"Legacy of slavery"? An eye-opening test
By Daniel M. Ryan
web posted October 10, 2016
Did you notice that profound insights into human nature and politics come from cultures that are degenerating or going through major turmoil? No better example exists than ancient Athens. Its philosophy hit the peak at a time when Athens itself hit the skids. If you're fond of historicism, you can read Plato's Republic as a book of suggestions on how to put Humpty Athens back together again. It's no accident of time that Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan was written during the turmoil of the English Civil War.
Our culture is certainly going through turmoil, and arguably is degenerating, Case in point: transgenderism. We've beat even Weimar culture in this avenue; the farthest they got was transvestitism. Unlike them, we have a whole swath of SJWs using prefixes like "cis-" and "trans-" - as part of a large collection of classification tags that makes one wonder if their mothers were filing cabinets. No: to find a precedent, the depths of history have to be plumbed until we reach the late Roman Republic. The Republic in the days when…it was evolving into something more advanced.
Contrast our age to the dark, dank time period inaccurately labeled "the '50s." In actual fact, "the '50s" stretched from the late 1940s to about 1965. It was a dank time when a man with only a high-school diploma could get a blue-collar job and afford to buy a modest house with only his wages. A time where dark prophets like Henry Wallace were triumphal; he declared it "The Century of the Common Man." A time when other dark prophets concluded that benighted housewives had it much better than their nineteenth-century counterparts. They had the dank temerity to claim that a housewife looking after the kids, keeping the house with the aid of modern appliances, going to the beauty parlor once a week, etc. had it better that the American farmwife who sweated alongside her husband in the fields. Dank prognosticators saw a nightmare future wherein the working week would shrink to 32 hours or even 28 hours, with the same pay packet. It was so unenlightened a time, sages seriously believed Schopenhauer's warning that the problem of the age would be boredom.
Oh yah, those were indeedy the dark ages – weren't they? How different they were from our age of post-modern…enlightenment.
Of course, the dank age of "the '50s" was suffused with sexism – which did have its effect on the rating-and-dating process. Only in an age of dank sexism could a young man who took this song to heart become a heart-throb. In contrast, our enlightened age has discerned that that song is music for beta-male cucks who are destined to be orbiters. Only in an age of unenlightened family values could a tougher band put together a song about The Life – and suffuse itwith bitter regret. In our reconstructed age, where our post-feminist lads see a band like Steppenwolf as alpha dudes, the latter song is not profound but confusing. ("But he's bangin' hot babes!!") Interestingly, the favourite come-on moves of a beta male only work in a culture suffused with "sex-role stereotypes." When these are eroded by social progress, Dependable John finds that the dating floor has been cut out from beneath him.
Another custom of that dark, dank age is "peers marry peers." In the middle of that unenlightened period feted by Henry Wallace as the Age of the Common Man, the favoured genre of American literature was "slice-of-life" stories. Among them were twists on the Cinderella fable wherein the gal rejected her rich or powerful swain for the boy next door. She turned down Walthorp for good old Wally, and the tales implied that it was right and heroic for her to do so. This slice-of-life custom did show up in the music. The all-American gal was expected to reject "Silver Threads And Golden Needles" for a decent all-American love.(So were the boys…) Accordingly, Walthorp and Contessa were expected to marry their own. Story after story assured both Wally and Tessie that life with the plusher set would be frustrating, saddening, fraught with betrayal, or just plain boring.
Just like it marked a low point in crime, those dank "50s" also marked a low point in female hypergamy. Given the fetishistic acceptance of the nuclear family, Walthorp dumping Dymphna for Angelina would get him Danny Deevered out of his country club.
Our age being more…enlightened, we've seen an uptick in female hypergamy and high-status men taking advantage. Once again, we've had to learn the hard way that what we thought was "natural" is enjoined by custom. As those dank old customs are stripped away by…enlightened deconstruction, we're seeing more and more of the Old Adam and the Old Eve. Yes, this age of social progress we live in is enlightening. It is easier to fetch up nuggets of profundity about human nature nowadays, just like it was in the Humpty Athens of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.
One spot of enlightenment comes from the place where those old, dank customs have most completely been stripped away: namely, the inner-city 'Hood. Since the chief source of over-the-table funds in that environ is welfare, we get a glimpse of what men and women are like when the pressure to make a living is much lessened. Since the welfare system incentivizes women to have children, we see what mating and birth patterns are like in the absence of resource scarcity. Significantly, a 'Hood woman who was born, raised and lives on welfare has none of the economic inhibitors that induce women to restrict or eliminate reproduction. For example, she doesn't need to worry about paying for college: she has the option of either believing that the system is rigged against her kids or adopting a reasonable expectation that the federal government, a college and a philanthropist would gladly team up and give any of her college-bound kids enough aid to make college bills a non-issue. No dean, in this day and age, would regretfully say that a matriculant from the 'Hood can't attend because (s)he can't pay the bills. It's easy to imagine what would happen to him if he did….
Housing and food are taken care of. The 'Hood folks who can adjust their desires downwards to their circumstances can get along. If they can't, there are sources of under-the-table money – the chief of which, in many inner cities, is the drug trade. The illegal drug market is strikingly noteworthy in this day and age because it's the only line in which a person can make a stack of Benjamins without even knowing how to read. It's a perilous life, 'tis true, but Schopenhauer was wrong about the problem of plenty being boredom. Naïf that he was, he assumed that the customary restraints for both respectability and hire-worthiness would not erode.
The existence of female hypergamy as a drive, the existence of livable plenty, and a Christianity whose sola fide is almost Muslimesquely fatalistic provides a bed of sorts to test SJWs' favourite notions about race – namely, "legacy of slavery", "institutionalized racism" and "white privilege."
A Stupid Question…
To start, a stupid question: "Why didn't Kate Middeton reject the marriage proposal of Prince William and marry a fellow-commoner boy next door?" True: this is a stupid one, but the ball to keep your eye on is why it's a stupid question. The fairy-tale marriage of "Wills and Kate" encapsulates hypergamy.
So do the poignant tales of slave gals who present their massa with a baby that looks a lot like him. Our compassion and our horse sense combine to make this scenario believable, to the point where we're inclined to believe an urban legend to this effect. In the antebellum South, all children of slaves were legally slaves. That status included children that were also the biological children of the master, or of his son and heir. Since our compassion for the slaves allow us to slip past our customs-enforced blind spot in this area, we can easily see why a slave gal – without restraints – would benefit by enough rasslin' with the massa to present him with his own biological child. He then faced a situation where his own son, or his own daughter, was legally a slave. Needless to say, this complicated the situation for him.
But for her, unless massa was irrationally fanatical (which would chip away at his reputation), it's not that hard to see how she would benefit. The tug of nepotism meant that there was a good chance that her son or daughter would have a better life than she. Often, the son or daughter of such an informal union was manumitted at the age of twenty-one after being educated far beyond the level of any other slave. Then, (s)he was sent off to a free state with enough money to get him or her settled in life. Since we naturally sympathize with the woman enchained by slavery, a custom we all consider reprehensible, we can see and understand the workings of female hypergamy in this situation. She, in the chains of slavery, can nevertheless have a child that is free.
We can see it so well, the question arises: why weren't there more "oopsies"? The pleasing answer, at least pleasing to social conservatives, was that the slaves were deeply Christian. The restraint on the slave side, to use an anodyne term, was moral restraint. This piety of the slaves was so well known, it was easy for notherners to imagine that all products of such rassles were the result of a lust-ridden slave-owner forcing himself on a saintly-souled slave.
Nat Turner was far from the only slave-preacher: there were many of them. One of their duties and pleasures was to perform underground marriages of a young slave man and a young slave woman. This practice, this faith, gave the abolitionists a lot of moral thunder. They did not pass up the opportunity to denounce demonic slavers who rendered asunder what God had put together. Almost to a man (and a woman), the abolitionists were fervent Christians. They had the slave circuit so much on the defensive, there was a serious flirtation in the South with re-interpreting the Bible to claim that slavery was Godly because blacks were under "the curse of Ham." This attempt was the Christian Identity of its time. Needless to say, it didn't work. The folks who tried to push it were not aided by the fact that the restraints on the master side did not contain moral reasoning. Those injunctions were hard-nosed practical, amounting to "it causes more trouble than it's worth."
Given the centrality of fervent evangelical Christianity to the ending of slavery, it's hard to imagine an alternate universe where those moral restraints would have been largely eroded in the slaves. But our horse sense, conjoined with our compassion, tells us that the number of master-slave mulattos would be much larger than the actual number. We can imagine a slave woman giving herself over to her masters in this way – absent the moral restraint – because we can see why she would want one or more of her biological children to live as freedmen or at least be better treated than the typical slave. What mother would not want her children to have a better life, even if she herself doesn't? If you have the stomach for such imaginings, you can imagine slavery being slowly eroded through the nepotism drive (of masters) instead of the moral thunder that preceded the thunder of war.
In a time of slavery in which master and slave are different races, we can piece together how female hypergamy would work. Absent the slaves' deep and pious Christianity, the slave parts of America would be a regular exporter of manumitted mulattoes.
The same principle works in an aristocratic system headed up by a powerful monarchy. Ladies-in-waiting did give themselves willingly to a randy King, a behavior that was thoroughly exploited-for-television by The Tudors. That's because the recognized bastards of a King were given titles of high nobility. A lady-in-waiting who presented her King with his own biological child had a good chance of becoming the mother of a newly-made Duke. Such was the case for the mom of Henry FitzRoy, Lady Blount.
Even if the result of the coupling were not acknowledged, or if the coupling was between an aristocrat and a commoner gal, the nepotism drive meant that there was a chance that the biological offspring would gain a prestigious servant's job. We've long forgotten this, but servants' job used to be fiercely sought after when aristocracy was powerful. In the days when an aristocrat had a lot of latitude to rule on his own recognizance, a trusted servant who had the aristocrat's confidence had a lot of clout. He had influence similar to today's lobbyists. Just imagine the de facto power held by the Gentleman of the Bedchamber. His formal duties included "waiting on the King when he ate in private, helping him to dress, guarding the bedchamber and water closet, and providing companionship." We moderns might think he was nothing more than a valet, but the folks in the times of powerful monarchy knew better. This 'valet' job was so sought after, it was legally barred to anyone below the rank of gentleman – and was almost invariably filled by a nobleman. The folks back then knew what really came with the job, just as we know that an internship for a Senator is a heckuva lot more than an unpaid job a youngster takes to avoid explaining experience gaps in his or her résumé.
This sketchy look into the awful system of slavery and the antiquated system of aristocracy reveals the workings of female hypergamy in a class system. Women being pragmatic creatures, who also want better lives for their kids, they take the risk of submitting themselves to superior-classed men in the hopes that the nepotism drive of the men will secure a good future for any resultant offspring. Thankfully for the West, this behavior was restrained by Judeo-Christian morality. In cultures where this restraint is absent, we can see its workings more openly.
No wonder we have a taboo that blocks thinking about this: in a democracy with equality under the law (equal status), it is aggravating. Thankfully, the hypergamy drive is attenuated in a democracy - so there's less need to give it any mind. In a democratic republic, a "class system" is more like a set of subcultures than a real hierarchy. This subculturization had the happy effect of limiting the reach of behaviors that are markers of high status. Have a listen to this excerpt from Sir Winston Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech, and pay close attention to both his intonation and his tone. If you didn't know he was Sir Winston Churchill, what would you think of him? Try imitating him; listen to what your voice sounds like. What kind of person do you hear? If you answer anything other than "a high-status upper with power," you'll see how the American class system is drained through subculturization.
That process is exactly why Sallie Jean, in the deepest part of her heart, prefers Billie Ray to Randolph. Because of it, Randolph comes across as an inhibited bore, an affected twit, or something else not admirable. Subculturization is why Sallie really believes that Bille Ray is a better man than Randolph. It's a major plank against a class system setting root in America; it's a structural beam holding up equality of status.
In a real class system, that structural support doesn't exist. In such a system, everyone knows what the behavioral markers of high status are and what they mean. The women certainly do. That's the deeper reason for why the question "Why didn't Kate Middeton reject the marriage proposal of Prince William and marry a fellow-commoner boy next door?" is a stupid question.
…And Revealing Answers
From the dank wisdom above, we know how women behave in a genuine status society. Their hypergamy, no longer channeled by subculturalization, kicks in. Instead of heartland disdain, we see the Lady Blounts and the Anne Boleyns sizing up their chances. "I don't care if he's an effete snob…"
According to the SJWs, America has a full-blown class system that's undergirded by institutional racism, a legacy of slavery, and white privilege. If this hypothesis were true, we'd see it reflected quite noticeably in the 'Hood. Women are good at sensing these things, and they do take pains to adapt their behavior to the desires of high-status men. It's no accident that the decade that bequeathed the saying "You can never be too rich or too thin," the decade which saw Tom Wolfe poking fun of rich Manhattan wives by writing that they were "social X-rays" "starved to perfection" (Bonfire of the Vanities), was the same decade in which anorexia nervosa and bulimia first became health problems. Women know. Even if they only have the indirect aim of breaking into the crowd of high-status women that consort with high-status men, even if their ambitions are limited to being thought of as one of the Beautiful People, they know.
So: given what we know about hypergamy - and how its slips its republican fetters in an outright class system - the evidence of this legacy of slavery, this institutional racism, this white privilege, should be very visible: mostso in the 'Hood. Remember: although a welfare mother is incentivized to have more kids, the system is indifferent to what kind of babydaddy she selects. In this area, she has a free choice. Since the Christianity in those parts has taken sola fide to an eye-opening extreme, the moral restraints of the pious and Godly slave women are close to absent in the 'Hood. It's not uncommon for a welfare mother, and not all that uncommon for a working mother, to have kids by more than one babydaddy. This subculture's Christianity has mutated into a form wherein fidelity is detached from reproduction. A fourth-generation welfare mother who's has six kids by six different men can sincerely insist that she's a good Christian and in the good books of God. In part because the welfare system penalizes marriage, what passes for Christianity in these parts is severed from conduct to the point where it approaches Muslimish occasionalism. (God caused me to fornicate, God caused me to shoot that member of a rival gang, and God will cause me to go to heaven.)
Leaving aside theology, the inner city provides the perfect test bed for the legacy-of-slavery hypothesis. Were there real institutional racism, the 'Hood would be full of Elizabeth Blounts. The women down there, being mothers with normal motherly instincts, would be trying to get their sons over the bar of institutional racism by selecting babydaddies with white privilege.
In other words, the 'Hood would be full of kids that are mulattoes. Given the real power relationships that affect the lives of people on welfare, it should be full of mulattoes that bear distinct resemblances to local philanthropists, politically-powerful staffers that don't have to shoulder the exposure risk that elected politicians do, and caseworkers from different districts practicing the old back-scratch dodge around anti-nepotism laws. ("I'll take yours, you take mine.")
Very obviously, the real kids of real 'Hood mommas are nothing of the sort. Instead of the local philanthropist being the Darwin-lucky babydaddy, the luckiest gene-spreader is likely to be a gang-banger.
Granted that it takes two to rassle, but the bending to the high-status winds that's tragically evident amongst middle-class gals is absent in the welfare-mother circuit. They don't even see the need to try. The closest reed is hair-straightening, but it's a thin reed indeed. As we know well, the Darwinian success in the 'Hood is likely to be a hardened criminal. A criminal whose own momma would be quick to warn against threatening the real Man: the Man with real power over all of their livelihoods. Like the local philanthropist, the politically-powerful staffer, and so on. Again, their real behavior shows nothing of the sort.
In fact, black women overall show an almost unanimous preference for black mates. Remember, selecting the man to mate with is a primal decision deeply influenced by considerations of what kind of kid will have the best reachable chances in life. In middle-class society, this desire is constrained not only by culture but also by availability and moral restraint. As I've already belaboured, the first and last constraints are much weaker in the welfare circuit. If babydaddying is the norm, the mother-to-be isn't even constrained by whether or not the man would make a good father. Subject to his willingness, all that matters is his phenotype – a facet that the incentivizing welfare system is legally indifferent to.
The take-away is, real mating and real daddy-selecting behavior amongst black women is strikingly inconsistent with the notion that America is a class system with white privilege. Black women's choices are profoundly at odds with the unrestrained mating choices of lower-status women in a class system.
True, this inconsistency is explainable by subculturalization. But as I explained above, subculturalization is precisely the cultural force that prevents the socio-economic scale from becoming a real class system. If subculturalization is the reason, then any legacy-of-slavery institutional racism – if any at all - is weak. Too weak to have any Darwinian-anthropological significance. Lady Blount, for one, would see this instantly.
This back-of-the-envelope Darwinism shows that the SJWers' favourite claims are hot air. The evidence that should be there, isn't. The dog that should be barking, ain't.
The debunking you just read is yet another item for the file cabinet stuffed with SJW wrong-headedness. I can see a historian of the 22nd century, one who sees himself as a new Charles Mackay, pegging the SJWer frenzy as yet another example of the madness of crowds. Let's hope that this 22nd century historian does not add it to a symptoms list of the fall of a then-defunct American Republic. 
Daniel M. Ryan, as Nxtblg, is shepherding the independently-run Open Audi Initiative Prediction Market Shadowing Project. He has stubbornly assumed all the responsibility and blame for the workings and outcome of the project.