Staying in Your Lane

There’s probably nothing more annoying than listening to political drones preach on some social issue clearly out of their wheelhouse. Alas, the public pulpit is now largely the domain of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Silicon Valley oligarchs.

The prevailing cultural winds now blow from a very woke establishment left.

Beyond obvious political bias, the public and digital airways now feature a pernicious narrative targeted on guilty whites and gullible blacks. In a rapid succession of sensibilities, we see heliographic films on Jackie Robinson, Jack Johnson, Muhammed Ali, Miles Davis, and Sammy Davis; three jocks, a musician, and a tap dancer.

Political pandering and condescension needs a big public stage.

American Public Broadcasting, the largest government propaganda network in the world, is now a forum for racial tropes. Public television (350 stations) reaches 75% of American households. Public radio blankets 50 states with well over 1,000 stations. Public television is also the nanny state nanny, providing Orwellian cartoon programing for young minds and insomniac parents 24/7. Ironically, PBS and NPR management and audience is a demographic of guilty zealots, mainly liberal white women with a spritz of fey gents, countrywide.

PBS is clearly America’s “progressive” baby sitter, a kind of national pre-school.

Concurrently, the public airways seldom report on, or sponsor documentaries on, professionally diverse black role models; genuine achievers such as Clarence Thomas, Ben Carson, Condi Rice, Candace Owens, or Thomas Sowell, to name a few. Were Sowell a beatified liberal, he probably would have a Nobel Prize for economics by now.

Nor will you see any documentaries on the dark side of African American culture, now a social stew that would choke a maggot.

Athletics, entertainment, and street “culture” have become separatist ghettos, servile urban Democrat political slums dominated by; tattooed/pierced punks, obese women, vulgar victims, athletes, “influencers,” hip hoppers, and rappers.

        George Floyd, a skell or habitual offender by any measure, is now an iconic global martyr, canonized before the “black lives matter” blue screen.

Concurrently, black punks will probably take the lives of six to eight thousand other American blacks in 2021. No one will ever know the names of those perps or victims. In New York City alone, thousands more black babies will be aborted than born alive.

No one will ever know their names either.

If facts matter, homicide and abortion numbers should go in the books as a rolling African American pandemic. No one, especially black liberals, should be able to cry “BLM” without having their pants catch fire. Taking a knee today is the sporting and cultural equivalent of diving into an empty pool.

Self-inflicted genocide is aggravated by social recidivism, a retreat to segregated ghettos. The modern black separatist meme originally bled out of American prisons with the Nation of Islam, a hustler’s cult wearing an Islamic burka. The resegregation of public schools was a more subtle process where academic quality and performance in black America were thrown under the bus in the name of civil rights. There are no “A” list, elite, black high schools or colleges anymore. Lowering the academic bar for blacks in the name of equity, amounts to making inferiority and incompetence a graduation requirement.

In contrast, performance and talent are standard for professional and college athletics. Making the team, alas, comes at the expense of social skills and academic achievement. The “cake-and eat-it” model for the black youngsters cultivates cultural, social, and academic inferiority. No intelligent premier black athlete or scholar aspires to matriculate or teach at a segregated, or inferior, university where the predicate is skin color.

Smart black athletes go to Notre Dame, not Howard. Separate inferior schools, segregated by skin color, is the worst kind of government subsidized bigotry. Apparently, the only unique feature of black academies today is the marching band.

Credentialism, across the board, is the new scholarship.

The certificate, diploma, or degree is a token signifying nothing. Scholarship, skill, and even literacy is forfeit to the woke void. Testing for subject competence is a symptom of “white” (sic) privilege. Dumbing down is the new up.

The racism of low expectations is now a cash crop too at national institutions like PBS and NPR, where a largely white, liberal establishment exploits and manipulates the emotions of the gullible, especially athletes. The PBS message to young blacks is clear; the only lanes open for African Americans are basketball courts, football gridirons, boxing rings, or recording studios.

The recent Casius Clay/Muhammed Ali biopic, now on view at PBS, provides a tale of the trope.

Ken Burns would have us believe that “greatness” is a semi-literate boxer who makes a career beating other black men to amuse whites: or “greatness” is a black man who gives his fortune to hustlers or religious cults; or maybe “greatness” is a palooka who stays in the ring long enough to have his lights punched out; or maybe greatness is a priapic baby daddy, not a father or husband; or possibly “greatness” is a black man who spends his golden years as a brain damaged mute, drooling into his oatmeal and signing autographs for chump change.

Ali stayed in his lane too long, unfortunately, because he was incapable of doing anything else.

Ali with Malcom X. (Photo by Bob Gomel for LIFE)

Ali was not great yesterday any more than jocks or rap minstrels are the “greatest” today. Clay was used, first by a white Nashville cartel and then Ali was used by black hustlers like Elijah Mohamed and Don King. Clay was never his own man. He was a slave to a big gate and a child-like ego that never allowed reflection or self-awareness, confusing notoriety with character.

When low personal standards or expectations become contagious, communal or generational; “systemic” isolation is inevitable. The modern American ghetto is a self-inflicted wound.

It does not take a village to raise a child; a child needs the deuce that produced. A stable family is the bedrock of all societies. No state subsidized pre-school or CPB cartoons can do a better job than two competent, responsible parents.

Baby daddies and single mothers will not do.

Adam Smith wrote the book on social integration. He argued that prudent men devote their energies first to a successful family and then to building local social and economic institutions. By doing so, men and women, in their own ways, contribute to the common weal and ultimately a successful community and country.

Muhammad Ali or George Floyd are not heroes or role models for any youngster; black, white, or pink. Such icons are especially suspect when elevated by condescending, guilty or pandering white liberals. The assumption that blacks cannot learn, earn, speak for themselves, or succeed without “white” help, is a social shibboleth that underwrites permanent inequality.

The politics of low expectations lowers the bar for everyone.