Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

The left is correct, there is still racism in the United States. But not in the way they mean it.

In Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird, Tom Robinson commits the ultimate Southern segregationist sin. He, a black man, took pity on a white woman. Not that he raped her (He didn't, but the jury was willing to believe that he did), but that he took pity on her.

Today, the ultimate sin for a black man is to tell white liberals that he does not need their condescending views of his place. As Clarence Thomas wrote of his confirmation hearings, “I refused to bow to the superior wisdom of the white liberals who thought they knew what was better for blacks,” he writes. “Since I didn’t know my place, I had to be put down.” At the time he called the hearings “a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks”

In his autobiography, he wrote: “As a child in the Deep South, I’d grown up fearing the lynch mobs of the Ku Klux Klan; as an adult, I was starting to wonder if I’d been afraid of the wrong white people all along. My worst fears had come to pass not in Georgia but in Washington, D.C., where I was being pursued not by bigots in white robes, but by left-wing zealots draped in flowing sanctimony.” “My Grandfather’s Son” (Harper; 2007)

In To Kill a Mockingbird, we never actually see what happened between Tom Robinson and Mayella Ewell. We see only their testimony in court. Now take that courtroom testimony and bring it forward from the 1930s in Alabama to a modern university in a blue state. Would the outcome change?

I referred to Scott McKay's article, [Weaponized Governmental Failure: A Primer](https://spectator.org/weaponized-governmental-failure-revivalist-manifesto-excerpt/), in the [October 30, 2022, issue](https://ncc-1776.org/tle2022/tle1180-20221030-00.html) of [TLE](https://ncc-1776.org/). The author's thesis is simply that the liberal Democrats' mismanagement of urban life is not a bug, it is a feature. It's deliberate.

One effect of that mismanagement is to drive the middle class (white and black) out of the cities. Why? Because to the Democrats, people who actually want their cities to run well are a pain in the ass. That leaves rich voters, of whom there are very few in a big city, and who mostly write big campaign contribution checks.

It also leaves poor voters. Generally unsophisticated and dependent on government, it is easy to manipulate them and keep them down on the plantation where they vote Democrat. It's easier to keep them docile if you spend $15-$20,000 per student per year to turn out functionally illiterate future voters.

This modern liberal plantation certainly can't have uppity blacks rejecting it, and it cannot have them on the U.S. Supreme Court. That might give the plantation inhabitants idea.

There are, of course, Democrat black mayors, black legislators, even a black President. They enforce the plantation rules, and convince the plantation inhabitants that this is the natural, and right and proper order of things. There's a term for such people: house negros. In the antebellum South, the house negros worked in the house, cooking, cleaning, serving, etc. That was better duty than working in the fields. They had a vested interest in maintaining their position. Think Mammy or Pork from Gone With the Wind. Think Stephen in Django Unchained (2012)