Milwaukee, Cedar Rapids(!), Melbourne: Three Black Riots — Three Explanations

By John Derbyshire

08/19/2016

[Adapted from the latest Radio Derb, now available free on VDARE.com]

This week we saw some more fruits of Midwestern Nice. By a pleasant concinnity, the scene was Wisconsin’s 4th Congressional District, right up against Wisconsin’s 1st, where Paul Ryan, the Dark Lord of Midwestern Nice, crushed his enemies in last week’s primary.

Those two Congressional Districts are considerably different. District 1, Paul Ryan’s, is 91 percent white, less than five percent black. District 4 is only 55 percent white, more than 33 percent black. By contrast with Paul Ryan, whose darkness is entirely spiritual, District 4 actually has a black representative, six-termer Gwen Moore — the first black congresscritter from Wisconsin ever when she was first elected in 2004.

District 4 includes the city of Milwaukee, which is forty percent black. Last weekend an armed black criminal resisting arrest was shot by a (black) cop. A black riot ensued, with cars and businesses burned and, of course, much looting.

Mrs. Clinton and her Social Justice Warriors want to bring in further masses of poor Third Worlders to enhance our nation’s diversity. A thoughtful observer might question the wisdom of this in light of our failure to make any progress coping with the diversity we already have.

Look: Next year is the fiftieth anniversary of the 1967 black riots in Detroit, Newark, and, yes, Milwaukee.

Fifty years — two entire human generations — and still they riot. Fifty years of fretting and fussing, of nagging and shaming, of affirmative action and contracting set-asides; fifty years of jobs programs, food programs, billion-dollar overhauls of school systems. Fifty years of pushing role models, black doctors and detectives in movies and TV, black athletes as culture heroes, black actors playing God. Fifty years of Martin Luther King Days, Black History Months, and Kwanzaas. Fifty years of black mayors, black police chiefs, black Attorneys General, a black President…And still they riot.

Wouldn’t prudence suggest that we hold off on importing more diversity until we've made some progress in getting blacks to stop rioting?

I guess Prudence doesn’t live here any more.

What has the riot got to do with Midwestern Nice? One manifestation of Midwestern Nice has been the Midwest’s pioneering of the welfare state. In the later 20th century Wisconsin had some of the most generous welfare provisions in the country. This was, however, just the point at which low-level factory employment drifted off to Asia; and what didn’t drift off was colonized by immigrants from Mexico and Central America, who were easier to manage than blacks and worked for lower wages. Blacks who'd come up in the Great Migration of mid-century, now with no work they could do, fell back on those generous welfare programs. Milwaukee now has this sullen mass of unemployable, disaffected blacks, just waiting for an opportunity to riot.

It wasn’t just Milwaukee where black rioters turned, snarling, on nice Midwesterners last Saturday.

Here’s a report from Cedar Rapids, 200 miles west of Milwaukee: Gang War Erupts at Sweet Corn Festival! Cedar Rapids Defender, August 14, 2016

This one goes into the file labeled "Why We Can’t Have Nice Things Any More." The Sweet Corn Festival is an annual state-fair-type event you get all over the Midwest towards the end of the school summer vacation. Farmers and artisans set up stalls selling sweet corn, of course, and paintings and handicrafts and tchotchkes. Mom and Dad take the kids along. You meet neighbors, eat some nice corn on the cob, buy a nice jar of pickles and a nice landscape painting for Grandma, and everyone has a good time soaking in all the niceness.

That’s what’s supposed to happen. What actually happened in Cedar Rapids last Saturday was, to quote from the Cedar Rapids Defender:

… described as a nightmare and pure chaos by those at the scene. The event attracted mass hordes of teenagers, some claiming to be from Black Lives Matter, loitering about, bickering with rival gangs and threatening violence …

A police officer attempting to detain a teenage youth, was subsequently ambushed by dozens of kids, who kicked and stomped, beating him on the ground.

The Defender was at least honest enough to mention the blackness of the rioters, if only obliquely. The indispensable Colin Flaherty, writing up the incident for American Thinker, tells us that

The rest of the media in Cedar Rapids stuck to the usual script of "groups of racially ambiguous children doing all sorts of bad things for no reason whatsoever, other than that is just kids blowing off some steam."

My own favorite headline came from one of the TV stations: [Headline] "St. Jude Sweet Corn Festival Shut Down Due to Reckless Children."

Forget Milwaukee: Cedar Rapids Had Better Black Mob Violence and Denial, August 18, 2016

But that’s Midwestern Niceness for you. Rampaging Blacks Shut Down Nice White Festival would be a more honest headline. But it wouldn’t be nice.

When these riots happen, you get a lot of thumb-sucking pieces about why they happen, what causes them. Well, what does cause them?

You're asking me? Well, I’m a race realist, so I'll give you an answer in that vein. Then, in scrupulous fairness, I'll give you some of the other hypotheses on offer, and compare and contrast them with mine.

My answer: Different races — different local varieties of Homo sap., that have followed different paths through evolutionary space for many, many generations, end up with different distributions on most heritable traits. That includes traits of intelligence, behavior, and personality.

So in a multiracial society that rewards certain traits and penalizes others, different races will precipitate out, average-average, at different social levels. American blacks, for example, with low average IQ, low average impulse control, and high average inclinations to antisocial behavior, will tend to pool at the bottom of society, in slums and prisons and criminal gangs.

The blacks thus pooled, being too dimwitted to understand anything about biology or statistics, will attribute their sorry plight to the malice of hostile agents. They'll develop a lot of anger against those agents, the anger occasionally breaking out in riots.

Their attributing their crappy life outcomes to the machinations of evil agents is itself a hypothesis of course, one that you can set down on the table next to mine. It’s Hypothesis Two.

Here’s one black guy expounding Hypothesis Two last Saturday, one of the Milwaukee rioters.

Clip: It’s sad, because, you know, this what happen because they not helping the black community. They, like, you know … The rich people, they got all this money, and they not, like, you know, trying to give us none …

I’m going to go out on a limb here and speculate that when that man says "rich people" he doesn’t have Oprah Winfrey in mind, or Kanye West, or Magic Johnson, or Barack Obama, or Morgan Freeman… But that’s just me speculating.

Here’s Hypothesis Three, offered by The New York Times. This one must be serious stuff, backed by rock-ribbed deep social analysis, to be aired in such a prestigious outlet. Right?

Well, the NYT consults Reggie Moore Director of Milwaukee’s Office of Violence Prevention:

Tackling the root causes of crime would be the most effective way to make the community safer and calm tensions, [Mr. Moore] said. "I think it’s a matter of having a dual conversation about what justice needs to look like in this particular situation, but also the broader conversation of what a just community looks like," Mr. Moore said.

Racial Violence in Milwaukee Was Decades in the Making, Residents Say

By John Eligon, August 14, 2016

With a penetrating intellect like Mr. Moore’s on the job, we should have the problem solved in no time. How can it be that, in these fifty years since the long hot summer of 1967, how can it be that no-one ever thought we need to tackle the root causes of crime? And have a conversation? It’s so simple!

So there you are: three hypotheses about what causes riots.

• Hypothesis One: cranky old Derb with his stupid, bigoted, so-called "race realism."
• Hypothesis Two: It’s the fault of rich people not giving money to the black community.
• Hypothesis Three: It’s our failure to tackle the root causes of crime and to have conversations.

The Social Justice Warriors will protest. I haven’t taken account of history, they'll say, wagging their fingers at me — of the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. That’s what underlies the anger, the resentment, the failure.

Is it, though? Let’s look at a different black riot, and see which hypothesis better fits the case, my race-realist one or the one from history.

When scanning the Western world for stories about race and diversity, I always like to take in the Antipodes. For one thing, I have some slight family connections with that zone. For another, the issues they're having with diversity down under shed interesting light on our own troubles.

And then, I just hate to see the Aussies and Kiwis left out. They were stalwart allies in WW2. One of my very first VDARE.com pieces was about Australia; and I’m pretty sure I’m the only contributor to have written an entire full-length column about diversity in New Zealand, albeit on a different website.

One blogger I follow is the one who calls himself Oz Conservative. He’s very much on my wavelength, or I’m on his.

Well, reading Oz Conservative the other day I caught a reference to the Apex gang, which I'd quite forgotten about.

Who they? They a criminal gang in Melbourne, Australia, who staged a nasty riot of their own back on March 12 this year, the so-called Moomba riot.[ Police charge 34, some with links to Apex, over Moomba riots, The Melbourne Age, April 19, 2016]

There seems not to have been any particular cause for the Moomba riot. The only thing the news reports are all agreed on is that it was nothing to do with race. Absolutely nothing, I tell you! The Melbourne Herald-Sun, April 10^th:

A four-week police probe has ruled out race as being a motivation for the violence.

Moomba riots: Police blame mob mentality for Melbourne violence

So if you think the Moomba riots had anything whatever to do with race, you are a very bad person, and you should go wash your mouth out with soap and water.

Strange to say, though, when you look at video clips of the riot, what you see is mostly black guys. Yes, there are white people around here and there in the videos; but that’s because Moomba, like Sweet Corn, is the name of a family festival, with rides and stalls and musicians and floats, and a fireworks display at night.

Someone better tell the Aussies they can’t have nice things any more either — not if they're going to climb on the Diversity wagon.

The Moomba riot seems in fact to have been a gang rumble, with the major gang involved being this Apex gang, most of whose members are black.

These are not indigenous Australian blacks, mind. They don’t cause much trouble. Like our own indigenes, they live mostly out of sight on remote reservations, peacefully drinking themselves to death. No, the Apex gang is made up of South Sudanese, who flooded into Australia in quantity in the middle years of the last decade. These are black Africans.

Apex have been fortifying their numbers in recent years by recruiting from “PIs.” That’s Antipodes-slang for "Pacific Islanders" — Polynesian peoples from the islands of the South Pacific, who have settled in Australia and New Zealand in great numbers over the past few decades. I mentioned in that Richard Lynn’s estimate for the mean IQ of PIs is 85, same as the mean IQ of black Americans:

While of course there is much variation, as there is in any large group, Polynesian New Zealanders as a whole are underachievers … Polynesians … are way over-represented among high school dropouts. PIs are unemployed at twice the national rate …

I can’t see that it fits at all with the historical Hypothesis Three, even if The New York Times does support it. There was no plantation slavery in Australia, and no hundred years of Jim Crow. Practically none of the Sudanese have been in Australia even twenty years. Some of the PIs would have been there longer, but they weren’t there in any quantity before the 1970s.

And of course they arrived voluntarily, as did the Sudanese.

Yet there they are in Melbourne: racially distinct groups with depressed mean IQ and presumably corresponding statistical differences in heritable patterns of behavior and personality.

And they're doing just what the blacks in Milwaukee and Cedar Rapids do.

I’m going to mark up one for race realism here.

John Derbyshire writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him. ) He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books. He’s had two books published by VDARE.com: FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT (also available in Kindle) and From the Dissident Right II: Essays 2013. His writings are archived at JohnDerbyshire.com.

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