Threat

This is, essentially, the Angry Black Man thread.

I would say that the signal difference between the ordinary Joe and the Angry Black Man is that the ABM wants to keep whitey on the hook. Specifically, he wants to extract something from the white man that the white man doesn't want to give up himself. Perhaps a better way to say it is that he wants whites to pay an existential penalty. It is not enough for whites to meet blacks halfway. The Angry Black Man wants the Guilty White Man and he wants that relationship permanently so the black man can play his race card arbitrarily and have it accepted without question.

Again, I understand where he's coming from, but I am not particularly sympathetic.

I mention all of this in the context of Obama because I believe Obamian rhetoric is assuring Americans that our problems are not going to require us to play that tired old game between angry blacks and angry whites. It's something many Americans have realized on their own, but he's another, larger symbol of that equanimity. My personal opinion is that Michael Jordan was the man who broke that barrier more than a decade ago.

The matter of threat is important, which is to say at the heart of the American racial dilemma, what threat is implicit in a black man's success? I would say that our society has matured to the point at which most people agree that a black man's success should have no limit and they aren't threatened by it - rather that they encourage it. But none of that changes the fact that competition can be fierce and even ugly.

There are two more points I want to make that are related in terms of the way this anger spreads.

The first is the rather obvious one illustrated by the comic which is that the Angry Black Man, like the Angry White Man digs his own grave by polluting his own character. I think it's impossible not to be mad at America if you are Angry, and obviously you are going to be mad at folks for not seeing things your way. That's going to get you in trouble in your personal life, and of course you'll have to blame the enemy. 

My second curious observation is that the black vs white battle may be fundamentally and permanently imbalanced. Racial bigotry, in theory, is equal to terrorism in that it works when a terrible example is made. That is to say it must be communicated to a wider audience. It's the difference between a murder and a lynching. But what about at the personal level? Let me provide an example that sprang to mind as soon as I wrote about fierce competition.

Two men, one black one white are hired into a company. They are rivals for promotion. Privately, the white man tells the black man that there is no way he's going to get beat by a nigger. But that white man tells nobody else in the company and acts in every way perceptible that he doesn't have a racist bone in his body. In other words there has been only one conscious racist action. Has he crippled the black man? There is only one way he can, which is if that single act undermines the black man's confidence.

This example makes it quite obvious, I think, that a black man's self-confidence is key which is my point. If he crumbles under that threat, there is no hope for him. That's precisely because that is the smallest threat possible. Both racism and anti-racism are enabled by network effects - you've got to tell somebody and somebody has to respond in kind. Neither white bigotry nor black self-confidence are worth a damn unless they are multiplied in the environment.

So here's the asymmetry. Ignoring self-confidence for a moment. What is a more accurate assessment of the environment? Is it more accurate to say that racism will echo and multiply or that anti-racism will echo and multiply? That assessment may be the kernel that either contestant uses to play their card. Which is to say people must evaluate the culture and decide whether or not it is robust enough to sustain meritocracy if and when a racist element is introduced. Americans, of course, do this all the time. But in survey after survey, for as far back as I can remember, blacks have always shown themselves to be more pessimistic. For the sake of brevity, blacks say that the prospects for racism to be sustained is high, whites say that the prospects for racism to be sustained is not high.  All sorts of cultures get evaluated. The NFL, the Congress, the local PTA, the car dealership, the supermarket. (And I would suggest that blacks evaluate more cultures than whites, as well as evaluate them more skeptically).

So the final question remains. What can the individual black person do, with regard to self-confidence, given a general black pessimism about the propensity for racism to be sustained? The answer is that absolute self-confidence is required regardless, because if the single private act wrecks you, you have no choice but to claim victimhood and attempt to communicate that meme, which, depending on the culture, can backfire or leave you indebted. The second choice is to reinforce the culture to sustain meritocracy and fairness, so that whether or not you have absolute self-confidence, you can rely on others to help remedy the situation. Clearly, we prefer a combination of both.

I could go on here. There are obviously complexities as you add different actors into the mix. But I did want to put this framework up to talk about how an Angry Black Man or Angry White Man, depending on the culture, can poison themselves by making assumptions about how the culture will respond to a racist act.  Implicit in any act of racism or anti-racism is an expectation of collaborators, and what you expect of your fellows really determines the effect your own self-confidence.

In conclusion, black fear of racism in the context of constant threat assessment can become a self-fulfilling prophesy. This is how 'subtle racism' has become a reality, because whites are doing the same kind of threat assessment. Everybody wants fair play, and everyone has a stake in meritocracy, but whatever gap there is between black aspiration and black achievement can become the racism gap. If few people expect a black President is possible but most everybody expects a black Vice President is possible, that difference becomes 'subtle racism'. It isn't until the self-confidence and trust in the environment is established that such differentials in assessment become negligible.