Not long ago, I asked the rhetorical question about how much is six pounds of racism. The question is a starting point for investigating how much the question of race should be considered when looking at the prospects for what is now a majority middle class black American population. I contend that the black race has progressed into an integrated set of Americans for whom racial discussions become increasingly pointless, and needlessly aggravating. I perceive my opponents from the Left and Progressive political viewpoints tend to believe they have the facts in their favor about what race is, how it operates and why it must be countered through public policy and political watchdogeration. My enemy combatant du jour, Mr. deVega of the Respectable Negroes, whose opinion and engagement I respect (although I wish A. Charles were around) plays the foil to all that is Cobbian and wise. Sometimes he makes points, sometimes he annoys, but he is never stupid and never boring. So we engage to quibble over exactly how many white supremacists dance on the head of the pin of black pride and therefore crumble our race's ability to achieve its world historical destiny.
As always, I play against the predominant ethos of my black communal upbringing, that of the Race Man of the Talented Tenth, always looking to establish political unity and keep Charlie on the hook by subordinating myself to the black collective and using my talents for their racial uplift. I do so not out of any sense of racial treachery or bad blood but from the logical consequences of achievement by those very same standards which today's debased society finds increasingly difficult to defend. That is to say, I became a Respectable Negro a long time ago and found other prospective Negroes unable and unwilling to undertake the same disciplines in word and deed - instead the Left and Progressive vanguards of black politics have taken to excuse making for the Down Low of The New Black, which has much more need for speaking out on racism, yet encounters orders of magnitude less than any generation in American history. And so I have found common cause as a conservative black among the larger American Conservative Movement and find myself at the nexus of some namecalling and controversy which I engage from time to time because, hell I have the free time and curiosity.
So today in my black racial trust-busting suit, I insert class only as a start and suggest we agree to finagle some numbers about the relative friction of relative racisms on the relative success of our relatives. I say only as a start to re-emphasize my emphasis on diversity / market segmentation / demographic reality as contrasted to race, although not always as a substitute for race. My operating theory is that if you divided America up into 66 demographic profiles, as they do at the PRIZM group at Nielsen, a group I've long been aware of now going on 20 years, then African Americans might span 8-12 of those groups. I happen to know that I lived in the third group from the top 'Money & Brains' back in 1988 when I moved to Hermosa Beach, CA, and following Massey & Denton my mantra was 'racial geography is destiny'. My attitude was, now that it's illegal to discriminate in housing, and you know there are no jobs in the ghetto, why would anybody stay? Today I find myself repeating such rhetoric in talking about the masses of black Americans who live and raise their families in the heart of Dixie. You catch my drift.
I bring up PRIZM because I've dealt professionally with demographics and psychographics for Philip Morris back in the early 90s and I was fascinated to discover how much time and effort is generally made to get Americans to part with their disposable income. This was going on at the time that 'corporate diversity' was just getting started, something tangential to both marketing and race. At any rate, there are very serious reasons why black Americans smoke menthol cigarettes much to their detriment - even though they may not think so. And I firmly believe that a smart enough message and marketing campaign can be made to get people to be loyal to all sorts of ideas and products. Why then, given all of the real demographic and psychographic realities of the broad variety of Americans, do we, especially anti-racists, dumb everything down to race and racism? It is because our discussion lacks nuance. You would have thunk as the Inuit have x number of words for snow and ice, that we would have a similar facility with race, but we don't. It's all just institutional racism, white privilege, white supremacy and racism, which all pretty much mean the same thing if your'e talking about black folks. It hurts, so don't *do* that. But how much does it hurt, and how much should any of us be bothered with that hurt? Moreover, how are things getting better or worse? Nobody wants to seem to want to say, or maybe DeVega has been saying such nuanced things all along and we've just thrown his Stuart Halls out with the bathwater in the same way he throws out the economic writings of Thomas Sowell.
I'd like to think, as a professional in private enterprise, that my way of thinking about all this is superior to that of those of professionals in academia. But that's just me. Let's get down to it.
So here's how to read my SWAG of the race. If you live on the Hill, then you represent 4% of all black America. Racism in all of its manifestations hold you down to 95% of your full potential, thus the Racial Friction Factor is 5. Can you read the second line? Of course you can. If you live in the Burbs, you are 11% of black America, and you're only cooking with 9 of your 10 burners because of those dad blamed racists and their legacy of oppression.
|
demo |
% of all |
RFF |
|
Hill |
4 |
5 |
|
Burb |
11 |
10 |
|
Hood |
45 |
20 |
|
Ghetto |
32 |
30 |
|
Projects |
19 |
35 |
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