The “Black Code”: Blacks discriminate against other Blacks who socialize with Whites

You know all those ads where Blacks (usually cool and competent) and  Whites (often dorky and behaving weirdly) are hanging out together, often drinking beer while watching football. Best friends forever. The Hollywood/Madison Ave. image of America’s harmonious multicultural future.

Now we all know that this is a fantasy of the people who run the media. But its implausibility derives from not only because White people prefer being with other Whites—the phenomenon of implicit Whiteness. The  same goes for Blacks, and a recent academic paper goes further, showing that Blacks disapprove of Blacks who socialize with Whites (which makes me think that  such commercials are not going to be effective with either race) (“Testing the ”Black Code”: Does Having White Close Friends Elicit Identity Denial and Decreased Empathy from Black In-Group Members?“).

The “Black Code” referred to in the title refers to the attitude among Blacks that ‘‘relationships with whites must be kept at arm’s length maintaining a silent us against them mindset. Blacks who appear too friendly and comfortable around whites are viewed with suspicion; their blackness in question.”

Prior to presenting their own data, the authors review findings that “Blacks, more than any other racial group, show empathy toward members of their in-group.” In the  experiment Black college students (mostly female from an all-Black college) observed a  Facebook page of a White person alone, a Black person alone, and a Black person and a White person in two conditions, with same-race friends or opposite-race friends.

Results showed that Blacks saw Blacks with White friends as less Black — perhaps not too surprising. More interesting were the results for empathy which was measured by telling the subject that the person in the photo had lost his parents in a car accident so he had to raise his two younger siblings. Subjects showed significantly more empathy for Blacks pictured either alone or with Black friends than when they were pictured with White friends. But Whites pictured with Black friends did not get any more empathy than Whites pictured alone or with White friends. The authors conclude:

Having cross-race friends made Black targets seem ‘‘less Black’’ and thus less like the self for our Black participants, thereby decreasing empathy …. However, having cross-race friends did not necessarily make White targets seem ‘‘more Black’’ or more like the self; thus, there were no implications for empathy.

The paper shows that the racial chasm continues in “post-racial” America, despite the fact that our elites have decided that race doesn’t even exist except as a way for Whites to obtain unearned privilege. And Blacks are far from passive bystanders in this process, behaving far more aggressively than Whites in actively maintaining racial boundaries and stigmatizing other Blacks who socialize with Whites.

The authors note that such discriminatory behavior can work against Blacks in the workplace because Blacks must typically work with Whites. And it also plays out in academic situations where Blacks who take school seriously are ostracized for “acting White.”

A theme at TOO is the racialization of American politics, as Whites coalesce in the Republican Party and everyone else votes Democrat. So it’s not surprising that everything else becomes racialized too. Heather MacDonald has a great article on the total corruption of humanities departments at American universities, where, e.g., English majors at UCLA need not take any courses in Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer, but must take three courses from the areas like “Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability, and Sexuality Studies” and “Imperial, Transnational, and Postcolonial Studies.” So it’s not surprising that the campus environment encourages Blacks to completely avoid anything having to do with traditional Western culture.

Compare the humanists’ hunger for learning with the resentment of a Columbia University undergraduate who had been required by the school’s freshman core curriculum to study Mozart. She happens to be black, but her views are widely shared, to borrow a phrase, “across gender, sexuality, race, and class.”

“Why did I have to listen in music humanities to this Mozart?” she groused in a discussion of the curriculum reported by David Denby in his book on Columbia’s core. “My problem with the core is that it upholds the premises of white supremacy and racism. It’s a racist core. Who is this Mozart, this Haydn, these superior white men? There are no women, no people of color.” These are not the idiosyncratic thoughts of one disgruntled student; they represent the dominant ideology in the humanities today. Columbia not only failed to disabuse the student of such parochialism; it is also all but certain that some of its faculty strengthened her in her close-mindedness, despite the school’s admirable commitment to its beleaguered core.

There’s not much doubt how this student would have scored in the study on empathy for Blacks with White friends.

Make no mistake about it, multiculturalism is the death of the West as a culture. Heather MacDonald would like to think that Western culture is for all humans, but the facts speak otherwise. Imagine a world without Shakespeare or Mozart, because that’s what it’s going to be as Whites are increasingly displaced, first from elite universities like UCLA and Columbia, then everywhere else.