The climax of the civil rights campaign produced a black separatist movement that has endured for half a century:
It emerged at exactly the moment that the two signal civil rights acts passed congress in 1964-65 (the public accommodations act and the voting rights act).
I think the reason for the sudden rise of black separatism was anxiety among black Americans about the prospect of being formally invited to participate in what was then American common culture. By the late 1960s even colleges were chartering new, separate student unions (at the demand of black students). The sad irony of this has been lost to history. But in effect, by that time a large segment of the black population had opted out either actively or mentally from trying to join the then-dominant culture. The gulf between the two cultures has only grown wider since then, egged on by a foolish white-sponsored “diversity” campaign which had imposed the ridiculous idea that a common culture in one nation is unnecessary.
The result is a permanently oppositional black culture with an elaborate ideology of endless grievance and a guilt-tripped white political culture held hostage by it and pandering endlessly to it — and sandwiched in between those two dispositions is a whole lot of really bad behavior. The least you can say about the four incidents involving Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice is that they involved some degree of ambiguity about what was actually going on, and in probably all those cases, at least, death was not caused by sheer malice. The same is not true about the case of Zemir Begic, or of the many people victimized during last year’s “knockout” game fad, or indeed the astounding number of people being gunned down regularly on the streets of Chicago.
I don’t think we’re capable of making these distinctions anymore, and surely not of doing anything constructive about them. Instead, we just appear to be careening toward a new and different kind of civil war.
James Howard Kunstler is an interesting character. Even though he is still a registered Democrat (if my memory serves me right) and rather lefty on a lot of issues, he seems to be slowly falling into the orbit of the alt right. I think he even published a piece for Radix Journal sometime within the last year.
He is an interesting example of someone who is approaching the alt right from a left-wing doubt of society (doubts about technological progress) as opposed to a right-wing libertarian approach which was doubting the idea of social progress.
As for the article itself, I would not be surprised if there is full blown war in America by 2020.
I always despised Kunstler, but he does seem to be coming around. Of course, he’s still a prick. He’ll probably be like Malcomb Muggeridge, who was an obnoxious left-wing atheist, saw the light, and then went on to become an obnoxious right-wing Christian.