Rafia Zakaria advocate of imbecility

Rafia Zakaria moved from Pakistan to America as a young bride. She is a lawyer and novelist. She writes in the Baffler-

The situation of black Americans today is more similar to that of the colonized Indians.

How can this be? African Americans are a small minority- about 12 per cent of the population. The Brits in India did not represent even one tenth of one percent of the population. In any case, non-violent, Trade Union and Church based, agitation by African Americans like Randolph and Dr. King had secured Civil Rights by the mid Sixties. America has had a Black President. Will India have a Muslim Prime Minister? It seems unlikelier now than every before.

The vast web of subjugations small and large directed toward black Americans insures that their labors will be ignored, their character continually besmirched, their voices silenced in service of white supremacy.

What on earth is Rafia talking about? African American Culture is hugely popular across the globe. Obama was a two term President. African Americans have the same, or lower, percentage of people with problems linked to drugs or alcohol. Crime in that community is linked only to this. But it was African American Churches- and politicians like Clinton and Biden who pandered to them- who insisted on the draconian Policing and Incarceration laws which plague America. Gandhian gobshitery will continue to stigmatize Blacks disproportionately if they engage in recreational drug use. This is what has ensured that some Black Lives stopped mattering at all. Their deaths were the Statistic that Democratic Administrations used to show they were 'tough on crime'. Of course, this did not affect Organized Crime Lords at all.

The American brand of subjugation is one of not only outright violence—from agents of the state as well as white nationalists

African Americans can deal with 'white nationalists' by themselves. They are not a timorous and cowering community. It is the licensed violence of the Police, which the majority of Blacks themselves support, and the discriminatory incarceration of non-violent Black offenders, which again the majority of Blacks support, which has led to some Black Lives continually being sacrificed on the altar of 'broken windows' policing which, in truth, is anything but.

—but also deprivation and neglect: excluding many millions of black people from access to health care, functioning educational systems, and countless other privileges that most white Americans enjoy.

But which the upwardly mobile African American too enjoys. The reason the incarceration rate for Blacks went up between 1960 and 1990, before sky rocketing because of things like Biden's 1994 Crime Bill, was because better off Black Americans distanced themselves from those with problems. Of course, this happened amongst Whites as well. But the Whites weren't claiming affirmative action on the basis of their own 'left behind' class. This is the hypocritical aspect of American politics which Black economists and jurists and sociologists have exposed. Thus Sowell and Fryer are quoted by the Right. But the Left objects to the work of Princeton Professor Omar Wasow which shows the counterproductive nature of violent protest. They can't get him fired because he is technically 'Black', but a white data scientist who linked to his tweet lost his job.

Rafia comes from Pakistan. She is educated. Yet she writes

Like the British did with native Indians, white America has historically justified its cruelties by insisting that there is something inherently immoral, inherently criminal, inherently dissolute about black people. British India believed that natives (and of course, those colonized throughout the Empire) were deficient, a perspective they substantiated by creating metrics of education, health, etc., that would ground their white superiority in “fact.”

This is crazy shit. The Brits came to India to trade. Since their ships carried the goods they bought and sold, they grew rich and thus could afford to pay Indian soldiers properly. Thus the sepoys showed up for battle in order to fight the enemy, not sneak around looking for a baggage train to loot. They didn't run away if there seemed no prospect of stealing stuff.

 The British realized they could make a profit running Indian territory. Since property and life was more secure under the Brits and because any 'pension' they granted was paid decade after decade, century after century, Noblemen took the British shilling while the mercantile castes thrived as compradors and tax-farmers.

The Brits were careful to protect the indigenous religions and laws of the Indian people. Back in Blighty you were welcome to speak of the savagery of the heathens. But if you tried to convert Indians on Indian soil and the Indian ruling class objected, then you were thrown out of the country.

African Americans have always been a small minority in America. Indians have always been a huge majority in India. The Brits had paramountcy in India because of their financial might. But they were ugly and the Indian climate was unkind to them. Nobody thought them superior in anything save efficiency and enterprise. After the Second World War left the Brits bankrupt, they negotiated a good severance-package for themselves and quietly packed their bags.

Jews in Germany did better than others in terms of education, enterprise, etc. President Hindenberg was surprised when half of all the Jews who had lost their Government jobs when Hitler became Chancellor turned out to have fought on the 'front line' during the War. Even in terms of military courage and sacrifice, the Jews were ahead, not behind. But what good did this do the German Jews? Their condition soon became worse than anything faced by victims of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Rafia ends her article thus-

Ultimately, the British were driven out of India in part by the battering they took in World War II. White America has been similarly battered by the Covid-19 pandemic and the rapid spiral into Trumpian racism and denial.

The Brits were a miniscule minority in India. Even in 1818, Warren Hastings was saying that 'the time is not distant when the only connection between India and England will be that of commerce'. Hastings could not have predicted how shite Indian intellectuals would turn out to be. Even after Independence, they would go to study worthless shite in Oxford or Cambridge. Seventy years later, the grandchildren write nonsense of Rafia's sort. This is India's revenge on Macaulay.

While many protesters have turned to King and the example of Gandhi before him, this moment has also shown that great change can come from more confrontational tactics, like the burning of a police precinct in Minneapolis, where a majority of City Council members have since vowed to disband the police department and “dramatically rethink” their approach to public safety.

Devi & Fryer have a paper which shows that moral panics in the face of 'viral violence' have a perverse effect. First crime goes up as the Police 'work to rule'. Then there is a backlash and over all police brutality ratchets up. By contrast, proper mechanism design and 'Pattern or Practice' investigation resulting in consent decrees has an exemplary effect. I may add that Public Sector Unions must be cut down to size. The problem is easily fixed. The Right wants it. Only the stupidity of the 'woke' Left stands in the way. Rafia, though a lawyer, is on the wrong side of History on this one. But then she isn't really 'Black' is she? What she is doing is jumping on a bandwagon for a careerist reason, not showing 'solidarity' at all.

Either way, the moment of change is no longer a sentence that begins with when, but one that starts with now.

It may start with now but must finish with 'shut the fuck up you stupid, careerist, virtue signaling clown. Fixing the problem is easy. It makes everyone better off. Not fixing the problem, however, could make some lawyers very rich. You can take the wokeness out of the shyster but you can't take the shyster out of the woke movement.'