Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

If you think that saying “All Lives Matter” somehow diminishes the fact that black lives matter, you might have a chunk of Marx in your eye. You might also be a stone cold racist.

Look, the way a Marxist explained it (I got it second hand) is that if you tell someone that your kid is having a really sh*tty time in school, and they say “all the kids are having a sh*tty time” you are somehow diminishing that parent’s experience.

Sure you are. IF the kid is having a particularly sh*tty time, in fact. For instance, when younger son was going through hell with no galoshes, if someone had said “all kids have a terrible time in that school” I’d have said “uh, not all, but you’re right, the school resembles a prison camp, and when I went to have lunch with him, I was appalled.”

I wouldn’t have said “you’re disrespecting my kid for saying that.”

And if in fact, the facts on the particular thing you were complaining about (say, you claim your kid is getting an extraordinary number of detentions) turns out to be not only false but also crazy cakes (no, statistically unarmed black people DO NOT get shot/killed more than unarmed white people, not even proportionately to their numbers in the population. Not that you’ll find that without looking very carefully at this point.) not only am I not disrespecting your kid, I’m telling you to loosen up the tinfoil hat.

I’m sure that Marxist—I don’t talk to him, because frankly 2020 is enough of a problem—would come back citing rates of single parenthood, rates of failing in school and statistics of employment.

And yeah, you can say that black people in America have a really rough deal in those respects. But—and this is very important—do they have a rough deal because no one gives a d*mn or because they’ve been the state’s particular pet project since the Great Society? Because you know what? I’ve never seen the government actually do something to improve the lot of Americans or in fact anything outside its allotted duties in the constitution that doesn’t in fact result in the exact opposite of what they say it will. Examples? Oh, hell. Radio Free America is a source of anti-American propaganda. The department of education has resulted in generations of uneducated, barely literate children. The department of energy seems hell bent on making sure that energy supply is irregular, fragile and expensive. The government’s space program, after a burst of some achievement now seems mostly devoted to keeping Americans out of space, at least Americans in their own bodies. And—Why go on?

In fact anything beyond protecting the borders (wouldn’t it be a great idea if they actually did THAT) and enforcing the law equally (Wouldn’t THAT be another great idea?) seems to be beyond the reach of the government. Mostly because government is force and it’s at its best when breaking things.

Yes, I know the racists of both sides (Joe Biden “Poor kids are as smart as white kids” Head desk.) will come and say that black people couldn’t achieve or find their way in society without help. I not only find that argument nauseating, I find it bitterly funny.

To the idiots who think that black people are genetically inferior I say that the diet in the poor parts of Africa influences IQ and that the culture distorts the whole thing further, and besides IQ doesn’t mean what you think it means. Or as a friend who works in the field put it “We don’t know what IQ means, but it doesn’t mean what people think.”

Oh, you mean black people in America? Yeah. genetically speaking, unless we’re talking about the children of very recent immigrants, the technical term for black people who are American is “Caucasian.”

As someone who was once not culturally American and who has acculturated, let me tell you that the way Americans identify races makes me think of the farside cartoon with the two penguins on the doors of the bathrooms and “only they can tell the difference.”

Not only could the Reverend Wright and Kamala Harris disappear into the general population in Portugal and not even be thought anything but white (not that Kamala Harris pings anyone’s radar as “African” or at least I hope not) but it would have shocked me 34 years ago if you told me I looked or could be identified as anything but white. However I recently found a 20 year old picture of myself (I’ll probably be using it for the Jane Austen fanfic pen name’s author page, once I figure out where Dan put the scanner after the office move.) I’d never thought of myself as anything but white, even then, though people tend to identify me as Latin. But I was wearing a perm at the time, and the picture is black and white. And looking at it, I realized, if I saw it now, and didn’t know it was me, I’d assume it was a young black woman. (Oh, I DO have black ancestry, according to 23 and me, though frankly the total changes back and forth. Probably enough I could claim to be black if I so wished. But it’s not something that would cross anyone’s mind in Portugal. Or here, when my hair is straight.)

As for the racists on the left side…. I was extremely shocked not so long ago when someone told me with a straight face that the government needed to hire black people even for make work jobs, because as technology became more advanced, all these people were going to be unemployed. I didn’t say “Say what?” though I should have. I mean, seriously? Up until that moment I’d never thought that being able to tan killed brain cells. Never mind.

Moving right along, it occurs to me that telling these people “All lives matter” is in fact inadequate.

If we’re talking about deaths-by-police, well, you know, it’s not a problem. And if it’s death in life by government, yes, black people have it worse than many—most?—in the US. But how is identifying them as a group and giving them more government loving “care” make things better?

And if its’ crazy cakes insanity like what Bully Lament and Murder as an organized movement do, such as demanding that people just hand things over in reparations?

That’s just the insanity induced by Marxism. And it would work as well as Marxist redistribution does. I.e. total immiseration of everyone.

You see, people aren’t classes. Or colors. or any external characteristic.

People are individuals. Which means whatever things affect them personally they affect THEM not everyone else who looks like them.

While you can make a lot of noises about the generational effects of slavery, let’s be brutally honest, even 100 years ago most people were traumatized in ways we weren’t and ways that would break our kids. We don’t know how that affects family culture, or individual lives. We just don’t know.

We know in the long run—though it would shock most graduates of American high schools—we’re ALL no matter what color descended from slaves and slave masters, from cannibals and rapists, from the raped and the tortured. There are no universal winners in the human race, only temporarily “privileged” people, and that privilege is often less than it seems.

I recently watched some crazy person tell us that the ability to go the new world and colonize was white privilege. Let’s look it over: you get in a vessel that will take months to get somewhere you’ve never been, leaving your entire family behind, every tie, every connection, and you get to wrestle a living out of unfamiliar soil This is an endeavor that killed most people. But hey, privilege!

Then there are the ones who claim death camp survivors have white privilege, something that would make you cry if it weren’t so funny. Also, nauseating.

One starts to think that “privilege” as defined by the left might be a Marxist mirage.

Anyway, the point is yeah, given horrible schools, broken neighborhoods, and the fact that social programs have destroyed family structure, it is true black people have a harder time in America.

Who was it—sorry, no memory for celebrities, but it’s a black man—who said the way to end racism is to stop talking about race. Just stop it. Stop trying to turn it on its head. Stop telling me—a first generation immigrant, married to a man whose family never owned slaves—that I owe reparations to some black immigrant—say Ilhan Omar—who arrived in America this generation and who—yeah, surely—has slave ancestors, but NOT HERE.

Stop telling women, for that matter, that they should humiliate and mistreat men because women were humiliated and mistreated in former generations. Sure, some women—not all—were. But I can guarantee they weren’t mistreated and humiliated by any man alive today. If a man alive today mistreats women PUNISH HIM, not all males in general. And anyone who thinks a man deserves what is coming to him because some distant ancestor might have been an abuser, let me point out women can be abusers and tyrants too, and that you undoubtedly also have a lot of those in your ancestry. All of us are descended from sinners, criminals, saints and martyrs. Of both sexes. AND more importantly, none of us are our ancestors OF EITHER SEX, OF ANY COLOR, OF ANY CONDITION.

Humans are individuals. And individual lives MATTER. They matter profoundly. In fact, to other humans they are the most important thing in this world.

I don’t care who your ancestors were, if you tan or not, or if your nose if like mine or tiny and inconsequential like my husband’s. I don’t even care if like me and the boys you have Neanderthal brow ridges.

I care that you are Human (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) and your own person.

It is not the government’s or the culture’s job to punish you for the crimes of people who look vaguely like you, long ago or now. And it is not the government’s job to compensate you for the oppression of people who look vaguely like you, long ago or now.

It is not the government’s job to decide your potential and give you pity jobs, or chain you to low performing schools, no matter what your color is.

The government’s job is to treat you equally with other individuals under the law, with no prejudice in either direction.

And the government’s job is to guarantee your life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. The later of which includes securing to you your property legally acquired, the fruit and sweat of your brow, and everything that gives life meaning.

Giving the government power to strip people of their property, either because they got in a stupid panic over a virus OR because they think they should hold you accountable for the crime of long dead people to whom you have no relation will only make sure that no lives matter. Not mine, not yours, no matter what color the people living these lives are or think they are, or perhaps aspire to being.

Humans aren’t born responsible for the crimes of anyone but their own.

A system that punishes people for things they did not do is called INjustice. It has always been so. And you don’t create justice via injustice.

Stop lumping people in arbitrary groups and pitching them against each other in obedience to the system of a long dead and honestly very evil man.

Individual lives matter. They’re the only thing that matters. Let’s give people the freedom to live them to the fullest.

 

Reprinted from According to Hoyt for August 17, 2020