Wright provides, as Obama has exploited, an opportunity to talk about race in this country, but there are apparently none courageous enough in the commentariat to seize it as it is, instead using it to reiterate the same farcical resentment-saturated rhetoric that mires its intended beneficiaries in the pathologies that truly “keep them down.” The fact is, we have public education in this country. White people who grow fat on Cheetos cannot be healthy and cannot blame their malnutrition on a racial or economic conspiracy. Any individual who wishes to understand his world must learn a basic curriculum of skills and knowledge, without which he cannot understand the signs, cannot operate the machines, cannot navigate the legal relations – this is true whether he is a Ukranian peasant in 1938 or a bureaucrat in the Sultan’s court in 1710 or a cobbler in Guangdon during the Southern Tang period. If such an individual chooses instead to play video games and hang out on street corners, they will not be competent in their or any society, except perhaps in a tribal hunter-gatherer society successful enough to support non-contributing members, in which case these members will probably be slaves in any case. If you want children – the wild uneducated raw human animals who must be guided and nurtured and disciplined into subjects or citizens – you must parent them; although a certain amount of the adult is inherent in the child in the quantity Personality, the adult will be childlike unless he is guided toward adulthood. A good way to achieve this is by having two committed parents who raise the child over the course of human being’s long developmental period.
These are basic strategies that must obtain under any political system or any historical circumstance. If instead a group of people is allowed in large part to continue to avoid these responsibilities, they will simply become people who are incompetent. They will rely on superstition to fill the holes in wisdom and explain away their incompetence, which they do not understand. They will produce criminality, which in reality is just a function of assholery (criminality is not a result of maltreatment; it is a result of the absence of the nurturing required to loose the bonds of egotism – a person who is not taught this will simply more likely commit violence or fraud against his fellow beings, to whom he will attribute insufficient regard). They will become the subjects of more competent people, upon whom they will depend, and who must control them, because they will remain quasi-wild, which is to say, Childlike.
All this is self-evident, and should be said aloud, as Cosby and his partner pyschiatrist are saying it allowed. The Wright-Obama moment ought to be seized – as Obama sort of seized it in his Selma speech – as an opportunity to say it. They basic message should be, instead of conspiracy theories and socialist bullshit, this:
“This country has been for 40 years at least as free as it’s gonna get for you all. You can do, and do do as you like, to the extent that anyone can do as they like. The law is on your side; the public sentiment is on the side of your happiness. You must acknowledge that no one, not even the ‘dominant race,’ could engage in certain behaviors and succeed – it is simply not possible. I see black people in all positions of commerce and government, education and entertainment, industry and law enforcement. I have black bosses and go before black judges; I am taught by black teachers. I am governed by black legislators and black executives. I live next to or near black families. I study with black students. I listen to music by black people. I watch black athletes, who make millions of dollars. My opinions are in part administered by black intellectuals and media personalities. My curriculum through my entire educational career has dwelt significantly upon black personalities and the civil rights movement, to the exclusion of other subjects. Frankly, it’s time you people shut the fuck and acknowledged that you are in the mainstream, and the and the injuries you suffer are OVERWHELMINGLY SELF-INFLICTED. The first thing you should do, if I may be so bold, is to send these demagogues back to Africa, where the injustices you guys rave about are being committed by black, against black people. Otherwise, IF you are rejected, it is because you are acting like assholes. Snap out of it! It’s all in your heads.”
