The Stubborn Truth of Black Social Breakdown

Heather MacDonald, in her latest column on the Jena 6 case, argues that demonstrators and the press are avoiding key facts underlying the episode. There remain serious unresolved issues surrounding the proceedings, and MacDonald's clear to suggest that if prosecutorial misconduct is found, the most serious penalties - including disbarment - should be considered appropriate.

Yet MacDonald's also clear to identify a lot of backgound information that protestors (celebrants?) are conveniently overlooking in the controversy:

The idea behind the protests and the politicians’ exploitation of them is that just as these five youths were overcharged, the hundreds of thousands of blacks in prison are also the victims of systemic abuse. But for institutional racism, the black prison population would be much smaller.

This is an old complaint, for which no proof has ever been offered, Hillary Clinton’s irresponsible statement notwithstanding. The usual evidence in support of the charge that the criminal laws discriminate against blacks is the far stiffer sentences for selling and possessing crack cocaine compared with powdered cocaine. But that colorblind sentencing regimen, which dates from 1986, was a heartfelt effort to protect the overwhelmingly black victims of crack, not to penalize them. Black liberals such as Congressman Charles Rangel were loudest in sounding the alarm about the effects of crack in the black ghetto. Not even the most deluded racial apologists have ever explicitly suggested that racial bias motivated Congress’s efforts to combat a drug that results in much higher rates of violence among dealers and users, quicker and more onerous addiction, and more emergency room visits than its powdered cousin.

The reason that the black incarceration rate is the highest in the country is that blacks have the highest crime rate—by a long shot. Don’t trust the police, prosecutors, or judges to give a fair picture of black crime? Then go where the bodies are. Los Angeles is representative. In the first seven months of 2007, blacks in Los Angeles were murdered at a rate ten times that of whites and Asians. Who’s killing them? It’s not whites and Asians. While a minor proportion of the assailants of blacks are Hispanic, the vast majority are black themselves. Nationally, blacks commit murder at about eight times the frequency of whites. In New York, any given violent crime is 13 times more likely to have been committed by a black person than by a white person, according to the reports of victims and witnesses. Though they are only 24 percent of the city’s population, blacks committed 68.5 percent of all murders, rapes, robberies, and assaults in New York last year. Whites, who make up 34.5 percent of New Yorkers, committed only 5.3 percent of violent crimes. These ratios are similar across the country. In Los Angeles, blacks committed 41 percent of all robberies in 2001, according to victims’ descriptions, though they constitute only 11 percent of the city’s population. Robbery victims identified whites, who make up 30 percent of the Los Angeles population, just 4 percent of the time.

MacDonald also points out the fundamental hypocrisies shadowing the advocates for racial justice:

No one in the Jena stampede dares whisper a word about black crime, because it undercuts the portrait of a victimized race. You can listen to every protest across the country glorifying the “Jena Six” and you will never hear an acknowledgement of the massive social breakdown that is the black crime rate: no mention of the violence in inner-city schools that black students commit overwhelmingly; no mention of the rising homicides in midsize cities that young black males commit when they feel “disrespected.” It is not racism that is putting black men in jail; it’s their own behavior.

What about the broader significance of Jena? Again, assuming for the sake of argument that this minuscule Louisiana town seethes with the crudest bigotry, held uniquely by whites against integration-seeking blacks, is Jena’s supposed state of affairs a microcosm of America? To the contrary: there is not a single elite institution in the country that is not twisting itself into knots in favor of African-Americans. Every minimally selective college is desperately seeking to enroll more black students. Boosting black enrollment requires drastically lowering a college’s admissions criteria to overcome the intractable 200-point SAT gap between black and white high school students, but every college institutes such double standards for the sake of “diversity.” Any black student who graduates from high school with decent grades and respectable SATs will leapfrog over thousands of more qualified white and Asian students right into the Ivy League. Blacks are also the hottest commodity for exclusive private schools that serve as training grounds for the Ivies. Andover, Exeter, Choate, and every other fancy prep and day school practice the same double standards in their eagerness to admit African-American students. After college, law schools, business schools, medical schools, engineering schools, and others accept black students whose test scores would disqualify them if they were white or Asian.

The preferences continue into the professions. Wall Street law firms annually flagellate themselves over their lack of proportional representation of black associates and partners, even though the number of blacks who graduate from law school with grades and bar-exam scores comparable with the firms’ white hires is negligible. The lack of comparably qualified black candidates does not stop the law partnerships from hiring black associates, though. Corporations have saddled themselves with massive “diversity” bureaucracies whose only function is to justify hiring and promoting less qualified African-Americans and Hispanics. Newspapers, TV stations, and advertisers put enormous pressure on themselves to have blacks on their staffs and to show black faces to the world.

In short, the opportunities for blacks to roar ahead in the economy if they stay out of trouble, study, and apply themselves are legion, but the numbers taking advantage of these opportunities are not. California’s state superintendent of public instruction broke a longstanding taboo this August by pointing out that middle-class black students in the state score worse on math and English than poor white and Asian students—a disparity that applies across the country. The usual poverty excuse for black underachievement does not hold up.

The Jena protesters will go home in denial of these truths. In fact, the purpose of such mass celebrations—and that is indeed what they are—is to make sure that attention stays far away from the actual problems holding blacks back. Astronomical rates of black criminality are not the only topic that the Jena rallies have obscured. No one wallowing in Jena promotion has had the courage to speak about an even more important crisis, the breakdown of marriage. The nearly 70 percent national illegitimacy rate for blacks—a number that can approach 90 percent in inner cities—is a cataclysm. Its consequences go far beyond the harm to individual black children—especially boys—who grow up without fathers. The real poison of the marriage crisis is the message it sends to young men about personal responsibility. The first duty in civil society is toward one’s own children; everything else is built around it. But when boys are raised without any expectations that they will have to support their children and marry the mother of those children, they fail to learn the most basic lesson about responsibility. They also are freed from the civilizing force of the marriage requirement, which pressures young men to become attractive mates. With enough support, individuals can overcome the moral perils of the illegitimacy culture, but given the prevalence of black crime and disaffiliation from the working world, it’s clear that not enough young men are finding ways to do so.

The race industry will try to keep Jena in the media and political spotlight for as long as possible, and to reinforce the notion that this episode exemplifies blacks’ situation in America.

Read the whole thing. I was hoping to see an analysis by MacDonald on this issue. There's virtually no analytical discussion of the Jena 6 case from an objective, big picture perspective.

In my previous post on the case ("Jena and Race Politics"), I cited a CBS News story whose title completely captured the national media's sensational obssession with race in America: "Jena and the Son of Jim Crow: Case Shows Racism Still Pervades The Nation — Not Just The South. There's very little (if any) MSM reporting offering perspectives on Jena outside of this "continuing racism" consensus.

Yet as MacDonald argues (as well as many other commentators), continuing outcries against racial discrimination reflect the ideology of victimization, and they do little to promote the kind of initiatives that will truly advance the cause of black justice and social mobility.