A ground-breaking look at the problems of black America!

(Below, a reader suggests that maybe negative images of blacks are indeed the cause of negative black behavior, and I reply.)

Janks Morton, who has made a movie called, “What Black Men Think,” is being interviewed on C-Span. The interview started with Morton talking about how bad things are in the black community, with 70 percent illegitimacy, with men and women alienated from each other and all the rest of it. At first his message seemed to be, “Black people are doing this to themselves, they have to change their behavior.” But as the program has proceeded, excerpts from his film, featuring interviews with various prominent blacks, make it plain that the message is that “society” and the “media” are imposing negative images on blacks, presenting blacks as thugs, criminals, irresponsible, sexually indiscriminate. The implication is that if society and the media stopped producing these negative images of blacks, black behavior would improve. So, notwithstanding Morton’s own moderate, non-anti-white demeanor, the movie he made looks like the same old same old—blaming society.

- end of initial entry -

Anna writes:

You wrote about Janks Morton’s movie,”What Black Men Think,” where interviews with prominent blacks blame “society” and the “media” for imposing negative images on blacks, and concluded the message is the same old same old—blaming society.

I wonder if there is a different way of looking at this.

Some of your other writings came to mind, when you extolled some old-time movies that conveyed positive virtues, virtues that were present in the society. Could it be that perhaps an effort at similar portrayals, in this context, would evoke and promote similar behavior?

LA replies:

Movies and tv are FILLED with the most positive images of blacks, as judges, doctors, computer geniuses, patriots, heroes, exemplars of middle-class virtue! For the last 20 years we’ve been drowning in such virtuous portrayals of blacks, even as white men are regularly portrayed as inhuman coldblooded monsters or as pathetic, neurotic nerds.

The idea that the entertainment media lack positive mages of blacks and that therefore the answer to black dysfunction is to increase even further the portrayal of black “role models” is a typical liberal escape from reality. It doesn’t seem to occur to Morton that the reason for the images of blacks as violent thugs, gangsta rappers, and abusers of women is that so many blacks are, indeed, violent thugs, gangsta rappers, and abusers of women.

I’m reminded of the British leftist Neil Clark who wrote in the December 1, 2003 issue of the magazine laughingly known as The American Conservative that “racist” neocon “Arabophobes” have manufactured a “new image” of the Muslim as “the fanatical terrorist, the stone thrower, the suicide bomber.” Clark sort of reversed the causal sequence, didn’t he? As I keep pointing out (according to AFLMMRLS), in liberal society, the more objectionable and troublesome a non-Western group or minority group really is, the more the majority must be blamed for the minority’s bad behavior.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 19, 2007 08:18 PM | Send