— Martin Luther King Jr.

My father grew up at the bottom of a hill. My mother lived at the top of that same hill, in Washington Heights, New York City, in the 1950s and 1960s. Both were the products of refugee families.

My mother’s father, an avid reader of the news, left Germany just as the Nazis began to hang signs railing against “Juden!”

My dad came to America in 1954, literally on a banana boat, leaving in the middle of the night, fleeing a coup that would be followed by decades of bloody war in Guatemala. My dad’s father was a well-known journalist with connections in government. They left my grandmother and my two aunts behind to be sent for six months later. My dad was 6 years old.

For years, they lived at the bottom of the hill in New York. It was a slum, and it still is. My grandfather worked at a plastic factory, from which, my dad tells me, he would come home at the end of the day and peel off bits of plastic that had melted onto his face before bed.

The top of the hill, only blocks away, wasn’t so bad. Despite opposition from some family members, my parents married, and there I was raised.

Growing up as a child of a mixed marriage comes to my mind this Martin Luther King Day. Today, as I do most days, I drove to the office on a congested MLK Boulevard. Over lunch, I walked past the downtown library, where flyers promote upcoming meetings offering “An Honest Discussion of Race” — a topic promised again and again everywhere. I stopped attending these lectures years ago when I realized that these talks weren’t all that “honest” and that they were not attended by anyone actually interested in discussing anything.

Among my fondest childhood memories are our Sunday trips down the hill, amazingly steep it seemed, to have lunch at my grandparents’ apartment. There, my grandfather and I would eat a snack on the fire escape and watch young hoodlums in the street below messing with parked cars, harassing passing girls and generally looking for trouble. My grandmother in the kitchen would attempt to pan fry hamburgers for her American grandsons. Bottles of beer — not cans: Sunday was a special day — went around as we watched moonwalks, football games and reruns of Flash Gordon.

I didn’t know it at the time, but the couch we watched TV from was where my dad slept those years he grew up — it was a small apartment for five people, and he never had a bedroom.

But he studied hard. He became a citizen. He learned English and was a star gymnast in his high school. He got a job at the New York Public Library, at one point collecting the works of the recently deceased composer Henry Cowell. He attended City College, and entered the Baruch Graduate School of Business.

He left Baruch after one year to support a wife and two children, and to pursue a career in a field that was just taking off: telemarketing. I remember his fine suits and cufflinks, his waking up early to catch the train in the dark morning hours. He would come home late with stacks of printouts, and work after dinner at our dining room table, beside a propped-open briefcase. He would talk about clients and new responsibilities he had just undertaken. It all seemed to me as incomprehensible as a magician’s craft, which really is how a father’s job should seem to an awestruck young child.

What impressed me most then and still does was his fairness. In my years growing up, I never once heard him make a racist remark. Never once. Not in passing. Not in anger. Not in jest. He was never angrier than when at age 9, I came home repeating a joke that used the “N” word that I had heard from a friend. Frankly, I didn’t even know what the word meant. I was stunned that he would telephone my friend’s parents, as he never called them before. As he explained the meaning of the word to me, I could tell it hurt him to discuss it, and hurt him more to think that I might one day use it again.

His fairness also played into his business. Throughout the 1970s, he pioneered the telemarketing divisions of several companies, quickly rising up the ranks. At a time when laws were needed to break up the discriminatory employment practices of many corporations, my dad saw the opportunity in hiring talented people of all backgrounds — precisely those who were discriminated against in other places of business.

To a bigoted eye, they may have appeared a jumble of colors and genders. But in reality, they were ambitious professionals thankful for a chance and ready to work hard to prove it. When he founded his own company, in 1984, he hired minorities even to the highest executive levels.

By employing talented people overlooked by the old boy’s club, my dad’s core belief in fairness gave him the edge over competition.

There was no March on Washington in my dad’s life. There was no Selma or Edmund Pettus Bridge. There were no church bombings. There was no James Earl Ray, no Lorraine Motel.

But he was a refugee who worked hard to be a successful American. Life threw obstacles at him, but he overcame. He entered the country a native Spanish speaker and was thus threatened (as schools did in those days) with being held back, but he learned English — more perfectly, in fact, than almost anyone I know. Who else could tell his son, then a college English teacher, the difference between “continually” and “continuously” without missing a beat?

He got involved in a nasty series of lawsuits with former business partners in the late 1980s. Then a divorce in the early 1990s. Lawsuits kept coming in those days.

Then, in late 2004, the U.S. government implemented the National Do Not Call Registry for telemarketers. I heard the news over the wires while I was working for The Associated Press in Washington. Businesses were panicking. I called my father that night, expecting despair.

But he had an impish tone in his voice. After listening to me for a few minutes, he broke in: “Do I sound worried? This is going to drive the weaker companies out of business and leave the good ones with more work. This will be good for us.”

Today, he is remarried and lives in a peaceful suburb of Chicago, thousands of miles from Guatemala. His company has employed 100,000 people in more than 20 locations across the globe. At his headquarters, rising-star executives in his employ listen to him with fierce admiration. My dad’s in his early 60s, and after visiting China a few years ago to check into business opportunities and to lecture at business schools, he thinks he may one day retire there and resume a childhood love of painting.

Years ago when I learned that I had passed my exams and would thus be completing graduate school, my first call was to him.

I could tell that he was weeping over the phone line. He very rarely cried.

“Oh, Erik,” he said, “I’m crying because I’m happy. Finishing graduate school is something that I was never able to do.”

“Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

Regards,
Erik Kestler
Whiskey & Gunpowder

January 17, 2011

Under the Sun of That Dream was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

Doug: Sure. But as I said at the beginning of our conversation on Russia, the first thing to say is that any time you’re dealing with a large group of people, it’s almost always wrong to think of them as a group. Logically, the more specific your statement about a lot of people is, the more people within that group won’t fit the bill, and the more general – i.e. vague – your statement, the less useful it is.

I always do my best to treat each individual I meet as exactly that; the individual he or she is.

Thinking of people in terms of groups, Groupthink, is simply sloppy thinking, whether it’s “the proletariat” vs. “capitalists” or “African-Americans” vs… What? All Americans came from elsewhere. But we risk anger if we say “white people.” Groupthink is logically unsound, one error among many of the communists and socialists made.

L: I knew a white guy from South Africa, who immigrated to the U.S., who used to put “African-American” on all the forms. I sympathize with his desire to mess with stupid social expectations by putting square pegs in round holes.

Doug: Shaking people up can be a good thing; it can force them out of mental ruts, so they start dealing with you as they should, as an individual. But don’t expect them to ever thank you for it.

L: Heh. No. When I went to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, I put “other” for race on the forms. To me, “Hispanic” isn’t a race, it’s a culture (of which I am not a part, regardless of my genetic inheritance), and I always experience such attempts to group me by race to be more racist than the racism such information is supposedly gathered to fight. So, anyway, I usually put “human,” but I put “other” – and I kept getting letters inviting me to join the RPI Society of Black Engineers. Every time I got one, I was struck by how offensive it would be to so many people if there were a Society of White Engineers… But, back to your point, I didn’t think I’d make any friends marching up to their building to point this out to them. So I let it be.

Doug: Doubtless, a wise choice.

L: Groovy. But Doug, I’ve heard you say many times that you have more in common with polo-players you’ve met in Argentina, or cigar aficionados you’ve met in the Congo, than with the majority of the… er… European-Americans? Screw it. Let’s just say “white people.” Anyway, you have more in common with many visibly not-white people from around the world than with most of the white people down the street from your house in Colorado. An admirably color-blind statement. You said last week that you form your relationships based on what people’s values, ethics, spirituality, etc., are. But fess up, aren’t you more likely to find people who share your values among white North Americans who share the remnants of the culture of freedom America once had?

Doug: It might have been so a generation or two ago, but the libertarian values that made America great beat a steady retreat throughout the 20th century, and were largely out of fashion before the current young generation was born. And most of their teachers are actively hostile to these values. So, who knows – it might be less likely for a kid growing up in the U.S. to encounter these ideas and values than one growing up in China, where people value hard work, innovation, creative effort, etc.

L: I’m not sure the same is true of a child growing up in the Congo.

Doug: Maybe so, but that’d be because society there is so debased by corrupt government – not a function of race.

L: Okay, so you’re an equal opportunity investor, friend, and poker-player. You’ll sit down for a chat with anyone from anywhere, if the individual seems interesting to you. But if you happened to be walking alone at night in New York City, and took a wrong turn, ending up on a street with a group of large, young black men in what look like “gangsta” clothes, wouldn’t your adrenaline level rise? And might it not drop sharply again if suddenly a streetlight revealed that they were all carrying bibles? Is that prejudice?

Doug: No. Aside from the fact that the bibles might make me worry that they would chase me down the street, trying to save my lost soul, it’s not prejudice to assess your environment for potential threats – most of which will take the form of other human beings. People do get mugged in some places. That’s a fact, and being aware of that fact is not prejudice – it’s prudence. Prejudice would be deciding that those men were hostile before they made any hostile moves. Deciding to walk in a different direction even before a threat was made would not be prejudice, but a tactical decision based on the way our world is at present, not imagined knowledge about the individual men in question.

Prejudice. As always, we should work with a good definition before going on.

L: My Webster’s says that prejudice is 1) a preconceived judgment or opinion, 2) an adverse opinion or leaning formed without just grounds or before sufficient knowledge.

Doug: So, prejudice – pre-judgment – involves thinking you know things about people before they give you any evidence for those things being true. It’s not prejudice to consider a possibility, but it is prejudice to make assumptions and treat them as facts.

Let me put it this way, if I see a guy wearing an Arabic headdress, and I don’t start our conversation by offering him a glass of wine, that’s not prejudice. Or if I see a guy dressed like a Hassidic Jew, and I don’t offer him a ham sandwich, that’s not prejudice. They are displaying themselves in a way that gives evidence of their being members of certain groups about which some things are known. But if I told myself the Arabic guy was going to give me a hard time for me having a glass of wine, or that the Jewish guy was going to try to stick me with the bill for lunch, and was hostile with them in advance of them having done any such things, that would be prejudice.

L: Okay: assessing possibilities, based on visible cultural and other data, is not the same as judging people before you know them. Let’s move on from prejudice and get back to race. In our conversation on Russia, you said that Russia’s problems could go beyond culture to the impact of Soviet and even Tsarist policies on the gene pool. That may be completely true, but isn’t it a kind of Groupthink, and racist to boot?

Doug: I didn’t say that groups don’t exist. Of course they do, and there are many groups of people in the world with well-defined characteristics. It’s reasonable to conclude that a guy dressed like a Hassidic Jew is probably a Hassidic Jew, and it’s necessary to make such assumptions in day-to-day life. If we don’t, and we stop to test each individual assumption, we’ll never get anything done. But just because I acknowledge the group’s existence and, in this case, don’t offer the guy a ham sandwich, I still treat him like the individual he is, and if he asks for a ham sandwich, I’m fine with that. Groupthink is not a problem of acknowledging the existence of groups, including human groups; it’s treating individuals as though they were the group, or as though they necessarily hold all the traits that define the group.

And if it’s racist to acknowledge that human groups exist, including racial ones with genetic commonalities, then we are all racists, whether we admit it or not.

L: Webster’s says racism is the belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.

Doug: So, again, it’s about Groupthink. It’s not racist to acknowledge that there’s a subset of the human race with darker skin and curly hair, but it is racist to think you know something about an individual because he looks that way. And what’s bothersome about racism isn’t acknowledging differences, but the belief that one’s own race is superior. Near as I can tell, there’s no superior race. So I just look for excellent individuals with whom I can enjoy spending time.

L: Right then. Investment implications?

Doug: Broadly speaking, the big conclusion is to short cultures that, on average, discourage individual achievement and have no work ethic. Even if such a society has not existed long enough to impact the gene pool, if it exists at all it has impacted the meme pool, and that’s bearish.

I’m not judging any individual Russians, but saying that I’m not optimistic about Russia. For the same reason, I’m bearish on the U.S. America was once the land of the free and the home of the brave, but it has degraded into the country of intellectual lap dogs and welfare recipients. There’s a large minority of Americans who have The Right Stuff and are still struggling to set things right, but that’s hard to do once you’ve been trussed, stuffed, and placed on the sacrificial altar to satisfy the hungry lust of needy voters.

L: So what cultures are you bullish on? This is not the same question we’ve taken up on your favorite places to live – I’m not asking about quality of life now, but about The Right Stuff to build a better future.

Doug: Well, I think China has a lot of short-term problems, but over the course of the 21st century, it’s a good bet that it will surge ahead to lead the field.

L: As you know, I’m partial to a number of former Soviet republics, but I need to go back and look at their demographic trends. What I do like about them is that they have living memory of real, naked socialism, and they know it doesn’t work. In places like Belarus, people want to get ahead, are willing to work hard, are very smart, and I have met many people with strong personal ethics. It’s hard for me not to be optimistic for them, even though they’ve got a horribly obstructive government.

Doug: You may be right, but I think most, if not all, of the Baltic states have the same demographic problem the rest of Europe does.

L: Population implosion. Who-da thunk it in the 20th century? At any rate, as far as the places and cultures you’re bullish on, the general idea is to watch for strengthening rule of law, stabilizing business environments, etc. and then invest in those markets? Or would prices be high by then, making it better to speculate now on the cultures that seem to have The Right Stuff, while prices are low?

Doug: Too early to say. That’s something we’ll be tracking in The Casey Report as we go.

L: Okay. But this seems like a good time to repeat your mantra of getting your ass…ets out of the U.S., or as much of them as you practically can, as soon as you can.

Doug: I’m afraid that’s the way the odds say to play it. We’re already seeing the tightening currency controls we talked about last year, and it’s going to get worse. Much worse.

L: Roger that. You know, I’ve always thought of America as a beautiful young woman, full of hope and promise and all the greatness in our species. I even considered the name for a daughter – it was that beautiful to me. But a real woman of flesh and blood would age, in time, and I never wanted to see America as an old woman, bent with age and the care of years. Unfortunately, I’m starting to see her that way anyway.

Doug: I know exactly what you mean. But, as gloomy as I may sound about America, I am extremely bullish on humanity, in and of itself.

L: That’s right. America herself may not rise again, but some of her children, and the best and the brightest from around the world may make a new beginning, just as those who fled the tyrannies of Europe hundreds of years ago did in America. Maybe we’ll do it on Mars. Hey, if I stake a few of the Martian canals, will you buy a lot in my development project?

Doug: Only if I can play Polo.

L: I’m not sure if the lower gravity would make it safer, or more dangerous…

Doug: One way to find out.

Regards,

Doug Casey and Louis James
Whiskey & Gunpowder

April 26, 2010

Race, Racism and Investing was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

Americans of obvious African descent really got a raw deal. Their ancestors were slaves in Africa and sold to Europeans by their African masters. That’s some introduction to American society…and you never really get over the first impression you make. And then there was the fact that Africans just looked so alien; surely, if you weren’t one of them, it must have been hard to think of them as human in quite the same way; the same genus perhaps, but not the same species. The swarthy Greek and Italian, epicanthic fold-bedecked Pole and Swede and even the unwashed Irish all eventually melded into the existing Anglo-Germanic society of North America…but at least they were honest-to-God white people. And the Asians! As exotic as they must have seemed to a European, they at least weren’t so brown (well, maybe the South Asians were…), nor at all nappy-headed.

It must have been easy for people of pure European stock to view Africans as chattel with only vaguely humanoid shapes: sort of like bipedal goats and cows. That, of course, didn’t stop white slave owners from doing what slave owners have done with their female slaves from time immemorial: add them to the harem. The result: there is hardly a person of African descent in the New World today who doesn’t have anywhere from 10 to 60% European ancestry (the median is about 20%; those with more than 60% or so were able “to pass” and sometimes they integrated into white society). In Latin American countries some of them wouldn’t even have to check “black” on the census box! On the other hand if you’re white in America and your ancestors’ arrival predates one of the waves of European immigration in the 19th and 20th Centuries, then you may be surprised at what’s in your family tree; it’s probably not just “a little bit of Indian.”

There are tons of blacks in North America with no immediate pure white ancestry who nevertheless carry about as much European DNA as someone like Obama whose own father was about as pure black African as one can get. Obama, despite having a white mamma, looks like any random sampling of blacks in the U.S. who on average have almost as much white ancestry, though very rarely as immediate as a full-blooded parent or grandparent. Someone like Obama has geographical/racial genetic markers occurring in clumps as opposed to the more sifted occurrences in the chromosomes born of generations of mixing. Whatever the case, it doesn’t take much African blood to make one black. A drop will do…particularly if the evidence is written on one’s features.

Let’s be frank: a lot of the resentment folks rightfully feel about government handouts and entitlements are focused very squarely on a particular group of recipients: the descendants of the African slaves in the U.S. To the average white taxpayer, they amount to shiftless negroes, crack-dealers and bastard-producing welfare queens…even more simply put: just about every single black person on these shores who isn’t a professional athlete, entertainer, Colin Powell, or Condoleezza Rice.

What does this have to do with the price of tea in China or the price of gold in a Comex squeeze?

I dunno.

I’m just pointing out that there is a very real and seemingly irreconcilable resentment among a small handful of different groups in this country. The two largest players are the American white and black races, but making a growing claim are the Spanish-speaking folk of largely indigenous descent (the majority of those reading this will know them simply as “Mexicans” or “illegals,” whatever their actual nationality). Their arrival to our black/white tussle is like that of fashionably late Kurds to an all-nighter being thrown by the Sunni and Shia.

I can only guess at the role these post-1492 mestizos will play as our nation wends its way toward currency destruction and resource shortages. Maybe a lot of them will just go back home. Maybe the ones who’ve been in the Southwest of this country for generations will conspire with the government of their ancestors and help reconquistar California, Texas, Nevada, New Mexico, and a hearty chunk of Arizona. I do know that just about every one of the hundreds of Mexican or South American immigrants I’ve ever met usually works at least 10 hours per day and is willing to live in a small, neatly kept room for years at a time, often in a houseful of strangers. In other words, like the white immigrants who preceded them, they are willing to risk, sacrifice, and work hard in hopes of a better a future for their descendants. I also know that they feel about as much solidarity with blacks as do the Irish or Italian immigrants who came before.

Though the ethnic, linguistic and cultural differences certainly don’t help the situation, the hatred toward Hispanic immigrants (remember: the ones we see tend not to be primarily of European descent who tend to stay in their home countries…unless a communist dictator kicks them out…) is largely a byproduct of our welfare state. Those of us paying into it can’t help but resent those who benefit from it without paying a dime. Few probably hate the old, the sick or even the illegal immigrant so much as they hate being forced to give strangers money…though giving money to strangers from another tribe is probably more painful. Alas national socialism is a perfectly natural end result of the state…and it tends to breed the longing for genocidal purging.

But as I pointed out a little earlier, at least the Hispanic immigrant will be looking to earn his keep, even if he benefits from the taxes we pay and which he does not…and even if his descendants in this country are tripped up on their way to integration because of multicultural political frippery like bilingual education. On the other hand, black folks in this country have come to rely on politics to address grievances, instead of simply getting to work. Yet they mistrust and hate the state from which they demand resources. The result is an entire race stumbling through life like an indolent teenager who when asked to pitch in falls back on the line, “I never asked to be born.” Fair treatment before the law is about as far as anyone should want to take things. Government subsidy just begs for resentment.

Race is a troublesome and unscientific way to group things, but like Newtonian physics, it’s tremendously useful for where the rubber meets the road. Race is both real and ephemeral, a concrete phantom, a mirage that you can smell and taste just enough to think it has considerable substance. As with the aforementioned Newtonian mechanics, it breaks down when you look really close, but it’s real enough for the gross world in which people must live. Angels and molecular biologists can ignore it; most of us can’t.

The trouble really comes not from folks making personal decisions based on race, but on the state doing so. And here we come to the meat of this argument. The ideal American attitude toward people-who-aren’t-exactly-like-me ought to be “I’ll tolerate you…but don’t expect me to pay for you. I ask that you do the same.” Perhaps it would be so if we hadn’t been accelerating toward outright national socialism for the past hundred years. Socialism, despite its attempts at kindergarten inclusiveness, naturally lends itself to genocide. It’s what happens when you mix the basic human tendency to favor those clearly of one’s own tribe with forced resource-sharing a la the state.

Forced integration is as pernicious as forced segregation. Leave people alone and they’ll sort themselves out. I can’t fault anyone for wanting to live among people who look like they do and speak the same language. But that’s really a matter of property rights and personal freedom. When it becomes a matter the state feels obliged to address, the results are the enhanced division we see manifest in the decay and color-based blight in our cities. It was the state that initially passed laws forbidding people to intermarry and that racially codified who would be property, thus retarding integration of people of obvious African descent into mainstream society. It is the state that now uses money stolen from one set of citizens to pay off and simultaneously cripple another along glaringly racial lines.

It doesn’t matter whose ancestors did what or had what done to them. Things are as they are now, and compounding past errors with the excuse of past grievances is just not a good idea. Of course, the state doesn’t agree with me on this. Hence the past hundred years of forced integration and legislation, whose end result has been to strip one segment of the people of initiative, morals, and hope…and which continues to foster resentment and mutual distrust…and often hatred.

Working whites don’t’ mind the relatively small portion of their own race on the dole so much, but they see the black race as (innately) parasitical and perhaps intellectually challenged. And this goes for those whites who voted along party lines for the black messiah. Whether they think this calls for coddling, deportation or extermination is an individual matter, but the perception is probably fairly uniform. They may view Hispanics the same way to varying degrees, while Hispanics may have similar intimations towards blacks. Whites see non-whites as taking food from their own children’s mouths at the point of the government gun and offering only criminal violence in return. Whatever the accuracy of this perception—and it’s very accurate to quite a few—whites may not stand for it as the going continues to get unbelievably rough for them financially. Meanwhile, the black race seems to be itching for a chance to enact wholesale violence against the white race…and probably won’t be in any better shape materially as scarcity increases.

A black face will be superimposed on the head of the monster from D.C. I suspect that it doesn’t mean a blessed thing in terms of healing the damage done to race relations by state intervention in the first place. And then there’s what we expect will happen to the currency. Hmm…hyperinflation and three large and distinct racial groups who really don’t care for each other? How do you think this is going to turn out? Personally I think no amount of wishful thinking and singing “Kumbaya” together is going to help. When resources get scarce, people tend to eat the horses…and then each other…and they tend to do their killing along ethnic and racial lines.

Regards,
Gary Gibson

January 16, 2009

A Few Nations Under God: Race and National Socialism in America was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.