Paved With Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America

Paved With Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America by Jared Taylor. Paperback: 416 pages. (New York, NY: Carroll & Graf Pub., 1993.)

Review by Ryan Setliff

Paved With Good Intentions

Arguing rather persuasively that alleged white racism is more an excuse for black failure and social pathologies than an accurate explanation, Taylor challenges political correctness on issues concerning race relations and ethnicity in America. He brings a plethora of evidence, statistics and hard facts to the table which bear some uncomfortable truths for many Americans — black and white — and especially that nebulous group we affectionately know as liberals. As Jonathan West laments, “Liberals are not concerned with outcomes our even with how policies work. They are only concerned with how policies FEEL.” That Trotskyite-Marxist ideological appellation ‘racist’ is reflexively thrown at every sensible piece of social dialogue on the matter, and Taylor’s book has not been immune from such charges. But as black economist Walter Williams said, “Paved With Good Intentions should be on everybody’s bookshelf.” See for yourself, what the establishment doesn’t want you to see.

The Myth of Institutional Racism Holding Down Minorities

In his introduction, Taylor notes, “For many people, both black and white, the notion that white racism explains black failure is the key to understanding American society. They are so convinced of the prevalence of white racism that they refuse even to consider the possibility that it may not be the sole obstacle to success for black Americans. For them, white racism is a brutal fact that seldom need be questioned—to question it may be immoral” (p. 16.) Taylor points out with much validity, “if whites in America are inveterately bigoted, other nonwhite races should face obstacles similar to those faced by blacks. Yet Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and even black West Indians have overcome America’s storied racism,” and “instead of complaining about oppression and prejudice—of which there used to be plenty—they have taken responsibility for themselves and seized opportunities for a better life.”

What is institutional racism? We hear so much about it from liberal sociologists. Here is one textbook definition illustrating its ludicrousness:

Institutional racism can be defined as those established laws, customs and practices which systematically reflect and produce racial inequities in American society. If racist consequences accrue to international laws, customs, or practices, the institution is racist whether or not the individuals maintain those practices have racist intentions (p. 30.)

In 1988, Miss Hanga, a journalist from eastern Europe, worked for a time in Boston as part of an international exchange of journalists. When she came to America, she had her eyes peeled for the white racism she heard about. Her black friends advised her “the time has passed when discrimination is visible to the naked eye,” as they reminded her about that elusive phenomenon of “institutional racism.” Apparently, institutional racism lurks in subtle places. Hanga eventually concluded that whites were not trouble for all of the plight which befell blacks, and proclaimed, “In my country we know about racism between black and white, and I thought this was the only evil preventing black progress,” to which she adds, “What upsets me most is the racism among blacks.” If her remarks don’t ice the cake, the 1999 words, of black columnist Larry Elder should. Elder, a political libertarian, flatly proclaimed the generalization that “Blacks are more racist than whites.” Elder writes,

To put it more bluntly, many blacks simply despise whites. They assume white bigotry and hostility toward blacks, and feel—against all evidence—that ‘white racism’ remains an intense and formidable obstacle. What nonsense. So convinced that white racism stops black progress, many blacks not only ignore obvious signs of progress, but viciously attack anyone—especially someone black—who dares to challenge the ‘they’re-out-to-get-us’ point of view. To hold this view—as I do—that racism no longer represents a serious threat to black upward mobility, to feel confident and positive about ‘race relations’ in America—that makes me a ‘sell-out.’ Thus, the questioner’s attack, not on my views, philosophy or ideology, but on me personally ¹

If anyone thinks Elder is committing hyperbole that some blacks see racism everywhere consider the remarks of the Black News Weekly, which declared, “Make no mistake about it. The Klan is alive and well in Southern California and there is a good chance that many of the CEOs who sit powerful positions could either be Klan members or Klan sympathizers.”

Most whites know ‘institutional racism’ as reverse racism or Affirmative Action—where the civil rights’ rhetoric about being judged by the content of one’s character and not the color of one’s skin falls flat on its nose as an Orwellian platitude. As Taylor remarks, “America practices a host of double standards that permit much to blacks that is denied to whites. The doctrine of white racism excuses blacks even when they are guilty of what is least tolerated in whites: racism itself” (p. 17.) Today, the race card for non-whites gives minorities a sense of entitlement in the pursuit of employment, subsidies for business, and government contract set-asides. It has soured race relations, and will continue to do so. As Taylor sardonically says, “It is the practice of discrimination in the name of equality, of injustice in the name of justice” (p. 123.) Affirmative action by every logical, rational and sensible deduction of equal protection jurisprudence runs counter to that jurisprudential concept of equal protection before the law.

With Affirmative Action, race is delineated as a criterion for special entitlements and benefits. It effects every facet of public sector hiring:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation runs its own formalized affirmative action program. On combined written and oral exam scores of 100, blacks get 5 extra points because of race. Since there are about eight thousand applicants every year for six hundred positions, every point makes a big difference… the agency ignores the scores if nonwhites do not score high enough. ‘Somehow they would decide they want so many blacks, or so many Hispanics,’ [and] ‘then they would go down the list until they got that number’ (p. 152.)

When Richard Nixon (AKA Tricky Dick) signed off on Affirmative Action, he privately reasoned blacks need a pick-me-up as he presumed black inferiority. The 'racist' Nixon considered it a pragmatic gesture not unlike the one intended by the 'racist' Johnson. No black American should be comforted by this nefarious system which presumes inferiority, and marginalizes the success of those who do achieve as a government crutch that made them successful. It insinuates that amongst black achievers, their success somehow owes to Affirmative Action and positive subsidies at taxpayer expense rather than their own initiative and hard work. "Nor do Americans need to go to the brink of civil war before repealing a policy [i.e. Affirmative Action] that has produce polarization and intergroup violence in other countries, including even civil war in Sri Lanka." ²

Taylor like Charles Murray maintains that, “When Congress voted the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it hardly changed the mood of America; it bowed to it” (p. 125.) Federal statutes didn’t really change attitudes about tolerance, fair play and dignity. The trend had started beforehand. Title VII was written to abate so called discrimination in employment, and section 703(a) forbade any employer to “limit, segregate, or classify his employees in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status as an employee because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin (p. 126.) The assertion that it wouldn’t be used to sanction reverse discrimination, quotas, and set-asides was repudiated. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) soon repudiated equal protection, and in a bizarre administrative interpretation, it interpreted the statute by turning it upside down and sanctioning reverse racism to enforce its provisos. A federal judge subsequently upheld the legality of this activity. I frankly even today maintain the politically incorrect position that forced integration much like segregation violates the freedom of association and its concomitant freedom to disassociate. Besides, economists like Walter Williams have pointed out that it adversely affects a white employer economically to set out and only hire whites, instead of all races, because of the costs incurred. Moreover, Affirmative Action and similar 'government programs' never could do what time, patience and market forces could accomplish at alleviating racial tension and opening up economic opportunities to black Americans—and all just in spite of past historical injustices—rightly perceived, exaggerated or imagined.

Being Frank About Black Social Pathologies in America

“When Arthur Eve, a black New York State assemblyman, learned that blacks in his state are ten times more likely than whites to be in prison or under court jurisdiction, he had one explanation: ‘New York State is the most racist state in America.’” For years, liberals have lamented the so called racial disparities in the criminal justice system and alleged ‘institutionalized racism’ amongst law enforcement, but demographics and crime statistics bear a much different truth. The simple reality is that blacks are disproportionally arrested and imprisoned in comparison to whites and Asians, because blacks commit a far disproportionate amount of crime to their population. Police officers characteristically patrol inner city neighborhoods in greater numbers because that is where their warrants are served and their response calls are coming from. Taylor’s statistics from the early 1990s show high crime amongst blacks, but more recent reports from the New Century Foundation, entitled The Color of Crime: Race, Crime and Justice in America, in 2005, bear out these tough facts:

• Police and the justice system are not biased against minorities.
• Blacks are seven times more likely than people of other races to commit murder, and eight times more likely to commit robbery.
• When blacks commit crimes of violence, they are nearly three times more likely than non-blacks to use a gun, and more than twice as likely to use a knife.
• Hispanics commit violent crimes at roughly three times the white rate, and Asians commit violent crimes at about one quarter the white rate.
• The single best indicator of violent crime levels in an area is the percentage of the population that is black and Hispanic.
• Of the nearly 770,000 violent interracial crimes committed every year involving blacks and whites, blacks commit 85 percent and whites commit 15 percent.
• Blacks commit more violent crime against whites than against blacks. Forty-five percent of their victims are white, 43 percent are black, and 10 percent are Hispanic. When whites commit violent crime, only three percent of their victims are black.
• Blacks are an estimated 39 times more likely to commit a violent crime against a white than vice versa, and 136 times more likely to commit robbery.
• Blacks are 2.25 times more likely to commit officially-designated hate crimes against whites than vice versa.
• Only 10 percent of youth gang members are white.
• Hispanics are 19 times more likely than whites to be members of youth gangs.
• Blacks are 15 times more likely, and Asians are nine times more likely.
• Between 1980 and 2003 the US incarceration rate more than tripled, from 139 to 482 per 100,000, and the number of prisoners increased from 320,000 to 1.39 million.
• Blacks are seven times more likely to be in prison than whites. Hispanics are three times more likely.

These aforesaid statistics are collaborated and based upon the U.S. Department of Justice / FBI Uniform Crime Report. Jared Taylor notes:

Many people have argued that the high crime rates reported for blacks only reflect the fact that police concentrate on the kinds of street crime blacks commit. According to this theory, whites break the law just as often, but commit ‘white collar’ crimes rather than assaults and robberies. In fact, blacks commit a disproportionate number of white-collar offenses as well. In 1990, blacks were nearly three times as likely as whites to be arrested for forgery, counterfeiting, and embezzlement, and were 3.4 times more likely to be arrested for receiving stolen property. These disproportions have been known for decades (p. 37.)

Special Treatment as a Right

“Some blacks have become so accustomed to preferential treatment that they may be unhappy when others get a break,” notes Taylor.

In January 1989, Miami blacks rioted and looted for two days after a Hispanic policeman shot and killed a black motorcyclist. Rioters burned down twenty-seven buildings, and six people died… many observers saw in it resentment of Miami’s then-current mobilization to accommodate a second new wave of Hispanic immigrants, mostly Nicaraguan. Blacks were angry at what they called ‘red-carpet treatment’ for immigrants and charged that their own needs were being ignored.’ (p. 197)

To fan the flames of resentment, when one official in the Hispanic-run city was asked why they didn’t do more to help Nicaraguan immigrants, he bluntly responded, ”We don’t want to make them into American blacks” (p. 197.) Sharp words—and political suicide for a white man to say!

Whenever conservatives talk of establishing a meritocracy where people are judged by the content of their character and qualifications (see Setliff, Ryan, Creating Equal? It's Just Not Possible InternetPundit.com), black liberals characteristically retort as black columnist Carl Rowan that "'merit' is the code word privileged whites use to protect their special hutches at Harvard and hundreds of other universities" (p. 199.)

Taylor notes American blacks have been so long accustomed to entitlement and special treatment, they may become resentful when the logic of egalitarian level and multiculturalism includes new designated victim groups, for as black professor Kenneth Tollett of Howard University proclaims:

A substantial sector of the black community is suffering because so much of the energy and driving force of the [civil rights] movement have been deflected toward Hispanic Americans, middle-class white women, homosexuals, the handicapped, the consumer, the children of the affluent [?], the aged, and the environment… Don’t forget the civil rights movement started out with blacks… [and they are] losing ground at each displacing development (p. 198.)

Well, he figured something out that I figured out a long time ago. With race-based special preferences, every group gets the spoils of such a corrupt system of patronage at the expense of another. And in the new social hierarchy, white males get last dibs on the feeding trough — if anything is left at all. So here comes the white man’s lament in this Brave New World of entitlement and the politics of white guilt, so fervently proclaimed by Charlton Heston:

Heaven help the God fearing, law-abiding, Caucasian, middle-class Protestant—or even worse, evangelical Christian, Midwestern or Southern—or even worse, rural, apparently straight-or even worse, admitted heterosexuals, gun-owing-or even worse, NRA-card-carrying, average working stiff—or even worse, male working stiff-because, not only don’t you count, you are a down-right obstacle to social progress. Your voice deserves a lower decibel level, your opinion is less enlightened, your media access is insignificant, and frankly, mister, you need to wake up, wise up, and learn a little something from your new-America and until you do, would you mind shutting up?

A Political Culture of Self-Victimization

The elusive search for institutional racism only reveals a political culture of self-victimization common to many, (though certainly NOT all Blacks.) Amongst uneducated blacks, absurd conspiracy tales are popular. Fanciful conspiracies include such absurdities as the U.S. Government’s complicity in importing crack-cocaine into black communities in south-central Los Angeles (which Rep. Maxine Waters supports)³ or that the dreaded AIDS-HIV plague was a synthetic virus manufactured in a government laboratory as a conspiracy to be targeted at Africans world-wide.⁴ Never mind that sexual promiscuity is more common amongst blacks and is prime causation for high rates of venereal disease infection amongst blacks world-wide.

In the weeks after Hurricane Katrina struck the predominantly black city of New Orleans in 2005, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and countless activists spun a fanciful tale of fiendish intrigue about the hurricane. Farrakhan the long-time demagogue has proclaimed the events surrounding Hurricane Katrina to be a racist conspiracy going all the way to the White House:

Katrina, so the conspiracy theory goes, provided the perfect and long awaited pretext for either the Army Corp of Engineers, secret government agents, the Klan, FEMA operatives, corporate real estate interests, or unnamed forces to blow the levees in New Orleans and send torrents of waters raging through the city's poorest black neighborhoods. The aim of the plot, depending on who spoke, was to kill blacks, protect the white, upper income areas from flooding, gut political strength in New Orleans, or grab black homes and land at fire sale prices and dump pricey condominiums, townhouses, upscale malls and gallerias in their neighborhoods. ⁵

To further substantiate this implausible conspiracy, some blacks interviewed at the SuperDome reported hearing explosions. Apparently, everyone was in on this conspiracy including the White House and perhaps the racist hurricane itself — with its winds of institutional racism — which set itself upon New Orlean's poor. (That's a little institutionalized sarcasm.) But who knows, maybe the U.S. Government secretly redirected Hurricane Katrina toward New Orleans with tractor beams from a secret weather machine orbiting around the earth. For black rap singer Kanye West, it was all too evident that “George W. Bush doesn’t care about black people,” as he proclaimed on national television on NBC’s Saturday Night Live.

A sensible black minister from Los Angeles, CA, Jessie Lee Peterson stepped foot into this malaise of black self-victimization and animosity towards whites. He dared to suggest that the moral depravity of blacks cost them in New Orleans, and that the blame doesn't lie with the Bush Administration so much as the peoples themselves including Mayor Nagin. He tacitly laments that people with common sense seek refuge some way when a category-five hurricane is bearing down on them and they live below sea-level:

Say a hurricane is about to destroy the city you live in. Two questions: ¶What would you do? ¶What would you do if you were black? ¶Sadly, the two questions don't have the same answer. ¶To the first: Most of us would take our families out of that city quickly to protect them from danger. Then, able-bodied men would return to help others in need, as wives and others cared for children, elderly, infirm and the like. ¶For better or worse, Hurricane Katrina has told us the answer to the second question. If you're black and a hurricane is about to destroy your city, you'll probably wait for the government to save you. This was not always the case. ¶Prior to 40 years ago, such a pathetic performance by the black community in a time of crisis would have been inconceivable. The first response would have come from black men. They would take care of their families, bring them to safety, and then help the rest of the community. Then local government would come in. ¶No longer. When 75 percent of New Orleans residents had left the city, it was primarily immoral, welfare-pampered blacks that stayed behind and waited for the government to bail them out. This, as we know, did not turn out good results. ⁶

Yet, for many Blacks, the social pathologies afflicting the inner cities are characteristically the fault of ‘the white man,’ whether by subtle ‘institutional racism,’ or some imagined malevolent intrigue. Many whites have grown resentful at these insinuations. Peterson suggests that blacks need to look within for answers to their economic and social plight and the spiritual ruin afflicting so many of their inner city communities. Maybe historical injustices has fed bitterness. But most hurdles today are largely the product of one’s own making. Peterson plainly reasons that positive steps towards curing these social pathologies so prevalent in black communities starts by rebuilding the family, the building block of society. To this end, Peterson has founded the Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny. Admittedly, for blacks who are mistrustful of whites, it serves them well to be guided by their own leaders and clergyman in rebuilding their communities and families. But they have to get rid of the tried and failed leadership, as many are quite content being demagogues and pandering to the politics of self-victimization.

If we are to look for external culprits in government social policy for the plight of minority communities, then we could certainly fault of the welfare state since it arguably replaced many black fathers with 'government welfare checks,' and it weakened and arguably destroyed the black families of inner cities (see Walter Williams’ The State Against Blacks and Charles Murray's Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980.) However, for conservatives or anyone to blame these failed social policies exclusively on well-meaning white liberals would ignore the pivotal role which black civil rights leaders had in promoting it as well. Martin Luther King, Jr., and many avowedly Marxist civil rights activists and communist party members, plainly and proudly hung socialism on the coattails of the civil rights movement—with King's proposed inauguration of the ‘Poor People’s Campaign,’ and tireless advocacy of socialist legislation. And it was something a racist Lyndon Baines Johnson was eager to accommodate in his Great Society vote-buying campaign that would change the once predominantly segregationist Democratic Party into the new plantation welfare-state party that would court the black vote. LBJ triumphantly thundered, “I’ll have those niggers voting Democrat for the next one-hundred years.” ⁷

Somehow, in the complex political realignments that ensued in the 1970s and 1980s, the Democratic Party became the party of the downtrodden (i.e., ethnic minorities, immigrants,) moral reprobates (i.e., homosexuals,) Hollywood’s limousine liberals, and trial lawyers. Much as the Civil Rights movement might have climaxed in setting the stage for a more peaceful co-existence between blacks and whites, it instead evolved into an alien ideology of group rights which is antithetical to our Anglo-American constitutional principles.

Such policies have fanned the flames of white resentment. Taylor notes:

In the fall of 1988, a white senior at Temple University founded the first White Student Union, because he was frankly angry at the racial privileges that were accorded to blacks. Temple put up every possible resistance but could find no way to deny whites their own student union when other races had theirs. Michael Spletzer, the union’s president, rejected the inevitable charges of white supremacy. “White people are being discriminated against by affirmative action,” he said. “We feel that giving scholarships, jobs, or anything else because of race is wrong and they should be given on merit alone.” In January 1989, when the union tried to recruit members, clusters of black students shouted obscenities and threatened violence. Any whites who so disrupted a black organization would, of course, be immediately disciplined (p. 241.)

Affirmative action has provoked resentment amongst whites, especially males, at minority privilege. This resentment is coupled with the recognition that their gain is our loss, especially in the pursuit of public sector employment of government contracts. Many working-class whites have come to see every gain of a minority comes at their expense. Incidental to her academic research on organized white separatist movements, black sociologist Carol M. Swain has tacitly argued that the continuation of the group rights and identity politics phenomenon, will find its logical culmination in the growth of reactionary white separatist movements and continued widespread white resentment at minority privilege. For Jared Taylor, a decade after writing his book, the professed desire for white separation is little more than a rational defensive posture by whites, as the trend towards identity politics is prevalent, deep-rooted and nearly irreversible. Taylor himself correlates the mass exodus by whites from the Democratic Party, and the transition to a largely white voting-block in the Republican Party as indicative of this phenomenon.

Anyway, amidst the mixed successes and failures of race relations in America, for blacks to find meaningful gain in terms of future social progress, it means losing misplaced grievances and culture of self-victimization. This entails ditching blowhard demagogue leaders like Al Sharpton and Jessie Jackson. Booker T. Washington prophesized the coming of these two charlatans:

There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do do not want to lose their jobs.⁸

Jackson has been rightly dubbed, “a racial ambulance chaser,” in the words of David Horowitz.⁹ All things considered, if white Americans — like myself and Taylor — cannot say the obvious than we’ve accomplished absolutely nothing in terms of dialogue about race relations in America, and never will. Besides, I was one of those white “racists” that helped rebuild black churches in New Orleans, along with countless other whites — as billions of dollars came from churches across America, (and from many predominantly white communities.)

And as conservatives are besmirched in the eyes of minorities, it is really the white liberals — or liberals in general — who reveal themselves as the most harmful to minorities in America today. White liberals offer two things: an ideological rational for black failure and a patronizing white condescension. They serve it up quite well, because it leaves liberals in a glow of self-absolution, as they spout their egalitarian rhetoric from the comfort of their communities in some of the most segregated northeastern cities in the country. Larry Elder laments this condescension:

What is white condescension? Professor Shelby Steele defines white condescension this way: whites bend over backward to show their good motives and unbiased minds. This provides a way of regaining the moral authority lost due to slavery and Jim Crow. Economics professor Walter Williams bases white condescension on emotional and irrational white guilt—that whites feel, if not personally, at least responsible by heritage for the ‘black plight.’ Thus, Williams offers universal amnesty to whites ‘so that white people can quit acting like damn fools.’ Good motives aside, white condescension does more damage than good. White condescension says to a black child, ‘The rules used by other ethnic and immigrant groups don’t apply to you. Forget about ‘work hard, get an education, possess good values. No, for you, we’ll alter the rules by lowering the standards and expecting less.’ Expect less. Get less. ¹⁰

Arguably white separatists who spout rhetoric, 'Stop the hate, separate,' have little to offer blacks in encouraging them to emulate the political philosophy of black nationalist Marcus Garvey and opt for self-reliance and separation. However, history shows that it is liberals — both white and black — with their politics of guilt and self-victimization that truly inculcates mental self-sabotage in the minds of people. Sadly, many black Americans have embraced this culture of self-victimization for years. All things considered, it is these liberal propagandists who reveal themselves as far greater enemies of any ethnic minority than a white separatist shows himself to be. That's something many black Americans have struggled to figure out. American liberalism is a wretched nursury of discord in America giving rise to group rights and identity politics—while only begging more class, cultural and ethnic conflict as result.

Many people might not fall for the culture of self-victimization. But for those that do: they soon become their own worst enemies in the race of life. Thus, the great failure of race relations in America was that it was paved with good intentions.