Learned helplessness refers to the way that once the mind is conditioned in a certain way, it can become immobilized in that state. In this sense, learned helplessness is an enslavement of the mind. Today it has become a basic principle of behavior analysis and behavior therapy. While Seligman used the concept for individual analysis, however, we can also apply it to groups. Groups can learn to be helpless just as individuals can.11
Learned helplessness seems to be the reason why people who live miserable lives on the urban plantation nevertheless don’t get up and leave. They have become used to the plantation; even if they feel an impulse to leave they cannot, as there is nowhere for them to go. They lack the skills and sometimes even the motivation to survive outside the plantation. They are too dependent on the drug culture, the crime culture and the culture of government subsidy and support. So while they are free in theory to exit, their minds remain captive, no less to the Democratic Party than to the urban plantation.
What about the people who run the urban plantation? I am referring here to the whole class of overseers: the politicians, the intellectuals, the public defenders and class-action lawyers, the social workers and administrators who together operate and uphold the plantation. Why don’t they fix, improve and rehabilitate it to make it more livable? The short answer is that they have no reason to do this. The urban plantation is run entirely by Democrats. Most of these inner cities are one-party states. There is not a Republican in sight. Every position from the mayor on down is held by Democrats. So these are Democratic plantations in the same way that the old rural plantations were Democratic plantations. Many things change over time, but some don’t.
The urban plantation as currently constructed by the Democrats works just fine for the Democratic Party. It creates a dependent class that the Democrats can service, maintaining inhabitants in a position of meager provision so that they are content enough to vote to keep the subsidies coming, but not so well provided for that they might entertain the thought of leaving or making it on their own, in which case they would cease to be a reliable political constituency for progressive Democrats.
Additionally, the meager circumstances and cultural pathologies of the urban plantation create a resentment among inhabitants. The Democrats steer this resentment toward the Republicans, and the white man and the larger society, always forgetting to mention that it is they—the Democrats—who actually run these places. Instead Democrats use the racial resentment generated by the way they run the urban plantation to bludgeon society and condemn America for failing its most vulnerable citizens. The whole idea is to extract an increasing fund of capital for the urban plantation that, however, never actually fixes anything but keeps the inhabitants in a state of lasting, intergenerational dependency.
The Democrats have recruited a whole class of people, black and white, to organize, administer and defend the urban plantation. This is the new overseer class, typified by longtime Democratic congressman Charles Rangel of New York. In 2010, an eight-member panel of the House Ethics Committee found that this African American representative had brought “discredit to the House” by violating federal laws or ethics rules. He had obtained donations from people with business before his committee to fund a center named after him; failed to pay taxes on a Caribbean home; used a rent-subsidized apartment for campaign purposes; and not properly disclosed more than $600,000 in assets and income.12
Although the New York Times described the House Ethics Committee findings as a “staggering fall” for the senior House Democrat, Rangel was comfortably reelected in 2012, and he remained in the House until 2017. How is this possible? It is possible because like the Tammany bosses of old, today’s overseers retain their power based on the patronage that they dispense to their dependents. Without the overseers, the inhabitants of the plantation cannot survive. Consequently, overseers have a virtually foolproof system for staying in power, no matter what shenanigans they pull in office.
But you don’t have to be unethical to be an overseer on the urban plantation. John Lewis, a legitimate civil rights hero, is a leading overseer. He and Rangel may be opposites in moral character, but in their collaboration to sustain the Democratic plantation, they are in it together. So are Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. These writers derive their moral status from being spokespersons for black suffering. Harsh though it may be to say it, they have a stake in that suffering. Their careers would not be the same without it.
Today there are two kinds of people who can be found on the urban plantation: the people who live there, and the people who control them. We can spot these people here and there in books like Streetwise and Code of the Street. But in reality they are everywhere. We are talking about hordes of social workers involved in urban planning, education, health, welfare, academic research, housing, alcohol and drug rehabilitation and innumerable other programs. In some areas this group seems to rival in size the population it is supposedly taking care of.
Here we see how the plantation, which does not create employment for its inhabitants, nevertheless does provide stable employment to a whole class of academics, social workers and bureaucrats. The employment is stable because the plantation is permanent; there are no plans for it to ever be dismantled. The “war against poverty” is a perpetual fight in which poverty always wins because the game is rigged and the combatants are not fighting to win, only to hold the line.
Not surprisingly, overseers of the urban plantation like Coates also become its tenacious defenders. They aggressively fend off criticism of the plantation and roundly abuse those who try to find ways to help people to leave the plantation.
No wonder Coates suppresses the role of the Democratic Party in creating and sustaining the plantation. Over the past few decades, we have seen how ferociously Coates and his fellow overseers respond to proposals to transform the urban plantation or to help people escape from it.
They don’t want to end social policies that subsidize illegitimacy; yet they have no plans of their own to restore and stabilize the black family. They oppose law-and-order schemes to reduce black-on-black crime in dangerous neighborhoods. Meanwhile, they rail against white and even black policemen who may develop stereotypical biases by working in these rough neighborhoods but who remain, nevertheless, the best protectors of black life on the urban plantation.
The grand pooh-bahs of the overseer class despise the fight against drugs and insist that drug dealers be released from prison. Drug incarceration, they insist, is the “new Jim Crow.” They hate gentrification or schemes for “enterprise zones” in the inner city. They detest parental choice and educational reforms that attempt to give young people the job skills to enable them to move out and go where the jobs are. In sum, they protect the interests of the overseer class. They don’t want to dismantle the plantation and they don’t want “runaways.”
It is time now to revisit the concept of the Uncle Tom, which I introduced earlier with Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. I do so because this is the accusation that plantation overseers routinely and almost inevitably apply to black conservatives who promote schemes of self-help and self-reliance. These conservatives are accused of being collaborators with racists and traitors to the black community. Since I know these people I can tell you that Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, Walter Williams, Clarence Thomas and many others are depressingly familiar with these baseless accusations. The latest target of overseer attack appears to be the rap artist Kanye West, who is not a conservative but who has declared himself to be a freethinker and has shown his independence by appearing in public wearing a MAGA hat signed by Trump himself.
What makes the Uncle Tom charges especially ironic, of course, is that they are advanced by members of the overseer class who are, just like Du Bois, the real collaborators with a racist plantation scheme. The new overseers sustain the urban plantation just as the old overseers sustained the old rural plantation. Yet this relat
ionship of power and dependency between overseers and inhabitants is camouflaged by the rhetoric of racial solidarity that Democratic overseers routinely employ. Their favorite term is “we,” much as the old master class liked to refer to “my family black and white.”
In reality, however, the interests of the overseer class and the inhabitants of the urban plantation are very different. The inhabitants want to move up and make it, and this can only be achieved by transforming the inner cities or by moving out of them, just as whites and so many others have. But this is the last thing that the overseers want. It is the mission of this group to ensure that the inhabitants of the plantation stay in perpetual dependency. Thus they can justly be considered betrayers of the people whose welfare they are charged with. So the real Uncle Toms are accusing people who are not Uncle Toms of being Uncle Toms.
OVERSEERS WITHOUT A PLANTATION
Something interesting happened when President Trump advanced a proposal to extend the so-called Dream Act (DACA), enabling the children of illegals to stay in the United States. Trump agreed to keep 1.8 million DACA “dreamers” on the condition that Democrats also support increased border security and funding for a wall to restrict the entry of illegal aliens. Trump insisted that he would not accept a DACA solution that did not involve more comprehensive immigration reform. One might expect that Trump’s position would be resisted by Latino progressives like Univision host Jorge Ramos, and it was. But interestingly enough, it was also resisted by African American and Asian American activists.
At a gathering of more than one thousand African Americans at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, organized to celebrate the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., pastor and activist Raphael Warnock condemned Trump as “a willfully ignorant, racist, xenophobic, narcissistic con man.” Taking up the DACA cause, Warnock thundered, “Some of us came on immigrant ships, others of us came on slave ships, but we’re all in the same boat.”13 Interestingly Warnock made no reference to those who have come here unlawfully; in line with progressive talking points, he slyly conflated legals and illegals, putting both into the umbrella category of “immigrants.”
Around the same time, Asian American activists showed up at a pro-DACA rally outside a federal building in Los Angeles, where Democratic representative Judy Chu declared that Trump’s willingness to rescind DACA was “a cruel and devastating blow to the nearly 800,000 young Americans currently enrolled in the program. This indefensible action is an open attack on America’s immigrant communities and undermines our core values as a nation.”
Chu’s rhetoric was echoed by representatives of an alphabet soup of Asian American civil rights organizations: the National Council of Asian Pacific Americans, the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center and the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund. I happened to see this rally on TV. Yet when the cameras panned to the audience, there were hardly any Asian Americans, just a few Asian tourists, who looked like they were from Japan, taking pictures and laughing.14
What’s going on here? DACA is an overwhelmingly Hispanic or Latino issue. So what explains the involvement among black and Asian American activists? And they aren’t just involved; their tone on the DACA issue is one of hysteria. Clearly something bigger is going on here. We’re seeing the expansion of the Democratic urban plantation beyond blacks to include other groups. None of these other groups has a full-scale urban plantation; one of them does not even inhabit a plantation.
Asian Americans don’t have a plantation; in fact, as a group, they illustrate the difficulties and limits of the Democratic project to expand the plantation. There are sizable Asian American communities in Los Angeles and one or two other cities. But by and large the Asian Americans who move into the inner city move out as soon as they can, typically within a single generation. For the Democrats, this is very problematic. How do the Asians do it? They do it by succeeding academically, professionally and entrepreneurially.
Asian Americans are vastly overrepresented at the nation’s top colleges and universities. Not surprisingly, Asian Americans are, despite their relatively small population, more likely than other groups to become doctors, engineers, software programmers. Asian Americans form more businesses on average than other groups, including whites. Asian American median household income is around $78,000 as compared with the white median household income of around $62,000. This success has earned Asian Americans the title of “model minority.” Democrats, however, aren’t into model minorities; they like dependent minorities.
Asian Americans have a history of being victimized by the Democratic Party. The Democratic unions excluded the Chinese and Japanese, and progressive Democrats lobbied for immigration restrictions that kept Asians out of the country. In World War II, FDR interned Japanese Americans under suspicion of disloyalty, although he did not even consider locking up Italian and German Americans. Today the affirmative action policies that progressives implement throughout academia discriminate both in academic admissions and job hiring against more qualified Asian Americans and in favor of less qualified African Americans and Hispanics.
Even so, the absence of an Asian American plantation and the seemingly obvious compatibility of Asian Americans with the Republican Party have not stopped Democrats from recruiting Asian American overseers. How does this process work? It works in two steps. The first is that progressives use their influence in academia and popular culture to cajole Asian Americans into their camp. Asian Americans are eager to assimilate to the culture in which they find themselves—a culture they identify with status and success—and in the university they encounter the regnant progressive culture and so assimilate to that.
The progressive appeal to the Asian American elite is through identity politics. Progressives welcome them not for their individual achievements but for their “diversity.” Notwithstanding the absurdity of lumping, say, a Pakistani and a Chinese, with no cuisine, religion or culture in common, under the umbrella category of “Asian,” the left manages to convince some of these people to think of themselves in that way and even to become professional Asians—that is, purported spokespeople for the Asian American community.
This offer comes with financial support. Basically the Asian American groups are not sustained through membership; there are hardly any members. Rather, they are funded by progressive philanthropic foundations like the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation. These groups create shadow ethnic organizations that then have offices and letterhead and issue statements purporting to speak for Asian Americans even though they actually speak only for themselves—or more precisely they become parrots for the progressive party line.
The presence of shadow organizations is important for what the Democrats are now trying to create, not a single African American plantation but multicultural plantations involving every ethnic minority group. In the case of Asian Americans, if Democrats can’t get full-blown plantations, they want at least the simulacra of them. But the left wants every minority group to be part of the picture. In the twenty-first-century scenario, the Democrats want black urban plantations, Hispanic plantations, Asian American plantations and Native American plantations.
REZ LIFE
We see here how the Democrats are moving toward realizing Lincoln’s fear. Lincoln feared the triumph of a Democratic national plantation system controlling and subjugating more and more groups of people. For Lincoln the nightmare scenario was the expansion of black plantations to some form of white plantations. The Democrats, however, have gone for a tricolor plantation featuring (to put the matter in crude stereotypes) black, brown and yellow people. To each minority ethnic group its own plantation, with a single group—the progressive Democrats—lording it over all of them.
Native American plantations don’t bear that name; they are called, of course, reservations. These reservations are rural, not urban. Most native Indians don’t live on reservations; just one in five—some 400,000 out of a population of 2
million—do. Yet reservations continue to define Native American identity. There are around 310 reservations in the United States. Most are on virtually uninhabitable land, the result of the forced relocation of the principal tribes in six Southern states in the nineteenth century by the Jacksonian Democrats. Yet upon closer examination, the native Indian reservations bear a striking resemblance to the Democrats’ urban plantation.
I visited South Dakota’s Pine Ridge reservation a few years ago while filming the movie America. I interviewed Sioux tribal leader Charmaine White Face, and even though we disagreed strongly about Columbus—a genocidal maniac, in her view—we had a good rapport. She took me for a drive through the vast reservation, and I was struck by the ramshackle dwellings, the filth, the cars on the lawn, the wild dogs running around and the disconsolate native people sitting around in clusters, apparently doing nothing. Struck by the absence of office buildings or businesses of any sort, I asked White Face, “Where do most people around here work?” She replied, “Our unemployment rate is 80 percent. Most people around here do not work.”
Pine Ridge reservation, White Face told me, is one of the largest reservations in the country, and the poorest. Like other reservations, it is run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), an agency of the federal government. While in theory the native Indians are separate nations, in reality they are, as the Supreme Court once termed them, “dependent nations”—dependent on the government through the BIA. Government control is virtually absolute, White Face said, and the quality of services, from housing to education to the reduction of toxic pollution, is uniformly terrible. “If you want to know what government-run healthcare looks like,” White Face warned, “come see the mess that we have here.”
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