Black Women Climb Hill
Attention, people of the world:
In the New York Times, Megan Specia reports on a staggering feat of racial fortitude:
Or, Black Women Climb Hill.
Specifically, a hill in the Yorkshire Dales National Park. Yes, I know, it’s emotionally overwhelming, the defining triumph of our time.
There are photos and everything.
Note the use of the word disparity and its intended connotations of unfairness, of unequal treatment. The implication of some dastardly external force at work. As if the demographics of those taking walks in the British countryside weren’t chiefly a result of personal inclination, of leisure-time choices, or a simple matter of geography and where a person has chosen to live.
Or, Black Women Complain About Lack Of Black Women In Place Black Women Seldom Visit.
It occurs to me that a perception of the Yorkshire Dales, or the Peak District, or any of Britain’s National Parks, as some exclusive fiefdom of upper-class white people is the kind of misapprehension one might expect from someone who rarely, if ever, visits such places. One of the features of the nearby Peak District, for instance, is the number of East Asian students enjoying the scenery and walking about entirely unmolested.
And we’ve previously touched on ways in which parochial assumptions of racial “representation” will likely be distorted by proximity to the nation’s capital, which in my lifetime has gone from a native white-majority city, over 90%, to a native white-minority one, around 35%, an arrangement wildly out of step with the rest of the nation. Such that, things denounced as “horribly white,” or whatever the current term of disapproval is, may be puzzling to people who live in, say, Chesterfield or Plymouth.
But back to our tale of self-inflicted sorrow:
Well, a walk in the countryside has much to recommend it. Britain’s National Parks are very easy on the eye, and time spent in them can be both enjoyable and restorative. As to why some demographics deny themselves this pleasure, we find the usual, somewhat vague rumblings of injustice and oppression, albeit of a kind not entirely convincing:
At which point, readers might reasonably expect the author of the piece – and Dr Fowler, our professor of colonialism – to reveal exactly how “people from other backgrounds” are being forcibly excluded from hiking, yomping, and casual walks. These cruelly thwarted attempts to enjoy the scenic parts of the country to which they or their parents had moved.
Alas, we are merely told that, “People are very quick to dismiss the suggestion that there is racism in the countryside.” On this point, no details are forthcoming. No damning particulars are presented to sway the reader. None at all. Though clearly, we’re expected to assume the worst.
We are, however, reminded of other struggles:
Yes, dressing is hard.
We have, it seems, entered a world in which basic map reading and remembering to take a coat are deemed noteworthy achievements.
Of course, it’s not just a matter of waterproofs and picking out suitable footwear. There are other complexities to be navigated:
Needless to say, our activist’s heroism has not gone unrecognised:
Regarding Ms Fatinikun’s accomplishment of walking with other women who look a bit like her, we’re told,
Again, details of this racist abuse are oddly absent, and a news item on Ms Fatinikun’s appearance on the programme refers only to “complaints” from viewers. One of whom objected to the notion of black visitors needing a “safe space” – a term Ms Fatinikun deploys frequently – when among The White Devils, and the implication that the locals – shopkeepers, hoteliers, and sellers of ice-cream – are somehow dangerous.
An omission of particulars that leaves the reader unsure of whether the British countryside is in fact teeming with menacing bigots, people who refuse to sell lunches and fortifying beverages to those deemed alarmingly brown, or whether televised race-hustling is simply disagreeable and unpopular, along with the notion of whiteness as both an accusation and a pejorative.
As if it were the cause of all human woe.
If the above sounds familiar, you may be thinking of this assembly of much the same conceits, published in the Guardian, or any of the near-identical articles that appear on a regular basis. In which we’re invited to be outraged by the scarcity of brown-skinned rock climbing instructors, as if a person can’t possibly learn to climb without an instructor of a matching skin tone, and reminded of the need for “culturally appropriate provisions,” none of which are specified, but which must nonetheless be provided at taxpayer expense.
And in which we’re told that a place being “white,” or “distinctly white,” or “very white,” a “last bastion of whiteness,” is obviously lamentable and indecent, a thing that must be fixed.
Given the above, it may be worth repeating the following, from my comments on that particular Guardian article:
Or perhaps something worse.
This blog is kept afloat by the tip jar buttons below.
Actual snort.
When race hustlers call you names you’re not allowed to object. Objecting is racist now.
The implication is that it is somehow closed to black people.
They can’t say this explicitly, lest they prove themselves to be liars, but they can use clever language to insinuate it.
Should have titled it Black Women Take a Hike.
Commas can be left to the discretion of the reader.
Perhaps only a misapprehension. And there certainly are people who are deluded in this way. But this is the New York Times where politically motivated lies are not merely preferred but mandatory and telling the truth can get you fired.
DEI is not just racism, it is the worst form of racism. A white racist might think that all non-whites are naturally inferior in all ways, but without wishing to in any way impose restrictions on where they live or work or enjoy recreation. An advocate of DEI, however, seeks to impose endless restrictions.
As someone who often visits the Peak District, which is just a few minutes away, it’s all rather at odds with my experience. Racial minorities are seen routinely, it’s utterly unremarkable, and the locals seem to welcome the appreciation of their scenic neighbourhood. That’s often how they make a living. They’re quite happy to sell you meals, drinks, waterproofs, ice-cream, whatever. They do, I suspect, want you to come back and spend more money.
And it’s a little odd to write several thousand words on how supposedly racist and unwelcoming our National Parks are without providing even one example.
In the US South, rural small towns are literally IN THE WOODS. Small houses just surrounded by trees, not manicured yards. And with black people living there. People who hunt and fish.
I have heard blacks in Chicago say they do not apply for jobs in the suburbs or move there because they “don’t feel safe”. They currently live in murder central but are afraid of the suburbs. Sure, they may get looked at by white people because they look out of place but “unsafe”? hahahha no. What they feel is social discomfort but please, this “unsafe” crap is boring.
This.
“Unsafe” is one of the left’s favorite pieces of dishonest rhetoric. All one has to do is claim to “feel unsafe” in order to put innocent people on the defensive.
It’s a white-majority country and the countryside is where a lot of white people live. What the hell do these idiots expect?
It is a bit like visiting Seoraksan National Park or Namiseom Island and then complaining about how those places are just crawling with Koreans.
But of course if you put it that way, as one might, the thinking is not entirely flattering for the person doing the complaining.
It’s not an ideal attitude to inspire a warm welcome.
And thus the British Empire is diminished further.
I’ll use that comment about the problem of echo chambers as an excuse to link to this classic conversation about the elevation of peer review over actual experience.
Archive version here if paywalled
May God grant us all the unselfconscious ethnocentricity of blacks. They’re shy and retiring around other races, they want to be able to be with their own people and are uncomfortable in non-African territory until they can mark it as their own.
The British countryside is white in the sense that it’s the ethnic home of the English, Scottish and Welsh, in the same way as Nigeria (guessing by the surname) is the ethnic home of Rhiane Fatinikun. But the British racial equality ideal won’t be complete until Fatinikun feels as much at home in the British countryside as Smith and Jones, and that requires that it stops being an ethnic home for Smith and Jones. So all the races can share Britain, and all the races except the whites can have their ethnic home too.
And deliberate countryside recreation – the spiritual uplift that white people think they get from being rained-on and blistered – isn’t necessarily well understood by other races. Those crazy white people could afford a luxury hotel with a spa, and this is what they choose to do. But there’s also a suspicion that these implicitly white activities might become crystallization points for white ethnic consciousness.
She’s territory marking for her race, and the “human connections” are within her own race.
Corporate/NGO sponsorships enabling her to make it a full time job, adulation from the New York Times, endorsement from British establishment itself.
That.
Well, it does rather suggest a mindset in which the concept of gratitude plays no obvious part.
And yet we’re supposed to applaud it.
Seems to me we need more exclusive fiefdoms of White people.
Stunning and brave.
Look… I worked around the “African-American community” for the majority of my adult life, and what I observed is this: For whatever reason, cultural, biological, or whatever, they just don’t do stuff like go out into the woods and camp. If they live there? They’re fine with it; if they don’t, they usually don’t see a point to it. Period.
Same with a lot of things. Fishing? Look at the people frequenting the stores, buying the gear… It’s rarely the blacks, even in areas that are high-concentration black in terms of demographics. Why? No damn idea.
Different deal if you go somewhere that has “country blacks”, but in the Northern cities, they just don’t leave the city. Ever. I don’t know why, either; it’s not like there were ever checkpoints denying them access to the rural areas or parks. They just don’t. The other ethnic groups? LOL… I’d love to introduce you to the Hmong and other Asian groups that have no problem getting out into the woods and strip-mining them for mushrooms and other stuff. Blacks, on the other hand? They will not leave the cities, once they’re in them. They don’t feel the need, and they don’t “do” the sort of outdoor rec stuff that the other demographics do. And, it ain’t because anyone is actively stopping them, either.
You get into the rural deep South, where there are “country-boy redneck blacks”, well… Different deal. You should see the sheer horror when one of those guys starts asking his white co-workers about things like “Hey, how’s the deer hunting around here…?”, and then going out hunting with them. It’s about like what your cat does, when it observes you in the bathtub, soaking…
Again, no damn idea why. It just is.
Swear to God, one of the flat-out strangest conversations I ever had was with a couple of urban-type blacks in the city of Everett, Washington State. Both were health-care workers contracted with the Veteran’s Administration office there, and natives of the city.
Everett is a city on the Puget Sound, and is maybe 40-50 miles west of the Cascade Mountain range, with all of its recreational opportunities. The Puget Sound and the Olympics are about the same distance in the opposite direction.Typical Northwest area; hasn’t had a history of racial issues, no real reason for anyone to fear the rural areas. Both of these urban blacks were astounded to hear that I’d driven in from just on the other side of the Cascade range that morning, and were horrified to hear that I’d encountered, of all things in a Northwest October, snow on the passes. We got to talking about it all, and they told me that neither one of them had ever once been outside the urban areas of the Puget Sound metro area. One of them had gotten as far south as Tacoma, and that was about it. They’d never, ever once been to the mountains you could see out of the office windows, either the Olympics to the west across the Sound, or the ones to the east. The two of them were in their forties or fifties, and had precisely zero interest in venturing outside their comfort zone, for any reason.
I have no idea why, and I still don’t fathom the utter lack of interest. I mean… I would have felt the need to just go check things out, in their shoes, at some point in my life. For me, it’d damn near be an imperative.
I think that’s a general reaction for a lot of people, irrelevant of skin color. My wife spent three years in Hawaii courtesy of the U.S. Navy, and she would tell you many people were perfectly fine living on base and rarely venturing off if they didn’t have to.
So long as I’m here, I might as well bore you all with my visit to Blighty recently. Two weeks, one in London, one in Torquay. Great visit overall, but here’s what struck me in particular, as a longtime Anglophile:
The far lower percentage of morbidly obese people overall in both places. Yes, overweight people existed, but I’m talking Amurrican obese. Like men who look like an upended Volkswagen van. People so fat they need mobility scooters. I suspect, especially in London, the lack of a car encouraged you to walk a lot more. My wife and I were easily bumping past 10K steps a day.
Take out culture. We were amazed to see how many stores sold prepackaged, freshly made food. Like Boots the chemist and W.T. Smith’s at Paddington. We bought our dinner at the local Marks and Sparks in Paddington (where we stayed in London), and ate on the communal patio. Canned gin and tonics. Heaven. The dogs were amazingly polite and well-trained. Only once did we see a barking dog. None of them leapt off the chain, and in parks they roamed free and returned to their owners. Thatcher’s cider on tap and cask-drawn ale. My beer taste has been reduced to stout and Guinness (I despise IPAs), so this was a delightful surprise. The food. Yes, the traditional English breakfast was there, baked beans included, but everything else was delicious. And we weren’t looking for restaurants with good reputations. I’m talking snacks at the Torquay Hilton, the Sherlock Holmes Pub, and the White Horse in Carnaby.
The money. Did not convert any money. We used Google Wallet to pay for everything, and an Oyster card for the wife on the Tube. The history. Yes, there’s a lot of old stuff about the place. I was prepared for that. It was seeing history sliced and diced and repurposed. Like Torre Abbey, where the barn was Norman, the original monastery had bits torn down and the rest sold to a family who (I think) lived in it for a couple hundred years, and it’s now a museum / garden / event space, on a lot next to a modern sports complex, and a hotel from the Victorian era.
Yeah, we stayed in Central London and didn’t venture into the areas that are diverse and vibrant with quaint native customs. But it was quite nice to get outside and experience reality, and remind oneself that online life is a contradiction in terms.
For those who missed it, another twist on the same drama:
In terms of imaginary woes, if you want to see some real barrel-bottom scraping, do click the link above.
That’s always been the attitude of totalitarians, be they communists or fascists or any other ists that have ever existed.
See the in-progress lynching of law professor Amy Wax: Race hustlers are allowed to blame white people for blacks’ persistent failures to excel. But professor Wax is not allowed to point to evidence that the blacks are just not cutting it.
To be fair, I’d rather hike in a place that’s not crawling with anybody.
I climbed Overlook Mountain yesterday in the hopes that the cab of the fire tower would finally be open (holiday weekend here in the US and last weekend the Catskill fire towers have volunteers up there). I got there early and ran into almost nobody on the way up and a couple at Echo Lake, but when I got back from the lake it was a madhouse, especially on my way down the mountain.
The steward was bitching (rightly, in my opinion) about how many people don’t dress properly or bring enough water for what is a relatively easy hike by Catskill standards.
Related: White woman climbs hill.
I have been the only white person within sight at the Forbidden City and especially when I went to northern China (this is 25 yrs ago). On more than one occasion I have been the only white (with my wife) at a black birthday party or such. Cannot say I was “uncomfortable” or “unsafe”. It is really creepy to talk like that.
Related: White woman climbs hill.
I suppose it is related in that if you go hiking up a significant hill and you have dysfunctional eustachian tubes you could have some barotrauma that also would make your ears bleed.
@ccscientist, who said:
The reason a lot of blacks feel this “threat” is that they also feel the general social disapproval for their behavior when out of their familiar environment. They are also severely out of touch with reality when it comes to demographics; they think that because they’re mostly the majority in their urban environs, then they should be in the majority everywhere. When they discover the reality, they’re frightened by it.
Possibly for good reason.
I once had a couple of newly assigned black “urban yout” types assigned to my platoon. They’d been in the unit for about six to eight months, and hadn’t managed to integrate. The two of them formed their own clique, and even the rest of the blacks in the platoon didn’t like them; different backgrounds. They were belligerent and mostly borderline insubordinate to all and sundry; other black junior enlisted refused to associate with them unless forced to by circumstance. Overall, the two of them represented a failure of the acculturation process for military service.
We were tasked for a funeral detail, assigned a military bus, and drove out to the location for the funeral… Which was up on the Canadian border, in a rural area of Washington State. It was about a six-hour drive, with all the stops we had to make for restroom breaks and all the rest. Throughout the drive, these two yuckleheads were getting more and more disturbed, because they weren’t seeing any other blacks besides those with us. They wanted to know where they were all at; where were the other black people? What had been done with them?
Accusations were made that the blacks had been driven away, that they’d been killed or something. It was simply not something that they could grasp that there had never, ever been a significant black population in rural Washington. They did not take this “lack of black” very well, at all. Finally had to direct one of my black subordinate NCO types to sit down with them and explain the facts of life. They still didn’t get it; they were so sure, thanks to the environments they’d come from, and the media, that blacks were the majority population in the United States. You told them the reality, that they were12-13% of the population, they did not “get” it, at all. The two of them literally had no understanding of percentages, not in any sense that they could actually relate to… Something that made me wonder how the hell they’d passed the tests to get in, but that was an issue for another day.
That road trip/funeral detail was a bit of a watershed, for those two. I don’t think they’d ever been out of an environment where blacks were not a large fraction of the population, and it had never, ever been brought home to them what the hell a “minority” really was. The two of them were significantly quieter after that, and made much more effort to “fit in”.
Give you an idea of it all, my NCO that I had talk to them had to sit down with a couple of bags of Skittles and lay out how many of what sort of people there were in the US. They did not like seeing the actuality of what 12% represented, laid out in Skittles.
I suspect that innumeracy and a failure to “learn the world” by exploring it all is a huge component of why blacks are so shocked when reality rears its ugly head.
We cut the cable years ago so watching commercial TV is an occasional thing. I’ve noticed the shift in advertising. Actors in commercials — If there are couples – they are all inter-racial. If it’s a group of couples (restaurant, holiday party) there is sure to be at least one gay or lesbian couple. All white seems to be ok for them, but at least 30% of the time, they’ll be inter-racial, too.
I can’t remember who the sponsor was, but there was one commercial for a business that was so obvious with this weird obsession I couldn’t help but noticing that among the dozen or so people in it (in an office setting) there was only one white guy (dweeby looking) and the ‘managers’ were all melanin-enriched females.
Say, what?
Palate cleanser: SpaceX’s catch of returning booster. (Via Elon Musk.)
I think that one thing which ought to happen is that if they want everything to be race-based, then we ought to actually enforce equity: Every sector of society should reflect the actual percentages of each race.
This would mean that most sports teams would have to fire a huge swathe of their black athletes, and recruit a bunch of whites, Asians, and Jews. They’d have to fire a whole lot of people in the federal government, and everywhere else: Every community would have to reflect the actual numbers of each race/ethnicity within their jurisdiction. If you’re the National Football League, that means you’re a national-level organization, and you have to match national-level demographics. Local city? Ya have 2% blacks in town? Two percent of the city employees can/have to be black. No more, no less.
Do the same for school admissions.
State-level government? Same rule; you must match state demographics.
I suspect that whole idea would last about a decade before it collapsed under the weight of the issues it would bring out, and we’d likely do away with using race or ethnicity in any way, shape, or form.
Anything other than merit is divisive, and should have been made illegal. Affirmative Action is such a horrendously bad policy that it’s not even funny; what they should have done was look at who was getting into jobs, passing the tests, whatever, and then working to deal with those issues. Don’t dumb down the tests; offer classes and training to overcome the educational deficits.
The problem with that, however, is that few blacks would actually take advantage of those remedial classes.
The closest I ever came to participating in a race riot happened while I was in the military; said near-riot was triggered not by “white racism” but by Nigerian truth-telling.
We had, at the moment in time that this occurred, a couple of actual, honest-to-God Nigerian immigrants in the unit. One of them was one of our senior mechanics, the other was a junior officer, a First Lieutenant. In the course of things, we had another one of those interminable racial struggle-sessions, what they termed an “Equal Opportunity Session”. What it amounted to was actually an opportunity for the very indoctrinated Equal Opportunity NCO to come in and do his best to stoke the fires of racism and division, in the name of… I don’t know. Whole thing was stupid.
In any event, in this particular session? He called on our enlisted mechanic Nigerian, a married man in his early thirties. He said something to the effect that said Nigerian could testify how bad American blacks had it, and how they were oppressed compared to their homeland in Africa…
I don’t think anyone was really prepared for what ensued. Our Nigerian mechanic was getting out of the Army, having finally attained his goal of completing his college education, and he was quite fed up with the American blacks he had to deal with. He unleashed the full venom of his loathing for them, his disdain, and outright hatred.
Up one side, and down the other… He lambasted them all for being lazy, never taking advantage of opportunities to self-improve. He pointed out how none of them were ever over at the Education Center, and always wasted their money on flashy cars, partying, and general laziness. He named names, of the ones who’d abandoned kids and all the rest of that…
He went into how his father had come to America with family/clan sponsorship to start a business, and had chosen to do that in a black neighborhood. He described how his father had been driven into bankruptcy by American blacks shoplifting, stealing, vandalism, and armed robbery. How his father had been shot three times, and finally killed by an American black, and how it was his fondest hope to finally earn enough money to pay his Nigerian relatives back for all the money his father had lost, trying to make an honest living in an American black community.
He finally capped it off by telling the room we were in that the real truth was that Africa was ashamed of American blacks, and that they’d been sold to the white man because they were, truthfully, lousy slaves. In Nigeria in those days, good slaves were kept, and could work their way to freedom again. Only if you were utterly useless and lazy would you be sold into the Atlantic slave trade…
I think you can imagine the scene, once he wound down and sat down. The guy leading this struggle session then made another mistake, and asked the Nigerian lieutenant if all that was true, and the LT basically agreed with our other Nigerian. You have to picture a slow, heavily-accented but educated Nigerian saying “Yes, I think that is true…”
Didn’t go over very well, at all. As you might surmise… We had to keep our Nigerian mechanic out of circulation while he finished up his time in the Army, which was thankfully only a couple of weeks. The whole thing was an exercise in “Never ask a question you don’t want answered…” The facial expression on our Equal Opportunity NCO’s was priceless; I don’t think he could process anything so far out of his expectations, and just froze up.
Our Nigerian did have a damn good point: A tiny fraction of our black demographic actually took advantage of the opportunities presented to them, and a goodly fraction just relied on Affirmative Action to get them promoted. You very often heard things like “I know I’m gonna be on the next promotion list; how many blacks are in this field?”, and they’d be dead accurate. I watched blacks with DUI charges, low scores, relief-for-cause ratings, and a whole host of other career-killers (only for white guys, do note…) promoted ahead of me. The system is set up to reward mere existence with high melanin content skin… Even better, if you can claim something really rare in the demographic, like “Asian-Pacific Islander”.
The whole thing is a crock of shiite, TBH.
I’ve run across several stories of American blacks going to one or other African country and feeling totally alien. They have this cultivated fantasy of Africa as some lost Black paradise (Wakanda) but they get their and discover they don’t speak any languages, they don’t belong ethnically or religiously with any of the tribes, and their ethics are totally at odds with the African natives who are patriarchal, hard-working, and who have no sense of Black Solidarity because they generally hate the other tribes.
If American blacks ran their own nation, it would be bankrupt within 24 hours because too few of them are prepared to work hard or be loyal.
I don’t like it, but I suspect you’re right. The testimony is out there, in every black-majority community that’s been taken over and then run into the ground. Detroit, Nashville, and all the rest.
The irony is that the other “common denominator” is the Democratic Party, which caters to and supports the pathologies rather than doing anything to actually help the situation.
Time was, I had no real opinion on the matter. I was a fully-indoctrinated believer in all the BS the luvvies taught me as a child, all the typical Kumbaya line of BS.
Early adulthood experience started changing my mind, because the reality I experienced did not match what I was taught; by the time I was finished with my military career, I’d reached a point where I think you’d have to be describing me as a “pragmatic racist”, in that while I was automatically categorizing people by their skin color and ethnicity, expecting certain behaviors, I was willing to at least entertain the potential that they wouldn’t conform to stereotype; I gave them a chance, if I could, to disprove the thesis I’d arrived at.
Usually only to be disappointed. You want to know the real source for a lot of racism, here in the US? It’s down to one thing, and one thing only: Proximity and experience.
The sad thing is, it’s not “all blacks”, but you usually can’t tell what to expect on encountering them as individuals or groups. I really don’t like to be racist, but safety demands that you’re either a racist or you’re a victim.
What’s worse about all this? The sense of betrayal I have from all of my “betters” telling me what a horrible thing racism and all that was, as a child. These days, I’m morally certain that racism is actually a survival trait, and only the utterly foolish are not what they describe as “racist”. At the least, they’re soon to be victims of their own delusions.
It shouldn’t be this way, but it is.
I have visited some of the Western European nations from which my ancestors came. In all of them I felt alien to some degree or other–because of the cultural barriers, not just language barriers.
Many American blacks have the added cultural burden of growing immersed in a self-destructive culture of victimhood and parasitism.
One of the many reasons why I hate the Democratic Party.
It started a bit earlier for me, because I attended a public high school which drew students from middle class and working class neighborhoods and from black slum neighborhoods.
That’s one of the many reasons people should be mindful of how they dress: Clothing, grooming, and body language convey numerous hints regarding character.
This. The only reason this is even remotely remarkable is…black (mostly) America. Within western and East Asian and most of Hispanic civilization, being a person ethnically different from the surrounding culture is still much more safe than being a black person in black America. Blacks, Americans and otherwise, in these other contexts are suffering far more from projection than any real threat. The tell on much of this is how these “OMGOMGOMG black peoples feel threatened while hiking in nature” stories are originating from the UK. It is not a story here in the US except very recently as a reflection from the UK. Which raises the question why you Limies treat black folks so bad when they’ve…hiking?
Not exactly American but a similar principle applies to a country called Haiti. Not entirely a far comparison but still more fair than not. What is remarkable to me, having lived in south Florida and worked a low wage job with an occasional Haitian is how hard working those that I worked with were. Kinda dumb but not entirely stupid. I was too young to be of any help but it pained me to see them not understanding how things in America worked. They were in some ways too afraid of being able to take the minor risks to be mores successful. In general this isn’t specific to Haitians but it is much, much more pronounced amongst them. Perhaps because they are more vulnerable to the preying upon them being done by the more criminal elements of the American black community. Or at least were in a 1980’s context. Today might be different but probably not.
This. Having played a significant amount of pickup basketball in edge communities, some minor low-wage work in my youth, and the occasional slumming experience, I’ve developed a degree of ability to discern such things. Not that I would be willing bet my life upon my observations and guesses, but it is terribly sad to see the lost potential up close. The more seriously sad thing is how those in the white community f*** up opportunities to improve things due to their inherent leftist race-based ignorance.
Heh. There was a period of about four months or so where my wife and I had recall or warranty issues with our Toyotas such that I had to drop the cars off at the dealer on my way to work and get a courtesy ride to the office. Consequently I got to know the courtesy driver, a Jamaican guy, moderately well. Having vacationed in Jamaica, not the all-inclusive crap but actually renting a car and driving the northern coast of the island, and having a fairly good work friend who was from Kingston, we bonded somewhat over that. He was very, very adamant about the things you say here that your Nigerian mechanic said. Much more adamant than even my coworker whom I knew much better but who didn’t like to talk about the bad stuff* too much. Not that I had an especially rose-colored viewpoint but this guy really drove home to me how bad stuff was in his Jamaican experience.
*My coworker had a scar in the back of his enormously round balding head that I asked him about once. He said that as a teenager someone tried to stab him with a knife and cut him there. He loved his homeland but his mother sent him to live with relatives in Florida after that. I got the impression that it was hard on him but he was very happy he had left.
Feds are back.
At the NYT link:
Lol. F*ck no.
Well, if you’re going to imply, on national television, that black people need “safe spaces” when walking through the countryside among The White Devils, as if people selling ice-cream from vans in tiny villages are itching to abuse anyone Browner Than They Should Be, and if you do this on a programme watched by the very people you’re badmouthing, people whose livelihoods may depend on hospitality, then some pushback is to be expected.
I suppose it’s possible that someone, somewhere did post something unpleasant on social media. Someone, somewhere will be doing that about pretty much anything, all the time. But if I were writing a New York Times article in which racism is implied as the premise, then I think I’d feel obliged to cite some particulars and offer some crumb of evidence. Lest the reader have doubts.
Heh. No, it’s not the most tempting prospect. I think we can guess the conclusions that would be arrived at, one way or another.
And if no one, anywhere is doing these unpleasant posts, someone, somewhere will conjure them up. See Feds are back.
One of the many weirdnesses you run into with regards to a lot of racism/ethnism is that the supposed “victim parties” never seem to quite “get” why they receive the reactions that they do.
It’s like… Are you blind to the fact that your racial/ethnic compatriots are doing the things they do to create and conform to the stereotypes everyone has of them?
I think that at least some of the problem for blacks in the US is that the endemic petty criminality that sets them apart from everyone else in the eyes of the other ethnicities is the norm for them; it is so common that they just don’t see it. They go to areas that aren’t black-majority, and all the “nice things” they find there, like things set out for sale at gas stations? Those don’t register as things they don’t have because “black criminality”, but because everyone hates blacks and conspires against them. They just don’t “get” the fact that the constant theft and shoplifting reduces their quality of life; it’s not “their fault” that Walmart and all the pharmacies are closing in their neighborhoods because they lose money and are too hard to keep going, it’s got to be some sort of conspiracy to do them dirty.
Precisely nobody in the black community really gets this, either. Some few do, but they generally get shouted down by all the others. It’s always someone else’s fault, never theirs.
NYT:
Mystery solved. Rest of article not really needed.
It does seem a more obvious factor. As opposed to tremblings about “whiteness” and its allegedly mind-bending effects.
The truth about the “Walz-goes-pheasant-hunting” meme and the other Dem ads targeting men:
This “outreach” to men is actually outreach to women. There’s a contradiction between what Democratic women expect aesthetically & sexually out of men and what they demand politically. The result is this uncanny valley of politically emasculated men LARPing as manly macho men:
Original post:
https://x.com/bungarsargon/status/1845476410409865561
And: the black race hustlers and white leftists who loudly and endlessly insist that the black-white crime differential does not exist, while those who do talk honestly about this are denied a platform.
And ditto for all the social and psychological dysfunctions that produce the high crime rates and low achievement rates.
That sort of touches on the nub of it.
I mean, it would be nice to just say, “Go for it, ladies, have fun.” But the addition of pretentious victimhood, and thereby specialness, and a basis for fawning media coverage, somewhat sours the endeavour and makes it vaguely insulting to people who live in scenic rural areas.
“A safe space, free from prejudice,” says Ms Fatinikun of her project – a term she uses repeatedly, in almost every appearance – while casually presuming that white people are likely to be unwelcoming or unkind. Which itself sounds rather prejudiced.
For me the most shocking part of this isn’t the clearly racist women, who for some reason will go only on walks with their own race, to the exclusion of white people. It’s the people leading the institutions; the honours committee, the newspapers, universities etc who not only seem unable to recognise blatant racism, but support it and reward it.
It reeks of a competency crisis.
And, most crucially, a morality crisis.
It’s possible that she and her ilk will eventually un-learn their racism, and become people one is happy to have around, but I wouldn’t bet on it. After all, how many KKK members abandoned their bigotry and grew to respect and tolerate blacks, Jews, Catholics, etc?
An entirely reasonable reaction is “Get the fuck out of our country, ‘ladies’ “.
Safe from what?
Don’t forget the politicians.
One of the weaknesses of democracy is that if you import enough enemies the politicians will cater to those enemies to get votes.
No, I see it as aimed at shoring up the H-W men. The standard D play is to undermine anything manly (not that they’re alone in that) yet the reality is that they cannot rely on just the soy-boy/metrosexuals/etc. What they are trying to answer to here is James Carville’s call to give men like him something to hang their hats on. Unfortunately for them, this sort of thing is at the limits of what they can see. Anything further than this would be even more awkward. But it will be ok for them. The media is working double time with no extra pay to position them for success.
Given the reliance on hospitality, and given that the Peak District has a very low crime rate and is generally regarded as the safest part of Derbyshire, a pattern I would guess is reflected in other National Parks, I’m not sure what kind of perils they have in mind. Beyond the British weather, of course.
Reality.
For some reason, I am reminded of this Saturday Night Live sketch.
Don’t even get me started on the pathological dysfunction perpetuated in Native American communities. I can at least sympathize somewhat with their historical plight and the popular culture doesn’t saturate the airwaves about their communities 24-7 as with saintly, can do no wrong African-Americans.
But again, generations of handouts just to get them just barely above water have indoctrinated Natives with a complete lack of drive to rise above survival status while continuing to wallow in substance abuse, broken families, sexual assault, subpar education, and other depressing pathologies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest_mountain_peaks_of_Africa
AREN’T THEY DOING WELL? EVERYBODY CLAP.
It’s a world in which basic map reading and remembering to take a coat are deemed noteworthy achievements.
[ Writes shopping list, orders rock salt for gritting in winter. ]
[ Awaits applause, press coverage. ]
Might want to go a bit heavier on the bronzer.
@David, who said:
Friend of a friend does mountain and fast-water search-and-rescue. He’s reached a point where he thinks it would be a really good idea if you were to start doing a sort of triage on the supposed victims. If the teams get out to the victim’s site, and find them reasonably well-prepared for the risks they were taking, fine and good: Rescue them.
If they go out and find, say, that you chose to go a-wandering in the North Cascade range of a fall day, wearing shorts and a t-shirt? No warm clothes, no map, no compass, no nothing?
Team turns around and leaves your ass for the wolves. The ones you likely voted to re-introduce to those areas…
He calls it the “Make Evolution Work” policy.
Ancient English tongue-twister.
via Mark Steyn
Not unrelated to the proceedings…
The real problem with all this “Columbus Wuz Evul” crap is that while you may win the first-order argument with someone, you also sow the seed for them to go away, think about it all, and come to the conclusion that “The Indigenous Victims Deserved It All”.
Frankly, when someone says to me that the Irish and Scots were “victims” of the English, all I think about my ancestors is “Well, they were a bunch of grabtastic morons who wouldn’t and couldn’t apparently get it together to resist a bunch of other inbred morons who were barely able to get it together somewhat better…”
I’m sorry folks, but we Scots-Irish? We were a bunch of infighting feckless morons that could never get our acts together properly, until some Englishmen with bad dental plans showed up and got it all together for us. Ireland would likely still be suffering the odd raid from North African slavers to this day, and going “Waily, waily, woe is we…”, perennial victims. They still haven’t got it through their thick skulls that having the ability to defend themselves might be a good idea, and here we are with it a hundred years or more past Irish independence, and they’re still sub-contracting with the Brits for sea security and all the rest. Stupid.
Can’t say much more about the Scots, really. Left to their own devices, they’d likely be up to even more stupidity.
I’d like to take pride in my ancestry, but when I look at what the hell they’ve gotten up to over the last century or so? Just can’t do it. I fear that the best part of both nations left the whole mess behind, and emigrated.
I feel pretty much the same about the various flavors of the day for “Oppressed Natives”. Ya know what? Tough titties: You had a few thousand years of life absent the nasty colonizers, and what did you do with it? Did you build anything lasting? At all? Or, were you caught up in a nightmare of human sacrifice and suffering? Burned widows on funeral pyres? Worshipped Kali, as a Thuggee? Which faith is better? The one that demands ritual human sacrifice, or the one that likes doing good works?
All I hear with this indigenous people’s crap is that they deserved everything they had coming. Just as the Europeans would have, were it the Chinese who showed up to show them the light of civilization.
A reminder that in the UK South Asians (Indian, Pakistani, and so on) are nearly double the size of the Black population (6% vs. 3%, IIRC) yet you never see them acting this way, calling for an Asian history month, etc. It’s all a reflection of American cultural neurosis.
I do worry, however, that they eventually will call for sharia law.
The ominous part of all these celebratory anthems is the bit about, well yes, there’s bunches of us out there doing these stupid wypipo things like hiking and no, none of us has been lynched or burned in a wicker basket by the locals, but what we HAS TO HAVE RIGHTNOW is SAFE. SPACES. Manned/personned by folk of OUR color!! Meaning, of course, that the local population will be forced to import sellers of ice cream, backpacks, sleeping accommodations, etc. etc ad infinitum who must have the appropriate levels of melanin to make us happy, even though most of us wouldn’t be caught dead doing something like hiking. You have to turn the Peak District into Somalia to make these people happy — only, if you did they wouldn’t be because the Somalis tend to hold other Africans in scorn.
Great concenpt.
Eventually?
And vice-versa, right? And ditto for pretty much all the tribes/nations?
Well, really I meant “a larger percentage of them”.
If you encounter the hoary Aesop about the scorpion and the frog, without immediately recognizing that the moral directly addresses Islam encroaching into non-Islamic societies…?
You might be an obliviot.
Most of this would be just an annoying and offensive curiosity if it weren’t for all the politicians a corporations spending cash supporting it. Nobody would know or care about Ms. Fatinikun’s group hikes if it was impossible for her to make a living out of walking while black.
Oh, it’s coming. Those in American educational (lol) institutions are well on their way into creating their own “walking/eating/working/etc while brown” industry. And then every other english speaking (and adjacent) country will find themselves abused by the same behavior.
“feds are back” actual lol. the feds march in a model of conformity, whereas actual conservatives are models of individuality. You will not find two MAGA marchers in the same clothes, and all the clothes will be well-worn. That the FBI thinks this false-flag operation is A-ok is quite disturbing. As well, haven’t they heard that lots of conservatives are very averse to masks due to covid? Just shows the FBI does not understand the “enemy” at all.
During the Saint Floyd riots, a “community spokesman” loudly proclaimed that if they kept arresting blacks for shoplifting at Target, they would burn it down. Because it is their right, you see.
@ccscientist, who said:
Wait until they see what the hell happens in the future, when Target and all the others start doing what Costco already does: Require membership just to get in. It’s coming, BTW… I was talking to a friend of the family who does apps for a bunch of different stores, and one thing they’re all looking at is making entrance into a store basically require membership and effectively posting a bond to get in. Everyone else is going to have to pay first and do curbside pickup…
Can’t wait to see how that goes over. It’ll be coming first to places with high shoplifting and pilferage rates. You’re gonna have to shop from your app on the phone or computer, then pay for it all, and then they’ll bring it out to you. If you want to go into the store, that’s going to mean buying a membership with a credit card linked to it… You get caught shoplifting or something on the video, they automatically charge the card.
It’ll likely include armed guards. That’s where all this is heading; the classical retail experience is going to die because the luvvies won’t enforce the law, and the scum won’t follow it.
US native american reservations: a big problem on many reservations besides handouts is that the entire land area is owned in common by the tribe. You cannot buy a piece of land and improve it and make it more productive or put a store on it. It is the ultimate tragedy of the commons. Many people just buy a mobile home, because you can move it and own it.
A reasonable response to that is the Mayor Daley solution: Announce that arsonists and looters will be shot on sight. And do it.
A video from the Saint Floyd riots: Black woman on the South Side of Chicago rages in anger that Arab shopkeepers are carrying firearms to protect their shops from looters. How dare they! Don’t they know blacks have a right to steal?, she rants.
Townhall posted the video with extensive quotes from that Chicago savage’s rant:
Woman, I wouldn’t insure your life because it is of no value. None.
(This is not the original posting. Facebook took down her video for violating community standards, and then kept taking down re-postings by people who wanted the world to know about these savages.)
For your amusement: Note that the woman calls those Arabs “fake a** Ramadan mother f**kers”, because she’s a follower of Louis Farrakhan and his fraudulent and fascistic Nation of Islam. Fake Muslim calls real Muslims fake.
Indeed. This is fascism-level malfeasance. Natural-life-in-prison-level malfeasance.
But it’s good enough to fool many liberals, which is all that matters.
AND it provides propaganda fodder for the far left.
And I’ve heard that many tribal governments are more or less corrupt, adding to the problem.
One of the the things I find darkly humorous about all the race BS is that the usual idjit luvvie completely misses the reality of things: Namely, that the race war is already happening, and blacks are losing it.
Go to formerly majority-black neighborhoods of California. They’re mostly Mexican-Hispanic. And, the new residents got there by effectively driving out the blacks through being more vicious and more effective as gangsters.
Also, note the rather massive hatred most Central American Hispanics have for blacks, as well as just how few there are “down there”. The only country in Central America with significant black population would be Belize, and that’s because they became a refuge for the blacks driven out of everywhere else.
By the numbers, the only difference between Mexico and the US in terms of slaves delivered was a few tens of thousands of bodies. The slave population in the US was up in the millions by the 1860s. By then, the number of living blacks in Central America was a tiny fraction of the population. Why the difference? Simply put, the Spanish used their African slaves as overseers in the mines and plantations. When the opportunity came, the majority of them got killed and/or driven out. There is strong residual hatred from those days still… The average Indio Mexican has no idea why he hates blacks, but he damn sure knows that he does.
I watched this play out in real time, within elements of the US Army I served in. Most of the time, Mexican/Hispanics and blacks got along. Whenever they didn’t? Oh. My. Gawd.
I don’t think things are going to work out the way everyone thinks they will, with a “race war”. The whites are going to be on the sidelines, the blacks are going to wind up dead, and the Hispanics will start calling themselves white within a couple of generations, just like the Asians. Meanwhile, all the luvvie idjit types are going to be sitting around going “What just happened?”, never realizing or recognizing that they did all of this by enabling mass illegal immigration from Central America.
The Indio remember. And, they still carry grudges. The funny thing is, they’re not even mad at the Spaniard full-bloods that brought in the Africans as overseers. They kind of admire them, for some damn reason. The blacks, however? Full-bore, full-on hatred and loathing, the likes of which you really can’t comprehend as an outsider.
Remember Niven and Pournelle’s Oath of Fealty? I don’t like the idea of living in a city with more surveillance than London or China, but that’s less bad than living in a nightmarish crime zone.
Luvvies. Are you living in the UK, or did you just decide that was a memorable label to apply to these idiots and monsters?
No, I’m in the US. It’s just that that’s such an evocative term for the people with that idiotic mindset, the goodie-two-shoes types that can’t find it within themselves to be judgmental of any form of destructive behavior, and who insist on enforcing their delusional take on everything on everyone else.
They love everyone but the actual victims; they love the homeless, but the taxpayer who has to wade through feces on the way to their vandalized car every morning? No love or respect whatsoever.
They care so very much, you see…
It is indeed.
They’re doing it to keep their base agitated.
… you never see [subcontinentals in the UK] acting this way, calling for an Asian history month, etc. It’s all a reflection of American cultural neurosis.
The Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers dynamic causes other races to have contempt both for blacks and whites. This American cultural neurosis will go away when whites stop manning the flak-catching institutions. Other races have no compunction enforcing civilized behavior even on blacks who don’t want to be arrested, and in separating civilization from black neighborhoods if blacks choose to riot about it.
Those in American educational (lol) institutions are well on their way into creating their own “walking/eating/working/etc while brown” industry.
Pakistani immigrants in the West have shown that can look after their group interests perfectly well. Tribal skirmishing is a skill they bring with them, and they don’t need lessons in it from Western academics.
Well, the liberals I know are certainly “agitated.” Or maybe hysterical.
Indeed. I started noticing this back in the early 70’s, with the extreme anti-male rhetoric coming from feminists. The “men are of zero value” rhetoric was bad enough, but the willingness of liberals to applaud this lunacy and scold those who objected was very disturbing.
Even worse was when the rhetoric got into the desirability of genocide. I noticed that a Nazi would never get an award (or even find a publisher) for a story about the necessity of exterminating blacks and Jews and so on, but feminists did find enthusiastic publishers and get top awards for stories about how men are just awful and need to be exterminated.
Liberals have been marinating in this poison for a long time.
“I’m not the pheasant plucker; I’m the pheasant-plucker’s son. I’m just plucking pheasants ’til the pheasant-plucker comes.”
Prime riff during Episode 422: “The Day the Earth Froze” on MST3K, during the scene when the earth, you know, froze, and they brought a lifeless swan into the cabin.
Kirk, pst — re: such an evocative term
Not the only one, by any means. My current favorite, which comes to mind when viewing the many, many vids of impromptu ‘hood riots and shopping mall war scenes (not infrequently involving all or mostly females) is “get stuck into.”
Amazing. Is she the next Elon Musk?
“The hills are alive with the sound of racism…”