And needless to say, I do so with the sort of wimpy, apologetic, hand-wringing demeanour of an effete Englishman flapping his hands in the middle of a riot! Up until the '50s/'60s it seemed to me, as a very young and even more ignorant Englishman viewing race relations 'over there', that the blacks had had a very bad time of it. My sympathies were entirely with the civil rights movement and in so far as I bothered with it all - not much, my interests were taken with birds 'n' beer - I was delighted when bit by bit the law was changed and blacks were able to vote and, perhaps more important to them at the time, some of the vicious social restrictions were lifted. Excellent, I thought, now they can contribute to 'The Great Republic' and lift it even higher up the mountain.
Big mistake!
It didn't happen. Well, it did for some but for the mass, they remained sunk in squalor and poverty looked down upon not just by whites but by many of the blacks who climbed the ladder that better men than them had won. It is the very richest of tragic ironies that it is under the regime of America's first black president that the degeneration of much of the black population has become apparent to this far off observer. From 'over here' it looks as though they were given the chance but they have fumbled it. From time to time I have wondered why - and how?
Tentatively, I have pointed my finger at those race rascals like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson who might have slithered out of the pages of one of Tom Wolfe's superb novels depicting with forensic exactitude the cancer in the body-politic of modern America. These two 'chancers', with the help of their myriad black supporters plus the assistance of their 'stat whites', particularly in the mass media, have injected the black population with a drug more powerful than crack cocaine, it's called 'd and e' - dependency and entitlement. The old American virtues of hard work and making your way by your own efforts have been replaced by total dependency on the state. That, of course, means total dependency on your politicians, cue entry stage Left of Obama, Sharpton and Jackson.
Even so, I was still confounded by what I can only call the lethargy of large swathes of the black American population who had seen the legal barriers brought crashing down followed, more slowly, I know, by the social barriers. Why haven't they seized the opportunities in the way that other immigrant populations have done. Chinese, Koreans, Indians and so forth have flocked to America and by the second or at most the third generation have prospered. Why not the blacks? I have been offered one explanation from a most unlikely source.
As you know I am a voracious consumer of 'pulp fiction'. I keep promising to cut back on this rubbish and to concentrate on serious books but, dammit, the other day I found myself alone in town and I simply could not ignore the lures of the charity shops. Anyway, I came home with five, dirt cheap, paper-back thrillers. One of them was The Quiet Game written by a man called Greg Iles some of whose books I have read before. Several of his tales are set in Natchez, Mississippi, a town steeped in black/white history. In this particular book, one of his characters points to the relative success of subsequent ethnic groups who have arrived en masse in the USA, such as the Chinese, Koreans, Mexicans and so forth. He puts it down to the fact that they still have a keen sense of their own ethnic history. Alas, the blacks have none because they were ripped away from their homelands and families in Africa and simply tipped ashore in America. They have no sense of ethnic history or their place in this new scheme of things.
I don't know whether that is right or wrong but it is an interesting theory. However, one thing I do know is that the quicker that black America rids itself of malignants like Obama, Sharpton and Jackson, the better off they will be!