with you, here. The problem is cultural, and it’s very much akin to the “cargo cult” phenomenon of post-WWII Pacific Islanders. As I point out, it’s the homes of these “poor students” that are the problem, not the schools they go to. Too many white “munificent benefactors” and black parents alike think of the schools as this magic box that they put the kids into, and they come out educated. ‘Taint so, McGee; the schools are downstream of where the problems are, namely that these kids do not see books, or “enrichment opportunities” in their homes during early childhood, nor are they disciplined appropriately to succeed in school-like environments. I used to go out and visit the homes of my soldiers to ensure that they were fit for habitation and all that jazz; the sad fact is, probably about 50-60% of the black homes, and maybe 10-20% of the other ethnicities had very little in the way of “enrichment” going on for the kids. No books; no “smart toys”, things that would challenge them and trigger intellectual development. You’d never see the stuff you’d see in a middle-class white home, like easels for painting, musical instruments, games…
And, that’s the problem: The parents “intellectual life” didn’t exist, so neither did their kids. I suspect that it’s more a question of adaptation than anything else; in “the wild”, i.e., Africa, those kids would be living in a rural village environment, and be constantly challenged by daily life. Urban US environment? No such animal, literally.
I don’t think it’s necessarily a thing of “Blacks are stupid and uncultured, ‘mmkay?”, but more one of “Blacks aren’t well-adapted to the modern world of abstraction; they don’t prepare their kids for success in it, perhaps because of innate nature, or perhaps because of not knowing how to do it, not having “broken the code”.” The “successful” black families I met and came to know were just like mine… Mom and Dad read them books, had toys around that challenged the kids, played games with them growing up… Lots and lots of “environment enrichment”. The ones that had problems didn’t do that stuff, and I don’t think it was a question of actual functional intelligence, I believe it was down to a different adaptational form, one that’s unfortunately not appropriate to the environment these folks find themselves in. If you come from a family lineage that doesn’t emphasize literacy and scholastic success? Guess what? Odds are, you don’t know what “right” looks like for that environment, and you’re just going to keep on perpetuating the problem down the generations.
One also has to keep in mind that the slaver bastards who had a lot to do with setting the stage for all of this deliberately didn’t “breed for smart”, culling any slave that showed intellectual potential and or interest in things like literacy. Blacks have folkways that preclude education in part because that got a bunch of their ancestors “sold South” or outright killed.
The problem ain’t intractable, but we’re going about dealing with it improperly. And, just throwing money at the “magic box” school system won’t help one damn bit… The issues are at home, far upstream from the schools, and they begin the moment Mommy and Daddy (if he’s around…) bring baby back from the hospital. No little mobiles over the crib? No books? No bedtime stories, lovingly read to them with Mommy and Daddy helping the little tykes sound out the words? Nobody teaching them how to count, learn their alphabet? Reinforcing what they learn at school, when they start? Ensuring they work hard, behave properly?
You’ll never fix this until all those things and more are a standard part of the homelife for these children. The schools can’t undo the first five-six years of intellectual impoverishment.
I know a family that has two adopted African kids that they raised as though they were their own. Those kids are entirely the same as any of their rural white peers, aside from skin tone. They do pretty damn well in school, and they probably “act white” to their urban African-American peers, but ya know what? They’re well-educated and primed for success in our cultural milieu. All due to the parenting…