Probably won't see this run on the NYT's op-ed page

Which is all the more reason to read it. Joel Kotkin: No future awaits those who rage against family, work and community

Excerpt of an essay well worth reading in its entirety:

In doing research for my 1992 book Tribes, I found ethnic success was less about gaining unquestioning compliance on cultural and political matters from the majority than in encouraging behaviors, such as frugality, hard work and mutual support. This latter approach has propelled virtually every successful dispersed ethnic group, from the Jews and British to the Chinese, Indians, Palestinians, Lebanese, and West Indians. As the great Arab historian Ibn Khaldun noted, “Only tribes held together by a group feeling can survive in the desert.”

This notion of a mutual assistance is more important than attempts to “reprogram” whites into “anti-racism” as defined by the woke. Discriminated-against minorities have succeeded, first and foremost, by developing their own skills and economic power, building alternative institutions and strengthening family ties.

In this country, Irish, Italians, Jews, and Asians, among others, were long barred from certain jobs and many neighborhoods. Rather than wait for the majority to discover tolerance, they labored in niche economies—fish mongering and construction among Italians, gardening and farming among Japanese, retail ownership for Koreans and the garment trade for the Jews. Among Asians, the first generation’s struggles allowed their children to make remarkable progress by stressing education and, when needed, political action. These groups have done, for the most part, better than whites. Asians, for example, constitute 74 percent of all Stuyvesant, a prestigious New York City academic high school, students.

African-Americans once widely embraced this approach. In the first half century after slavery many leaders, from pragmatists like Booker T. Washington to nationalists like Marcus Garvey, stressed both personal responsibility and social cohesion. Even Garvey, the father of black nationalism, modeled his program partly on Jewish success.

At its very essence, it seems absurd to base a group’s ascent on winning over people assumed to be congenitally racist at heart. Indeed much of the strongest progress among African-Americans took place in the 1950s and 1960s, when discrimination was far more rampant but black business communities, families, and church institutions were not just intact but cohesive and strong. The Blacks who built successful businesses in the first half of the last century, notes historian John Sibley Butler, nurtured a culture of “self-help”—in part due to their exclusion from mainstream business—that brought economic rewards, helping build powerful religious and educational institutions critical to the nascent Civil Rights Movement.