Jonah Goldberg over at NRO wants to talk about Bill Bennett again, which is fine. We were all doing well with one of our periodic squabbles over race when the president interrupted with his latest Supreme Court nominee.
So back to the squabble. In my previous post on this, I noted that blacks were many times more likely to be incarcerated than whites. And why is this I asked? I said, without answering the question, that liberals want to blame the system, and point to those high levels of incarceration as evidence of various forms of societal bigotry. White racists want to point to those levels as evidence of the genetic tendency toward the commission of the kind of crimes that will get you incarcerated.
Now I do not believe “the system” is reason for this, though it may affect it at the margins. The disproportionate contribution that blacks make to the levels of crime itself (and not just in suffering the penalties for alleged crimes) is, I think, beyond dispute. — and this was the reason behind Bill Bennett’s hypothetical statement.
So the facts are just plain out there. Blacks are far more likely to commit crimes that will land one in jail. The theological question that has to be addressed in all this is why? One response to my post raised just that question — why do I think different cultures and races behave differently in the way they do? And do these differences show up in their sinning? Of course they do, and the reason I have consistently given to account for this is that it is a function of the gods we worship. Culture is always created by cultus, worship. When you worship false gods for millennia, it is hard to get that out of the system. The pagan gods of Africa were different from the pagan gods of Europe, and both were different from the rising pagan system in America today. Different false gods lead to different kinds of cultural sinfulness. Whether you worship Mars, Venus, Dionysus, or Mammon affects day-to-day behavior. When blacks sin in a particular way, they must be called to repentance as individuals. When white liberals pay blacks to destroy themselves in a particular way, those white liberals must be called to repentance. After all, they are the ones paying vouchers to people to have illegitimate babies. There’s an anti-poverty program for you! And when white racists preen themselves on not having the temptations that another group has, they must be called to repentance.
Their problem is easy enough to point out. The fever swamps of the right do not contain many friends of George Bush’s developing empire — and I also am not a friend of it, but for different reasons. But let’s take a hypothetical treatment of how characteristic sins of a group get treated among such foes of the empire. When some black man knifes another black man in a dispute over a woman, white racists will attribute the problem to his race. Plain as day, they say. But when white folks kill (we usually do it from 30,000 feet, and with the paperwork in order), the problem is attributed to Washington, Democrats, liberals, imperialists, Republicrats, scoundrels, or whatnot. The white racists never say that this is an manifestation of the general genetic tendency of whites to overweening imperial hypocrisy. And Roe v. Wade was decided by lots of black robes and white faces. What about that? The black guy in the bar at least tries to kill people his own size. How many babies have been aborted because of a decision made by a bunch of justices who made that decision sitting around in their whiteness?
I have no problem saying that black culture carries with it a tendency to certain kinds of sins and crimes, distinct from white temptations. Of course it does — blacks are sons of Adam, and they have worshipped a particular kind of false god for a long time, and the Christian gospel has not yet had its way with them. But the Word of God is a double-edged sword that cuts both ways. White culture carries with it a tendency to certain kinds of sins and crimes as well. Whites are also sons of Adam, and one of our besetting sins is a tendency to a supercilious sense of superiority. And the closer you get to what used to be called white trash, the more virulent the racism becomes. If you want to find a supreme case of racial snottiness, your best bet would be to look for some peckerwoods in an Arkansas doublewide.
And this is why white racists see all such sins as a betrayal of their race, instead of as a manifestation of it, and the sins of blacks as a manifestation of their racial bent, instead of as a betrayal. But white racists can always quote the Bible. Didn’t Jesus say to get the speck out of the eye of others so that you can attend to the beam in your own at leisure?