Standing athwart history yelling, “Please don’t hurt me.”

Regarding John Derbyshire’s Taki essay, “The Talk: Nonblack Version:

(6) As you go through life, however, you will experience an ever larger number of encounters with black Americans. Assuming your encounters are random—for example, not restricted only to black convicted murderers or to black investment bankers—the Law of Large Numbers will inevitably kick in. You will observe that the means—the averages—of many traits are very different for black and white Americans.

I wonder how uniformly true this is.

My family’s period of downward mobility put me in social contact with large numbers of blacks, both rural and urban.  This was less true at college, perhaps, but my school did have a robust affirmative action program that boosted their numbers, and the campus was in an urban setting cheek-by-jowl with one of early public housing projects of some notoriety.

While my experiences there were what you might expect, and were salient enough that, once I was exposed to race realism, I nodded and thought, “yup, sounds right,” the averages were not so blindingly obvious that I would have come up with them on my own.  As a child, most people, black and white, seemed both dim and hostile; at college, I had less cause to interact with people in ways that would reinforce any generalizations.

But once I began my professional career, both my work and social life have been notable for the near absence of any but IWSBs.  Gross affirmative action doesn’t seem to be much of an issue except in the civil service,and even there the diversity slots seem to be confined to support and administrative functions.

A quick search of my past zip codes (there are a lot of them) on City-Data.com shows that some of them have surprisingly high concentrations of minorities.  Either they have become that way since I lived there, or the neighborhoods are segregated even within zip codes.

If my experience is typical, then I would argue that most typical middle and upper-middle class people, into which category the young Derbyshires certainly fall, will come into routine contact with very few blacks, and most of these will be IWSBs.*

(10c) If planning a trip to a beach or amusement park at some date, find out whether it is likely to be swamped with blacks on that date (neglect of that one got me the closest I have ever gotten to death by gunshot).

(10d) Do not attend events likely to draw a lot of blacks.

(10e) If you are at some public event at which the number of blacks suddenly swells, leave as quickly as possible.

This happened to me last summer at the large water and roller coaster park at our neighboring city (in what appears to be a very nice section of town, very different from the zoo, which is in a desperately crappy section of town).  It was the Fourth of July weekend, and we were re-entering the park after our evening meal picnic.  I noticed then that the proportion of blacks coming in was a lot higher than it had been throughout the day.  (The park dropped its ticket prices in the evening, I think.)

I don’t know if there was any trouble in the park as a result of this.  Our own experience was uneventful, but what happened later was notable.  We stayed for the final firework show, and streamed out to our car with the massive crowd.  Now, I don’t know if this is actually written down anywhere, but my own driving experience has taught me that in stop-and-go traffic, the normal rules of right-of-way are suspended.  The courteous thing to do at any merging of traffic is to alternate as if at an all-way stop sign.  But that night, as I pulled to the end of the aisle to merge with the road leaving the park, I was confronted with a lengthy line of . . . black motorists.  And they would not let me in.  And ostentatiously too, accelerating to close any gap that might seem inviting.  I had to wait for a white driver to come by before I could move.

(10h) Do not act the Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress, e.g., on the highway.

Derb has added some nuance to this bullet in a subsequent article, but the point I want to make here is that his example, at the link, screams “Do not act the Good Samaritan to anybody involved in a domestic dispute,” and that the advice applies regardless of the race(s) of the combatants.

Farewell, NR

I subscribed to National Review for twenty years.  I wish I could say that its late mendacity and cowardice drove me to cancel my subscription, but the truth is I let it lapse about four years ago.  I wasn’t angry at it.  I just finally realized that its issues, which I once read avidly cover-to-cover, were stacking up.  It just didn’t seem relevant anymore.  Its pages seemed filled with Republican trivia – lengthy profiles of politicians, most of whom disappeared into obscurity.  And as the housing bubble began to deflate, and the wars turned pointless, I grimly recalled how wrong NR had been.  I only have enough time to read stuff that makes me smarter, and NR didn’t any longer.

* During my own stint in middle management, our organization was vertically integrated at groups of a couple of hundred, and also had a vigorous social life.  This brought my family into contact with far more blacks than they did anywhere else.  But this was the exception, and even here the blacks were selected according to general (i.e. white) cognitive standards.