I understand where you’re coming from, but I think you’re misinterpreting my point a bit. I’m definitely not suggesting “going silent.” Quite the opposite: I’m suggesting a very aggressive campaign to shut up and shut down anyone who tries to categorize people by race in this country.

As you know (since I know you’ve read a bunch of the other things I’ve written), I haven’t been at all silent. Instead, I’ve written at length about topics such as anti-white racism and phenomena like “black entitlement” to pose as a counterweight to the racist idea of “white privilege,” and I’ve done these things because I thing it’s necessary to bring some perspective to the issue and get these anti-white racists to see that there’s another side to the story they want to tell, but ultimately, as I also explain in the piece on black entitlement, my goal is not to get people yapping about “black entitlement” the way they now go around yapping about “white privilege,” but rather, to get them to stop categorizing people by race. If we all want to live at peace in the same country, rather than fight a race war, then I think that’s the only long-term solution, but in the short-term, I agree with you that lots of push-back is necessary. This push-back, however, shouldn’t take the form of anti-black racism, because that just gives these people exactly what they want, which is to claim that we’re all white supremacists, whether out in the open or in hiding. Rather, the push-back should take the form of occupying the moral high ground and scolding them about their own bare-faced bigotry until the issue is recognized and we get to the point where we can once again stop making sweeping judgments about people based on the pigment of their skin.

That said, I won’t shy away from saying that black culture in America has some very serious issues that need to be addressed if black Americans are ever going to claw their way out of the disproportionate poverty and self-destructive behavioral patters we so often see, but I just don’t think this has anything to do with the skin color or biological characteristics of the people who embrace that culture. It’s not about race, in other words. Immigrants from Nigeria, for instance, are disproportionately successful in the world, including in the U.S., as Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld’s The Triple Package documents and explains. The lot of African-Americans is largely a product of their particular history here, and at this point, it’s too complex a phenomenon to unravel in terms of who’s to blame or not to blame, so the goal is not to cast blame, but rather, to recognize the problem and say, regardless of what made it the way it is, black American culture as it exists right now is something that needs to be addressed and fixed if we ever want to see black people get beyond their present-day plight in America.