A Bakery in Ghent

By Patrick Hall

One of the many mixed blessings of aging is that I sometimes have great clarity in remembering people and events that occurred years ago, while at the same time, I can't recall what the hell I ate for breakfast this morning. One such recollection occurred while vacationing in Ghent, Belgium, with my spouse and twin grandchildren. It involved a serendipitous conversation about American race relations. Specifically, the dialogue encompassed blacks' perceived mistreatment, discrimination, and systemic racism in America.

 Each morning during my visit, I made time for a daily run, which by default was a great way to see the city’s historic district, which dates back to the 13th Century.  Inadvertently, as I was weaving my way through the neighborhood, I ran by (actually, I stopped) in front of a bakery outlet to have a coffee and Flemish pastry.  While sitting at a table outside the bakery, a woman and her partner flagged my attention.

The woman noticed that I was dawning a University of Notre Dame cap and began to inform me that she had attended the University as an exchange student back in the 1990s. So, we related our experiences about Notre Dame, since I too had worked for the University for a few years, and later my two youngest children had attended Notre Dame.  The conversation was going along quite well until we breached the topic of race relations.  She and her partner were very curious about race relations in the United States and wanted to know how I dealt with it as a "Black man." They prefaced their comments with the perfidious perception of how the police are the most significant danger to blacks living in the United States, along with systemic racism.  

 I was by no means taken back by their question. The dynamic posture of their inquiries was sincere, although misinformed.  But in my many vacations to Europe and the UK, discussions about how I became unendurably common as a black man was dealing with race discrimination.

I began my response to the young couple by saying that despite what they might have heard and that the liberal American media has been propagating over the last four decades, America is not a racist country. It certainly is not the America of my youth, nor the America where many of my siblings, born in the 1930s and 40s, had to negotiate.  The police are not indiscriminately killing blacks as conspicuously portrayed through the distorted lens of the left-of-center corporate media and NPR. Blacks are not kept out of our nation’s higher education institutions, which many Americans of African/mixed descent had to endure at one time. Colleges and universities since the late 1960s have gone out of their way (sometimes to a fault) to recruit students of color, along with substantial financial and administrative support. America has come a long way from the days of Jim Crow, and Americans of African/mixed descent now administer many cities and government institutions.

Conversely, as I went on in my polemic, I was pretty terse in my comments that the police were hardly the existential threat. The American media has played up over the years, and that NPR, the BBC, BBC Europe, or even the popular German news magazine Der Spiegel seem to take as Gospel. No!  Americans of African/mixed descent have tremendous opportunities (no guarantees) that my parents, born at the beginning of the 20th Century, could only dream of. Is there discrimination that still exists in the United States? Of course, there is! And I also added that Black Americans sometimes author the outward racism that still exists in America.

However, the racial discordance that still exists in America is no more than you might see in any multiethnic culture such as the United States.  I went on to say that America has done more than any other nation to provide and promote "opportunities” to all of its citizens.  Contrary to what you may hear from the loud and very affluent race hustlers like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, as well as the perpetually offended “real-black-people” who run organizations like the NAACP, Congressional Black Caucus and the current neo-Marxists of the Black Lives Matter Global Foundation, American culture is not racist.  

 I bolster my remarks by stating that the most significant existential dangers that blacks face in America do not come from white racists or biased law enforcement.  The greatest everyday threat to the lives and safety of many black Americans comes from other blacks. In addition, many of the ongoing difficulties that plague the black community have little or nothing to do with race. Without apology, I stated that the main obstacle to racial equality is not racism (systemic or otherwise) but culture and behavior.

When we look at the propensity for criminal behavior within many black communities, this is a significant impediment to black socio-economic progress.  The stats are horrific. Whether homicides, violent assaults, robbery, legal drug trade, or domestic violence, the black community continues these self-inflicted cultural degradations in all major crime categories.  To take one example, according to current FBI and DOJ crime statistics, blacks who make up around 13% of the United States population commit over 53% of all homicides. Welfare dependency accompanied by the breakdown of the black family since Great Society entitlements of the late 1960s has led to the epidemic of single-parent households. Before the so-called benefits of President Johnson’s Great Society Programs, over 70 percent of black households had two parents in the home.  Today, it has shifted entirely around, where single-parent families, many of them welfare-dependent, approach nearly 75%. Other tertiary cultural behaviors have had a devastating effect on hamstring blacks' progress, which once again have little or nothing to do with racism. The value of personal discipline or delayed gratification is often not present in the socialization of many in the black underclass. Also, too many young blacks don't take advantage and shun education opportunities in many cases. Even when I was in high school in the 1960s, the charge by many young blacks was that you were "acting white" when you tried to speak proper English or if you even liked to read.

 Fundamental civic responsibility also seems to escape many in the black underclass. This can be as simple as picking up trash in their communities before it becomes an eye-sore. But once more, this would probably be seen as acting white, in the screwed-up cultural nomenclature of many in the legacy black underclass.

But returning to the area of education, I often paraphrase the words of the late black economist Walter Williams. He once opined that education has always been an unsettled area in black communities for numerous reasons.  Many legacy black Americans  And their children are not imbued with the critical life philosophy that "learning" is virtually the same as "opportunity."

These are some cancers that only the black community can address. However, as I have been saying for over four decades, I tried to convey to the Belgium couple that Black Americans need to confront and circumvent the “victim mentality” that is too often nurtured and encouraged by the black political class and their supporters.

You Silly Little Negro

 Of course, this wasn’t the answer they expected. Having had similar conversations over the years with various European friends and in-laws, I usually get the same polite, you-must-be-crazy-look from them.  Without fail, the discussion is quickly aborted, followed by an obligatory change of topic, or how is your pastry?

  As a sidebar, in my travels to Europe and even back in the 1970s when I was lucky enough to go Central and South America when I came across my fellow Americans, I often ran into what I call the “America is bad types.” It seems a group of Americans, primarily insufferable Progressive Liberal Suburban Busybodies, relish talking down or pointing out the faults of the United States.  I guess I missed their point. What a silly little Negro, I can be at times!

There must have been some unwritten point system that Americans visiting other countries received for their requisite pissing-on their country or indirectly musings to their foreign counterparts about how awful the United States is.

My observations of America and race were somewhat of an epiphany to the young Belgium couple, whom I’m sure bought into the narrative of the endemic nature of racism in America.  I’m also certain that as long as the corporate media, NPR, the AP, and BBC Europe keep feeding the endless storyline of blacks being murdered by police and other white racist maleficence, this disinformation will not abate.  The death of George Floyd and Michael Brown and others are constantly fed to an unsuspecting public, both here and in Europe. Despite the rarity of these events, the reality that since 2017 over 9000 homicides have been committed by blacks, many of them against their people is of little consequence.  These tragic stats on black-on-black murder will hardly get a byline. The stark reality since 2008 is that blacks are disproportionately represented among homicide victims and offenders.

 Obviously, there is no political cache in bringing up the murderous criminality in far too many black communities. Even the recent murders perpetrated by a BLM-inspired “black-racist-nutjob” in Waukesha, Wisconsin (whose social media footprint was replete with racist and anti-white people rage) will not receive the attention by the corporate media nor NPR.  

Gosh! If only Darrell Brooks had been a white supremacist. Now that would be a story worthy of flashing around the world.

Auf Wiedersehen…

[Patrick Hall is a retired university library director. He is a graduate of Canisius College and the University of Washington, where he received three advance degrees. He has published in Freedom's Journal Magazine, America, Commonweal, Headway, Journal of Academic Librarianship, American Libraries and others. He currently volunteers at a local VA hospital in the town of Erie, Pa.]