Content Of Their Character
Kim du Toit
April 11, 2008
10:00 AM EDT
· General
As a White boy growing up in apartheid South Africa, one of the basic social tenets I learned was that Blacks were an inferior race.
It was an easy attitude to adopt, in those days and in that society: there were no Black politicians as such, because Blacks weren’t allowed to vote; there were no Black industry captains, because there were laws which prohibited Blacks from advancing up corporate ladders beyond a certain point; and we certainly didn’t have any Black neighbors in our town, not only because few if any Blacks could have afforded the house prices, but because the Group Areas Act forbade Blacks to live in “White” areas. The only Blacks we ever came into contact with were household servants, who were there to do our bidding.
And the State-controlled media (radio and Press; there was no TV) were careful to show Blacks in their worst possible light: when there were faction fights in the “Black townships” like Soweto, or tribal wars in the “homelands”, those were reported with great detail. Likewise, civil wars in sub-Saharan Africa and stories of Black misgovernment and corruption were given the same treatment, and the 1960s race riots in the United States and Britain were seized upon with glee—all grist for the apartheid mill, and all to show just one simple fact: Blacks were inferior, uncivilized, and incapable of understanding government or management of any kind.
It took two factors, and many years, to undo all that propaganda.
Education was the first factor.
The first seeds of doubt were planted when I was sent to a private boarding school, St. John’s College, which instilled in me and the other scholars not only a classical liberal education, but the seeds of modern-day liberal thought. Most important, however, was the inculcation of intellectual curiosity and skepticism. We were encouraged to approach everything with a spirit of inquiry—“Why?” and “Why not?” coupled with “Are you sure about that?” became our guiding principles.
In addition, we were exposed to educated Black men—for many of us, for the first time ever—in the form of Black clergymen from Britain, invited as “guest” speakers to deliver sermons and homilies from the pulpit in our chapel. For the first time, we heard Black men speak perfect English with British accents, and not the broken English and African accents of our own Blacks, the latter being so easy to mock and denigrate. And in our own Anglican Church, the Diocese of Johannesburg elected a Black man—a local Black man—as the Dean (later the Bishop) of the diocese, and Desmond Tutu became a fixture at St. John’s College, speaking not only from the pulpit, but from the speaker’s lectern at our social and sporting events.
The unspoken message was clear: if they have the opportunity, Blacks are just as capable of achievement as Whites.
As I started to read more widely, I came into contact with foreign magazines like Time, Newsweek and Financial Times, and started to read about Black achievement: in politics, in business, and in academia.
For the first time, I read about the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who, it came as a surprise, was not a Communist sympathizer and agitator as he’d been painted by Afrikaner propaganda, but was instead a civil rights leader and a champion for not only Blacks, but for all non-white men.
It is impossible to describe the effect on a budding young opponent of apartheid of the words: “To be judged by the content of his character, and not by the color of his skin.”
After education came the second factor which changed me forever, and turned me into an implacable opponent of apartheid: television.
When television was finally introduced in South Africa in the early 1970s, it was controlled by the State, just like all the other media. But even under those circumstances, it was impossible to control all the content, and when people began smuggling in news shows from Britain and the United States (the video equivalent of the Soviet samizdat photocopies), the images became real, and not just abstractions in print.
In the heady days of the 1970s, where student protests were erupting all over the Western world, it was natural that the same started to occur in South Africa, except that we had no Vietnam War to protest. (our own version, the border wars against terrorist infiltration in Southwest Africa/Namibia, were a fact of everyday life, but the casualties were trivial by comparison to Vietnam, and it never became a burning social issue.)
What we could protest against, and did, was apartheid. We protested as much as we could—along with all the other apartheid-era laws, there was a law forbidding public protests except those allowed by the State—but we were young, and indestructible, and anti-authoritarian, and so we protested, peacefully.
And, for my impudence, I was arrested, briefly imprisoned and subsequently acquitted on a technicality, along with many other students. (I should point out that in the mass arrests of 1972, of the forty or so male students in our group of arrestees, almost half were St. John’s College alumni, so clearly the lessons had been well learned. Of course, not all had learned the same lessons: one of the men later turned out to have been an officer in the Security Police.)
It didn’t matter. For the next decade, I cheerfully ignored the apartheid laws as much as I could get away with: I employed people without the “proper papers”; promoted clerks to junior executives, and junior executives to managers; drove cheerfully through “Black-only” areas if the route was more direct than the circuitous one dictated by the law, and so on.
Never having been one to accept the diktat of authority and social mores in the first place, I found that apartheid was just one of the “sacred cows” to ignore, make fun of, or actively try to destroy.
I’ve never changed.
Nevertheless, in the early 1980s I decided to emigrate, because I could see that apartheid was doomed, and I thought that the post-apartheid era in South Africa was not one where I would want to raise a family—not because of the reality of a Black government, but because I thought that there was just too much hatred, and too many generations of oppression for the country to remain a safe place for someone with a White skin—even a White liberal like myself.
So I emigrated to the united States in the mid 1980s, and true to my irreverent nature, have ever since referred to my emigration as “The Great Wetback Episode of 1986”. (My justification: “If you think your back gets wet swimming across the Rio Grande River, try the Atlantic Ocean.")
So here I was, in the Land of the Free and among We The People; the land of the Constitution, Martin Luther King Jr., and the most egalitarian society on Earth, where a man could, finally, be judged by the content of his character, and not by the color of his skin.
As I so blithely told a South African friend, himself looking to emigrate here: “The central promise of the Declaration of Independence has been achieved: everyone can vote, everyone can say what they like, and with application, anyone can achieve whatever they want.”
Well, not quite.
It turned out that there was this thing called “the legacy of slavery”, and something else called “institutionalized racism”, which were instrumental in preventing Blacks from furthering their lot on life. The first made no sense, because slavery had ended in 1865; and the second made no sense, because there was a plethora of laws and regulations designed to prevent such nonsense from occurring. (I paid no attention to laws and regulations which tried to change people’s attitudes—from bitter experience in South Africa, I knew the hopelessness of trying to convert an entrenched bigot.)
But I saw that not only did Whites buy into this nonsense, but Blacks did, too—only, in the case of the so-called Black “leadership”, the slavery and racism rationale was being cynically used to further their own power and careers rather than that of their race. Indeed, I saw examples (most notably in Chicago, where I was living at the time) where funding intended to improve Black neighborhoods was being blocked by the very Black leaders who represented that community (Gus Savage, call your office—to quote but one memorable example). Worse still, the funding was not being blocked so that the community should work to improve its own lot and circumstance (which would have made sense). The inescapable conclusion was that having an “underprivileged” and “deprived” electorate was in those politicians’ personal interest, so that their election campaign slogans of “Us Against The Man” could be maintained.
Worse still, I saw Black preachers (Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and, lately, Jeremiah Wright) make speeches from the pulpit that were so palpably racist, so overtly hateful, and so shamelessly bigoted that any antonymic statements made by White preachers would have resulted in a public uproar and wholesale condemnation.
Let me take it a step further: not even Afrikaans preachers in the Dutch Reformed Church of my youth would have dared say the equivalent things about other races from their pulpits.
Instead, in our racially-sensitive America: nothing but a few resigned shrugs.
To someone for whom an entire way of thinking had been changed by Black preachers—the Oxford-educated guest speakers of my youth, Desmond Tutu, and Martin Luther King Jr.—this perversion of the pulpit, and the indifferent reaction, was shattering.
I had been trained as a statistician, and one of the expressions I’d learned was that when faced with a situation or problem of great complexity, the whole solution began with a small solution of a manageable problem. We called it, “getting a fingernail under the edge”.
Then a strange thing began to happen: I saw Blacks reaching positions of power, and saw corruption, mismanagement and arrogance appear—just as it had in Africa. And this was not just a few isolated examples, but everywhere. Detroit, Philadelphia, New York: it didn’t matter where, but find a place governed by Blacks, and you would find sickening corruption, cronyism, self-enrichment and misgovernment—just like in Africa.
At the end of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, the animals look into the farmhouse and find the pigs playing poker with the humans, and find that there is no difference between the two groups.
So is it with Blacks, and Whites. It is truly a case where the yardstick for the public trust is not the color of their skin, but the content of their character.
Sadly, however, too many Blacks are cynically using the color of their skin to hide the content of their character, crying the racist wolf whenever anyone dares to scold them. (It is, of course, a tactic forever denied corrupt White politicians of the Spitzer-McGreevey sort, but that’s a side issue.)
More to the point is that when Blacks do get to positions of power and governance, their administrations, over time, begin to resemble the kleptocracies of Africa more than the law-governed societies of the West, and it takes a massive amount of work to unseat them, because they are often abetted by their own constituents, purely because of their race.
Which leads me to another interesting point about African governments: when yet another Black leader comes to power, promising open and fair elections, and soon becomes “Dictator For Life”, it’s the norm rather than the exception.
Hundreds of generations of life in Africa have been governed by maxims such as “survival of the strongest” and “to the winner go the spoils”. More than that, it is not only expected behavior of African leaders, it is also expected by the people whom they rule—and only when matters become intolerable do the oppressed people overthrow the dictator, and replace him with the new great hope for the future (who then becomes the next oppressive leader: Africa wins again).
Let me digress for a moment, to explain the “Africa Wins Again” cynicism.
I once wrote an essay called Let Africa Sink, which argued that sending aid money to Africa was a pointless exercise, and that the money served simply to enrich the kleptocrats—and there was ample proof to support the thesis. Of course, because I was talking about Africa, the essay was branded “racist”, when in fact it was nothing of the sort. (Had I written, “Don’t send aid because they’re Blacks”—well, that would have been racist, not to mention foolish.)
The essay was really an indictment of the entire concept of welfare—and particularly so when abundant evidence proved its worthlessness and waste.
The same is true whenever anyone talks about ending welfare in America, and making people responsible for their own welfare. Because Blacks are proportionately the largest beneficiaries of the welfare system, such initiatives are likewise branded racist.
In America, incidentally, we have proof that winding down the welfare entitlement works. When Bill Clinton (almost at gunpoint) was forced to sign welfare-limiting change into law, the lot of Blacks (and all other races on welfare) improved almost immediately, just as the law’s proponents had argued.
Nevertheless, to return to the main point, what we see when American cities and towns are governed by Blacks, and are mostly populated by Blacks, is a scenario closer to Africa than to America.
Detroit is a striking example.
The largest city in Michigan has been governed by Blacks for decades. “White flight” has only strengthened the Black voting power in the city, and it would take a brave (or foolish) prophet to think that any White politician has a chance of being elected Mayor of Detroit anytime soon.
One would think, therefore, that if Blacks are indeed equally capable of self-government, that Detroit would be no different from any other American city.
Instead, it has become clear that over time, Detroit has come to resemble Lagos, Nigeria more than it resembles, say, Pittsburgh or Indianapolis.
Whole areas of the city are “no-go” areas, under the control of warlords gang leaders, and at certain times of the year (like Halloween), the city is ungovernable, and is prone to looting and wholesale burning of buildings. This description could apply to both Lagos and Detroit equally, with only a few minor changes in terminology.
It could also apply, to almost the same degree, to Washington D.C.—another city with longtime Black government and a large Black voting bloc. And we’ve all seen the truth about New Orleans, since Hurricane Katrina.
What was told to me in my youth—that Blacks are incapable of governing themselves in the Western tradition—and that I dismissed as “racist” because of its source, is now becoming increasingly less unreasonable a position as more and more evidence of Black mis-governance presents itself, in more and more areas of America.
Unfortunately, there’s not a whole lot that anyone can do about it. The “logical” conclusion of the thesis, even if 100% true, is that Blacks should not be “allowed” to govern—a proposition so vile as to be almost unspeakable, even if it were possible to implement such an odious initiative.
Many people reading this piece, however, would be quick to ascribe that conclusion to me, when in fact I have written nothing of the sort—and it’s the sole reason I mentioned it at all.
The lesson to be drawn, I think, is less dramatic.
If the Detroits and New Orleanses of America do indeed resemble an African hellhole, I think it would be most prudent not to rescue them—in the same spirit in which the United States would be foolish to sink huge sums of money to “rescue”, for example, Lagos.
Certainly, the cries for federal aid money to “rebuild” the shattered inner cities should be resisted, until the cities themselves can prove to us all that they are capable of using the money wisely, honestly and as a foundation for their own efforts, rather than as the total underwriting thereof.
Of course, the race hustlers like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton would see such an attitude as “evidence of racism”, when in fact it’s nothing of the kind.
It’s not being racist; it’s being realistic. Let me end this piece by giving an example of what I’m talking about.
In the early 17th century, the citizens of Amsterdam tired of being constantly flooded out, and built not only the canals, but the dikes and dams which made the city the center of the European commercial universe for centuries, and a port which flourishes to this day. They did it, moreover, without massive amounts of aid funds from the Dutch government, and with a population of fewer than 100,000 people.
I would like to see a similar plan for the reclamation of New Orleans, using only labor and resources drawn from the New Orleans population, and supported solely by the government of Louisiana. Federal funding should never exceed 15% of the total cost of the project. (The Port of New Orleans is of strategic importance to the country as a whole, and is therefore deserving of some federal funding—but only a small proportion of the total.)
If New Orleans should prove incapable of implementing such a plan, its government and population are clearly not worth support, and New Orleans should be dismissed as a basket case, and left to its own devices, to survive or fall into ruin.
I would like to think that the (largely-Black) citizens of New Orleans and its (Black-run) government could pull off such a feat; after all, the Dutch were able to pull off a similar one, against a far more implacable and constant enemy in the North Sea than for New Orleans, threatened only by the occasional hurricane from the Gulf or flood of the Mississippi River.
This is not some acid test for Blacks, nor should it be seen as such.
But I have come full circle. I have come from believing that Blacks could indeed govern themselves (despite all that propaganda), through being disillusioned by all the evidence since (Lagos, Detroit), to where I am now.
I believe that Blacks should be treated equally to Whites. I believe that a man should be judged by the content of his character, and not by the color of his skin.
I believe that for every race hustler like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, there are many more colorblind Blacks like Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams.
But it cuts both ways.
If I am to believe that Blacks and their Black-majority government can rebuild a city by themselves, then I should likewise be able to castigate them for their failure without fear of being branded a racist.
I may have come full circle, but on this go-round, a healthy dose of realism has been added.
