'majority minority'

A lot is being made of the evident fact that within a couple of decades the US may no longer be a majority-white country.  On the face of it, I have no particular objection to this.  As long as we have a citizenry that is civilized, educated, and responsible, I don't care what color they are.

There is, however, one major caveat to this.  If, over the course of this transition-- and seemingly as a direct result of it-- we seem to be sliding into becoming a third-world country, then this will stop.  There are two major criteria for determining this:

1.  The public schools.  If the public schools as a whole seem to be deteriorating to the level of unruliness and low achievement of ghetto schools, this trend will stop.

2.  Even more obviously, the crime rate.  If the crime rate in general begins to approach that of the ghetto, this trend will stop.

These two things probably go hand in hand.  People of low educational achievement have far more of an incentive to become criminals than others, because they have fewer and more unpalatable options.  If the public schools remain pretty good and even improve in low-income areas, fine.  If the crime rate continues its downward trend of recent decades, hunky dory.  But if these two criteria seem to indicate that we are becoming a third-world country, as a direct result of this demographic transition to 'majority-minority' status, then that trend will stop, and in fact be reversed.  Trend, as they say, is not destiny.

meritocracy

This country should be as much of a meritocracy as possible.  To that end, we should abolish all racial and ethnic categories as legal constructs.  If that were the case, the government couldn't require universities and workplaces to set up affirmative action quotas for less competent people.  Nor would freebies be handed out on the basis of these irrelevancies, either.  We should concentrate on economic inequality, which is the real problem.

trump

Donald Trump is on to something.  The real question is not that these people are coming here illegally, but what they-- and more importantly, their children-- do once they get here.  I've often maintained that if we had 12 million illegal CHINESE immigrants, and their children were getting straight A's and winning science scholarships, nobody would care.  But Hispanics have an even higher dropout rate than blacks, and Hispanics have all these children ('anchor' babies are just the beginning) they can't support.  We don't want to be reproduced into being a third-world country.  We only need so many people to trim hedges or pick strawberries or make hotel room beds.  And we certainly don't need no more stinkin' Latino gangs.

baltimore

The major upshot of this unpleasantness in Baltimore is this:  Not a lot is going to change for black people in this country unless one thing in particular changes.  They have got to start doing better in school.  For one thing, their low level of academic achievement means that vast swathes of the job market are closed to them.  The obvious exampe is 'STEM' jobs-- those involving science, technology, engineering, and math.  These are well-paying jobs, jobs with a future in a rapidly segment of the job market, yet there are essentially no blacks in these jobs.  Why?  Because they lack the qualifications for them.

A few years ago, Jesse Jackson gave a speech to a group of Silicon Valley bigwigs in which he said it was their responsibility to 'groom' blacks for these jobs.  In addition to the rather obvious fact that this is simply not the way life works-- at least not in this country-- it would be impossible to groom anybody for anything if they lacked basic skills in literacy and numeracy.

But look at it from the other end.  Let's say you're fourteen or fifteen years old and are reading at a fourth-grade level, can't write a coherent sentence in idiomatic American English (which you also can't speak), and can't figure out how to make change for a dollar.  What kind of future can you envision for yourself?  Unless you're one of that tiny, tiny, tiny number of people who can actually expect to earn a living singing or dancing or playing basketball, you have two choices:  some kind of menial-labor job, or crime.  In that situation, crime becomes a viable option.  This is especially true if you don't personally know any adult males who actually get up in the morning and go off to a real job, and if you see guys on your block who are already in 'the life.'

And this gets us back to Baltimore.  Criminals, for some reason, seem to have many more interactions with the police than law-abiding citizens do. Although some curbs may be put on out-of-line police behavior as a result of these incidents, they are still very likely to occur over time as black men commit crimes at rates way out of proportion to their numbers in the population.

And there's one other distinct downside to low black academic achievement.  It's only going to reinforce the central racist stereotype about blacks:  that they're intellectually inferior to other people (and not just whites).  In fact, if this situation continues for another couple generations, that stereotype will become firmly embedded in the popular consciousness.