Shelley v. Kramer v. Brown v. You
The story of Shiloh Hendrix has brought to the surface things that have been bubbling under the surface for some time. The most obvious is the general fatigue with regards to race among white people. The media is doing the usual point and shriek, expecting the lynch mob to chase after this woman, but instead money is flowing into her fundraising account with messages of support. The white population is using this event to make a point about race in America.
For most white people, this is not a moral issue. It is a practical issue. They wonder why we have Somalis in Minnesota. No one campaigned on bringing tribes of Somalis into the country and dumping them into white communities. No one was organizing pressure groups demanding the importation of Somalis. The people who made this decision never mentioned it to the public and the public was never consulted. Suddenly, we have this new problem, and we are expected to adjust to it.
Even putting aside the immigration issue, why are white people expected to adjust to black behavior at all? The core assumption of our racialized society is that it is the duty of whites to adjust to the other races. No one ever demands that the other races try to act white, as saying such a thing has been declared immoral. On the one hand whites are expected to venerate nonwhites, while on the other hand nonwhite are encouraged to harass and assault whites.
If you are white, a central part of your life is navigating around nonwhites. Maybe it is knowing where the black areas are, so you avoid crime. Maybe it is teaching your children about dealing with the nons in their school, so they do not get jammed up by the morality police. Maybe it is educating the old people in your life on how to spot Indian scammers. Of course, the background noise of the public square is the endless drone of race talk.
The question is how did it get to this? Like the Somalis in Minnesota, the public was never asked about any of this. The people who decided on the new rules never campaigned on them or asked for public support. They just did it. They kept doing it one court case, one new law at a time. The place to start is the landmark Supreme Court decision Shelley v. Kramer, where the court declared that restrictive covenants violated the 14th Amendment.
In 1945, a black couple named J.D. and Ethel Shelley attempted to purchase a home in a white neighborhood in St. Louis, Missouri. The property was subject to a restrictive covenant that prohibited nonwhites from occupying the property. This was a deliberate setup to get another case in the system on this matter. McGhee v. Sipes was a similar case out of Michigan. This is a common trick by the usual suspects to help fast track a case to the Supreme Court.
Of course, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the blacks, declaring that while restrictive covenants do not violate the rights of the parties to the contract, any enforcement of these covenants violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. In other words, homeowners are free to make any rules they like about who can live in their community, but no court will enforce those rights if they discriminate on race.
What the court did is shift from a position where it enforces private contracts to a position where it decides if the contract is acceptable. In one decision we went from a world where private parties were free to make contracts with one another for whatever reasons they liked to a world where private parties must seek permission from the state before entering into a contract. If the court could selectively enforce contracts, as in the Shelley case, then they could do it with every type of contract.
This marked the beginning of the general shift away from a rights-based society where the state is a neutral arbiter in disputes between citizens to a permission-based society in which the state regulates the behavior of citizens to achieve goals never imagined or considered in the Constitution. Ten years after Shelley, the Court sealed the deal with the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision, where they enshrined this entirely new moral paradigm into law.
Brown took the basic concept of Shelley, where the courts get to decide which contracts to enforce, and extended it to the law. Specifically, they declared that any law or private action that discriminates is assumed to be unconstitutional. Any law or behavior that furthers an open and inclusive society is assumed to be constitutional. This has been the moral framework of race communism ever since. The reason Shiloh Hendrix is famous now is because of this moral framework.
The great frustration that white people sense in that clip of Ms. Hendrix using colorful euphemisms is the result of the American false consciousness. We are regularly told we live in a rights-based society, that we are free to live our lives as we see fit, but in reality, we live in a permission-based society. If anything you do or say is deemed to be discriminatory by the courts or someone empowered by the courts, you can find yourself in a jungle of moral contradictions.
It is a good example of how reform within the rules is probably impossible. To fix the race issue it would require tearing down this moral edifice erected by the courts that now dominates the old Constitutional arrangement. That means removing the moral authority of the courts entirely. To do that would require a revolution in the law where lawyers cease to be a secular clerisy. Such a revolution in the law will require a revolution in the streets.
That aside, the tension between how we want to act and how we are told to act is why Ms. Hendrix blew her top in the park. She does not want to live in a world where she and her children are harassed by Africans. She thinks she has the right to not be harassed by Africans. She does not live in that world as the people in charge think she should be harassed by Africans. That video exists because we are about to find out who shall overcome whom.