Chaitanya Jyothi Museum Opening, 2000

RAMANAM
In the Name of The Father, and of The Son and of The Holy Spirit, Amen.

Countrymen,

ORBIS NON SUFFICIT
SOLUS DEUS SUFFICIT

In February of 1966, on a beautiful, cold, sunny day, snow on the ground, I visited Reinhold Niebuhr and his wife Ursula — English-born and Professor of Early Christian History at Barnard College whose lectures I heard while in utero — at their apartment on Riverside Drive. During my in utero lecture auditing, my father served as student assistant to Rheiny.

Rheiny invited me to accompany him on his morning walk. He, being of elder years, and the sidewalk snowy and uneven, held my arm. Walking north along Riverside Drive towards Grant’s Tomb, he asked me what I thought about “this integration business.” I said I thought it would be accomplished easily and quickly. He said, no, it will be hard and take a very long time. There was gloom in his tone and he was not pleased with my answer. I think he thought me flippant and ignorant.

I think we both were right and talking about different things. I was talking about black — then Negro — people who were from good families, regardless of rich or poor, educated themselves and got on with their lives as regular Americans. Rheiny was talking about Negroes who were from little or no families, who eschewed education as “white” and set themselves against America and Americans even though they were both.

MLK got his wish.  Americans did assess American Blacks by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin and found the great majority of them to be repulsive, dangerous and despicable … and also beyond redemption.

Update 1: What Do The Ten Most Dangerous Cities In America Have In Common

Update 2: Confessions Of A Public Defender

Update 3: Race Relations And Law Enforcement

Update 4: Moynihan’s Scissors

Update 5: The Flawed “Missing Man” Theory  I commented:

The War on Poverty was waged by white supremacist liberals, who reproduced themselves markedly. The portion of the black demographic that always had been layabouts took the bait so they could do even more of what they always had done. Sanger, the white supremacist liberal par excellence, targeted that demographic. When did layabouts every think?

There is a black demographic that works, always has, and has fine American families. Perhaps they know what it would take to turn those deep-history layabouts into citizens.

Update 6: The religion of racism, and here.

Update 7: James Huffman: The Real Cause Of Campus Racism

Update 8: One wonders whether urban blacks, left to self-policing, as they are now, will wise up and actually self-police.  First they would have to self-rely, one would think.  Could they do that?  Would they do that?

Years ago (1966), on a cold February morning and while visiting him at his home, Reinhold Niebuhr asked to hold my arm while he walked on Riverside Drive.  He was diminished by stroke but lucid and limber enough to walk slowly.  Ursula — the other Dr. Niebuhr, as she styled herself — told me to take care and I replied I would return him in good shape, and did.

Out there in the brisk river air, Rheiny asked me what I thought of this integration business, as he put it.  [The US Army was long-since integrated, the first major USA institution to do so.]  I replied that I thought it would happen fairly easily and quickly.  He grew hot on the spot, stopped and whirled on me, saying, “No, no, no, it will take a very, very long time, many decades at least.  You do not understand the depth of the problem.”  He took me as breezy.

I invited him to continue walking, we did.  He spoke more about the depth of the problem I did not understand, wanted to keep talking about that.  I just let him talk, and then I took him home, where Ursula greeted us with remonstrance at Rheiny for being too long in the cold air.  I never returned and was never invited to return.

We both were right but about different facets of the problem, mine about employment, his about a socially and politically critical mass of self-reliance.

Afflatus

Update 9: First they wanted integration.  Now they want segregation.  To hell with them.

Update 10: Probably someone has already dilated upon this observation long since: descendants of USA house slaves have skills/intellectual frame of reference bequeathed by their forebears, who had to manage owners’ households, to make their way in the world and in consequence are self-sufficient, working Americans; while, descendants to field slaves had passed to them no such skills/intellectual frame of reference by their forebears and were/are the focus of the federal/state dole, to keep them quiet, which manifest evidence — then and now — illumines as a forlorn hope.

Actually, putting them on the dole recapitulates the same decision criteria slave owners used to discern between house and field slaves: the ones who could think and manage came to the house, the rest went to the barracks and fields.  The dole (The Great Society) is the modern concomitant of sending the non-self-reliant ones to the field.

There is substance to the Bloys/HBO intention here, but it is not as they want it to be.

Update 11: Black Americans: The Organized Left’s Expendable Shock Troops

Update 12: L. Todd Wood: Black America Blames White America

Update 13: Affirmative Action is a declension of the Soviet espionage term of art Active Measures. It means getting inside, subverting an adversary’s OODA Loop.

Affirmative Action/Active Measures is the battle plan of choice for the weaker side in asymmetrical warfare.

Anybody who wants special treatment because of some quality they possess is asking to be enslaved. We do not have titles of nobility in the USA.

AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA