Sacrificed to Dionysus? – Are Blacks really the
scapegoats of White religiosity?
A review of:
Orlando PATTERSON,
1998, Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries.
New York : Basic.
By:
Chris BRAND (author of
THE g FACTOR and research consultant to the Woodhill Foundation, USA)
This
book's author is a well-fed Black sociologist at Harvard University who wears a
suit, tie and glasses and sympathizes with Christianity. He has a wife called
Anita. Patterson thanks Anita for her "information and insights about her
native culture, America", so Anita may be White. In any case, Patterson is
a stylish writer who is as at home with social statistics as with Madonna's
complaints that her one-time Black lover -- the basketball star and
transvestite, Dennis Rodman -- failed to give her cunnilingus when the pair met
for sex. More especially, Patterson abjures constructivism; he thinks American
Blacks are in a "desperate" state of criminality, drug-addiction and
family breakdown; he agrees that Black teenage pregnancies are
"catastrophic" for both mother and child; and he denies that Black
social problems are attributable to poverty or to the daily grind of White
racism. In 1993, he took the trouble to denounce the more Afrocentric versions
of multiculturalism that were being touted by Black racists (such as
university-employed Lionel Jeffries Jr.) for America's schools. Altogether,
Patterson looks as promising a Black sociologist as Whites are likely to
find.
What, then, can have
inspired Patterson's latest title, Rituals of Blood? Why, nothing less
than a belief that Black ghetto bastardy and violence – not least to Black
women and in turn from these women to their Black children – can be blamed on
nineteenth-century Whites. These primitives, not content with enslaving Blacks
and denying them marriage prospects, proceeded to hack off Blacks' ears,
fingers and genitalia in the process of roasting them alive at joyfully
attended lynchings. According to Patterson, this meant that Black males were in
no position to supply adequate male role models to the children they casually
sired; that Black womenfolk learned to despise them; and that Black men in turn
came to hate their own mothers and Black women in general. By all means, the
modern world has witnessed what Patterson obligingly agrees is a marked
lessening of White savagery and even of White racism; and Black sportsmen like
O. J. Simpson have been venerated by White sportslovers (at least till O.J.
murdered his wife then shamelessly played the race card at his trial) and made
into American multi-millionaires. Yet Patterson sees only more trouble ahead.
Niggas with attitude, like the musician Puff Daddy, apparently serve the
function only of letting Whites indulge the 'Dionysian sides' of their natures.
Meanwhile, rap artistes lead Black youth to impossible dreams and to a
sustained non-involvement with the normal world of work and family life that
will outlast all the corresponding efforts of affirmative racists and
welfarists. In their "Dionysian entrapment", "hypnotized"
Black youth replace Uncle Tom's cabin in the sky with the "all-or-nothing
hope of one day slam-dunking the basketball net" and head towards their
"fateful moment" of the gathering future.
At the core of this
dramatic account of forever-collapsing Black culture lies an impressive
collection of survey statistics which bolster Patterson's feminist analysis of
the essential modern problem of American Blackdom. So hostile and suspicious
are the two Black sexes that 46% of Black men have never been married (compared
to only 27% of what Patterson calls 'Euro-American' men). A Black woman in the
USA can expect to spend just 22% of her lifetime being married (compared to the
43% spent by Euro-American females in one or more viable marriages). Surveys
reveal the reasons for the frostiness between the Black sexes: 56% of young
Black men say they cheated on even their very first sexual partner – which the
refreshingly judgmental Patterson finds nothing short of
"deplorable." "….the great majority of Afro-American
mothers," says Patterson, "have been seduced, deceived, betrayed and
abandoned by the men to whom they gave their love and trust." Tracing
these problems further back, Black children experience high rates of sexual
abuse: Blacks are a minority of the population in Chicago, but 70% of child sex
abuse in that city is Black-on-Black. Nor does Black isolation occur just
because a third of young Black men are in jail at any one time. Contrary to what
Patterson calls the myth of Black brotherhood, Black men have markedly
impoverished social networks compared to Whites; and their minimal contacts
seldom link them with any realistic world of employment that is both gainful
and legal. Contrary to what White sociologists have believed, Black boys' gangs
do not in fact include relatives: the Black 'extended family' is actually a
myth. Poverty is emphatically not the problem, says Patterson: being
unmarried and friendless are especially frequent for Blacks at both ends
of the social scale.
Thus it is that
Patterson proposes his solution to US Blackdom: that the urban ghettos be
broken up and Blacks dispersed among Whites who will be further assisted to marry
them by laws which would guarantee Blacks 'equal opportunity' to marry a decent
proportion of Caucasoids – who currently miscegenate freely with all
races/ethnicities except the unhappy Negro.* Admittedly, Patterson also urges
that Black men should "radically alter their ways" and "change
their gender attitudes"; but he has no confidence that Black men will
respond to this "sociological imperative" to repair a culture of
mistrust that is "execrable", "disastrous" and
"grievous." Hence the need for Blacks to "engage more in
out-marriage" and reap the "exchange of cultural dowries"
currently enjoyed among themselves by Whites, Latinos, Mexicans and Asians.
What
can be said of this engaging thesis before 'equal opportunity' enthusiasts take
their next step forward to oblige childless White suburban women to take Black
lodgers and turn them swiftly into husbands? There are in fact three remarkable
omissions from Patterson's story.
First, the attribution
of Blacks' problems to White enslavement and the "lynching cult"
neglects that Africa had its own pattern of Black-on-Black slavery,
inter-tribal violence and brutal tyranny long before White sailors ever showed
up to buy the slaves readily supplied by Black potentates and princelings. The
notorious Zulu king Chaka was witnessed despatching 60 twelve-year-old boys
before breakfast and massacring 500 women for witchcraft -- see Burnham, 1993.
Patterson's only acknowledgment of such historic Black brutality is in an
entirely unlikely and unsupported claim that centuries of enslavement by fellow
Blacks "would have weighed traumatically on the minds and souls of West
Africans and their descendants", "[making] the slave gulags of the
Caribbean harder to endure." Surely it is more likely that White slavery
would have come as a considerable relief from the African variety. Anyway, the
first few hundred thousand slaves in the USA were actually Whites, and they
managed without any spectacular 300-year slide into criminality, bastardy and
unemployability (except for a few descendants in the Blue Ridge Mountains). Nor
was there cultural breakdown among the Asian labourers of California and Canada
whose 'indentured' bondage typically lasted longer than that of Black slaves
(who were themselves treated as valued possessions and often manumitted by
their White masters). Patterson challenges conventional Holocaust piety by
claiming that the slave gulags and "the Afro-American holocaust" were
"arguably the worst nightmares of human brutality in the history of the
world", but he does not even glance at the hundred million people killed
by Stalin, Hitler, Hirohito and Mao – savagery which began with Stalin's
killing of the half-a-million Jews who had enthusiastically joined the Russian
Communist Party. Whereas Jews, Cambodians and today's people of Nanking have
survived their respective horror stories and moved on, Blacks continue to set
an unedifying counter-example of human feebleness. Altogether, Patterson fails
to establish his causal thesis that the White man's slave trading can be blamed
for anything very much.
How, then, do there
occur the appalling relations between the Black sexes? Astonishingly, Patterson
shows little sign of having heard of Africa -- let alone of personally visiting
or studying the Dark Continent. On West Africa's Gold Coast, he could easily
have learned that women mistrust Black men and that men reciprocate exactly in
the pattern of America's slave-holding South and the inner-city ghettoes of
Kingston and London today. Just as in Virginia of 1800, hardly any Black woman
in West Africa will trust her man for a day. Familiar with her husband's
whoring ways with his 'secretaries' in every dance hall in town, and finding no
serious protection from preacher men, Black women of the Gold Coast have long
contented themselves with the business careers advocated today by Western
feminists – with a toyboy on a 'scholarship' to keep them company at weekends
when they take time off from bribing customs officials. Patterson has
apparently not even read the writing of the Black Washington Post staffer,
Keith Richburg, who took a sabbatical in Africa in 1996 and returned to give US
Blacks the message that they were lucky that the White slave ships had fetched
them out. Inter-sex suspicion is a staple of Black lifestyles – as might be
expected in any group where sexual activity is the main fun in life (with 23%
of American Black women reporting two or more orgasms during their last sex
session, compared to only 11% of Whites). Given 1990s appreciation of the role
of female orgasm in boosting the likelihood of fertilization, it is small
wonder that the one really successful part of Black life gives rise to
considerable uncertainty about paternity and to mutual recriminations. Needless
to say, contraceptive restraint forms no part of Blackdom. Contrary to the
evidence that it is actually the White race which is now dying out, American
Blacks believe, says Patterson, that "birth control is a plot to kill the
Negro race."
As its last omission, Rituals
of Blood entirely ignores the levels of crime, bastardy, welfare dependency
and inter-sex suspicion among Whites having the same levels of IQ as Blacks.
Despite The Bell Curve having copiously documented the causal role of
low IQ in social pathology (for a summary, see Brand, 1996, Chapter 4), the
names of Charles Murray, Richard Herrnstein, Arthur Jensen and Phil Rushton are
simply not thought worth a mention by a Harvard sociologist – indeed,
intelligence and IQ also remain unmentioned. Such a high level of wilful
ignorance is astonishing. Patterson should recall Mark Twain's observation that
a man who won't read books can claim no serious superiority over a man
who can't read them.
Rather
than consider empirical evidence of what is the most likely cause of Black
problems – in low IQ, not in distant enslavement by Whites – Patterson prefers
to persist with a striking thesis that Whites have a special religious
relationship with Blacks, regarding them as biblical scapegoats who can
satisfyingly be roasted by insertion of red-hot iron rods and made to eat their
own penises, followed by their testicles. Supposedly, there would sometimes be
a mystic "hush of transition" at lynchings where barbecueing of Black
rapists took place. (Whether this hush occurred at the 6% of lynchings that
were Black-on-Black is not stated.)
In fact, it was only
at one American lynching in ten that any singeing or mutilation occurred; and
if Patterson thinks Whites specially like taking things out on Blacks he should
really read a few newspaper accounts of Europeans' 1990s atrocities in Serbia
and Chechnya. It is nice to encounter a fine writer who does not blame the
wretchedness of Black culture on poverty; but if Patterson expects success in
arguing that Black preachers will lead Whites out of expiatory Pauline
Christianity into non-sacrificial Southern Baptistry and inter-racial brotherly
love, he will first need to show he can tackle simpler tasks. Blaming the
institutionalized violence of rap musicians "ensnared in Dionysus"
partly on White corporate sponsorship and its "lucrative industry of
managed frenzy" is fair enough; but Patterson needs to ask himself why
most Whites simply breathe a sigh of relief that Blacks receive plentiful
offers of lawful work as 'singers', boxers, basketball stars and Cabinet
members for President George W. Bush.
For Patterson to
suppose that Blacks are enduringly exploited – even sacrimonially – by Whites
must invite, in 2001, the response that Blacks are not kept in the USA by means
of any Berlin Wall. And Patterson's idea that the enduring popularity of the
barbecue in Texas is due to its reminding participants of the delightful smell
of roasting Black flesh comes from the wildest shores of paranoid Black
over-inventiveness. Today, 90% of inter-racial hate crime in the USA is
Black-on-White despite Whites in the police and media being reluctant to pursue
Black racists. Patterson should attend to this simple and sobering fact and
trace Black mayhem and self-destruction not to Whitey but to the very same
genes that have made Africa notorious for its rates of under-age rape,
illiteracy, superstition, corruption, wife-beating, prisoner mutilation, unemployability
and AIDS. Patterson can be congratulated on an engaging book -- which includes
both an intriguing finding that a history of child sexual abuse halves the
divorce frequency among White women and an investigable (if currently
unsupported) claim that Black-White miscegenation makes for
"creativity." Patterson is plainly a superstar among Black social
scientists. Sadly, he is quite as irresponsible as the Black artistes he
discusses.
* The idea of forced residential integration for
Blacks and Whites was first put forward by the 'liberal'-left social
psychologist Marie Jahoda -- 1960, 'Race relations and mental health', in Race
and Science: Scientific Analysis from UNESCO. As a neo-Freudian, Jahoda had
brought herself to belief that all racial prejudice was just a 'projection' –
e.g. of the White id on to Black people, followed by criticism of Blacks
for being 'over-sexed.' In reply, A. James Gregor pointed out that Whites had
many reality-based reasons for keeping their wives and children out of contact
with Blacks – 1961, Mankind Quarterly 1.
BRAND, C. R. (1996). THE g FACTOR: General Intelligence
and Its Implications. Chichester, UK : Wiley DePublisher.
BURNHAM, Stanley (1993). America's Bimodal Crisis:
Black Intelligence in White Society. Athens, Georgia : Foundation for Human
Understanding.
May, 2001